This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2 page)

Today I still speak of the fourteen that are dead in Kenya from earlier in the week, some by their own choice and some by the choices of others, as I speak of the parrots.

And as I speak of the parrots I speak of the day’s weather here, the slight breeze and the blanket I pull over myself this morning in the subtropics and then I speak also of East Africa, those detained for questioning, porous borders, the easy availability of fraudulent passports.

I speak of long coastlines and Alexandre Dumas’s body covered in blue cloth with the words “all for one, one for all.”

I speak of grandsons of black Haitian slaves and what it means to be French.

I speak of global jihad, radical clerics, giant planets, Jupiter, stars’ gas and dust, gravitational accretion, fluid dynamics, protoplanetary evolution, the unstoppable global spread of AIDS.

When I speak of the parrots I speak of the pair of pet conures released sometime in 1986 or 1987 that now number at least thirty.

I speak of how they begin their day at sunrise and fly at treetop height southward to rest in the trees near our bed, beloveds, where they rest for about an hour to feed, preen, and socialize before moving on to search for fruits and seeds of wild plum, Christmas berry, papaya, strawberry guava, and other shrubs and trees that were, like them, like us, brought here from somewhere else.

I speak of our morning to come, mundane with the news of it all, with its hour of feeding, preening, and restrained socializing before turning to our separate computers and the wideness of their connections and the probable hourly changes of temperature between 79 and 80 degrees that will happen all day long with winds that begin the day at 12 mph and end it at 8 mph.

When I speak of the green of the parrots I speak of yous and me, beloveds, and our roosts at the bottom of the crater once called L
’ahi, now called Diamond Head, and I speak of those who encourage us to think of them as roosting with us, Mariah Carey, Jermaine Dupri, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jay-Z, Cam’ron, Justin Timberlake, Nick Carter, Rod Stewart, and Shania Twain.

And I speak of the flapping of parrots’ wings as they come over the tree that reaches over the bed and the helpless flapping of our wings in our mind, our wings flapping as we are on our backs in our bed at night unable to turn over or away from this, the three-legged stool of political piece, military piece, and development piece, that has entered into our bed at night holding us down sleepless as the parrots have entered into this habitat far away from their origin because someone set them free, someone set them free, and they fly from one place to another, loudly, to remind us of our morning and we welcome this even, stuck on our backs in bed, wings flapping, welcome any diversion from the pieces of the three-legged stool.

December 1, 2002

Beloveds, yours skins is a boundary separating yous from the rest of yous.

When I speak of skin I speak of the largest organ.

I speak of the separations that define this world and the separations that define us, beloveds, even as we like to press our skins against one another in the night.

When I speak of skin I speak of lighting candles to remember AIDS and the history of attacks in Kenya.

I speak of toxic fumes given off by plastic flooring in a burning nightclub in Caracas.

I speak of the forty-seven dead in Caracas.

And I speak of the four dead in Palestine.

And of the three dead in Israel.

I speak of those dead in other parts of the world who go unreported.

I speak of boundaries and connections, locals and globals, butterfly wings and hurricanes.

I speak of one hundred and fifty people sheltering at the Catholic Mission in the city of Man.

I speak of a diverted Ethiopian airliner, US attacks on Iraqi air defense sites, and warnings not to visit Yemen.

Here, where we are with our separate skins polished by sweet-smelling soaps and the warm, clean water of our shower, we sit in our room in the morning and the sounds of birds are outside our windows and the sun shines.

When I speak of yours skins, I speak of newspaper headlines in other countries and different newspaper headlines here.

I speak of how the world suddenly seems as if it is a game of some sort, a game where troops are massed on a flat map of the world and if one looks at the game board long enough one can see the patterns even as one is powerless to prevent them.

I speak of the memory of the four floating icebergs off the coast of Argentina and the thirty thousand dead salmon in the Klamath River this year.

I speak of how I cannot understand our insistence on separations and how these separations have nothing and everything to do with the moments when we feel joined and separated from each others.

I speak of the intimate relationship between salmons and humans, between humans and icebergs, between icebergs and salmons, and how this is just the beginning of the circular list.

I speak of those moments when we do not understand why we must remain separated or joined only in the most mundane ways.

I speak of why our skin is our largest organ and how it keeps us contained.

I speak of the preservation of a balanced internal environment, shock absorbers, temperature regulators, insulators, sensators, lubrications, protections and grips, and body odor.

I speak of the Pew study on anti-Americanism and the three C’s of the IRA—Columbia, Castlereagh, and Stormont Castle—and I speak of the unconfirmed dead in Iraq from the bombing of a refinery at Basrah.

When I speak of skin I speak of a slow day in the forces that are compelling all of us to be brushing up against one another.

When I speak of skin I speak of the crowds that are gathering all together to meet each other with various intents.

When I speak of skin I speak of all the movement in the world right now and all the new boundaries of the right now that are made by all the movement in the world right now and then broken by all the movement in the world right now.

But when I speak of skin I do not speak of the arbitrary connotations of color that have made all this brushing against one another even harder for all of us.

Beloveds, yours skins are of all colors, are soft and wrinkled, blotchy and reddish, full of blemish and smooth.

Our world is small, contained within 1.4 to 2 square meters of surface area.

Yet it is all the world that each of us has and so we all return to it, to the softening of it and to the defoliating of it and to the moisture that we bring to it.

