Souvenir


The emotional reaction is all that matters.  As long as there is some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be 
understood.
— John Coltrane


	take this as you see it or hear it, with a grain of salt, perhaps, or as a text, a poem, or a story about how our minds are 
strewn like a field of landmines across the landscape of predicaments in which we find ourselves, a fluid origami trick, a 
crane that unfolds and reveals a diagram or a chart or neither but closes in on itself to form a box and more importantly 
asks a question and the question we might ask, then, is this: can you tell us, dear friend, that a world awaits beyond the 
next hill, that the reaper knocking at our door has been misdirected—who he's looking for is living in an apartment 
down the hall?  There's a court jester and he's laughing along to the tune of an opera, laughing at us, now, waiting for the 
coin to roll off the tips of our fingers, waiting for the coin to fall into that watery waste, the sea-expanse of your eyes, 
that carpet of glittering black.  And all the humming in the world won't help if there's no one around to hear our tune so 
we demand an audience.  We'll whistle, too, if that's more to their liking, but there's a piper at the door, now, telling us 
we've stolen his tune, asking to be compensated.  You tell him, though: tell him to shove it.  We want a refund, and after 
all, after all we've been through, don't we deserve one?  The stretching ambuscade of days, bitter offerings before the 
altar: incense, yellowed paper brushed with black ink; this march of idleness and loose intent.  The statuary's cracked 
visage gleams a distant glimmer of ravens perched, corners of a gate.  But the vision fades, the trees, skeletal in winter, 
etch out spider geometries, lines that deceive as easily as they delimit: the frieze depicts the haggard face of time, but his 
gaze is askew; his eyes will not meet ours, searching upwards in supplication.  There are hands that offer only that which, 
when taken, would scrape the fruit clean from within or an awkwardness as of children taking their first steps or the 
hesitance that attends the same; like a gift only if it is given, and, even then, too often the dark and clouded edge of pain 
would encroach upon the good once seen in that offering—take the time spent aside the rotting stump of youth and 
crush it in your hand, compress it as you might a ball of tin foil, add to that the measure of the stone on which we sat 
when this recognition first occurred, the canopy of trees that opened up to evanescent rain.  Somewhere in your hand, 
then, is the gist of this, the ambling steps that lead deeper and deeper within the cave until all that remains of your 
entrance is a pinprick of light, and, now, that is gone too; your journey has taken you well past nightfall, past the very 
edge of night, the singular vision of a dream, and by a dream, know that we don't mean a hope or an aspiration, but 
those dreams that come in sleep when exhaustion has taken its toll, the lengthening of your fatigue until it draws itself 
across your shadow like a shroud.  The rib-cage of this fevered figment evokes a person, a feeling, an intent, the curve of 
a bone—the measured lines of a pine box, an undertaker's economy, then a collapsing, a slippage, tectonic as the tide 
that wipes our footprints from the sand, and we would walk harder, press our feet more firmly upon the ground; there is 
violence done and a thing is drawn out from its environs as our gesture would imply.  It's rude to point at things.  But there 
you have it, or have, at least, brought it closer: the unbroken chain of things, the flow without stop, this tide that washed 
our castaway selves upon the shore.  To know that some things are best experienced in passing, to avoid, at any rate, the 
fate of the deer, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, the eyes focused by the empty sheet (a sparkling laid upon 
the tracery, but, more, the imprint of that light upon the stone, the floor, and we might see dust motes or ash in the 
same way) only this is the armature of our assemblage.  The plot requires it, requires a perch, an embankment from 
which to view the scene in its entirety.  Where will the sniper have the best line of fire?  Where to set the landmines, 
where the escape route?  This is all in the planning stages, of course, and in the mix, things will never turn out as 
planned.  But to improvise fully is to invite accident, to remain tethered to the pose before the altar: the small bird that 
searches out sustenance in the gutters among rainwet cigarette butts and discarded promises.  Softly, now, softly, the 
sound of real birds waking in step with the artificial ones that never sleep—it takes a death to remind the living what 
they are doing sometimes (billboards speak a different dialect, and the rainbow appeared and was gone again too quickly 
to catch with a camera, so quickly that we could comment on it but it's gone and in its place the creeping doubt that, had 
you a camera on hand, it would never have offered itself to your eyes in the first place).  

	At any rate, the hands move, frantic, beyond our control, along some invisible harp and there is movement, 
unnatural, a lot of stumbling about and looking awkward.  But that, you see, is precisely why we'll fit right in.  It isn't so 
much in knowing the full story or even in knowing fully the fragments as they have been offered to us, so much as 
having the undeniable sense that the fragments cohere, that the whole gels into something greater than the pieces we 
might dust off and place under the microscope.  And a path often appears as a stream and there are small animals to be 
passed by in the search for something else and there are trees and night and day and cold and flame and there is talking.  
