Seamstress for the Band

Paul Simon is short. I imagine him gentle and concise, a feather duster on a pane of glass you didn’t know was dirty until it has been cleared in uneven strokes, the former patterns of former birds. I imagine him cross-legged and flexible, wearing brown shoes whose soles have been noticeably mended. I imagine he is bright, mostly in the eyes, like he always has ideas, a new idea with every step he takes in his brown shoes. His ideas are happy and ingenious like steps on cobblestone. His feet aren’t happy on cobblestone, nor are his mended shoes, but his steps are a different thing, separate from the thing that actually does the stepping. Steps have their own souls.

Walking down, steps feel cautious and curious like a cat pretending and worried there is something around the corner. Walking up, steps are certain—not like birds are certain, but like flocks are. Walking on sand, steps are children who are thrilled by the possibility of ghosts. Under water, steps are dreams, they only time bodies don’t doubt their existence. In grass, steps are ant-murderous, Darwinian philosophers, Freudian sexologists, soldiers of ripe things, the guerilla combat of couples who are deeply in love. Steps on glass are rare and precious like giving an old and beloved vice another shot at weakening your will. Steps made in the same place feel more like a new location is being achieved than fast ones forward do. This is because the same place requires staying, and this is the greatest trick. So far, only one person has ever done it before, and no one can tell you where he is.

This song isn’t by Paul Simon. It’s by an acoustic duo called The Milk Carton Kids. They aren’t stomping in Paul Simon’s steps. They have their own happy cobblestone movements, lilting gaits, side by side harmony like foxes on their way to the den, where there are stories to tell around a fire, which steps can walk across and claim it doesn’t  burn. It is the feet who burn. These steps are evidence of the unproven—but 100% true—theory that someone once came up with that we’re all walking around in each other’s invisible yarnpath, that we’re all coming unraveled all over the place in an invisible mess. It’s not all connected like the gurus and simpletons believe. It is tangled, indivisible, each thing unable to stand upright alone. In other words, the strings music is. And undress us of.

MP3: The Milk Carton Kids- Undress The World

The Milk Carton Kids sent me their album with the explanation that they offer their music for free. You can get all you want here, and I recommend you honor this gift here:  www.themilkcartonkids.com/

 posted by holly.

This has nothing to do with how gold it was that evening, or that the water reflected the gulls as if they were pieces of punctuation—one turned over saucer of a parenthesis, or a pelican’s comma scoop into the surface for fish, the egret erecting an exclamation in the brackets of the spartina, the fiery dot sinking into the end of a thought.

This has nothing to do with Mexico, where I am sitting upright in a bed beside a half-drunk cup of red tea a la naranja and the scattered ellipses of Bimbo cake crumbs. This has nothing to do with hunger or tequila. This has nothing to do with the palm trees that sound like rain when the breeze (%)  tangles their fronds like these things: ~ ~ ~ <–what are those, besides mustaches? This has nothing to do with the rooster that crows every three minutes or so, or with the one, further away, who responds. I caught one crossing the road the other day. It looked like this: # Still, this isn’t about that.

This is about the ampersand. This is about where the cord on your headphones parts and tangles all the way up to your ears. This is about saying the same thing over & over again & knowing that it is true because it can be no other way. Not about how gold (*) it was that evening & how the water reflected the birds & the spartina & the palm trees that dimpled the waterskin, but about the place where the inlet flows into the sea. This: <  Not about the chicken or the road, but the other side. This: ?

It is about hearing the same thing over & over again & knowing it isn’t true at all, no matter how many times you hear it, no matter how skilled you are at making something out of nothing–metaphors made from punctuation, the very thing that demands that they never become anything but magic quarantined in the prison of parenthetical afterthought: two men bowing in respect to the obvious, something intended to be actual, but is instead muttered under the curvy tuba-huff of the &

MP3: M83- Soon, My Friend  This song has only one line. (___)

Buy Hurry Up We’re Dreaming:

posted by holly.

