This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

by Spahr, Juliana

  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.

  I speak of the weight of the alien planet.

  And I speak of the benefits of swaddling sleeping babies.

  Beloveds, all our theories and generations came together today in order to find the optimum way of lacing shoes. The bow tie pattern is the most efficient.

  I want to tie everything up when I speak of yous.

  I want to tie it all up and tie up the world in an attempt to understand the swirls of patterns.

  But there is no efficient way.

  The news refreshes every few minutes on the computer screen and on the television screen. The stories move from front to back and then off the page and then perhaps forward again in a motion that I can’t predict but I suspect is not telling the necessary truths.

  I can’t predict our time together either. Or why we like each other like we do.

  I have no idea when our bodies will feel very good to one of us or to all of us together or to none of us.

  The drive to press against one another that is there at moments and then gone at others.

  The drive to press up against others in the same way.

  December 8
, 2002

  Beloveds, those astronauts on the space station began their trip home a few days ago and sent ahead of them images of the earth from space.

  In space, the earth is a firm circle of atmosphere and the ocean and the land exist in equilibrium. The forces of nature are in the blue and the white and the green.

  All is quiet.

  All the machinery, all the art is in the quiet.

  Something in me jumps when I see these images, jumps toward comfort and my mind settles.

  This, I think, is one of the most powerful images in our time of powers.

  Perhaps it isn’t lovers in our beds that matter, perhaps it is the earth.

  Not the specific in our bed at night but the globe in our mind, a globe that we didn’t see really until the twentieth century, with all its technologies and variations on the mirror.

  Beloveds, when we first moved to this island in the middle of the Pacific I took comfort from a postcard of the islands seen from space that I bought in a store in Waikk. There was no detail of the buildings of Waikk in the islands seen from space. No signs of the brackish Ala Wai that surrounds Waikk. Everything looked pristine and sparkled from space. All the machinery, all the art was in the pristine sparkle of the ocean and its kindness to land. The ocean was calm.

  Beloveds, this poem is an attempt to speak with the calmness of the world seen from space and to forget the details.

  This is an attempt to speak of clouds that appear in endless and beautiful patterns on the surface of the earth and that we see from beneath, out the window from our bed as we lie there in the morning enjoying the touch of each other’s bodies.

  This is an attempt to speak in praise of the firm touch of yours hands on my breast at night and its comfort to me.

  An attempt to celebrate the moments late at night when yous wake up with kindness.

  An attempt to speak away.

  And when I say this what I mean is that I am attempting to speak to yous of these things in order to get out of our bed in the morning in the face of all that happened and is yet to happen, the spinning earth, the gathering forces of some sort of destruction that is endless and happens over and over, each detail more horrific, each time more people hurt, each way worse and worse and yet each conflict with its own specific history, many of them histories that we allowed to be formed while we enjoyed the touch of each others in the night.

  But the more I look at the pattern of the clouds from our bed in the morning, the more it seems the world is spinning in some way that I can’t understand.

  Oh this endless twentieth century.

  Oh endless.

  Oh century.

  Oh when will it end.

  In recent days, I hear rumors that ships are being fueled and then are slipping out of port slowly at night.

  I hear rumors from mothers in the street talking to other mothers.

  I hear rumors from lovers in line at the grocery talking among themselves.

  I hear rumors from friends at parties.

  I hear rumors of ships refueling and of ships slipping out of port while we sleep in our bed, even as I can’t see them in the news.

  In the news I learn that Iraq is ready for war but most people there are too busy to notice the refueling of ships here in my corner of the world and their beginning of that long journey to their corner of the world.

  Even as I can’t see the refueling of ships I see ten killed in the Bureij refugee camp by shells from Israeli tanks on Thursday and then one more killed in Gaza on Sunday and then five in east Nepal by a bomb that might have been set by Maoists and then one hundred and twenty in Monoko-Zohi by various means because of civil war.

  Beloveds, how can we understand it at all?

  Oh how can the patterns stop.

  All I know is that I couldn’t get out of bed anymore at all without yous in my life.

  And I know that my ties with yous are not unique.

  That each of those one hundred and thirty-six people dead by politics’ human hands over the weekend had numerous people who felt the same way about them.

