It takes a
lifetime to learn how to become forgotten.
I was reading about the Cloud of
Unknowing & thought,
We’re lost in
the Cloud of Knowing now, we know too much
& understand almost nothing, & hard on the heels
of that thought
came a blank—as if oblivion itself
gave me a nudge, grinning without a
mouth, a nod
as good as a wink
to a blind bat, but bats aren’t blind:
they move through the dark by
echolocation, I read that
as a child, I
could search that up, confirm it, but I won’t.
I want to sit outside the cloud for a
while, outside the
knowing that’s a
form of forgetting. I want to sit here,
outside the cloud, outside knowing,
drinking apple cider
by a window where
the trees move silently. A few feet
from here sits all I’ve accomplished,
on a shelf, ready
to be forgotten,
or not. Ready, or not, I live
to be forgotten, we all do,
eventually, though
we do our best to
deny it. What good will it do
to live on in memories unless someone
writes it down?
A book to live on
until it’s forgotten too, but oh,
to live against oblivion for just a
little while
longer, a few more
decades, a century or two...
The mystic claims that to write is to
get out of the way
of the self, to
decreate it; only then can you be
one with God, a magic trick where you
disappear
up your own sleeve
(nice work if you can get it). Who
is the echo in that union of voice
& reply,
that dissolution
of self that allows the self to live
in ecstasy, in bliss? It doesn’t
matter: if they
hadn’t written it
down it wouldn’t exist. When I
was in sixth grade, briefly in a
private school, we read
Randall Jarell’s The
Bat Poet, & I had to write
an essay, & I didn’t quite get it
(my head was full
of science fiction
at that moment), & the teacher
gave me a C+ with the comment, For
someone
who wants to be
a writer, you don’t have much to say.
Well, I certainly showed her, didn’t
I, haha.
How the laugh
echoes backwards & forwards at once,
like a cloud that moves with the wind
& against it.
I’m wondering at
the loneliness of that little bat,
the loneliness of echoes, of mirrors,
of blanks.
I’m wondering if
it wouldn’t be better to sleep
upside down for a while, to let the
underground
rivers of my life
pool in my brain & drown the thoughts
that give shape to the dark, the pings!
that tell me
where things are,
the landscape I must navigate every
night, in dreams, nightmares, buried
aubades, don’t-let-
that-evening-sun-go-down
dusks. The cloud grows & glows,
glows & grows. To be an animal is
to live without
regret, to live
with forget, the eternal present
that doesn’t exist for us, a unity
with a God
that’s only
available to bats, to dogs, birds, tigers,
whales. I’m the kind of animal who
lives in a cloud.
The cloud grows
& grows & glows so sickly bright
it’s blinding; it bears down upon us
like headlights.
I’m the cloud,
too, & the little bat, flitter-fluttering
within it, through it, winging my way
toward the dark
through the dark,
listening, speaking, waiting for the echo,
the blank I recognize, my voice &
not me at all,
feeling it fading
& in that fading finding the shape
of my forgetting. The sound comes
back, back:
scritch,
screech, tap tap. Is this
union? Is this God?
Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.
Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System).