It’s actually very simple. I don’t care what you believe. Take it from me, I don’t believe in any of it. I don’t believe in any nativity: the camels, the sheep, the kings, those hooded people, Jesus as a baby, Jesus as a non-pot smoking adolescent, Jesus as a conservative and voting adult, Jesus as the antithesis of capitalist, Jesus as ascetic. I don’t believe in the twelve superheroes, the Grateful Dead’s Eleven, the ten commandments, the nine Supreme Judges, the eightfold path, the seven sins, the six journalistic questions, the five Russian composers, the four leaved clovers, the three musketeers, the two lovers, not even the Partridge Show. Maybe, I believe in the pear tree.

Take it, though, from me. If your nativity is covered in snow, it was sand. If it is covered in sand, imagine snow. If the baby was blonde, his hair was like violets in shadows. If his hair was black as when your eyes are shut tight, it was made of light. If there were camels, imagine squirrels. If it was common sparrows, imagine glittering cloaks quivering on the backs of donkeys. If it was a virgin, imagine a whore who refuses to apologize. If it was a whore, imagine a woman who isn’t ready. If it was a long time ago, imagine it now.

Listen to this song. Does it move you? Is that proof? Of whom? Of what? When? Where? And, why? How.  I believe in the root it. Those twelve days missed the real proof of the first. The tree. That thing we can all agree upon. We can go from there. We may branch, and stray, and reach, but may we all know something concrete. May we all know one tree. I won’t ask that you hug it. I know better than to deplete our love on something so almost antagonistic in its simplicity. But where I am, it pours rain now. I am outside. I can barely hear this song over it. I can barely hear anything over it. The rain is that loud. Where I am, that is the nativity. It is rain. It is a candle. It is my smoke, my wine, these silent words out loud and alone with them. But where you are, the sun might shine. It might be warm. Or much colder and you cannot imagine being outdoors. It is you, somewhere, not thinking about it. It is you, around a tree. It is you, knowing something you think the rest of us should. It is you, knowing another thing, without a tree. But we’ve all met a tree, and we’ve all suspected something more, haven’t we.

Eva Cassidy- Silent Night

posted by holly.

Our voices are so distorted. I can’t hear you. Can you hear me? Are we out there? Is anyone out there? Come in. Come in. Come in.

I think we really might be all alone. I wake up in the middle of the night, stark and straight up, rigid, so awake it is unlike actually being alive. So awake it is dangerous, life feels threadbare, made of curtains hung decades ago but parted to let the sun come through the cobwebs. I remember being four, five, and then adolescent, then grown all the way—the whole time, alien. Then you. Then now. Time is ineffable.

Did it happen, that hopscotch time? Did it happen that night we were gathered around a holy water bong? Did it happen when they say women ruled the world? Did it happen with that virgin, that night? Did it happen tonight when we drank wine around a branch covered in a vine of colored lights? Did it happen when you and I loved each other so much we decided that the end was too brutal to go on? Did we fall on our knees? Am I on my knees now when I say I love again and someone else, what about  everybody? Are you on yours when you say you do too, but it’s not the same, not real and from the earth like potatoes and blood oranges? Did you know that blood oranges have an inside skin like gauze, like a whisper, like the shroud of a ghost? Is everything holy now? Is nothing?

Do you believe in anything? In Christmas? In that light that makes us want anything but darkness? In our own souls? In continental borders? And then in states? And in selves at all? And then in you? And then in me? And then in night again, that holy darkness, possibility in impossibility, in birth, in rebirth, in life, in hope, and in maybe, oh God, maybe.

Do you suppose we are too covered up in our own holiness to recognize that it’s all one night, a supposed lifetime, and we are going to waste it by being ghosts and not bodies? By being whispers, by whispering when we can, by covering our blind selves in the deaf of distorted guitars over a song we know by heart, if we had hearts, if they stayed beating. Oh Lord, if they just stayed beating and we could keep each other and know we’d never lose ourselves.

MP3: Warm Ghost- Oh Holy Night

posted by holly