SNOWSHOES ACROSS THE CLOUDS
31. DENSE STIPPLING
This makes me wonder. That is why she was bitter enough to set her sister’s things on fire. Did he really know it was coming, but just didn’t want to believe it? I had a very difficult time paying attention. They gave each other an outlet that no one can enter. It’s like plugging in those rechargeable batteries, though the connection is with an astral plane instead of an outlet. Those were the days that you always had butterflies in your stomach every time you saw your crush. I’m not religious, so was wondering, do churches allow people to take pictures of the stained glass windows? I’m guessing that they do not. I plan to show the intertwining, serpentine-like aspect of the moment with a twisting of metal pieces, perhaps connecting both mouths, either from the back of the piece to show all dimensions, or even the front. At our house, we rake our leaves.
When she stood on the porch, you could tell she knew from the way she put her arm on her hip. She looked off, too, into the mist.
Garments in which no-one has slept nor ever will. The invention of morning: hidden worlds in her veiled heart.
Yesterday’s kingdom is tomorrow’s war zone; storm damage our continual song. I regret the disputes between us, hand out burnt pages to survivors. Subsequent to summer is my comeuppance: the signs are among us. I have filed all my notes on lying in the memory tray; privacy is an urgent matter. After the expanding mirror contradicts proud knowledge, the jaguar of sweet laughter strikes. Night vision has deserted me, I am on another kind of mission, am trying to explain. You have to burn to shine; the door into the dark is just a gathering of ways. All varieties of religious experience share your questions and the astronomy of love: minus signs, hope and daring, fish magic, beloved things dying. No, I am not afraid, but should be. Lines of sight and voice-overs do not disclose the alphabet prior to meaning or a suitable language for the parasite poems we hope to write. You are travelling without a valid ticket, a stranger in amber sleep being walked by an imaginary dog. In the dream telescope, annunciations and echoes of the blues; a single folded leaf under the storm’s wing.
32. RECHARGEABLE BATTERIES
Signs of constrained chaos: coffee and more Moondog. I promised to be intrigued when I offered to listen, but entering the space the music seems more mind than thing – making what I already know less clear. The mischief of contradiction includes internal/external expansion; I cannot be more precise. It isn’t a matter of mapping out a series of sounds, it is more like swimming in a lake of dreams – trusting one will make it to another shore, or wake up dead in the glade of communal memory. Glottal stops and improvised siren howls… low rumblings and distant inclinations… a clatter of cutlery as percussion: common heritage has been replaced by a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices. I go to my house about three times a week and am always made welcome there. I share a sense of loss and pain: the writer is always throwing away his best work, the musician switches off the machine to save tape and misses the improvised moment.
Nostalgia embedded in silence, which may explode or leak if inserted incorrectly. Early works are wonderful visionary experiences.
Ancient seeds from the frozen royal tomb sprouted magnolias with one more petal than our flowers today. Clever seeds, so sensitive to our grandiose associations.
After the arcane murders, the trails of blood lead to the plain faces of ordinary boys surprised by the splendid joy of vengeance. What if it is a prison to know forever the cauterizing waste of all mystery? To have felt divine wrath acting on its chosen victims? We horrify the unspeakable, intent upon speaking, surrendering ourselves daily to the blade of language, the knife of expression, the bullet of paint, the violation of music. None can escape their garden agony. After we enforce laws, we plant more flowers. Publish as many novels as possible. Kitsch up the museums, use the churches for nuclear disposal. Write an impenetrable myth and genius will show up later. Justice intrudes into the crime, wanting its access to the revelation, wretched and bitter that it never gets it. Never. Or not unless everything floods. All at once, heart relieved, blood released.
33. LAKE OF DREAMS
Call the roller big words – weather, sex, God, art, color – we could see at once how meteorology, psychoanalysis, theology, aesthetics and chromology could learn much from each other. As good pilgrims all, we refuse. I don’t want to learn, really. Another New York cannibal has sold his life story to a Hollywood producer. I would rather have apotheosis. The less you all write, the more I will. Drowsy, dreamy solitaire. I have been buried underground, confined in a smoky cave. The aroma of euphoria, or is it the stink of dumb luck? With a string of grateful nods, humility and honesty erase anxiety. Iris leaves and bare earth emerge from snowbound invisibility. I will build me a new bedsit solar library from buckets of rubble, make a curvaceous nest. Colors of last light: butter, periwinkle, flamingo. A final, pompous violet-blue. Rostropovich.
