She mumbles a few words to herself. Her voice acts like everything else in the room: falling, then falling silent. His body, no longer there. Imprints of the human body are in some way more human than human bodies themselves. They contain the body as a negative, yet something more besides. A very fundamental voice, the tone of the human, that lingers, reverberating in the impression.
There’s something satisfying about hearing a pop song’s reiteration of a simple truth, for instance the banality of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. You lose someone, but at the same time gain a more complete picture of the love you nonetheless felt for that person. That’s one way of putting it. But one might also consider that time changes everything; that the next day will always be new; that in a way it’s too late to learn what you had to lose after you’ve already lost it—the glancing back over your shoulder, or the longer look, reveals the land you’ve covered to be different from the land in which you lived. The fields you left behind, the distance measured out in units of assumptions and kilometers. She stands with her hands on her midriff, concentrating on listening. But the light has the same effect as water, distorting all sounds. And yet she is certain, he is downstairs shaving with the electric shaver. The door is closed, she lies down and turns on her side. Lying there on the bed she can look down between the beams and see the door, which indeed is closed.
She gets to her feet. The pane is steamed up, a drop of condensation travels down the middle.
The sky is not blue but white; the light is the voice of the sun, unready as yet, though sleep-drenched it muscles in. The pane is soaking wet. She descends the loft ladder and cautiously opens the door of the bathroom.
He is facing away, quite apathetic.
She goes towards him. In the washbasin in front of him the electric shaver buzzes. He is standing quite still, staring out through the milk of punctured double glazing above the washbasin. She steps up slowly and pauses a few centimetres behind his back. He is naked. She turns her head, as if the light should take her photograph in silhouette, baring her cheek and glancing at her reflection in the mirror that is affixed to the wall next to the washbasin and which cunningly doubles the bathroom’s size. Her face is partially obliterated. Only the part of it that is turned towards the light exists, the rest has collapsed, to dribble like thick glue from her hip, the eye left behind at the shoulder. She blinks, but only the left eye closes, the skin that surrounds the other, at her shoulder, contracts as if in resignation, a half-hearted smile. Great, black gloves cover his hands, his only garment. His eyes are different colours. In the mirror she sees the glint of something metallic. A few centimetres in front of his eyes, leaping sparkles of light as if from a Roman candle. But what she sees is a needle, threaded with thin red sewing thread. It protrudes from his eye. It was your brother, he says quietly. You were twelve. Is it still there.
He does not move, she does not reply.
The gloves are like an answer.
Can the past leave a person and come back for them again. The past, leaving you and coming back at inconvenient times.
His face is her face.
Their bodies have worked through the night, have lain in various positions, limbs draped like honey spun from the comb. Condensation trickles down the panes, both the windows are punctured. Through the glass one sees the sun upon the rooftops. Other planets are visible too, one is very near, dissected by the corner of the window frame. The planets drift as if suspended in water, close by and far away, sedately, prompting one to attribute their slowness to the distance at which they are seen, though in actual fact it is all about the eyes.
The eyes are planets too.
The slowness lies between the objects.
The individual body, the individual planet, possesses unimaginable speed and is proceeding insanely towards destruction. She reaches up and raises her eye to her lips. With two fingers she presses the orb between them. She stands for a moment, the eye in her mouth, the planet soon to block out the light from the window in front of them. One has the feeling of everything closing in, and yet one might easily claim the opposite. That would be true as well.
The outer wall, pale and yellow-washed. The cold stillness of the cobbled yard like a boiled sheet draped out to dry over a pile of sticks and left forgotten over the autumn and on into the winter, a face frozen in a kindly look, the coldness of demonstrations, symbols. They’re winding the rectory up in its present form, selling it off to cut their losses. Everything’s being marked up. A feeling of all the time that has passed, the struggle to keep things going, the realisation that it wasn’t worth the effort. Sacrifices, losses. The two oak trees where the well used to be. Later, a leaf tumbling across the cobbles. Stepping under the trees one senses the trachea drop through the body; be dashed to the ground, thrust into the dirt and the tangle of roots, then a series of crippling blows that echo across the yard, causing the thin panes of the windows to rattle in their frames, the leaf to dry out and wither, turn brown, disintegrate and vanish, leaving only the frailest skeleton to be daubed against the yellow wall. The trachea is implanted in the ground like a fencepost; a fleshy paleness, blood as it drips from a half-open mouth, blood as it seeps, the trees that take on its colour, the roots becoming veins, the leaves then a deepening red, almost violet. The light in the yard transforms, now it penetrates the red cover of leaves. One cannot shout, one cannot hear, for this is a place of stillness. It comes with the soft yellow, one senses, the colour of the limewash. The trachea is implanted in the ground, the mouth is the eye of the well; there is a feeling of function and death.