Much talking.  But also a story.  A song and dance routine isn't quite all it takes to put together a show, but you're invited 
anyway, and it'd be disrespectful not to go, wouldn't it?  What I mean is that all we've ever wanted is to be pleasantly 
surprised, and a voice, returning from the forests, surprised us, though, of course, not pleasantly.  It's like thinking you 
have a way out and then realizing, once you've decided to give up and leave, that the way has been blocked by 
circumstances beyond your control, a mudslide, perhaps, or a hurricane has rendered the bridge unpassable.  There are 
things here that we'll gladly give up.  You see, we've forgotten how to make them, and so, sooner or later, we have no 
choice.  But what that leaves us with, of course, is the constant search for replacements.  It's not as if we've learned how 
to do without these things or figured out the blueprints even, and so these walls we build are utterly human, built from 
the inside as an onion layers its own flesh; and as we're building, we wonder what snippets of conversation these 
thicknesses have absorbed, what knives in the backs of others, what furtive whisperings abound outside this wood and 
plaster cage, or perhaps we have been more extreme than that and crafted them of cement or granite.  We're curious 
though, once inured, and so we cut a window, chisel and drill a way back out, but the view is limited, and all the while, 
the ones outside have been at work; what we see of them is limited in its own way, likewise what we hear: a diorama cut 
from our expectations; the stage, the play (the play's the thing, but by the third act you'll say oh 'tis so tragic).  Only you've 
forgotten, you've been taken in by these masks, the wooden crane that lurks offstage.  Just when you thought the hero 
was about to stab out his own eyes, the gods arrive, proclaiming no, no it isn't so; he never slept with his mother or killed his 
father, it was all just a bad dream, a nightmare, in fact, from which we awake, filing out of the auditorium with a collective 
sigh of relief, it wasn't a tragedy after all, it was a farce.  Yet there's something unsettling in our laughter, an uneasiness at 
how easily we've been satisfied, but it's too late to complain; the show's over and all our boos and hisses won't make a 
jot of difference.  And while you must agree that everyone's a critic, it's a shame that we don't write the reviews that 
determine the success of such shows, because here we are now, and, come to think of it, it's not a subtle thing at all: we 
feel like we've been had, our sympathies strung along when it was nothing but a dream.  So we feel a little stupid.  We 
trudge on home, to our cozy beds and television sets and incandescent lights, to refrigerators that make strange noises in 
the middle of the night, and faucets that drip and drip.  Maybe we're still a little disturbed so we pull the covers over our 
heads and curl up into the fetal position; we make believe we're in the womb again and start to dream our own dreams, 
dreams brought rumbling towards us like a great river of marbles or a clod of mercury, a snowball gathering size and 
speed.  Somewhere in this, a memory is plucked out of the pool: he was a vicious little kid, the one who taught you how 
to pack your snowballs hard as solid ice so they'd hurt more when you threw them, and when you were held responsible 
for splitting someone's brow with one, you glared accusingly at him, and he pretended not to know you.  Deep down, 
you knew he had only given you that knowledge, and you (yes, you, remember the bright edge of blood on immaculate 
snow?) were the one that had chosen to use it.  Or maybe the thing we remember isn't so violent, but it is tinted with 
that edge of unhappiness, like the treasure maps we made as kids and burned the edges to make them look authentic; X 
marks the spot twenty paces from here where you hid the cookie jar, only it won't help anyone else to find it since we've 
already stolen the prize, hiding ourselves inside the house eating chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies while all the 
others scampered about outside trying to piece together the map.  But the map was a forgery and the mapmaker had 
long since taken off with the loot.  Was it fun?  Perhaps, until the others uncovered our deception, but that's beside the 
point when we look back on it.  Somehow, we notice something we missed the first time around, how cruel we were as 
children.  But that isn't all there is to it; it doesn't necessarily come from being small, and this is what scares us the most, 
this is where it becomes a nightmare for us, and a real one at that: what are we doing now that we might look back on in 
the same way, with that same sense of embarrassment and dismay?  It is not simply the fear that we haven't grown up or 
that we've allowed ourselves to be mired in immaturity, but that there is something genuinely cruel and heartless about 
the way we treat others, and underneath this, the fear that we have grown to be this way and were not this way to begin 
with.  An aberration, a cancerous movement through time, arrows that seemed to string telephone lines behind them as 
they arced through the air towards our homes; a fire, indiscriminant in its choice of fuel, the moth that bends towards it, 
veering (the flight plan was logged long ago, genetically— go ahead, check with the tower; you'll see I have clearance), and you 
could say it was his destiny, though, officially put, his destination.  An interval of privation fastened to a predatory stare, 
the dark wager we've laid against the moon (impenetrable moon), as if to remember were to acknowledge that something 
lies beneath the surface of our lives and we must come to it, gather it up in our hands, lift it through, permeate, the grain 
of the past, the hollow, credulous bones of birds that have allowed them flight.  