Feeling keenly alive in spite of gloomier veils descending. Grackles screech, the sound of a flushing toilet. Ritual osmosis. Droll ornaments.
The benefits and drawbacks of being alive. Tears at bedtime; discarded toys in the rain. Rhetorical stew and cold dessert.
Cosmology is no longer anything but an inflexion; all my vital functions have gone to sleep at the same time. I am studying a speck of dust on the crowded bookshelf: whiteness contracts space and frost slows down time. As the moments have lit out from the centre they have engineered a scatter phenomenon: motionless groups of memories and stories-to-tell clustered in block letters of varying size across a sheet of paper. Suburbia’s careful grammar is no use in the dark; syntax is double-parked by a telephone box, the worst of the snow has melted. In the absence of more precise information we can only signal our presence to each other. This is called prayer, impossible conversation. There is a pervasive smell of rust, the sky is hidden behind dark rain. Bulldozers are straining at the leash waiting to wreak destruction, to clear the whole area. I desire the aural and temporal texture of silence, a righteous minimalism. If you really want to you can chant it.
34. SOLAR LIBRARY
Milky constellations. The colours of last night? Pale-green shadows, amber glasses, tawny-white stars and moon, drunken blackout. I gather snippets of history and gossip and conversation, am trying to explain borrowing and lend; how to survive in an atmosphere of rumour and intimation, how to live between the covers of a book. I gather snippets of history and gossip and conversation that have faded in the light. I am trying to explain memory and the lack of; how to survive without a desire to go on, what to make of social and technological change. Heat is transformed into cold, the past is hypothetical: what did we say or do? I gather snippets of history and gossip and conversation that have fallen into the sun, and burn out the optical nerve of history. In the library of the blind the familiar is kin. The more you write, the less in the will. Less will to write? The lesson ends.
Reconciliation. Substance, value and greatness; language is totally closed to me. Each item is a function of the last.
A chair is a good thing to be. We should all know that. Try a little subtlety in self-defence; it’ll help, you’ll find out.
Her flight was delayed for five hours. The village movie palaces were letting out. I betook myself to the tollbooth. A small cat rolled in the snow of the darkened gutter. Please return dishes to main room after using. She was carried to a fainting couch upholstered with brilliant poppies. It’s good to step off the steel carousel. I was on a shallow porch, looking about the walls of the familiar nest. Which direction did he say to take? Restlessness of fish in a deodorant ad. We’d all blow up if it didn’t. He had shaved his head some seven years ago. I’m confused now, a little. Abruptly the chords of a string quartet finished. I, too, need a poetry of meaning, of homage. In another life we were in a cabin made of small boards, above a thin lake. The pumpkin-yellow sun lit all this up, climbing slowly from ankles to handlebar. We all came to be here quite naturally.
35. HOW TO SURVIVE
Corrections to the manuscript arrive from Argentina. Faded leaves cling to the branches through the whole winter tumult. It is a wonder more people are not hurt, given the oppressive complexities of marriage and children. You would think mirrors would be handed out free at every corner. Vacuum machines now provide the music of our spheres. Rented projectors throw colored lights onto the blackened cityscape. If only I could view one video for a few moments at a time. In the future the pages will be color-coded. Concentration comes from the structure of the music itself. The drying racks stand oblivious to the noonday sun. Piles of damaged bows from the symphony remind everyone of how much lost music can fail us when we need it most. Above our heads at night, in the ether of books-to-be-read, men and women weep, curse, keep and break faith, kill themselves for love.
On the thirty-ninth day he walked amid the snow drifts spilling cans of pigment. A desert of blue, red and purple dunes bloomed in icy light.
Colour has snuck away into the land of neon and shadow: the evening has come to an end, the night has arrived.
