to keep afloat.
A thin film of oil on the surface.
The square flooded, and everything enlarges, a biggening of space;
the sky is the excavator in a city expanding.
The sound inside an ear. If you ate it, the way a sheet of paper can
be crumpled in the hand—whose winter then.
The bush that scrabbles in through the broken pane; the sprouting
floor.
That’s how they stand.
We hear the waves.
The movement of her hair, like a voice in water.
You look like you’re lost in thought. The way you’re standing there.
In that way.
Lost in thought.
His eyebrows are bigger and more and more like plants,
her gaze is made of wood.
The tension of the bentwood chairs, the way they curve, like love
that stays the winter.
The idea of surviving oneself.
Two beams of timber thrusting diagonally through the space to
keep him upright.
The piercing gaze in his back that prompts a person onward. Or
a look that binds you to the table, staples your feet to the floor.
She looks up at him. Raises her chin. Slowly.
As if the shadow beneath her jaw is a broad band of dark elastic
that splits and tears when pulled taut, quivering, jawbone sharp
and salient.
You’re wasting your time, she says. A voice in the room, saying
just that.
Her voice, and yet from another time.
The ice-breaker lies still in the harbour, or rests in its steel-limbed
cradle in the dock.
She doesn’t phone her sisters—it would only ruin things.
The sea, swallowing all.
The sea, making everything its own.
The damming-up of the outermost fields in those years.
The sky, swallowing all.
I can’t go on, he sighs.
It’s a way of giving her a voice, is what she thinks to herself.
How can you say a thing like that, she asks him in sleep.
She is a body, salvaged from the sea.
She has been without air. This is what we understand.
She splutters.
What were you doing out there.
Or—what were you looking for.
Can a person bring the night up from the bottom of the sea. Can
the night be transported into other rooms.
He nods.
He understands, she drinks and brings up a clod of the night.
The night, swallowing all. You’ll always have me.
Making everything its own.
The descent of certain sentences into episodes of history.
A pearl inside a clam.
The sea, being the possibility of a hundred thousand pearls.
A bit like the two of us.
And then not.
Have I told you about the hills.
Yes. And I can see them, he says.
He hesitates—
the way you can, he adds after a moment.
She nods—but, she says: have I told you about the hills.
The way they superimpose like faces. Or days.
We see them from above. Skin becomes more skin.
Everything is a question of distance—if you get close enough
everything dissolves,
and drawing back again it comes together in new and different
ways,
it turns into something one can miss, of which one is really fond.
A gradually increasing distance between one thing and another.
An uncertainty as to direction, as to what is moving; who is seeing
and what is being seen.
A feeling of being witness to something vanishing.
The eye weeps, its constant loss.
His legs are bent like his thoughts, bent around a very small point
or an eye.
The body can be seen as an embracement of air.
Direction in all things.
What will you do about me, he thinks.
His stomach contracts, as if she has gathered together his organs
and carries them now across a precious rug.
You see the shadow. The two arms and a bundle being lifted.
The body expiring like light and discolouring all things.
The air can be seen as an embracement of the body.
The moon behind us.
The night, making everything its own, swallowing all.
What can be said of darkness.
The balcony plants have dried out while we’ve been away.
Dark wood, submerged too long in water.
Birds pecking in the pots.
The green dill, like hands that clutch or else let go. The lavender
heads drooping on grey stalks. Something red, glimpsed as you
turn, gone when you look back.
Pale furniture, a thistle in the rearmost pot, nature as a kind of
darkness inside the city, wrapped around us like a cloak or a shawl.
Nature, making everything its own.
The moon behind us.
Gristle, when cut with scissors,
him shrinking in that way after the transplant.
Face fallen in, as if immersed in a book.
I don’t know, she whispered one night, I feel so low.
Not having been there to comfort you.
Sentimental, he said.
All ruins remain intact. If you glance at them quickly, then look
away.
You see things the way they were.
At first she thought it was one of the cello’s strings that had
snapped,
but on closer inspection it was the instrument itself that had split
open.
She made a joke about it being his father interfering. But he was
actually cut-up about it being broken.
She suddenly remembered once having suggested to him that he
made a little box,
in which to collect some of his father’s things.