	We would like to hold open a revolving door or else be the lunatic who goes around and around, deliberate 
suspension, an infinity of neither entering nor leaving.  What context, what devout gasping are we brought to that we 
might disentangle ourselves from the face of this skirmish?  The sand that slips between our fingers because we have not 
thought of it as something else; it is the clear water from a holy font that we need to quench our thirst, or else it is so 
many grains of carelessness, misgivings, and regret.  Don't think of holding this thirst in check by force of will alone, for 
there isn't a hand at the faucet unless it is your own, and if the flow is to stop—or to begin at all—it is upon your 
shoulders that such a burden makes its weight apparent.  The mirror and the image seen in it, but it isn't your own, it's a 
vulture or a scavenger, carrion souls that prey on our misfortunes; there's hunger, the perception of a lack, the 
formulation of a strategy to fulfil this dire, dire necessity, but where, where the wind that filled our sails, the skeletal arms 
to which specters cling like leeches?  We've leaned too heavily on one crutch or another, our legs have atrophied from 
disuse, and we need to stretch them out, to learn to walk again—you've got to learn to walk before you can run—what we want, 
though, isn't to run, but to soar, above the scene, to reduce the world and it's petty cares to an easily digestible phrase: 
look, the people are as small as ants.  And the cars they get into, hurrying off to work, they, too, are as small as ants.  What 
would you give to be in this position, the innocent cruelty of the child with his magnifying lens?  What respect is due to 
the order of things that it has not been given in excess?  The stump we crouch upon, the trees that rose up out of the 
horizon of expectation, we could get lost in these woods it seemed, but, no, we're older now, a bit more traveled, and we 
realize that no, the woods, too, are small.  Somewhere, the distant sound of a woodpecker, or the faint glimpse of a 
raccoon at night before it scampers off.  It looked at you, though; did you see it, its luminescent eyes, accusing, in that 
half-second?  What has reduced the creatures of this world to finding things in the remains of others?  When was our 
ability to see something as new replaced with this sense of dread?  We fear it, then, we fear the leap, the dispatch sent 
off, and we have no recourse but to allow its delivery despite the regrets that creep upon us.  It rings clear like truth or 
light or silence, but only in our hopes.  You can see that the path I'm on now, the road I've taken, is untenable, because, 
in your youth, you walked the same path or ran, heedless, along to its destination.  I call that a failure.  I call you a failure, 
because, ultimately, you turned away.  You shrugged off the weight of this venture in exchange for the comfort of 
silence, a mundane end to an inferno that blazed across the countryside of days, unquenched, spreading ruin and 
inspiration.  The eyes close up in sleep.  But how to forget what they saw?  Or the ears, how to inure them to the voices, 
how to still the tide of words, clamoring to be born?  How to forget.  We cannot, and it is our suspicion that, though 
you gave the appearance of having done so, you could not either.  But that is only our suspicion; call it paranoia, if you 
will, but it is because these things press against us so urgently, so unrelentingly, that we cannot envisage someone who 
could let them go, make them dissipate as wisps of gossamer, trailing to their indeterminate ends.  Do you plan to keep 
writing?  Forever, insane question, forever, for as long as there are voices to be heard and ears that will hear them, and even 
in silence.  Even in that sparse vacuum of thought, there are words, words which seethe inwards and outwards and 
upwards, and beneath which the walls of that chamber shall bend or buckle and falter, crumble and fall.  This is the 
algebra of need, the addiction, the faith that gives order to the things of this world and to life, or, if it does not, it raises 
them up, beyond order, and there is no end other than the ends which words shall find in and of themselves, and, in so 
ending, they themselves renew and transform, by ways alchemical or arcane.  Eldritch scratchings, lines drawn again and 
again across the trembling sand.  And one would think the tide strong enough to wipe them away, but they persevere.  In 
memory.  In life.  In hope.  To have words, and have them be words of consequence.  Having drawn the short straw, we 
could take the liquid that is the life of the mind, let it filter through us as pure water through a sieve, the rush of 
circumstance.  You would like to cheat death with a game of chess, but death is a practiced player, knows the best 
response to your every move—you see, the game has been rigged from the very beginning, he offered to let you play 
white, but to the Chinese, white is as much a reminder of death as the color your opponent has chosen.  It's a sad, sad 
lot that lines the tiled floor where we relieved ourselves of too much talk (a poverty of interest hobbles past a silvered 
arch in time, and I have few regrets save that this is not yet the station at which our train shall come to rest, but, rest 
assured, the train, it takes us where we want to go, or else we have no choice, no chance to disembark at all, and might as 
well be content with what's to be our fate).  This is the enterprise of those seeking sainthood, the movement that 
extends past a larger expanse of dirt.  And by what are we guided?  What stars, what unconscionable souls steered these 
notions to their present page but ourselves, the actuality of us, peering, peering into the pool from which an elaborate 
arrangement of dominoes might emerge: the shadow of grass atop a savage knoll, things, a people, uncounted by risk, 
savage risk, obdurate embellishments, the dwindling of that coeval span that marks the limit of the telescope's eye, a 
seeping into the quotidian, the covenant that if we are not real then we are nothing.  Stilted steps, the extension of a 
thought beyond its decent conclusion.  Here, a mottled patch where the sun has filtered green through leaves above us, 
there, a car frozen by your attention as it attempts to find a parking spot, the view from the ground, shadowed by too 
many books.  Or else it is your room, blurred in darkness, and the eyes have overslept, missed looking up to find a thing, 
architectural in its beauty (give me a photograph of your beautiful smile so I might remember you, but we say it and 
already it sounds hollow to the knocking of our thoughts: if I want to remember you, then I will, photograph or not).  