Watching the black and white films, over and over again, it is the world that seems unnecessarily complex and horribly bright. I seek out the darker corners of the city: the grey canal, back alleys and the few pubs that aren’t yet theme bars. Even the cathedral’s soft stone is now spotlit at night, and is therefore to be avoided. I wait to hear my footsteps recede and try to imagine a music I have not listened to. The warm air thickens like a headache after a disturbed night, the mist descends. Sound is a concentration of structure and time; in the reflected light an icy future seems possible, perhaps even enjoyable. The sun only serves to show up dust on its passage through my day; your book is already at the printers, mistakes and all. This text was originally written to accompany what I thought was love.
36. CORRECTIONS
For awkward silence read terrible decline. For creaking planks read power depot. For glossy magazines read scribbled notes. For abandoned cinemas read exhibition halls. For expectations read glass-topped table. For spiral staircase read looted stock rooms. For sadly unplugged read charity case. For sandwich shop read fluorescent tube. For new boy read coroner’s report. For artistically fuzzy read pinnacle of sexual arousal. For light switch read disinfectant. For rationalised his decision read smelt of toothpaste. For kept a light burning read shouldered the guilt alone. For visual disturbance read freak winds from the north. For accident of birth read hissing and popping. For freckled elbows read good representation. For almost identical room read similarly inclined. For rubber flanges read rows of video boxes. For manic activity read great swirling rivers. For emergency handle read amateur detective. For moonlight read a brief message. For atmosphere read awkward silence.
Unfamiliar landscapes, misunderstandings and failures, the sweltering summer heat. Dissolving dreams. An insight into place.
Special effects spoil our views. To see is no longer desirable. Mills grind as though the atom was never deconstructed. Scenery flattens.
Landmarks above the horizon orient your wandering through desolate streets of ruined buildings. Metropolitan images consist of minor nodes being satellite to major nodes. Even in the countryside ramblers are impressed by the apparent kinesthetic quality of a path, the sense of motion along it: turning, rising, falling. Corrections help navigation but they do not insure transformation: green bud into flaming star tiger lily. If you want that kind of grammar, consult books of usage which prescribe the choices described by all who choose. You would wander beyond the reach of the world’s snare. How nothing clings to you; your vast golden shell reaches into endless space, and there rich, thick fluids rise and flow. Illuminated in your infinite peace, you are soon back in the city, floating gigantic loans to pay for the large ocean liner caught in the ice. The samples make clear: every color absolves cone, cylinder, and sphere.
37. LOOTED STOCK ROOMS
Award the prize to steely heliotrope, its dark blues, and runner up to the peachy clyvia blossoms, lording it over their massive, deep green leaves. Pale sunlight swims down into the transplanted courtyard, filled with a horde of antiquities from over seas. A mission to feed the poor, this place seems to be. Somewhere to go when something has shown up in her thigh, the lymph nodes. A bacchantic network, vulnerable to misinterpretation. In spring, the pale, delicate yellows of stiff cowslips give way in the great spiral to the stronger chromes of sprawling birdsfoot trefoil and buttercup. Our bodies idealize themselves in floor to ceiling mirrors. Imperfection measures up and down. Dust fingerprints the wind, perfumes elemental emotions. I was given an amulet to wear: a necklace made of the teeth of hedgehogs. This protected me from the dream hunters. I feel finally like my own skin.
Trace the path of the sun over the gleaming mosaic carapace. Osmotic transmission of light. A fair shiver on the horizontal lines.
Two widths of vertical, a smudge of detailed map, not a star in sight. A world goes home, shadows cast aside, to refix its aerial and realign the night.
Arranged by type of implement and find, not history or place, the brain does not find it easy to contain and capture poetry or song. We rely on the idea that this plus this makes this happen and write our diaries on each other’s flesh (later to be washed off), our memoirs on the breeze. Neon signs flash into the distance and are gone; circumstances and atmosphere are silent and elusive. In winter the past freezes and stays nearby, bothering us with its presence: white porcelain shivering in the dark. I am waiting for the end of memory; things that have already happened don’t seem real anymore.
