Of Darkness
Page 3
It looks like it once was lashed to the mountainside, and now
remains there out of something like—stubbornness
or oversight.
The mountains couldn’t care less.
The mountains breathe and are blue unreal.
The mountains’ hearts possess will in the way of our own.
An interchangeableness, becoming clear as evening arrives, as
morning does.
And the ocean:
the way it lies there at the foot of the picture.
Silenced by the morning haze,
which is insistent and—like she—indifferent.
The boats as they lie waiting in the bay.
Their sounds; waves lapping against a hull,
chugging engines, rope that slaps against the masts,
drifting in over the narrow shore, the quay, the main road.
The sounds that cut like blades through the harbour;
the arid earth, blue mountains, an echo lunging up from the sea,
into the landscape.
Chopping hoofbeats of the boats—voices of vessels.
The dry moss that yields under her weight,
her feet as they are placed, the roll of heel to forefoot,
sandal straps as they stretch, the foot raised again.
Fig trees, hugging their fruit to their frames.
The sap that leaves the body and the thoughts,
now only these empty pupa remain, to dangle like lanterns—here.
The lips of witnesses have been sewn together.
The violet crowns of the trees;
night’s violet teeth.
The distal joints of the fingers becoming loose,
thoughts, becoming loose.
A human being; that one should be lying there.
In the picture, a heap somewhere in the landscape.
Slumped among cypresses, occasional vines, spared or forgotten.
The keeping of something, close to the chest.
He has already felt most of what she says, perhaps even touched
upon it in thought.
An organ, a glossy liver—we breathe on it and wipe it clean.
A connection between the pores of the skin that hoods the nose,
extends across the cheeks,
and the starry firmament here,
these splashes of red on the bench,
a simple lamp switched on,
a mere socket dangling from a cord, a round bulb.
The light inside the room, the only light on the property.
Everything she can see from here.
The tree is older than the rest of the world.
A sound reverberating back to us from the time they cultivated
the slope.
Speaking from there. An olive tree. And beyond the sea’s blue
tongue as it swallows the strokes of the boat engines,
beneath the surface of the sea—a crackling distortion of sound,
and the song of pearls:
a person is lying there, among the shadows of the cypress trees.
It is late, the shadows are longer than the trees that cast them.
Accounts of that kind, a balance sheet.
The slender defence of something perishing and something else
remaining.
Small houses, refuge for the yearning.
The blue heap in all that dry red. Between the town and the sea.
A blue patch in a belt of burnt colour. An organ, the liver of the
sea. Lying in that way,
motionless. That’s how we see it. The sound of the boat engines
tears no hole in the haze,
their endless chugging endeavour towards the world.
The haze—a soft, devouring pillow.
We observe its consumption, the passage of prey down through
the throat, the thin skin that gives it away.
Nothing exists that can sway such a world,
nothing exists that can sway me anymore, she thinks.
Her hand in the sand, fingers sprouting dead and dry in the sun,
tiny twitches,
something dead, pumping life into something alive or—
the fact that all of this exists at once.
This is making you ill, he says.
He sits on the bed and gathers her up, the way you pick a pair of
sheets up off the floor, and arranges her in his arms.
That’s it, that’s it, he’ll say.
He has a bottle of water; he makes her sit up.
Her eyes are glassy, anaesthetised, their numbed expression, as
if the whole eye has only one colour; as if the black, the blue,
and the white have been mixed together into something like the
colour of dust.
Dust, absorbing all distinctions,
annexing and appropriating all things.
You see the water in the bottle, the rings close up, and you see it
is a thing of beauty,
all too easily overlooked.
The sea consumes itself again.
Don’t be a child now.
You see her dusty eyes, as if they are succumbing and will die.
And she drinks; I acquiesce and drink.
I’m on my way to the beach, I say.
You’re on your way to the beach, he repeats.
He sighs, and turns his face to the sky.
I’m on my way to the beach, she says.
Yes, he says, you are, but we need to get you home now.
You’re not yourself,
you can’t be on your way to the beach, you’re not even here.
She is loose-limbed, his cautious rearrangement of her body makes
her head loll like a baby’s.
Her mouth is open, her upper lip retracted, millimetred back,
exposing the white enamel of incisors,
you think to yourself he’ll remember this image for a long time;
you think you’ll remember it too.
He nods towards the car parked by the side of the road.