	I have felt the leper's caress across my back, the fear of plague, the isolation it engenders, and I have seen the 
streets flooded with staggering steps of madmen, lunatics fleeing from the blaze which consumes our city of meandering 
drumbeat and pulsating neon, the afterglow of a failed enterprise, opportunity preserved in a few faithless syllables.  
There are fire engines hopelessly flitting about, futile attempts to stem the tide of flame, its all-consuming wrath, the 
consumption that leaves a shell in its wake: pure surface, because what is there is only what we can see to be there.  An epidemic 
or a massacre or one who found redemption and descended just so he could do it all again—these are the true tests of 
the will, true tests of our courage, of humanity, whether we sit alongside events or engage them, risking the inferno 
ourselves.  Have we run for the safety of distance, one foot ahead of the other, or have we turned around and embraced 
the immolation?  What middle distance exists, what middle distance of reprieve; we would bathe in napalm and emerge 
unchanged or to see only skin burnt off, discarded to reveal something true beneath, or to be lifted above it all, rising as 
of hot air.  The report from the front lines—All's well as can be expected, our unit was reduced to half its original number in a 
skirmish last night; these are barbarians we battle who have no regard for the rules of warfare.  Please send cigarettes and send my love to 
everyone at home.  With luck, this will soon be over, and I'll be able to see you again—the urgency behind the missive, and we hold 
in our hands the final string, the one by which the puppetmaster is able to make the marionette stand upright, but the 
head angles down, and the arms hang limp at it sides, a creature that might find its forlorn face molded out of the clay, 
the ripeness of the expression which, as always, is fashionable, an expression of the moment.  You must understand that 
there are no guarantees when you purchase your ticket, no guarantee that the show will be to your liking, no guarantee 
that the train will ever leave the station.  Although scientists might claim otherwise, there are no such guarantees, 
because no one can promise what will become of you, and it's you and your questions that slow the stream like twigs and 
rocks, sediment gathered at the part where the flow narrows.  You see, the vision that blurs, the harmony that becomes 
tangible, weaving itself into your nerves, these things enter into the picture only as far as you allow them, and, at the crux 
of it, it is about a need to find a balance, a center around which to structure the elements of our day to day lives, but 
there is no center.  Or if there is, it is to be found outside the realm of our perception, finely tuned microscopes that 
turn outwards only and never in—the hands that trace the contours of a box or a cell, the feeling of confinement 
engendered by this gesture, or the hands again when they brush across the spine: goosebumps, and you felt as if death 
himself had touched you, a cold feeling, numbness as of one who has slipped into a lake, frozen over during winter.  
When facts pile up, incontrovertible, and each step becomes another step in the grave of impossibility.  Sulfur regrets: 
what thought had been stifled there, still born, for want of breath or I should say that a shiny bit glistened on her purse 
and I was convinced for a second or two that it was the flickering of candleflame and that is why I sat down to talk to 
her, to make her understand how this could be.  Or else it's something your vanity tells you but you've got too much 
common sense and brush it aside.  But it's still there, in the margins, a suspicion, and what if, sometimes, vanity is right?  
You look back now and say melodrama, but maybe you've fallen into this trap—it's a tourist trap, and as you cast your 
eyes across the vista of the past, what I want to sell you is a souvenir, a reminder, a shiny trinket whose price is 
remembrance: in the cave, the echoes of unvoiced thoughts; these are stalagmites and those, stalactites.  Interpolated 
thoughts, counterfeit notions, the time when thought isn't thought and who could have told us that the blind, white light 
could be as cold as the dark, that playing devil's advocate could make us more reviled than the goat-god himself?  These 
are dead hands that wipe condensation from colored glass; this is the word that ends it (inestimable word), or it isn't a 
word: this employment, then, the ravaging of perceptions, and we were wrong to think of it as an ending, though it ends.  
