John Biscello

My mother’s bones. My mother’s bones resounding in my ears piercing my eardrums. Death rattle of the dusty gourd. Of the earth’s grief calling to us to restore. Calling upon us to become wardens attendants to vibrations crossing passages. To follow is the only way to move. It being the liminal groove. My mother’s bones resound like echoes in distant corridors like lost colors and I am reminded I am recalled as the goblin child of a clawing rapist. But wasn’t he a poor soul too? Are not all souls poor and blessed and cursed the same as sorry lot? Questions I cannot answer. I can only sing the stains. The ineradicable stains can be sung blame can be transcended maybe transfigured by singing the hell out of the bones maybe. There is this and they are claims. The feelings legacies telling stories all their own. It is in the bones. Yours hers theirs. I must learn to listen to the accursed and blessed with equal ears to the incalculable crises amounting to fractures forming dissent within the self. Now split there are factions and warring within begins. The warring rapist seeded from the deep soil of the warring world within. And so it goes and so it went. How to mend and unify the fractures within the glaring cause of the whole. Not why to but how to. Existential concerns not solely my own but the flagging concerns of one and all. Existential concerns create pressure in a vacuum. In there how to breathe? Not why but how. Inroads in spite of the spite in spite of the faults the fissures the failings the odds. The skeletons assemble to dance a jig at night. The moon fires them up. The dead not an army but a dance troupe. Texts to be read aloud inside your head while no one is listening. This one of the directives hailing from the night. The night has many tongues. Divining many secrets many fates. We the dancing dead are charmed. If music be the proof of love then dance on. Dance on.

Grief attends to the bones. And does so listening to the spaces between the hollows where the ghosts are held hissing where loss compounded by fractures gives rise to near distant voices crying out on behalf of all that’s gone missing. It is matter of tempo of pacing. We do our best to sync up with what has left us what is behind rising again. In this respect the cadence of seances is our lead. We hum we sway. Possessed by the need to move we ask whatever ghost comes our way if we could have this dance. We are incorrigible romantics with a fondness for death warmly pressed.

Maya Deren “Meshes of the Afternoon”