About a week ago my mother was hospitalized after a rare reaction to the antibiotics she was given for pneumonia which caused her lungs to seize and interrupted her breathing. She was shopping with a friend of hers when she collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. Thankfully she’s making a full recovery now and is out of ICU and into a regular hospital room. But, for a few days my mother, my sister and I were stuck in a holding pattern, each of us hovering in a different geographic locations waiting for information. My mother lay in ICU in a hospital in Victoria, BC, my sister was mid-move from Victoria to Vancouver, and I was (and still am) buckled down in Los Angeles trying to get ready for my PhD field exams. Between us, a few thousand miles and the travel mess that accompanies a World Olympics in Vancouver.

Listening to my mother’s voice on the phone on Tuesday, I was struck by how much we’ve forgotten the marvel of it all. Here, in Los Angeles, I listen to the a fairly faithful mechanical and digital reproduction of my mother’s voice. I hear her annoyance at the lack of reading materials, the relief of speaking to her distant son, and the fine balance between hope and worry. I also her the start and stop of breaths, the additional pauses as she leans on the oxygen supply to help her finish longer thoughts and sentences. There’s a constant reminder of the mechanics of breathing, of taking in the air and letting it go.

We breathe unthinkingly. Each moment the world in particulate form passes into us and makes its way through us. Some of it stays behind. Some of it journeys onward. All around us, there is a chorus of breathing. An ocean of taking in and letting go. A constant trembling, even in stillness.

I am struck as well by how often we lose ourselves in that flow. Here’s something not about breathing exactly, but of losing ourselves and of the beauty that sometimes slips into these moments unaware, unbidden.

Programmer F, Descending

1.
This is not Chile.

The land does not end under his desk,
nor reach back across 5600 miles,
though F sleeps there as if it were his home,
a familiar metal cave and its flame.
His white shirt brilliant in the dark,
the collar, two bent wings of light.

He has sunk down
like a lost tooth
rolled into the earth
or last year’s seed
tossed out with the wind.

Above his head,
the machine’s fan whirs.

This is America.

2.
The heart of the machine
is silicon and gold,
a square city run through
with thin streets and wire.

At this hour, its sides
are hot enough to burn
a misplaced hand.

Night has occupied the corners,
filled the last pockets of our floor,
and even now someone is asking himself

whether the language spoken in this city
is a net of lures cast wide over the world
or merely the sum total of discrete truths,
each a fire or the absence of fire?

3.
F is sleeping
and we are all slipping
further beneath
the rising blade of the moon.

How blind we are
to have missed this
to have forgotten

how the memory of a place
can take form above us
in the empty case.

F descends
into the dark dream of numbers,
folding one void
into another, writing a name
then erasing it before dawn.

First published in Weave Magazine, Issue 3