It ends with a slow tapering off, a fade that begs continuation and we'd hope there's another part to this that will make 
what we've gathered complete, something that trails along the end of this impulse.  We've come to a realization: it's 
never been our part to tell that tale.  Not now.  Not ever.  

	And we're wondering what to make of it all.  The frame's been set down, the foundation laid; out of this comes 
the building, but that's been stalled, there's a problem, see—the architect didn't care about structural integrity, so what 
we've got here is like sticking a watermelon on a house of cards and expecting the whole thing to stand.  The sketches 
need reworking, the lines need to be drawn again; a sharp stick this time to scratch our names into the sand.  No, we've 
got to do something about the waves, and then, in another dream, it occurs to you that what you need to do is relocate, 
further inland, away from the water; the obviousness of this stuns you, why hadn't it occurred to you before?  But that 
won't do either, it would be too easy an answer, and, inland, the wind would catch up with you, and the ground would 
be subject to seismic tremors; the great machinery of erosion just waiting for the moment you tried to carve something 
permanent.  So, once again, at the mercy of tern and gull, like the nascent worm, fearful digging while death circles 
above.  Oh, to be anything but what we are.  But that's a feeble lie: a worm can pretend to be a snail, yet remains a worm 
without the snail's shell.  A seeking out of crevices, then, sanctuaries, islets of solitude, away from the burgeoning din of 
machines or of predators that scan our eyes with that pendulum-glare that demands attentiveness and, made awake now, 
the circling about the fountain fed by drainwater, its white foam flow.  There's a chemical muse that tap dances, tickles 
the ivories on the Steinway of our preoccupations.  But let's suppose you wanted to hear more than the abstract 
furnished by your reflection.  What we want is to find a place, a time, when decisions we made had a chance to alter the 
outcome, a moment of control, or perhaps not even a moment in time, but as a marker alongside what occurred, a 
thermometer for the chaos which was to ensue, or perhaps it's a thing we want to have before us that we might examine 
and criticize: that split-second lapse, that passing frailty which has left us where we are.  It would be nice to have a place 
to lay our blame, like you might pass on an unwanted birthday present to a younger sibling.  We know, of course, that 
the only ones upon whom these gifts would be bestowed are none other than ourselves, but still, it would be nice to be 
able to restore some sense of control to this rudderless ship of fools, only the mirror denies us even this.  The fractured 
pane seizes us and the past is a haze, chains of causation sent flailing into the abyss, or otherwise we see it all too clearly 
and still have nothing to point a finger at, no instant of which to say that choice we made, at that moment precisely, is what has 
brought about our present excursion into entropy and you see through the looking glass a young lady, abandoned at the altar by 
her fiancé who's run off with some whore.  Only maybe we can stop ourselves before this point, come to terms with 
what this is, this relentless desire to name names in the pursuit of self pity; maybe we can arrest this freefall into 
stupidity, drag it off to jail and throw away the key.  There's a confusion, a muddle, an equilibrium thrown off and, more, 
a fog, but one that might be lifted, burned away in the infancy of a day.  It's not what you might think: that we would 
like to forget; it isn't that, but to be able to remember without regret, without desire for a thing whose time has passed.  
(Oh, that's never the end of it, and certainly not the beginning; there are scars that can't be wiped away with cosmetic 
surgery, scars that run deep under the skin: optimal wound profile is one which is invisible and yet eats the subject away 
wholly, from within, the friend who threatens to commit suicide and in some dark and tiny corner of your mind the 
thought what, my friendship isn't valuable enough to keep you here, among the living?)  This is a selfish notion, to be sure, wrought 
of pure vanity, and that's why you've tucked it so carefully, so neatly away in that little corner of your thoughts, never to 
be set down on paper, never to be voiced, but it's there, there's no use denying it, it's there.  And what of it?  Is it any 
less real a loss, any less human a sentiment?  Isn't it enough, the crosses that we mount ourselves upon, that others must 
hammer home the nails?  (And, hey, while we're at it, when do I get my crown of thorns?  Judge-penitent, indeed, the 
stain of a burp from the angel of death, no less.)  It's a matter of common courtesy, of simple respect and it's a profound 
failure of the same.  But there's a player piano that keeps on going even when there isn't a monster at the keys when this 
attitude floats to the surface like so much pond scum or the grease in a pot of soup that's been left to cool.  A craft that 
kills or is killing.  These are the political overtones of the moment in the alleyway, four strangers, or, rather, two pairs of 
strangers.  You dyed your eyes the color of fatigue and were more a sister to him than anyone else, biologically or 
otherwise.  A refusal to compromise.  Or was that merely a refusal to be swept up by change?  And somehow we can 
care about things that we've allegedly forgotten.  Change, something unyielding in it, in its direction, the signs and 
omens, cards flipped over to signify a symmetry.  And a symmetry is the key to keeping your place along the marked 
lines of the diagram, the mind, rapt in pregnant thoughts, remembers a moment, stilled before the mirror, steered into 
recognition.  Inevitably, your twin knows something that you don't, if he knows anything at all.  And we have found a 
place where it began; we have found a place.  Of separation.