The leaves no longer fall from the trees, not here, not anymore. The losses are inscribed in the stones and in the leaves, all that now becomes still here. Worse than the counting is the lull when no one is counting. Even he who was meant to count is lost.
The great hands of the trees bear witness.
As long as there is someone to count, to call something by name in a way that does not destroy; then there is something worthwhile, a rhythm in the world, a relation between two points.
The sound of the glass, placed on the table.
A hollow sound, the glass encountering the surface,
amid this landscape of objects,
a hard sound of wood and glass, puddles and clouds,
oceans calm as millponds and the sun that glitters therein,
the water in the horse trough, the water in the basement,
the letters that float about, the scales of the fish as they reflect
the sun,
when the half-dead fish flap their tails,
twist their bodies and gasp on the quayside.
A fish-eye as it stares, without direction, seemingly at everything.
A gaze that has all the time in the world.
Why am I telling you this.
She says something along the lines of constantly missing someone.
He can’t really hear what she’s saying, she speaks rather quietly
and there’s the noise of the traffic too.
It’s not because you don’t love me, she asks.
He shakes his head. She seems changed, he thinks.
She closes the window—if we want to get out today we should
go now, before it’s too late.
He nods.
A sack of rubbish dropping through the chute, a spinal column,
green smoke rising from the oil drum in the back garden.
Maybe you should hold off writing something so harsh.
Until you know more about it.
Until you’ve felt what it’s like yourself.
Whatever it is I’m supposed to feel.
Regret, guilt, gratitude for the love that
nevertheless still exists
for what
nevertheless once was.
I’m somewhere else completely, with no idea what I’m doing or
if I ever even knew you,
you say
you have learned such
a lot from me.
The place where the shards of the urn were buried, at the foot of the tree, looks like a cathedral.
The sallow trunks turning dark against the light of the sky.
The sun entering in such oddly staggered fashion, a blade-box light, sword-beams of sharpened light penetrating the living body that time and again survives. The character of the light.
Light as it falls through windows high up in towers.
I almost miss the train, and had no time to put on underwear. I thought of the message it would have sent—if I’d missed the train. And you not being with me. How it could have been construed.
I like that place a lot, the whole idea of being scattered into the sea and the urn interred in such a cathedral of nature is beautiful.
The low fir trees. The tangle of brambles. You’ve said you’ll come and pick brambles in September. I’ll be in Rome then. The summer will be gone.
What has yet to happen is just as strong as what happened and went.
I’m pretty certain of what I would feel in this or that situation.
She looks back over her shoulder the whole time. She misses him now it’s spring again: it comes back in loops, the yearning, with the same intensity, with the precision of the seasons, the imprecision. She considers writing to tell you how it is. On a bad day he might come back in some guise. The idea of coming back for something you forgot. Not coming home, just back for something you’re not exactly sure what is. Maybe then you could take it with you, in a little bag, carry it around with care or whatever, according to the circumstances. She sits out on the balcony. It’s so quiet you could hear a man fold up a handkerchief.
All that cannot be transported, cannot be moved.
It’s like moving a lake.
The body lagging behind thoughts that have gone on ahead,
the body always yearning.
This direction or that.
Forget it, she says in sleep.
The sunlight of morning reflects in the windows and is hurled
back into nature.
The rear yard plunged into shadow for most of the day,
the underbellies of the horses,
the space between those underbellies and the grass, where e.g. the
stream thrashes up,
when hooves kick through its water.
Smothered coals, a closed circle of sighs in the sand, their grey
remains.
Everything the human body finds possible.
But we have no coals on which to walk.
New York, March 2012
Back pain due to misalignment of the pelvis. She did not have strong enough corset muscles to keep it in place when the irritation in the lower back began this fall.
42nd St/Bryant Park. Soho Herbs and Acupuncture.
I tear myself away like a boat from a quay at night.
You’ll wake up early on such a morning and not have me there
to help you live, to get you through
the day, to allow you to breathe.
Breathe, he tells her. Drink.
It’s so very common, they say, and she senses a calmness descend
upon them.
