March 1, 2024 • 6 x 9 • x 80 pages • 979-8-9883272-0-2

from December 13, 2022 to January 14, 2023

Imagination goes ahead of me. It goes because I know nothing. Why does this not frighten me? It seems as if it should. It seems it should scare the living daylights out of me. When I do understand something I say, oh, I see, I say I see I’m paying attention. I say to myself it’s called recognition, I see. I say it rhymes with ignition I say, how strange. What’s more thrilling than encountering what you’ve never encountered before? Plenty is. Sometimes I believe I’m about to make a discovery. I am a baby, I’d crawl right off a cliff if no one’s around to stop me. Like any baby I don’t even know who I am. I have no self-consciousness. I think I can fly. I’m clueless, I’m a baby. But it doesn’t mean I’m hopeless. It’s like being asked night and day do you know where you lost it?                                            

*

Nearly two years before his death on July 8, 2015 my husband, the poet James Tate, was diagnosed with what would for him be fatal. Neither he nor I lived every day thereafter with his death’s inevitable arrival pounding on our door. It wasn’t as if we denied what was coming, or we didn’t know what was coming, it was as if its weight would be too heavy to carry every minute of every day, too hopeless, too fated, too out of our hands to acknowledge at all times.

As if if we did acknowledge it too often we would die in the face of it. Both of us.

His death came suddenly; one day he was, frail as he was, boldly standing before a room full of people, reading to them, barely a week later he would not live to see his stepson’s birthday, July 9^th.

He held tight to his latest book, it had just seen the light of day 10 days prior to his dying, he held it like we mean it when we say we’re holding on for dear life, as if it might be a life preserver when there is nothing else left.

Our daughter and son came to say goodbye.

It had not been too long before I’d turned in a book, what was then this book, only it was another book then and it is not the same book now.

After his death I asked for the book back because not much about it made sense to me anymore. The kind-hearted publisher returned it and I put it away.

This book is what’s left of that book and what’s been found after finally coming to terms with how much I lost and how much more had to be found.

I’ve never before been faced with bringing a book back to life. I hadn’t looked at in—for the most part---going on ten years. Nothing about of what I felt when I looked into it felt familiar, much less understandable, it did not feel real, or sound or seem to correspond with anything I recognized. We say I’m of sound mind. I can barely believe what this seems to mean.

Nothing corresponded. Little made sense. Little did I realize bringing it back to life would require me to recognize it had decomposed beyond repair. I did not want to admit this. I wanted to believe it to be salvageable, redeemable. I wanted to restore it.

I knew the feeling of feeling as if I’d become someone else. I knew the feeling of not recognizing myself. I pictured myself with self-prosopagnosia. Blind to my own face. I had been transfigured, transmogrified, I’d undergone metamorphosis. I had to picture myself as a bee, an ant, a beetle, a butterfly, a moth, a flea, scorpion, mosquito hawk.

To become unfamiliar to yourself can be fascinating or it can be destabilizing enough so as to induce metaphysical vertigo.

If you’ve experienced the physical sensation called vertigo, you know the terrifying reality of seeing the horizon break up into jagged pieces, of gravity withdrawing its steady hold, of what it means to reel.

I did not want to be unfamiliar. I wanted to take myself for granted.

—Dara Barrois/Dixon