	Enough of that.  Let me tell you instead about a man who made an island of himself and found the walls of his 
solitude laid siege to from within, the myriad voices teeming inside that cramped and addled space.  Or maybe you'd like 
to hear about the other man who was wracked by those same voices, only he took a pure delight in that delirium, song, 
bursting from the inexorable drift of chance like smoke rising from a cigarette left in an ashtray.  I could tell you these 
things, but I'd have to ask something of you in exchange, an answer, to another question: since when has it mattered 
whether we participated or merely watched the slaughter broadcast live on cable or in real-time over the internet?  It's 
tough to keep abreast of current events these days and we'd like to consider ourselves informed, we would.  There's 
disconnection, ligament severed from bone, the flood that casts continents adrift and men as well (women, for the most 
part, too intelligent to be swept up by all this nonsense).  You wished only to own yourself for a memorable bracket of 
the hand's fell swoop, and you perspire, your scalp prickles with the intuition that a revolution is brewing as the morning 
coffee percolates, the color that drains into the margins of night.  There's a reckoning, and no account is taken of the 
results of our examinations.  You remember, the test of how readily we would pull our hands back from the flame, and 
if we did so when all we felt was warmth and not even the slightest hint of pain, surely that warmth was clear enough 
presentiment of things to come?  But after the warmth passes, nothing's left, only smoke and mirrors.  You may trust 
your own intuition on this one; it's really all done with smoke and mirrors and cleverly concealed trap doors, the 
occasional sleight of hand, nothing more.  So there's this struggle, a nervous fidgeting from which something new hopes 
to be born, and it really doesn't matter whether we cast ourselves as heroes or villains because this whole affair doesn't 
come about without both interested parties being present.  This is something like the jigsaw puzzle of our lives; a 
gremlin has made off with some of the pieces, and, oh, what a shame, it seems he's taken the corner pieces and all the 
pieces along the edges that frame the thing, and, come to think of it, that makes it quite a bit tougher, now, doesn't it?  
The next exhibit is an inkblot, or a history from which we might foresee our end only we've forgotten how long it's 
been, forgotten which configuration of digestive organs augurs well or ill.  This is the emulsion sheet of a family portrait, 
it gathers up a host of apparitions, invisible to the watchful eyes of uncles and aunts and cousins, once or twice removed.  
Hold the paper near a candle and the secret message, written in lemon juice, appears, but you've held it too close to the 
flame and the whole thing caught afire and you had to drop it to the kitchen floor, the burning sheet warm against cold 
tile.  Maybe you were meant to read the message in cumulations of smoke, hanging in the stagnant air, and, perhaps, 
what's written there is a confession—yes, a confession, because if you've stuck with us this long, we'd like to think of 
you as an estranged relative and it's with this confession that we'd like to welcome you back into the fold.  We've no 
more an idea of where this story ends or begins as you do, and, if you're flailing your arms among the waves, searching 
for a life-preserver, we've none to offer you, because, you see, we're flailing right there with you and it's not until you've 
learned to swim that we'll have even begun to tread water.  Where does the river find its end?  In an ocean you might 
say, or a lake, but what of rains and the glaciers that melt to feed the river?  What of the drought that brings end to the 
river in cracked earth, the riverbed without moisture?  We could fool ourselves into thinking that we know where 
memory begins, but a better question is how it became so important for us to believe it, that there is something 
unswervingly pure at the center of this: a well or a fountain (there's no difference, really), a story that isn't just about me 
or you, but about all of us, ourselves, about the little deaths that add up to one big death and the even bigger death that 
wouldn't be quite so big if we could wrap our minds around to looking at it in the right way.  This isn't so much a cipher 
or a combination lock or a three-dimensional puzzle of wooden blocks that fit together only one way.  Think of it 
instead as an unwritten language, one that needs to prey upon your senses to convince you of its message.  


...and I have this thing
I must do without knowing what it is or whether anyone 
will be helped or offended by it.  Should I do it?  And there, it was gone.

