I recorded the birds in the branches as they called out to one another. I recorded the birds as they flew away and as they rowed their wings through the morning air and as they made their way into canopies of light and shade. I thought about where I was on this planet, and just how lost I was in my life. And I thought about my love, Ilyse, and her own journey into the land of the dead, a journey of fire and ash which began more than a year before—when a sea breeze lifted the smoke of her aloft so that she might trace the curvature of the Earth from one season to another.

And when the bell tolled and I was called inside to a nearby school room, I slipped my shoes back on and entered a large Kalakshetra Foundation classroom with poets Sonnet Mondal from Kolkata and Erik Lindner from Amsterdam. We began an hour-long conversation in verse as students sat side-by-side on the concrete floor. Traditional forms of song and dance have been studied here since 1936, and so when it came time for me to speak, I stood and asked if they might join me in the creation of a song.

Let me be clear: I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t see how this moment, and many others like it, might somehow be in conversation with the future. I was thinking of the ocean. I was thinking how the ocean in Chennai echoes the waves at Anna Maria Island, where Ilyse and I spent so many summers laughing and swimming and making love and simply watching the sun as it spilled across the surface of the water in gold and tangerine and rust. It’s where we sat in chairs late one night in August, 2016, when she had only one month left to live. That’s the moment we chose a handful of stars to create our own constellation, and we gave that constellation a name only the two of us know. The waves rolled in unabated then, almost like the watery exhale of a breath, before transforming into a wash of foam at the edge of the dunes. I held those waves deep within my body, even if I didn’t know it then, and I think that’s why I asked the students in Chennai to sing—that we might chant the waves into being once more, that we might become the sea, one breath to another, rising, falling, rising again.

I pressed record.

And I began to hum. The students closest to me repeated the tone and that note traveled row by row until it crested and returned from the far end of the room, my hand rising to raise the pitch and then descending, as a wave, as the human voice in a chorus of voices descended into the trough between waves.

This process was repeated in Ireland, with a school choir at Coláiste/Gaelcholáiste Choilm in Ballincollig (along with several teachers). We gathered in a chapel in Cork, so that I might ask them to lift their voices, too, so that I might ask them to fall into that hush which follows the note into the dunes along the shore of a song I had yet to conceive of. A song that took several years for me to recognize. I did the same during a panel on war literature at a writer’s conference, and I repeated this at the Great Mother Conference in Maine, too. I also brought in musicians and singers individually to craft portions of a thing I could only vaguely begin to imagine taking shape in my mind’s eye. Still, the song itself came more and more into being with the arrival of each wave of sound.

