Or to Begin Again (2 page)

arousal from stupor lifting its head
to be silenced and to begin again

 

rhythmic shelter
hello
echoes
hello

 

Who and who is listening?

 

Provision gripped
loosened from its tether
most narrow abatement

 

along the slope of the sound's appraisal
what was heard

 

in the sanctity of the inner ear: w/ a/ e/ r

we
are
we
wear
we
war
echo

so feeble as to be
enchanted

 

if it were to return as itself
if it were to respond

 

that which repeats

 

I
told you so
at risk of beginning

 

as if stepping across a bridge
where there is no bridge

 

sending a note
when there is nothing of note.

 

Ants in the sugar.
I am waiting to calm down.
Ants in the sugar.
I am hoping to exit this stratum.

 

Who is that man walking along the road?
Who is that young girl in the pink dress?
Ants in the sugar.

Foregrounding a static molecule.
Spectral instant.
Maybe something is arrested, maybe
an elemental marker but not as yet present.
Could wander away? Could be at last lost?
The steps, the path,
filtered through the single static molecule,
did they come through passages of debt,
coming back across the field, avoiding the story?
Through the blue glass and across the nodding limbs,
dragging its shadow but staggering nevertheless:
accurate zombie with a license to foretell.

 

Logic in ordinary garb approaches.
Not dissimilar to a job offer, or a court decision.
Also not a simple ordinance or sequence
on the lap, in the garden, after the initial hurrah.
Moon quest arrives in late twilight; moon quest
announces another go-round under the tutelage of sound,
ever sweet, ever persuasive in rendition.
The moon and the piano in accord,
as if distilled from smoke, a
pale yellow suspended in a pale blue.
Some darker visual incidents, some stray sounds.
Nature not present. Moon not present, not as moon.

 

Feed the acid-loving plants.
Imagine the future.
Ants in the sugar.
That craft might collide with being, being
with others. That the blood might inhale toxins.

 

These, others: for example, the
this
or the
that
.
That she would withdraw, and the thing
would stink. That the body would exaggerate its claims
with its routines, its vitamins, its hurt ensemble.
That the cat would die in her arms.
That they would rush to the river to see the sunset.
That the dead girl's father would offer stones for the cairn.
That the instant would contain precision.
That the iris could be a definition.
That the shape of things to come would take another shape.
That the invention of the end is linguistic.

From the bourgeoisie tribe an aspect of looking.
The near settles in.
The near is rejected by the bourgeoisie tribe.
The bourgeoisie tribe
settles among its kinsmen
and adds to itself.

 

 

It watches the wasp struggle in bleach.
It erects implausible glass.
It brings into view the hanging man.
It enjoys the spectacle.
It copies out the printed day.

 

 

The bourgeoisie tribe makes babies.
The babies cry
I want
.
The babies cry
more
.
This is how it learns to count.

 

 

The roses are already in the fire.
The despot has been abased.
The shelter has been committed to film.
Weathers have reduced the population of herring.
Statements are made from
statements that have been made.
It, the tribe, is small among acts,
invisible from the erased horizon.
The sky is purring, engorged.
Steel has been seen to melt.
Steel with the strength of mutants and despots
has been seen to melt.
The articulating angel mauls the insentient thing.
The thing, a fiasco of nearness, erupts.

 

 

It seems to know fire; it seems to collapse
into whatever is without conversion,
no hand nor orifice, no babble, no touch.
It takes its place outside of the near.
The near comes on in, dragging a map.

—John CAGE

What? The other side? Now?
Not exactly, but what cannot be underlined or condemned.

 

This one for example, the fog and the police car sitting in the browning grass, cat asleep under the table. Thomas phones from London talking about Con's newly inherited Biedermeier furnishings

 

another

 

hurrying across the path, now stymied, which way the wind blows, which branch, and over, a cloth, impediment to the friend, in the position of that, her own surely omitted but not forgotten, so it becomes

 

impossible to point or to deny, hurrying into it, arranged along a path, the division between let's say heartbeat and thunder, or the alarm and Mahler's songs closing distance in, or the stones and paper waiting to be inscribed with the arrival at the circle as it curves outward split open to reveal

 

the excess of a dream, we who had been speaking mildly to each other following collapse, sipping tea in the tearoom, there, sequestered against those others and their meridians on the chart, it was difficult in this setting to notice, although the waitress was an actress, her lips scarlet, but this was only the lure ofglamour, toned muscles of the arm, cleft above the thigh. Found her there again, again walking the horizon, where what was alive and what not alive almost touched, as moments touch, walking now with her sister on the other side of the line which is an illusion, the line, not the sister, she was there, among all the sisters, their chorale in the meadow, now turning, now following the path moving along the outskirts, crabshouldered, distended her lesions unhealed, her heart, if she has a heart, down to its stone, allergic to light and the casting shadows both, alert only in the pitch and trill, the water under the edge seeping into foundations, drip by unable to find a glass to peer into or at the glassy contradiction, infinite regress drip beetles along an edge as morning opens its envelope to find the newborn dead.

