Awake

He did not want us to change the color of the ceiling

to his prison cell. Remember everything, he said, the words,

the meaning, and the sequence of events. We remember his story

with layers. What is heard, what is meant to be heard, the meaning

of the story. He maintained it was about freedom. He was put away

for carrying a narrative of tradition that swayed the minds

of his people. How he wandered beyond the isolation of prison cages!

How heavy his tongue from tasting the body devouring its own

muscles, the growing fingernails altering into talons. The sliver of sky,

the grass slipping through cracks in the walls: he measured them all.

The blue of remembering. Do not reorder my story, uncle said.

If you mix up the order with each telling, the story will be different

and the levels will change. If you change details, the meaning will shift,

he said. What he meant to say was there is a way to listen. It’s about turning

the mind. I thought about the mind as a place where things happened.

The mind was the thing that had been ripening, like a lotus in mud,

he would say, making us work to fulfill his analogy. Making plans

for the future in prison was like using a spoon to dig into an iron bed,

he would say. Freedom was always his to use, the mind, his. Liberation.

I was not present when he parted from his mind. He took nothing,

as predicted. I am careful with the layers, my hands now accustomed

to constant wringing and washing in my quarantine. The morning sun

draws out the vascular system of plants on the windowsill, I follow

the ridges of serrated veins and consider how little I know of longitude

and latitude. He’d say to start from the center. To turn the mind to mind.