Lately it appears the water
has been waiting for us to keep trying
to make it across. The rivers
and trenches glossed with light
know we are so relentless as to plan
for catastrophe, layering backup
upon reserve.
“Ditching,” R. A. Villanueva
I often feel like I can’t see the side to which I am crossing.
I’ve always felt this way.
It is a disorientation that contains multitudes—multitudes often a little off-course, often discomforting, and yet as I get older, I find myself navigating new unknowns with an odd familiarity which is not unlike an uneasy trust in such abilities.
Only now I’m turning around and looking at close proximity of what is here, right in front of me.
Only now I’m asking: Where am I now?
Currently: at home in Queens, early morning shift of waking. Meaning 4 AM. Meaning forcing off sleep without meaning to. How can I sleep while treading the very waters of Villanueva’s imagined rivers. These rivers were never imaginary. I know how they recede only to unleash their brute force. Not brute but cogent energy. That which acts without license and complete agency. River, tempest, tyranny. Where am I? Where have I awoken? Home in Queens, early morning, my husband still asleep.
I cannot sleep.
In multitudes, there are reactionary, obdurate ultraconservatives meeting, openly, to discuss a fate larger than imagined.
It was never imaginary.
Neither were they, these men and women of “traditional” values whom promise to return us to a “golden era” while also bringing “new change.” This seems like a contradiction, but quell your questions by buying the former for $149 as a Christmas ornament. (It’s now sold out.) Because most of us have a few hundred dollars to spend on toy promises. Because here questions are discouraged: within the multitudes who elected him, the presidential elect reprimands the free press. Off-the-record, please—no, it was demanded. (For that matter, remove the quotes around “tradition.” Tradition. Remove the italics, just as suspect. Tradition. Tradition.) Has censorship of the press begun, before he’s even in the White House? Not that he was sure he even wanted to live there in the beginning. And certainly it’s not to be expected that his family will. A man of “tradition,” remember?
My multitudes are not within the multitudes who elected him. So I am standing still, and yet I am drifting. I am looking around, and I cannot accept him nor the men and women who’ve chosen to determine a fate larger than they have imagined. The multitudes retaliate and say I am a “citizen” made suspect and scorned in quotation marks. For that matter, I am a “woman.” For that matter, I am “human.”
They won’t remove the quotes they have put around me, and I won’t remove the quotes I see in the air around us, in a fate larger than them.
Where will I speak as the quotes “close in?”
Perhaps within the blank space between them.
* * *
My sleep comes with a high-pitched, sluggish energy: the current of open season on a multitude of civil liberties. Alarms go off. It’s a time for unity say those who also say Trump didn’t “mean” it, that it was “only lip service” to appeal to those who would elect him, the very hate speech that has electrified our days and our nights. I’m talking about walking the streets of so-called liberal NYC and seeing a swastika. And not one but many. I’m talking about taking a crowded 6 train out of Grand Central and overhearing thirtysomething men in suits discuss openly the women they work with, in sexist and brutish descriptions and scenarios, many of them bearing wedding bands, these are men of “tradition,” of course, these men souring the air, these men each a relentless dulling of the senses. The future is female, they once said, and I hear unconsciously myself using the past tense, angry at myself for falling into undertow of “only lip service,” of hate.
As Villanueva writes, “lately it appears the water / has been waiting for us to keep trying // to make it across.” Lately is always. Change is lately is always. I’m not believing what I’m seeing across the river. I’m not believing what I’m hearing around me. There exists a “group of scholar and writers” who believe the incoming presidential candidate “has pledged to defend our religious institutions”—the same man another Jew used the Holocaust to defend, the same man who Chauncey DeVega reminds us:
…promised to target African-American and Latinos for racial profiling and harassment by the police. He also wanted to single out Muslims for banning from the United States and perhaps even mandate that Muslims who are already here register with the government.
What am I looking toward?
What am I seeing now around me?
It’s my instinct, something much older than me, that sharpens my senses, that keeps me awake, keeps wondering just from where I’m crossing
* * *
Ron Villanueva is a friend whose poems sit with me for long periods of time. I had the pleasure of hearing him read at The Dodge Poetry Festival this past October, and we frequently exchange texts and emails. And when one day in particular gets to be too much, having lost my keys, my wallet, and among other things, nearly my empathy, Ron texts me the following: That tentative certainty the muscle fibers break under stress only to rebuild themselves stronger? That’s what we rely on, yah?
He assures me that this idea is deeply entrenched in Gray’s Anatomy or his old biology textbook from high school, and I want to believe it. I want to believe that somehow my multitudes, my ever-wary, wayward multitudes, will recover and strengthen, that weariness is a virtue of resilience. I want to believe in a world dominated by poetry recent and forthcoming via women poets like Airea D. Matthews, Rachel McKibbens, and Randa Jarrar, to name a few. The future is female, they say, and when I read such poets, I believe it.
The problem is there exist multitudes in the present that are hostile to such a future.
The problem is what the present asks of me: to cross the next waters ahead of me, when I can’t even see the side from which I’m crossing, when I know not where I am, the present haunting me, from which there’s no waking, and hate speech is explained away as meaningless “lip service”—and yet my instincts sharpen, and yet I bind those ties closer in my communities familial, literary, and otherwise.
And yet would I navigate blank space in the shrinking breadth of free speech, that dark matter between old wounds of the multitudes of violent pasts and the distant, distant futures in which we could lose to the waters altogether, all of us, altogether, the waters taking all.
And there would be no more sides, no more crossings.