trout

They: 3

Juliana Spahr  

But at the same time they felt that they couldn't stop scattering their attachments out all over. They couldn't stop themselves from desiring them even if they wanted to just desire one other. It was from this feeling, this feeling of being unable to stop being and desiring them, that they began to vow to be with others, all sorts of others. They vowed to be with milkweed and with butterfly. They began to make all the various sorts of vows one could make whether they could keep them or not. They vowed without thought or discrimination or rationality about their limits. They vowed to protect the uncountable number of species. Vowed to grieve for the species lost each day, the named and noticed species and the species not yet named or not yet noticed. Vowed in health and in sickness. Vowed to mourn endless nameless and faceless deaths. Vowed to notice and mourn each of the losses in the world caused by their military as best they could. Vowed to not think of themselves as separate identities from each other which meant also to vow to not think of themselves as separate from those killed by their military or the grieving families of those killed by their military. Vowed to attempt a theory of collective responsibility. Vowed at the very least to let these nameless and faceless deaths break up their language. Vowed to grieve for all of them, the thems they knew to be near them and the thems they knew not to be near them, because to not grieve meant that their humanity was at risk. With grief, with worry, with desire, with attachment, with anything and everything, they made vow after vow. They began listing, inventorying, recognizing in the hope that a catalogue of vulnerability could begin the process of claiming their being human, claiming the being human of their perverse third Sapphic point, claiming the being human care for things breathing, again and again.

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