December 2, 2002

As it happens every night, beloveds, while we turned in the night sleeping uneasily the world went on without us.

We live in our own time zone and there are only a small million of us in this time zone and the world as a result has a tendency to begin and end without us.

While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine.

While we turned sleeping uneasily a warehouse of food aid was destroyed, stocks on upbeat sales soared, Australia threatened first strikes, there was heavy gunfire in the city of Man, the Belarus ambassador to Japan went missing, a cruise ship caught fire, on yet another cruise ship many got sick, and the pope made a statement against xenophobia.

While we turned sleeping uneasily perhaps J Lo gave Ben a prenuptial demand for sex four times a week.

While we turned sleeping uneasily Liam Gallagher brawled and irate fans complained that “Popstars: The Rivals” was fixed.

While we turned sleeping uneasily the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of whether university admissions may favor racial minorities.

While we turned sleeping uneasily poachers caught sturgeon in the reed-fringed Caspian, which shelters boar and wolves, and some of the residents on the space shuttle planned a return flight to the US.

Beloveds, our world is small and isolated.

We live our lives in six hundred square feet about a quarter mile from the shore on land that is seven hundred square miles and five thousand miles from the nearest land mass.

Despite our isolation, there is no escape from the news of how many days are left in the Iraq inspections.

The news poll for today was should we invade Iraq now or should we wait until the inspections are complete and we tried to laugh together at this question but our laughter was uneasy and we just decided to turn off the television that arrives to us from those other time zones.

Beloveds, we do not know how to live our lives with any agency outside of our bed.

It makes me angry that how we live in our bed—full of connected loving and full of isolated sleep and dreaming also—has no relevance to the rest of the world.

How can the power of our combination of intimacy and isolation have so little power outside the space of our bed?

Beloveds, the shuttle is set to return home and out the window of the shuttle one can see the earth.

“How massive the earth is; how minute the atmosphere,” one of the astronauts notes.

Beloveds, what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this minute atmosphere?

December 3, 2002

Beloveds, I’ve said it before, our bed is a few square feet, our apartment is six hundred square feet, our city is eighty-two square miles, and we live on land that is seven hundred square miles.

We walk less than a mile to the sixty-four billion square miles of the Pacific.

Beloveds, today the UN commission searched all the square feet of Hussein’s office in a show of power.

When I speak of feet I speak of attacks conceived in Afghanistan, planned in Germany, funded through Dubai, executed in America, using Saudis.

I speak of the frozen assets of Osama bin Laden and the demand from Turkey for a second UN resolution before the US moves in on Iraq.

I speak of Ahmed Zakayev being set free and Malaysia warning Australia that any preemptive strike against them even in the name of preventing terrorism would be an act of war.

Beloveds, I keep trying to speak of loving but all I speak about is acts of war and acts of war and acts of war.

I mean to speak of beds and bowers and all I speak of is Barghouti’s call for a change of leadership and the strike in Venezuela against Chavez and the sixty-six ships on the fleet of shame.

I speak of the sixteen million people from Mali and Burkina Faso who are in the Ivory Coast and their morning possibility of peace that disappears by evening.

I speak of the eighty evacuated from Touba.

I speak of the ninety-five-year-old woman who was shot by Israeli troops while driving her car from Palestine into Israel.

I speak of the six-hundred-year-old Spanish Haggadah now in Sarajevo.

I speak of Burundi and the Forces for the Defense of Democracy.

I speak of the US wanting to ban the antidote to nerve gas on the Oil-Food plan with Iraq.

I speak of the release of Saaduddin Ibrahim and his twenty-seven employees.

I do not say more than movement when I speak. I speak of movements larger than our short walk to the beach and our immersion in the sixty-four billion square miles of cool saltwater once we get there.

Beloveds, we say we do not want to move anymore. We want to see ourselves as located and bound even if not local, located and bound to someone else’s land, and there by chance even as we do not see ourselves as part of the land.

This is all we want today.

Yet the world swirls around us.

The ocean levels rise and the beach gets smaller.

We say our bed is part of everyone else’s bed even as our bed is denied to others by an elaborate system of fences and passport-checking booths.

We wake up in the night with just each others and admit that even while we believe that we want to believe that we all live in one bed of the earth’s atmosphere, our bed is just our bed and no one else’s and we can’t figure out how to stop it from being that way.

December 4, 2002

Embedded deep in our cells is ourselves and everyone else.

Going back ten generations we have nine thousand ancestors and going back twenty-five we get thirty million.

All of us shaped by all of us and then other things as well, other things such as the flora and the fauna and all the other things as well.

When I speak of yours thighs and their long muscles of smoothness, I speak of yours cells and I speak of the British Embassy being closed in Kenya and the US urging more aggressive Iraq inspections and the bushfire that is destroying homes in Sydney.

And I speak of at least one dead after rioting in Dili and the arrest of Mukhlas, and Sharon’s offer of 40 percent of the West Bank and the mixed results of Venezuela’s oil strike and the overtures that Khatami is making to the US.

When I speak of the curve of yours cheeks, their soft down, their cell after cell, their smoothness, their even color, I speak of the

NASA launch and the child Net safety law and the Native Linux pSeries Server.

When I speak of our time together, I speak also of the new theories of the development of the cell from iron sulfide, formed at the bottom of the oceans.