 

Meanwhile I will think a little in the middle. Think the day has a swan in it, long-necked and idle. Think without the lingering kiss, its slight partition. Think of the suspense of stages as you mount the stair, of the architecture spawned in mud in a thicket of thorns, of how the literal squanders its chance. Think that the heart is cut out of cloth and the cloth decorated with cutout hearts. Think how this would lead to thinking about the heart's own factory or how hindered speech is condoned as appropriation, the progress of gardens off to the side.

 

Think as Haiti flames or the sense that what was full is spliced so that air rummages along draining familiar branches ill-defined yet connected to a massive halt, cascade laminated, crowd stymied at the fence, and the memorized agenda begins to falter and decay, heaved up along the barricade.

 

 

Sleep turned to wakefulness, a kind of bag carrying night's profusion, undone and missing parts of day hauled across, partial tunes and burned flags, torn wrappings, murky waters, faces of the newly dead masking faces of the newly born, the beloved loping at the crest, pockets bulging with tissues, keys, and plans.

 

By morning the bag broken, spilling its shade.

 

Thought that.
Nothing to say
.

 

The body, now light-headed and limp, an odd circuit, slight pressure, slight nausea and fatigue, so it wants to curl up, sexless, lie down in the grass like a stone. A sense of debris, nothing useful, scraps, leavings, odd dry bits, like the white mineral residuum at the bottom of a kettle, bottle caps and pits and shreds of lettuce caught in the drain.

 

The rebuke of mild air.

The rebuke of the following day.

 

It seemed a rival course had spawned a rival destiny from countermeasures and hopscotch moves, players scattering into the woodlands and down the banks toward the river, now breaking into chunks of ice. Beyond, blue-gray mountains spread along the haze, ancient sea beasts asleep on their rim.

 

And in the cavern where the dream reeled out, its images flickering on stone, the old hall covered with bright moss, courtyard wired up along its fence, and the sister unpacking pictures with new captions, and the boy tosses a crumpled twenty on the kitchen tile. Open on the counter, he reads
the lovers, the invalids, and the socialites
just before she opens an invitation to join them at dinner immediately following.

 

There were two cats, the one with a kind of staple in its fur, smallish and wild, and the other, already dead. And so the dead and not dead gathered in the building in the dream, the building also now only in dream, static in memory by day, alive at night.

 

Sound, what are you?

Over there slight
nothing to say
happening now the full-take performance: sky roped in deep pink with purple interior crest
so what
like a down vest smaller rodent clouds moving south train many dead in Madrid
so what
the long humped mountains soon to disappear behind the green spring green millions in Madrid in the pouring rain, faces black ribbons quietly in rain denied condolences from a wreath in Athens nuclear biological chemical dog units beefed up
nothing to say
coincidence and chance and now pink eased from the clouds the rodents continue south headless, tail-less and to where and to where and to Dallas or Moscow or New York.

 

only

nine

hundred

and

eleven

days

later

 

millions more dream of owning
have a dream
the dreamspace near the warmth of the fireplace

 

And the
final novel
about to be truants
local
truants.

 

On the next day we would look for the previous day among the remains, the red bucket collecting drops, body parts strewn into nearby fields of lavender, pages and stamps and words still fresh, recoverable, easily reassembled into anecdote and news. The constant mild readjustment of expectation or anticipation to retrospection, adjusting the narrative line to accommodate the slight or major changes that curve it away or toward, altering the end, which, of course, is not an end at all, merely a punctuation with a circle around it. And then it went this way. And then we followed along until we came to a sign. And then I said good-bye. And then you turned and I thought I saw you smile. And then he got out of the car and saw her in the crowd and called to her and whispered something into her hair. And then he raised the gun to the window and pulled the trigger. So not to shut the story down, close the book, to let the threads mingle into patterns impossible to dislodge without dismantling the whole fabric, and visible only in certain lights, at a certain distancenot anything
subjective
exploration
, objective
knowledge
,

 

position paper, letter, an exhortation to get beyond
habits of mind that keep

 

from staying within
these moments
at the level of sense to let it

 

rise up to include

 

what is forsaken or forgotten like the shells of sea creatures on the ocean floor that are every now and then churned up and tossed out onto the beach to dry in the sun and then be picked up by a young girl to put in a box on her dresser where she keeps her collection. Some translucent gold the shape of a toenail and some opaque white and some speckled like a flicker's back, some so small they are nearly imperceptible, snails and whorls all the more perfect and wondrous for being minute.

 

From a distance, the ruptured train looked like a carnival, with the exaggerated welter of vivid color and apparent disarray, ephemera as if cast from an exuberant parade. The fact that the journey had been torn apart and the travelers sent off to hospitals and graves could not be immediately seen, although soon enough the close-ups of weeping relatives, candles, and draped coffins brought it to focus. Nevertheless, there was a gap, an elision, between these images and their captions, between the ruin of the wreck and the tidy inscriptions of representation, pictorial or linguistic. We speak quite easily about broken hearts, but the image this phrase conjures is never associated with bleeding, its literal content, because of course the heart, broken or not, goes on beating just the way a clock goes on ticking

 

violence of chronology pressed into muteness coward and clownas error migrates terror into the terrain blown open.

In the film she is writing in a journal as landscape unreels undated