They walk over the bridges. The wind bites at her fingernails—cut
too short.
Animals graze, regardless.
The body’s desire to get away with something.
The sun shines on the lawn, warming her lower legs; she walks
home through the cemetery.
You stop believing it will all go wrong,
and then:
you die.
When they came to the house they saw the trees were in leaf.
The winter, depositing everything;
the summer gathering something else up.
And you, where are you in all of this.
Some days in March, the fishermen put out to sea.
Inconsistencies.
Dead-end streets have no air.
Host and guest.
Some frozen tufts of couch grass.
Whether you want change or not.
You’re not here.
Everyone agrees the situation is alarming.
In principle the garden should simply be plundered.
Summer pulls everything up by its roots, leaving plants, bushes,
and flowers on the ground
like this
to wither.
Weeding the beds, at intervals.
Going to the zoo as if by ritual.
A particular way of descending into calm.
The distance between two objects may change by one object
moving, the other object moving, both objects moving, or by
some external force moving one, the other, or both.
Something with no obvious connection.
Is it a bad idea.
But love is no idea.
Quiet, quiet old song.
It’s like my eyes are repeating something you’re trying to put
behind you.
As if I remind you of something you don’t even know what is.
A body you can’t forget, but more than that.
Josiah McElheny, Modernity, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, 2003. Mirrored brown glass, aluminium metal display, lighting, two-way mirror, glass, and mirror, 29 1/2 × 55 3/8 × 18 1/4 inches (74.9 × 140.7 × 46.4 cm).
Maybe he’s just explaining something.
You know how the media work, you say. They want the drama.
Yes, I think, like you.
Sporadic movements forward, one knows them
far too well, the way one knows one’s sisters
far too well.
Why do you always try to make me feel worthless.
That poster of the sunset that used to be on the wall outside the
blue room upstairs.
Had it always been there, and if so who put it there.
Whenever it was.
At the dawn of time.
Counting down from ten and then starting from twenty.
The order of factors.
Ascription of value. Value added.
Every time I close my eyes I see the image of your back.
Apart from that I spend time looking at the view of the hills.
She thinks of an intuition she has,
the way it feels like she is stealing his love for her.
Borrowing isn’t the right word.
Buying isn’t either.
You look like you think we can protect him.
He’s a child, he knows everything, he says proudly.
Are you going to drink any more of that, do you think it’s a good
idea.
Where are you, are you in here. Had an eye for that kind of thing,
to be able to breathe.
It has been eaten up by silence, eaten up by stillness.
Your voice, I’ve forgotten what it can do.
Ground water and rain and blood and cries and spit. The beads
rattling across the teeth.
Him rising, shirt hugging skin
the way I did in the night, flogging another person as only I can.
As only you can.
Yearning in advance.
This afternoon’s sun is yellower and heavier than the morning’s; it’s as if it needs to convince you the day is still here, is not yet gone, not yet; it is too early to surrender, spare me the white flags, for nothing in this world is too late. A dark-yellow sun, nourishing an almost maternal concern for everything that exists in nature—that which belongs there and also that left behind by people, a pair of sunglasses on a lounger, a glass, a paperback read by the wind at a speed one can only accept as a possibility.
The light turns blue.
The flagstones turn cold, a transition much like a sigh, something turning in on itself and vanishing. A balloon lasting a week at most. And the skin covering one’s arms contracts in busy spasms, a window blind raised with a snap. The down of forearms rising, nipples hardening,
breasts round as a rounded hand; if I lose my breath, the beat of my heart will present itself in a tremble of tissue, a shuddering breast. I sit down on the patio and look out. Even the sounds can be seen now. The sound of sand, a dry grinding that comes from light being so mean with its warmth.
We stand inside the woman’s body and listen to his voice.
Hollow, his voice in the marrow and through the bone, the flesh,
the skin.
Sound travels through water,
like a grain of sand or a shard of glass back out again, through
the body,
a fish swimming against the current.
His shirt is wet, water settled on the field,
the stagnant pools, rain unable to escape,
through which they walk.
Clay soil—if we scraped all the mud from our boots it would
make a land.
Or the sand whistling in the dry wind, settling in all folds, in the
hair,
in the nostrils, in all notches and grooves,
all that sand together would make a land,
and not a single grain would be able to hide anywhere else again.
Run, he stresses,
we ran through the land.
I’ve forgotten how, that’s all.
Of Darkness Page 6