  Chances are that each of those one hundred and thirty-six people dead by politics’ human hands had lovers like I have yous who slipped yours hands between their thighs and who thought when their lovers did this that this is all that matters in the world yet still someone somewhere tells ships to refuel and then to slip out of port in the night.

  Chances are that each of those one hundred and thirty-six people dead by politics’ human hands had parents and children with ties so deep that those parents and children feel fractured now, one or two days later, immersed in a pain that has an analogy only to the intensity of pleasure.

  Chances are that each of those one hundred and thirty-six people dead by politics’ human hands had pets and plants that need watering. Had food to make and food to eat. Had things to read and notes to write. Had enough or had too little. Had beautiful parts and yet also had scars and rough patches of skin. Had desire and had impotence. Had meannesses, petty and otherwise. Had moments of kindness. Were nurtured for years by someone who was so devoted to them that they sacrificed huge parts of themselves to this nurturing and who today feel this loss of what they nurtured so intensely as to find their world completely meaningless today and will for some time after today.

  And yet still someone somewhere tells ships to refuel and then to slip out of port in the night.

  And it doesn’t even end there.

  The Greenland glaciers and Arctic Sea ice melt at unprecedented levels and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.

  Winona Ryder has thirty prescriptions for downers from twenty different doctors and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.

  Marc Anthony and Dayanara Torres renew their vows in Puerto Rico and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.

  Light and aromatherapy might help treat dementia, a patient sues a surgeon who left in the middle of surgery to pay his bills, cruise passengers continue to have diarrhea and nausea and yet continue to go on cruises, fires burn in Edinburgh, Hussein apologizes for invading Kuwait, United Airlines continues to lose eight million a day, Mars might have been a cold, dry planet when it was first formed, the Cheeky Girls knock Eminem off the charts, and still a ship fuels up and slips out of port.

  January 13, 2003

  Beloveds, I haven’t been able to write for days.

  I’ve just been watching.

  Days ago North Korea unsealed its nuclear weapons reactors.

  Days ago troops were moved into various positions. Gathered at various borders.

  I traveled around the East Coast of the American continent hoping it would never begin but watching it begin at the same time.

  We did not speak about it.

  We talked on the phone from various locations and we used soft voices and spoke of loneliness and being apart and difficulties in sleeping and the coldness of our beds at night and then went on about our days and listed in great detail all its mundane troubles—missing staplers, cars driving too fast, endless snow, difficulties in getting fresh vegetables in the neighborhood—and we did not speak about it.

  We did not speak about the December 24 deployment of twenty-five thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to the Gulf Region.

  We do not speak about the loading of M1 Abrams tanks, Apache helicopter gunships, and other equipment on two roll-on/roll-off ships, the Mendonca and the Gilliland, in Savannah, Georgia.

  We do not speak about the Seay loaded with Patriot antimissile batteries and wheeled vehicles in Fort Bliss, Texas.

  We do not speak about the Constellation in the Persian Gulf and the Harry S.Truman in the Mediterranean each with forty fighter jets on board, including F/A-18 Hornets and F-14 Tomcats, and about forty other aircraft.

  We do not speak about the thousand-bed hospital ship Comfort that has left Baltimore for Diego Garcia and is waiting for orders.

  And today, I am back with yous, beloveds, and still we do not speak about yesterda
y’s deployment of sixty-two thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to the Gulf Region that included seventeen thousand and five hundred marines and pilots, mechanics and additional warplanes, combat engineers, logistics support and loading crews.

  What we heard as rumor a few weeks ago has become a listing in the daily news.

  An endless refueling and slipping out of port in the night.

  We do not speak of it and instead press up against one anothers reveling in the pleasure of being back together.

  January 20, 2003

  Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet.

  Some say an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships.

  Some say horsemen or footmen or rowers.

  Or a troop of horses, the serried ranks of marchers, a noble fleet, some say.

  Some say one hundred and twenty Challenger Two tanks, or infantry, or a fleet of ships.

  There are those who say a host of cavalry, M1A2 Abrams tanks, and others Bradley fighting vehicles.

  Some say others of infantry, and others of ships, and others of 155 mm Howitzers.