Sob Artist, Take 9

— Slowly rising in deep, inner shudder words climbing the hollow staircase of my swollen throat one step at a time — as many droplets of full body art I dare not share with you, sob as a new genre, a new filigree of breeze that shakes the whole spinal column, every last vertebrae and rung of bowing down to earth-most, piece of bone chip china, a new way to shake up one’s innards in wobbling tremolos of feeling in bursting suds of bright iridescent sadness, traces of saliva and foam of poetry, personal sea and rising tide and tiny rafts of flotsam, jetsam, a shiny door knob thrust into my mouth like a balled-up fist, shining brass forever, pure drip-drop of feeling and the gushing floodgates or maybe knocked over goblet, snifter, maybe decanter, warm summer rain essential outburst of cumulus tears washed away for good in clean slate of tabula rasa you’ll be amazed at the thoroughness of it and Prince singing Sometimes it snows in April, sob as a new religion, a personal science with the paisley exactitude of rainbows after fading thunder, sob as a promise to write, a promise to weed the garden, take out the trash, any humble domestic task and knuckle grinder, shining shoes and folding laundry, please, homie, wear a mask, sob as a new way to eat grapes, to drop them one by precious one into the beloved’s mouth in all ripe fecundity unleashing starbursts into the waiting throat, sob as a heartfelt vocation, sob as a homemade mask circa spring 2020, a scarf, face covering of any kind so that we all become bandits of isolation and stick-up men and women of strict personal breathing, more droplets again hovering in the air for up to three hours just hanging around like tiny planets or death motes, sob as an inner convulsion and inner sanctuary close to hysterical choir, rave after rave after weeping, sob as cross-stitch etchings into one’s bare knees after kneeling on the pebbled ground, you know the kind, #brightburning intimations trailing contrails of heartbreak, #tearsflooding the paving stones, sob coming down the home stretch in slow slug of grief rising in any of us, bell-cap of living dread and recognition taking the elevator all the way to the top of the empty penthouse, sob the sudden stark alacrity and overwhelming knowledge that you’re on your own after all, that memorizing the phone numbers of the dead like Mandelstam doesn’t mean you can actually call them up and hear their voices, exchange pleasantries, thoughts for the day or a lifetime, the deepest surging grains of yearning which you somehow know are plugged into the light sockets of the stars, sob as a new municipality whose residents come out of their homes separated by six feet each to watch with interlocking fervor the rising of a full harvest moon whose very roundness and barren wasteland they somehow recognize as the geometrical shape of their own bereavement, their own sobbing, their own powerlessness, the moon-calf countenances of their fallen loved ones, those other and now buried moons who feed the earth and beetles, feed every harvest there ever was or will be, sob as soybeans, sob as cauliflower, as wheat and sunflowers drooping in mystical forbearance, sexual exhaustion, bowing down prostrations to the sun in burnt coronas and spent fuses, stems all voluptuary, all roundness and petal and full frontal nakedness so stripped and bare it’s like a masterclass in staring and vulnerability and going back to Eden again unashamed and no apple tasting from the tree of death, no snake or Satan, no hissing awareness or fear of any living creature, just the tree of every ever-sobbing life, tree of ecstasy and sorrow and no way to separate the two, in fact no separation ever again everywhere, after the first birth there is no other, one love that can’t divided, only madcap awareness of sob half a share and rising all the time, sob as a second birth and spiritual water mill, a way to be rinsed anew and restored to a simpler state of aching love, damply, a human bell tolling and sobbing, the only time traveler there ever was or could be, the drenching of many pages and the dropping of microphones, the simplest of all gestures, sob subsiding now and moving gently away from the tides of your once wracked body, your face, your skin, your soul suddenly amazed and made new by grief, a few bright seeds of hope beginning to glow with life again somewhere in the secret and wild fields of your body as you begin to bud out in leaves and blossoms and small bright flowers as you look out on a new and dripping, almost drenched and finally fever breaking world.

I'm a recent convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and am a novice in every way. Under the guidance of a spiritual advisor in a monastery in southern Michigan, I practice the Jesus Prayer and prostrations each morning along with sacred readings from the Orthodox tradition. Only after practicing these do I begin to write creatively.

Robert Vivian's most recent book, All I Feel Is Rivers, a collection of dervish essays, was published earlier this year by the University of Nebraska Press. He has also published four novels and two books of meditative essays in addition to two other collections of dervish essays, a kind of prose poem.