—John Ashbery, Flowchart 


	What could it mean to be as impossibly popular as some must become with age?  Is it to dull the edge of 
reason that we enter into this enigma?  The season of your dismay, season of sleet and hail as wide around as your hand 
stretched open in a paroxysm of pain, the convenience of business that consumes our every reaction to that sparkling 
cord of stimulus that spreads itself across our bourbon skies.  There is an empire built upon a mountain of skulls, the 
weight of it crushing those skulls to fine, white powder.  The pressures of that vein of existence, to hope that the 
compression of bones will, in time, produce diamonds.  To determine the direction of the wind: suck your index finger 
until all sides of it are moistened, hold it up to the impending air.  We would determine the color of your thoughts, 
incommensurable thoughts, which, even in light, cannot be reconciled with any process we could hope to call our own.  
This is subtractive mixing, the mixing that obscures, creates black when the spectrum presents itself in its entirety.  Or 
else it is the onion skin phenomenon upon which we've already elaborated.  The painter to the poet: a picture is worth a 
thousand words.  That picture, the one worth a thousand words, we should like to see.  Not a picture about which, around 
which, a thousand words could be written or spoken, but a picture truly worth those thousand words.  Or, conversely, 
the thousand words worthy of such a picture.  Our reply to the painter, then: the blind can hear our words, can they see your 
thousand?  There's a kind of honesty that's seen as a symptom of madness, for, at times, to be honest means to be rude, 
and rudeness, the civilizing machines cannot tolerate.  They hate it.  They hate it with a passion, only that passion is a 
dispassionate kind, for they are, after all, machines: cogs and pistons and wires and circuit boards; they serve a function, 
and have been designed to pursue that program ruthlessly, with the cold efficiency of an explosive device.  This is the 
part of the brain that likes to correct errors, misspellings in a textbook, that demands exactitude, that would have each 
sentence be as brief and concise as it is possible.  This is the part of the brain responsible for forgetting, that would like 
to forget the light that beckons off the edge of morning, shards of broken pottery, several photographs of the last time 
you went to visit your grandfather before he passed away, golden fields of grain that hurtled by your car the time you 
drove across the country, the time you found out that bandages wouldn't be enough to stop the bleeding and you 
stopped just shy of applying a tourniquet out of desperation (amber solaces, things kept permanent within, golden sap, 
like flypaper, but turned hard by time, things we preserve so that they, in turn, preserve us, the solemn pact, the offering, 
shared memory and the letting go. This is the dissonant flow: the harp song we lean into that bends to synchronicity's 
slightest whimper, vast, undinal cloud of pathways plucked from some wanderer's sense of seeming).  The key to it is in 
a code, a date and time after which the whole thing expires into an azure highway that spans the continent with its 
stuttering, chromosomal step.  We thought ourselves past it somehow like conversation could blast the whole thing into 
a thousand glittering shards of ice, but this is the zone of earth that engages us, pulls us in, magnetic, and we're left to 
ponder distant moorings, that hesitant sigh of resignation.  Who was it that suggested this venture to us?  We could 
blame them, at least, but in your heart of hearts you know that it was none other than your own pitiless longing that 
started this journey, this travail, that there is nothing to redeem yourself in it, no voucher by which we might have 
escaped detection, the cormorant eyes that scan the horizon, indivisible, no less and no more a palpable truth than the 
ways we sought to disguise ourselves: the guise of a carpenter in one life and, in another, you donned the face of a 
penitent, but knew all along that fooling yourself is oftentimes precisely the point of it.  The time you ran around the 
block, because you just felt like it, said in a tone that discouraged further investigation; run, run and where are you running?  
It doesn't much matter, unless we've forgotten.  But we cannot forget.  Or else we cannot want to forget, but it is not 
that either, it is that we only know that we ought to want to forget, and yet cannot.  So we remember, we hope to 
remember fully and without regret, but what's there, in the box you open with your mind, are half-remembrances, the 
things never wholly present to you as they were before and yet they persist, a decomposition in slow motion, a thorn in 
our collective side.  To evaluate a thing firsthand, with the honesty of which you think others incapable.  But you're 
wrong; the capacity for that honesty is in all of us.  And if you stare long enough at the photograph, you'll see yourself 
reflected in a store window, or you'll find your face superimposed over the face of the gentleman, not quite in focus over 
in the top left corner.  But there's your own ignorance, our own ignorance, of which we ought to be afraid.  And what he 
have to do is to go on asking stupid questions, hoping that the smart answers stick and the stupid answers drop off like 
dead skin.  The long face, the recognition that it's long since been late, too late, in fact, for you to do anything about it.  