The sister-in-law’s brother commits suicide.
It’s a month ago now.
She says various things about it when they visit her in their new
apartment on the outskirts of the city.
They ask her how things are.
How are you coping.
But she replies without saying anything.
While preparing dinner.
I hear myself saying it probably won’t get any easier,
not even with time.
Some objects might need to be coloured so they can be seen
properly when magnified.
An experiment colouring a landscape and moving some of its
elements about.
Moving some rocks and scraping some soil aside, for instance.
Making some order visible to the human eye, altering it.
The difference of disturbance.
Some words, entering things and changing them from the inside.
Entering people, changing them from the inside.
Time should be understood like that.
History’s medium is the fragment.
The fact of something being moved so we can see.
Alterations of form.
The different speeds of different places, their different movements
in time away from a geographical centre.
Beads spilling in a circle around her as she drops the tray.
Form is a way of recognising time.
The organisation of material as a prerequisite of understanding
anything at all. I.e. that’s where it all starts.
Regardless of his own condition, man is always emerging from a
form, and must exist within—a form.
And then another. To mark time.
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Alterations of form become crucial.
If undisturbed within the form, one remains young;
she, suddenly, is older, now that he is no longer there.
The eye weeps with the loss of what it is accustomed to seeing.
They huddle around the table like an iris illuminated by a flashlight.
A contraction.
In a way, the only difference is the scale and the sensitivity.
You can only see one thing at a time. Watermarks. The perspective
you then select.
The three-dimensional image requires an open viewpoint, one
that remains unfocused,
or else one that focuses—on a point beyond the picture, exactly
as in literature;
the structures that become apparent appear to us with voice and
a form.
The eye’s most immediate urge—to see several pictures in one—
has to be short-circuited.
Slabs of time, settling as field upon field, or as clouds.
The man and the woman huddled at the table, the iris contracting
in the flashlight beam, as if the boundary of light and dark were
the boundary of everything.
Simple, self-dependent images and double exposures. Nobody
then forgotten.
A white-hot coal.
She puts her fingers in her mouth and goes about like that for days.
We see her as a blur, a figure at his rear.
Mostly she is a body, we see her like that.
The wall is latticed with shadows cast by the timber of windows.
It’s hard to tell whether light or darkness is falling into the room.
A voice.
The ocean, brought inside.
Carried from the bay, into the town, across the parched lawn,
passing through the branches of the fig tree.
Passing through the branches of the olive tree, the lemon grove.
The birch.
Transported through snow and summer, to slip between the slats
of shutters.
I miss her, she says.
Men, taking on the burden, bearing her on; his eyes, bearing her
on across the narrow streams,
over the plain beneath the sky’s heavy skin.
Her eyes—
skin contracting upon her body like boiled wool.
She is cold, and yet she sweats, perspiration seeps from her pores,
a crystal rain of coldness, beading and trickling.
Both of them tremble with rage, shaking—why are we doing this,
what are we doing here;
it was your idea, they say in turn, in different ways and with their
healthy bodies.
Yes, he says, and sleep descends upon him like a guilty conscience,
that’s been hidden away.
She toys with ideas about being gone by the time he wakes.
Only then she falls asleep, and will not wake before him.
She dreams.
If only the narrative of dreams could be suffered by others besides
the dreamer.
You would see then.
If that were the case, you would see.
The hills bunching up the landscape, the earth here, the grass.
Perhaps nature can be viewed as a blanket over something more
real.
Beneath the grass, beneath the outermost mantle of rock, inside
the smallest droplet, a world undistorted. Beneath all the reflec-
tions of something else, a place to grab hold. Something firm, as
wanted by the eye.
Towards evening the hills turn blue.
Beneath the skin a body more real.
From under your hand I might slowly be revealed.
Albeit to your inverting gaze, or something—your eyes are like
two pearls upon my hip.
To lie still and cower in the hedgerow.
Pain cannot be divided and cannot as such be understood.
There’s no language for it.
In that way it is divine and yet a problem for music,
for art, and for people by and large.
To come back to a locked room that turns out to have been
emptied during the night.
Or day.
The idea of not losing one’s bearings.