It ticks in the heat.
The door on the driver’s side is open, a broken wing beckoning.
We need to get you there, first we need to get you there, and you
have to help.
Help yourself.
Her eyes keep closing.
You see her lips up close, you see an eye.
An eye, a pair of lips, filling the frame, are all you can see.
Her visible breathing—lungs, and skin.
The breathing of bodies together in sleep.
Birds sail across the sky, dipping and diving, weaving like lengths
of cloth being folded, a fan unfurled and opened again, one side
then another;
sunlight, bird shadows cast to the ground,
agitated blurs of darkness smudging the land below,
the way the birds themselves shear the light,
the landscape beneath their fragile frames;
the towns.
Our fingers almost touch.
The two people as they sit on the naked plain.
He holds her still. Holds her the way you hold a person you know
you soon will miss.
Points of contact are a way of breathing. A finger becomes a mouth
as it touches her skin; a mouth that breaks the surface of the sea,
to breathe at last—that kind of feeling.
Wide expanses and shining surfaces make us truly fearful.
Being unable to find a place to latch on, find purchase, being
unable to make any kind of decision at all.
A point of departure.
It’s hard to see how breathing may be shared with a clearing in
the forest, or any kind of nature.
At the same time—all surfaces breathe, and one may be encom-
passed by their respiration.
Basically, there is always some way
of connection.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
Basically, there is always some way of breathing and surviving,
again.
New image.
A shore, the sea behind it. A leaf-green veil of summer shrouds
all motion,
muffles all sound. Two people enter the frame, we recognise them,
the man and the woman.
They walk along the shore, together, as when we left them, but
this is later.
He has drawn her body slightly closer to his.
We observe the motion of their bodies, the way they gradually
move closer;
closer still.
We approach at the speed of her body, the speed at which her
body moves closer to his.
New image.
Again, the shore, the sea, the sky—this only.
There is a great deal of sky in the frame.
The heat.
The picture shimmers, like when you get out of bed too quickly
and the blood drains away.
The shore. Where she was meant to be now. If it had only been
a matter of—
will.
Like a word running on ahead, the way a blaze takes hold. Trying
it out for ourselves.
If it had only been a matter of will she would have been at the
sea now, and alone there.
Here, like this.
She sighs.
The waves lap against the sand, a knife scraped across a table,
a lifeless layer of solidified candle wax lifted up, white froth,
absorbing into the sand, leaving behind its various remains, soap
bubbles or lace,
tiny organisms that vanish down among the grains, a smooth
surface, smoothed like a sheet.
The beach is a new-made bed.
Smoothed sheets, tongues of silky wax, immaculate as a friendship
you’re not sure if you can introduce to another table or even—
another part of the country.
A frailty, reminding us of something we haven’t quite the courage
to admit is us.
But then once again it’s us, thinking like that;
once again our own train of thought bleeding into images, voices.
The fingernails of winter are short.
They have travelled from the winter. The hollow scratching at the
doors that is winter, in all its tedium, winter still.
Often the sun is a human voice that addresses you.
A letter that keeps on returning to its sender, who once more
turns out to be you.
The will of the skin, the will of the planets.
To have a function or occupy a space that is given.
The night is an unprotected place, like an unexpected clearing
in a forest.
When later that afternoon you tell me I’m your best friend, I think
of a deer wishing to cross such a bare and treeless place.
You smile and say it’s okay.
That kind of unprotected.
If you don’t feel the same way, it’s okay.
If one were to give the night a voice.
I feel the same about him, but in a way it’s worse.
It’s still a question of whether it’s a kind of crime—reading so
much human into nature.
Whether it’s our fate to do so.
The seamless movements and transitions, the friction of the bod-
ies’ joins.
Everything started with the symbiosis of cells, the way they com-
bined with bacteria that could survive the oxygen,
it’s almost the same principle on which poetry works.
And us.
In a way, we’re already back at the start, as ever.
The problem of movement always having direction but termi-
nating in itself.
To enter into a symbiosis with the self again, in a new and sur-
prising way.
Eternal rebirth.
He seeps into the ground, his arm dangles from the edge of the
bed, legs eaten by light.
A shirt hangs brightly in the wardrobe.
The thought of having a brother you never knew existed.
A wish to be found.
Weighed and measured.
Who do you look like.
Any movement becomes a movement towards her or away.
