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.
NOTHING TO SAY
I have nothing to say and I am saying it.
—John CAGE
1.
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.
Kill themselves for that kind of growth.
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.
2.
In the film she is writing in a journal as landscape unreels undated
We are in Rock Springs; between two boxcars I can see what is undoubtedly Main Street, with an attorney’s office, an appliance warehouse, and a J. J. Newberry’s. Long freight train; houses on top of a bluff. It has been weeks and weeks since I have seen a landscape that might be green! (The conductor just advised us that we are required to wear shoes while onboard!) Now muddy flats have appeared, but the color is still this grayish ochre, very pale, with darker tufts of what must be sagebrush. Passing now a field of mobile homes as the train swerves. The landscape closing up and then opening, flattening down and then rising in these peculiar dunelike shapes; one ahead has a sheer drop, completely straight, or so it seems from this angle. We are riding in tandem with a highway now. The sun lowering. The train quiet. We’re in a sort of gorge, curving through curves. It is incredible, really, to imagine persons on horseback coming through here, and the Indians! Do I only imagine the sense of expedient squander this vista conjures; its human waste? Did Americans begin to develop this sense of moving through, moving across, moving on, because of the harshness and endlessness of this terrain? (White trucks that say COVENANT TRANSPORT on them.) This cliff I mentioned earlier is now evident: impressive, roughly incised, reddish rock. The train is about to stop; I think I will get out and have a sniff at the dusty air.
They come quickly, days
and the ropes tied above
subject to doubt
where winter lay flat
and where bodies gathered like new flies on mold
and the big statements stretched across the
afternoon their gold announcement
the spectacle greater than the small
occasions we might recall
as certainly as the chat of birds at dawn
or even the explosions now sequestered in our bodies
the sound of bubbles in a
pail
old leaves
inertia of frost
evening
surrounded by a blue frame
partly noticed, swelling up
a breeze from across the ocean, its empty shape
pressing on shoulders
the mode of truth and the mode of peace
their inexact registers squinting up at the blank
no one can climb
and ghosts awaken, frightened that they are about to be disappeared forever, mere slant light falling onto the table. Discrete yet slowly merging into each other, shortly to vanish.
There is a leak in the kitchen ceiling from which water is dripping into a red pail from time to time with a slight sound, rounded at the edges, so you can almost hear the indentation in the surface of the water as the drops fall. Some of the drops are not falling into the red pail, but onto the newspaper placed on the counter under a second hole in the tin ceiling. The sound of this second leak, more infrequent than the first, is muted and flat, pff pff pff
jet screams across the room
names of the dead in tiny print, in alphabetical order.
If I look closely I can see the sheened river through branches ; as the sun sets, tiny distinctions appear among luminosities, sky, river, car, white fence, yellow lights of passing cars, pale stone of the graves–
horizon, eye–
As Dante, for example, chose Virgil.
3.
About life itself ?
The search for water
a necessary condition
the possibility that life might once have taken hold
under some sun
you must have
liquid water
is looking for water
water on Mars
we know lots of
ice
at the Opportunity Landing
rocks
laid down
what can a rock
minerals in the rock
a specific set
the right temperature
a clue
a fingerprint
in these rocks
water that is flowing
The rocks were laid down.
The Martian soil.
Could we then be
unsettled
shifts in a child’s toy
the Same reassembled
patterns of emphasis
unsteadily allied, but
now
let’s move on
to the Living Legend portion of our inquiry!
No precedents!
The distorted stomp.
A cycle of songs.
A fictional small town.
Sing a song for freedom, sing a song for love.
You gotta move on.
I want to destroy the feeling that I am going to do it again.
I hate fitting.
I’ve been like this all along.
I was always happy to wear clothes that were out of style.
White bucks and red socks.
What were you listening to when you were young, Neil Young ?
The bells.
Sensationally great and really beautiful.
Rain plick plick plick against the window.
The rattle of Texas chatter.
4.
To admire reason.
To be in awe of reason.
To think in a reasonable way about unreasonable events.
To reason with your enemy.
To feel yourself wandering from the realm of the reasonable.
To feel yourself flimsy within reason.
Begin again, after Lear. After Lear, reason abated, ebbed into nothing. Nothing but we heard chimes telling and tolling, among what we said were intelligent faces. Intelligent faces and the voice over the intercom a memory, and then the lights went down. The lights went down, people appeared onstage and your purple shirt. And your purple shirt touched my arm. My arm, in apposition. In apposition we had moved toward the dictionary to test the ways in which. To test the ways in which I slept and dreamed of water and a crimson thread around my throat.
Asleep after a pattern of nothings.
All this time had wanted to turn away toward
the altered coincidences of the near.
The man put up the building and then he died.
There are new blinds on the windows across the way.
To tackle certain things.
Nothing to say.
What is this?
Reason
leaps
onto unreason’s
shivering spawn
The man, his many
desires
the girl moves freely
between love and love and
blackbirds and
she concludes, then, she
cannot live
without
blackbirds.
&n
bsp; The room is ready, although no one is expected for years. Cheese out of the cold, crackers crisp, wine chilling. Pillows at optimum plump, floor shining. The best of the flowers, an assortment, arranged in a blue vase. It must be summer. When they come, it will be summer. Not late August when there is foreboding not of winter per se, but something other, a lassitude somehow connected to violence, like a slack rope around the neck of a bull.
Or to Begin Again Page 2