That crucial moment. Some nails that are held in the hand and
retain their coldness for a measure of time.
Different spans of time and the relation between them, the distance
between two points.
To be of general delight.
It snowed, and the island became frozen into a sea that joined it
to the mainland for months.
She told no one, but walked out into the white that lit up the
woods from below.
The cover of snow speaks to the sky, as if together they possess
some knowledge they continue to share, in that way to remain as
one. A language requiring no translation, like a hedgerow con-
necting two places in the world.
January. Bells of frost beneath the horses’ hooves, compact snow
wedged to the iron shoe, the frog of the hoof blued and fraying
in the freeze.
High walls balanced on the branches here.
It snowed, the way it had snowed for days, weeks soon.
Feet kicking up their fans of powdery snow with each step.
The darkness unrevealing of such detonations of crystal.
The crystal shares much with literature. Material held together in
a particular pattern,
determined by particular rules. Structures repeating everywhere.
He can see that, he says. It makes sense.
She remembers the snow consumed her tracks and that she was
unable to find her way home again.
Trudging, then to pause and listen to the sound of her breath,
which in turn startled her. No way forward, no way back.
Like a year suddenly past. Or just a summer.
She remembers she gave up and thought of a farewell scene, a
parting from her family and lover. She recalls being surprised at
who turned up in her mind.
How many were present, and the way the snow settled in her hair.
We come closer in a single seamless movement—a hand lifts the
long, dark hair of a girl aside in order that we may see her face.
A sick girl, draped over a toilet bowl, or a beautiful woman bent
over a bed—hair swept aside. It is with the slowness of the hand
that we approach the man’s face.
We see the stubble of his beard.
No one has any use for a sick girlfriend.
No one wants a sick girlfriend.
His stubble is too prickly to be pressed against a face, is what we
think.
Visible millimetres beneath the surface of the skin.
His eyes are so dark.
He is despairing. We have no idea why, all we know is that this
is the case.
Despair at her condition, at the two of them, that it should come
to this, this point in the story.
Or at himself. It makes no difference.
Reproaches.
I don’t want to go on, I can’t,
I don’t want to any more.
Who are you looking for.
The sounds she makes at the bar cabinet, on the tiles. She is
standing still, but the sound of her feet crossing the tiles has been
delayed by the image of him, the sound of his beard as it grows.
Her hands passing over the bottles, not this one, not that one—as
if there were a choice, as if it mattered.
Then the sound of her footsteps, and the sound of cognac s
loshing
inside the bottle. The two sounds combined.
And ice scooped into a glass.
What do we want with our bodies.
This perhaps:
to wake up again and have given them away, swapped them for
something else.
Catastrophes, violent, near-sickening reorganisations, accidents.
She is tormented by the feeling of everything erasing itself.
The water, when almost gone from the tub.
Concentric rings, fungus spores on fruit.
White horses you have to follow.
You say you will not be destroyed here.
Or repeat some pattern that isn’t even yours.
Or that you can’t bear to see me imitate my mother any more,
the whole time.
But then it’s my mother who has taken over my body. Who puts
herself behind your eyes, helping herself.
You fold our clothes to please me. You make an effort with
something.
I am exempted.
I don’t know who we are protecting by all this.
You, I suppose.
What is strong in the world is forever on its way to not being
strong enough.
Termination everywhere.
The seasons phasing out.
That protest that exists in nature too; spring coming round again.
The body’s recollection of rhythm, the yearning for another state.
I miss the repetition of you, mornings in a certain place, always, a
certain way you had in sleep, at once troubled and unconscious.
Standing behind you in the bathroom, seeing my body behind
yours in the mirror. Or that twist of your body turning over on
your side. As if you became stuck when lying in that position, as if
the skin refused to let go. I imagine it will cease, and have already
begun to miss it, though I am unsure what to make of it.
Cold feet fingers horses scraping at the frozen ground.
Everything ices up, and they’re skating on the lakes. You not liking
Berlin.
We travel to Boston together.
The cities we leave destroy us slightly. We’ve left a part of us in
every place we’ve been.
The light comes in easier now, yet drains away from us so swiftly.
The things you have to leave behind.
Abandon.
Of Darkness Page 4