Time has begun to gather in ways I cannot fully comprehend, with weeks folding into months, seasons, entire years layered in striations, one after another, and in each of the past 1,318 days since that Tuesday morning in September when the constellation of the Swan crossed the horizon at dawn through a river of stars, I’ve been looking for you in our house, in the poems you left, the birds at the window, in the surprise of messages left in various ways, just as you’d promised, and also, though we hadn’t talked about it—high up in the atmosphere, where the heat of the Earth and the intentions of all manner of plants and animals, the kingdoms of leaf and fin and feather and muscle and soil join together in a column that rises into the ether to engage in a conversation with the dead, and the dreams of the dead, that landscape you have crossed into, there in the clouds, in that transitory state of being, that meditation of hydrogen and oxygen as each molecule fastens itself to the finest particulates of matter lifted by wind and carried aloft over the curvature of the globe, which some might simplify as sleet or snow or rain, as if the crystallization of ice could be a mere scientific fact and not a point of wonder, as if the possibility of rain within that ice could not also be connected to a source of pain, or sorrow, or joy, as if the tears that poured out of us that last month, and the morning we cried in each other’s arms when that last phone call brought the oncologist’s final words into our very bedroom, as if those words and those moments are not part of what shifts and moves through the billowing structures of clouds, cumulus clouds, with their quiet meditations that cross the sky, no matter how accustomed we might become to them, how typical and inconsequential they may seem, as if mere acts of chemistry performed in a blue medium on a warm afternoon, the weight of each cloud somewhere just over one million pounds, and yet, even with such impossible weight, with so much to carry, they float and drift on the invisible, an insomniac’s delight, pouring rain from so high it is difficult to trace the source, where the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls outward no matter my sleeping form below, or maybe because of it, and the smallest raindrops there, some as slight as 1/16th of an inch fall into others as the water wells in the descent, which is in the nature of sorrow and joy, the rain gathering to the point where the air pressure below begins to press up against each droplet and—if one were to look close enough—they might appear like translucent miniature parachutes, these parachutes of rain falling in uncountable numbers before breaking up into smaller droplets once more on descent, the rain falling twenty miles per hour, about ten meters per second, which is dramatically slower than a human being falling through the sky, about five times slower, which owes less to the physical forces of gravity and the act of drag on bodies moving through space than it does to the dreams that form the rain to begin with, the visions of the dead crossing over the state of Florida, our own dreams in conversation there as I sleep in our bed and the forces of gravity are undone by the landscape of the imagination and the wild terrain of the soul, which I have witnessed from time to time, mostly on warm, sunny days, when I catch glimpses of you high over the Earth, a breeze washing sunlight over the features of your face, your hair blown back, the shadows deepening under your eyes and then softening in recognition of my concern and worry, your skin the color of stone, then rain, then peaches and sugar pouring through your expressions as your thoughts shift, the way clouds do, with so many of the dead clamoring for a moment of this visual language, its sculptural vernacular made of light and vapor and love, love the very source of it, as well as the water composing each face and figure, the water a gift, a loan we all share, the human body an echo of this work of clouds, as the water that mourns and lives within me will likewise one day speak from high up in the air as these clouds do now, just as the dust that rises from the Earth is composed not only of granite and shale and quartz, whole mountains and entire epochs of the Earth crushed into dust that might float and rise into the wind, into clouds, that dust is also made of hair and skin and nail and tooth, the ash and flake of bone rising from the chimneys of loss, with all of it seeding the rain, the generations that fall from miles above, the dead, the clouds, you, my love, and all I need to do is wake, to rise from our bed and walk out into the storm rolling in from the Gulf, the wild trees brushing the night around me as your face turns silver with lightning, then blue and charged and glowing, the two of us seeing each other once more, and from within you the water pouring its language, the way it always has, pouring through the empty sky as I lift my face to you, to the rain coming down cool and sweet as your lips kissing me with it, the infinite pouring its silver parachutes over the world and every dreaming thing in it, until I am drenched in moonlight and rain.

At over twenty-seven minutes long, it’s a song that proves, once again, that many hands go into the making. Of course, throughout, you’ll hear me singing and playing bass guitar, flugelhorn, acoustic guitar, living plants via PlantWave, a Resonant Garden, as well as an O-Coast synth from Make Noise. Every note was carefully tended to by the extraordinary talent and skill of my long-time friend and collaborator, Benjamin Kramer, who not only mastered the album as its engineer, but added upright bass, piano, string and horn arrangements, and much more. Vocalists Sarah Cossaboon and Chantal Thompson brought in sweet melodies and haunting backing lines. Guitarist Sunil Yapa shared an original composition and allowed me to weave it into a section of this larger meditation. Úna ní Fhlannagáin (harp), Dan Veach (bass clarinet), and Fan Yang (piano) added bridges and connective tissue and always just the right note where it was needed most. The choirs I mentioned earlier, if added together in a conservative estimate, would likely number around 250+ vocalists. Good souls all.

It’s a piece that took years to make. It’s a piece I didn’t know I was making for much of that time. It’s a piece that came together very quickly in the end. It’s a piece with no lyrics, though it is filled with human voices calling out into the vastness of the universe, the deep ocean of memory.

At least, that’s how it’s been for me. Grief. A kind of fugue. A kind of bewilderment.

And because of this, I needed a landscape of sound to wander into as I drafted the book. While my mind turned to language in an attempt to build an architecture worthy of the house of memory, a place where I might be in conversation with my love, Ilyse—my body needed music to keep me from falling apart, even if I didn’t fully understand it at the time. My body needed waves of sound to lift the spirit before gliding back down into the troughs between waves of grief, a process as ancient as the figurations of melody.

CLOUDS: https://vimeo.com/798586066/92a5a91116