My paternal grandfather burned his thesis after it was rejected. The
only thing I know is that it was about Selma Lagerlöf.
Jerusalem.
One thinks about the fact that some people can gleam the same
way as the pupil in a lazy eye
reflects the flash of a camera or some other burst of light.
Just the eye.
A former classmate they’d nearly forgotten.
At first she thinks the darkness belongs to the wall, then realises
it to be human.
All the time, a new past to recall.
We see her face.
A panning shot, a slow, vertical sweep.
Our gaze moving downwards upon her face,
our eyes passing over her, as over a field,
or the way some stories trickle down through a family.
The pores of her skin, tiny dots or shafts leading inside her.
The fairest down.
Too many have died too soon. In my family.
We see her eyes begin to moisten, visible capillaries.
They make a map, rivers entangling in a rhythm we cannot com-
prehend, tide and rain, seasons.
To listen to the slightest shifts.
Snow makes a sound when it falls and settles, as it becomes com-
pressed, as it wanders through the various layers of the world.
Crystals grow. Blood has sound—when the body is punctured,
you can it hear it sing.
Pain is a general term for the feeling that arises when seeing the
person inside you vanish from the body.
Thoughts are a comb you can draw through the body.
Our eyes are fixed upon her, and insistent—they do not rest, but
are constantly busy.
My sister said something one day that made me wonder if she
thought you could get stuck inside a person if you stared at them
for too long.
I thought it naïve, but now I find it more and more likely to be
true.
Various fossils.
You tell me you saw an exhibition in Sorø, and that you’ve seen
the oldest object in the world.
Older than the universe, you said.
I remember thinking it naïve.
The way your eyes gleamed as you spoke.
Our eyes move slowly down over her face, panning at a speed that
seems so very human,
the speed of the body, painstaking and cautious. Eyes are hands.
Fingers are the gaze.
We see her eyes, her eyes are in the middle of the picture the
whole time.
Eyes are at the centre of what we see all the time, ever a centre
of something.
We see only one detail at a time. It’s almost impossible to ignore
an eye.
The surface becomes taut and shudders; we see reflections of a
sky without us.
We are moved.
The sight of the sky in the eye moves us.
Like teeth that split in the mouth and double in number, and yet
at the same time become: something else.
The mouth becomes another.
Separation does something.
The body is a comb that can be drawn through thoughts.
The body is continually changing into something else. Ano
ther
body.
The fingernails of night are concealed in the sleeves.
A thread connects the bodies.
We are not here.
Little messages and food between us.
An exchange of something.
The bodies as rooms.
Her mouth is dry. She spreads her legs, he can see right up her
skirt.
He lowers his eyes and leaves.
She gathers her legs again.
The night sky may be seen as a weapon,
but everything can.
She drops a tray of plastic beads that spill out in a circle around her.
The glorious child.
Locked rooms next to your own.
What do you want here.
She stands on the balcony, leans out over the railing.
The tall buildings opposite reflect in her eyes.
We stand slightly left of picture, looking in at her from the side.
The canal has been frozen for two weeks. Yesterday the ice broke
up, and now the boats are sailing again,
through a carpet of ice, shattered windows or
the ice as verdigrised roofing sheets that burn white and chink
like bottles,
yet another street of frost, the canal’s long train grating, slipping
under and over the cape of ice that casts back the sun in every
direction.
She stands on the bridge and stares into the water.
It runs underneath her, and the wind blows.
Sticks and twigs come and disappear.
Garbage passes, an expensive, relentless gloss of plastic,
she holds the railing tight, there is a light and she is standing in
the sea in summer.
The water reaches halfway up her thighs.
These threads of light twenty centimetres down, ribbons of tan-
gling gift-wrap, and the sun drilling into the ribbed cheek of the
shore.
You wonder how she can stay upright there, how she can avoid
being carried away by the river.
The release of a hand, a moment of imprudence and then the
current, gripping her
The movement of her hair.
There is no sound, the image is enough.
To keep something together that can hardly be kept together,
hardly reach.
The sound comes later.
A black screen with sound—her breathing and the murmur of
the channel
is all we get.
Your heart is beating fast, she whispers.
Yes.
She crawls around him, trying to gain access.
Like a burglar or someone else, wanting something.
Please stop, he says.
She lies on her back, stiffly, the way you do in the sea when trying