38. THE GREAT SPIRAL
I am going to be as calm as possible, want to find out what this place is doing to me. Despite the warmth of a sunny morning I have a sinking detachment from everything that is going on. My house is burning, someone is banging around in the kitchen, storm clouds gather and disperse in time-frame manipulation. My philosophy of silence cannot be understood; my mind struggles with the literary manipulation of power and noise, the daily movement of the tides. I am standing motionless on the biggest hill, dark secrets are hidden underground. Far ahead are tombs. Welcome home.
Unwanted utopias, ill-fitting aesthetics, worry hanging in the air over a fading chord.
Mind jangled, concepts in disarray, casting around that shoplifter’s look before plunging an arm into the garbage bag.
I will get back to the subject later. For now I can say that my agreement to launder money through neutral territory means I will only ask questions. I will lie through my eyelids to sip cognac on a famous lake shore, to hear an opera in a baroque monument of sublime religiosity. I believe everything they say about all matters of divining. I will not pick and choose my dogmas. Nor will I seek guidance in matters of doctrine. The heresies that used to require navigation now require only sustainable management. I believe in the age to come when the hand-painted wrappers of cynical dismissal will be shown in museums like today’s yellow squares of collected pollen. The stones and leaves arranged into art robs the photographers of their souls. I will make a peep-show out of hardware from the soup kitchen. I would change chance into chains.
39. MOTIONLESS
I fear death by standing. If only post-modernism had not worked so well. Now we must designate someone to circle the wagons once more. Drunken, the rest of us, can await the arrival of those who conceived but never executed. The inventiveness wine shows for making new wineskins defies the parameters set by the advertisers. Who tolerates an endless a supply of good bread? Who can be interested in such lack of meaning? I need to know who murdered the fat lady before she had a chance to sing. A good story, with people I can fall in love with, is too much to ask for faith over. On a bright day like this, I love wandering the streets so full of life. Each face is beautiful in this light. The sadness comes forth all the more. My dog smells it. Happily, I cannot, unless I move forward.
Pivotal moments dance on the head of anxiety. A thorn in the side saves me from indicating the psychotropic action of visual stimuli.
Fingertips cling to worry. I cannot see what I fear, have no sense of meaning or time.
I stand by your idea of death: a man on a bicycle reading an upside-down book, not doing anything well, simply passing by. If only wells had been modernised and we all could drink freely. Instead, I cannot wait to be executed, to wander new lives and taste new loaves. Breath takes the shape one desires: on a day like today I love being bright, although the moment is not as light as was planned. Sadness is third in line, behind sorrow and madness; joy is in the blurred intervals between departure and destination. Everything is barely managed chaos, tainted by temperament. Only look and a new world of shimmering colour will be yours: new houses on the edge of the desert washed by sudden rain.
40. FALL IN LOVE
Emotion confounded, desires unsounded in the evening heat. There are all kinds of passions living in the hills around here; I have decided to visit. When I first saw you the world slid downhill and worship sparked, full moment calling to my tongue. Your story is littered with shattered glass and mirrors, distorted gazes and abandoned dreams. Life turned sideways and healing dark claimed dividends, promotion… we were told it was not true: skylight theories proved it. Stars and bells and blossom argued the toss, patience walked coastal footpaths and abandoned tracks. I stammered my dreams in the night and the urge abandoned me.
Walking with snowshoes across the clouds. Space remains empty and cold; there is no subject save self.
Search under rocks, wear bones and feathers, pray that we might soar. Or that light comes down to us.
A dyslexic response, but I would like to say yes about the wood, the old sandwiches, shoes with holes in them, and the new, azo red convertible. I wear my glasses a lot, as the optics have never achieved the sort of compression I need. Bright yellow thread looped through the eye of a small needle; late sunlight on a newly leafed tree, fresh smoky blue-green, hint of yellow, just a hint. I’ve been in the oily haze of that despair that gives birth to vertiginous happiness, like at the end of the movie where the father and son look at each other and know they will steal the beggar’s little wagon and leave him without his livelihood. How far men will go to satisfy or find a pattern. Skim rocks across the pond, throw cyberfonts into the river. Go naked in a scatter of ashes, stand in the burning sun. The alphabet.
SOURCES
