babylon.

In which I sing a round with myself.

I don’t remember learning the song, but I do remember it’s many hundreds of years old; I don’t remember where I first heard it, but it reminds me of home.

emprisonné.

November was a stuttering of days, and I am dreading in the next month a repetition.

(Why do people hold hope in such high regard? I do not understand. If I could resign myself to an inevitable–no matter how cruel–I could let go, and avoid the mocking pain of daily expectation dashed, and fractured, and dashed again. But hope keeps dancing–perhaps today! or today! or?–and I like a fool keep gasping on.)

Ah well. I cannot complain: there are worse fates, and worse sentences, and I have never loved the holidays. I shouldn’t complain: I am not the one detained, nor subject here to the cruel exclusions of alienage. Still, I miss him, and still I worry, and still I do not understand how the roulette of birthplace can render one subject to such bland and flabby injustice. Immigrant detention is ostensibly an administrative necessity, and not meant to be punitive, but I cannot conceive of being locked for over a month in a room with no daylight as anything but punishment. (M’s skin has turned ghostly; it has been over four weeks, and I have never seen him so pale.)

Meanwhile, I go through the motions, and hold to routine. (I am not sure whether to be grateful for or shaken by the fact that the world is so immune to rupture; that the world, despite personal upset, plods dementedly ahead.) I attend to my papers. I submit invoices. I manage inventory. I pay the bills. I try, and I fail, to sleep.

I don’t know what I expected. This entire planet is a blister of irritation, infected and teeming in a universe otherwise pure; to be alive and a part of it is to ache. What is there to do but love, then? What is there to do but weep?

rosaire.

I do not believe in God, but I believe in the suffering that knotted the Rosary above into being. It came into my fingers from the more skillful fingers of someone indefinitely detained in the slow-grinding cogs of the fragmented machine that is the US immigration system; it came into my hand from the hands of someone who deserves just as much to be free; it was delicately braided from scraps into meaning by a man for whom sunlight is a fading memory, and who is waiting, patiently, for relief.

The past few weeks have been harrowing, and disheartening, and eye-opening, and more. The past few weeks saw my beloved–a green card holder and lawful US resident since the early 90s–detained by ICE upon returning from a conference in Europe, and held without a hearing (or alternatives or freedom or sunlight) since. One of the detainees in his block wove the Rosary above; I cannot believe in God, but I wear it.

My beloved will be released. Unlike the majority of immigrant detainees, we can afford legal counsel, and with such an obvious case, and his repatriation is just a matter of time. But there are tens of thousands of others–the Rosary-maker among them–being held indefinitely and in deplorable conditions, guilty only of being pilgrims too late.

I am guilty of being a citizen of a country that would cage people so cruelly. I believe the latter is worse.

l’immigration.

There are things I wish I did not have to know about this country. Is blindness a sin?

pesanteur.

Does writing–or any expressive art–grow more challenging with age? It seems to me that the older one gets, the heavier the weight of experience that saddles each word, each brushstroke, each note. How can any sentence avoid the force of the existence that gave it birth? How is this not overwhelming?

All I want to offer the world is beauty, and yet I feel so incapable. Beauty is a terrible and cruel force, and I am too timid, and uncertain.

(I wish I did not so abhor the tangible; I wish I did not so love it.)

I lost track of the miles I walked today, and what I saw. Today was sunny, but in a minor chord–a sunshine tempered through cloud–and this among more made me want to cry. I walked along the Sound–that strange body of water that is both ocean and not ocean,  somehow partialled from the Pacific, and of it–until my soles blistered and my shins stabbed, and until, in the lowing light, I stumbled home.

These words are weighted, and these words will never be heavy enough.

vin.

At the end of today’s walk I stopped in at wineshop a mile or two from home. I’d never noticed it before. The sign out front offered tastings on Saturdays, and who am I to decline a gift of fate?

The bespectacled old man behind the counter–the owner, as it turned out–was a wizened caricature of Frenchness; his heavy accent was accented not only by a beret, but a black and white striped shirt. He poured as generously as he talked.

I left with two bottles, both old and storied. Walking back, the bag balanced precariously on my hip, I wondered into whose bellies–or cellars–the rest of each Italian barrel had been tipped. (I wondered this at yesterday’s dinner, too, over a plate of veal: who had the rest of the calf fed? Who else had it become?) It is strange what connects us.

problème.

What does one do with wonder?

I walked for miles today through a city misted over by ocean and fall, past girls running in high black boots and bearded men singing in riddles, and all beneath a low and smoke-grey sky. The leaves were dying in auburns and golds, and the air pulled my breath from me, and I walked. The dark and the coming cold shoved me stubbornly home; I did not want to go.

How does one translate beauty? What does one do with something so perfect that description is ruinous and cruel?

October has fled so quickly.