And isn't that always the case?  And isn't that a shame?  And where have you been, that you haven't noticed the knife as 
it skated across the surface of our promises, our best intentions?  We've been busy, or worse, we've busied ourselves on 
purpose.  The bruise that breaks and breathes, turns itself inside out, opens the wound to the air, to the dust of our 
discarded notions, a night of storm, breaking over building tops, the apple tree in the yard brought low by a wind like a 
flurry of whips and you'd have to see it to believe it.  And there's the catch: the only way you'd see it would be to believe 
it.  At any rate, we all end up back where we began, ashes to ashes, etc.  And to those who have invested their time and 
energy in us, their care, their hopes, what we have to offer is nothing more than what we have become, and this may 
seem to be nothing like the thing you would have crafted, but with you, it began, and with us it ends, or else it is a 
continuation and we, too, will see our predictions, our preparations made in vain.  If there was the opportunity to 
abstain from this cycle, it is a point that has passed us, and we offer our throats to your blade; our frailties, the knives 
you unwittingly level at our throats.  See, here, the search for vindication, but we so adamantly refused to let go of the 
tangled vine that threatened to strangle us.  Maybe one day, we will be able to look back on this and say it was fortunate, 
indeed, that we did not let go, but for the present, a host of lesser virtues entice us.  It has become difficult to choose and 
doubt clogs the air, the demon of second thought, hovering over our shoulders.  It's instinctual, we suppose, to laugh at 
someone engaged in what we consider futile (nervousness, the fear that what we, ourselves, could not do, another 
could).  Such mockery is the backdrop for too much of this scene, and, if we are merely trying to carve something 
indelible, we learn to dismiss it.  You're insecure, she says, that's why you've folded your arms up against your chest; and the answer, 
unspoken: aren't we all?  We'd like to consider ourselves easily read.  We make no secret of what goes on beneath the 
surface; we wish only to see ourselves in light, to see the curves and bumps, smoothnesses and irregularities of our 
situation, how history has marked us, to know why, to know how the present is assembled, how the pieces of the puzzle 
have come together, inevitable.  I would cheat fate if it were in me to devise a way.  I would lash myself to the mast of a 
great galleon, moving forward across the days, and I would hear the sirens' song, the temptresses' wailing—to know the 
longing they instill and yet live to see another sunrise burning red across the horizon.  We once harbored such hopes, 
but have since put such cleverness, such a stratagem, beyond our meager means.  (Yet hope resides within our hearts 
that we might stumble upon such a subterfuge . . . by chance?)  What this is about is the forms that hide beneath the 
ritual, the ones, unapparent, that rise to meet us in the morning, and what we want you to come away with is the sense 
that you've been through something, something more than the soft parade of words that is easy, too easy, to dismiss.  If 
only you would appear, then, unannounced, despite the rain.  But this would never happen, because it isn't even a dream 
that hopes for this and it isn't even a theory of the stars that stretches across my spine tonight, or an invitation waiting to 
be met, but unvoiced fear, and though we can ask for absolution, all we're granted is the clarity of silence as when a film 
switches to slow motion and the audio feed cuts out, because what's there in front of our eyes has become more 
important than what we might hear.

	Here it is, the stone buried at the middle of the snowball, black as coal, black as spite.  This is the hard, hard 
hate around which the rest gathers like a legion of the damned, or else it is only what we have been looking for, but now 
that we've found it, it disappoints.  What we wanted was a treasure, a shining gem, and we've wrung too many tears of 
blood from the stone to be disappointed like this.  This bit of rock isn't what feeds the watery grave or even what lifts 
the clouds above our heads, it's what's beneath us, underfoot, and what we've learned is that it is amazing thing that we 
have been here for this long and still have no idea where here is.  We're not lost, we just don't know where we are.  The 
thought refracts, forlorn, and if we miss anything it's the ability to tell a story from the beginning, and we blame the epics 
for that.  Greencopper pennies all around, greencopper pennies for my eyes and yours, for the ferryman, and for the old 
passage, the page in time to which we turn.  And having done so, we're supposed to have learned something crucial.  But 
maybe we've mined that vein a few too many times, and all it's fit for is to be ground into a paste and made into boot 
polish.  The crumbling sensation is like a landslide, a hallucination, the pattern you see, but know isn't real.  Trust us, it's 
more fun when you fool yourself into thinking that it is: that the snow can spread like the fingers of a hand between the 
trees (even in the middle of summer), that your shoulders have fallen off, that where you think you are isn't really where 
you are (even when it is, unfortunately, it is) and that the fall won't hurt (actually, it didn't, but you felt it later, didn't 
you?).  Because this isn't real and at the same time, it is.  It is.  And isn't it disappointing to find that you can only 
imagine people that actually exist, that, really, you can't have an argument with yourself?  And what you've got to realize 
is that it wasn't your foolish rage that broke the window screen or even an attempt to free yourself from the confines of 
an existence limited by the possibility of two outcomes, of two identical keys.  What it was, was the ladder's approach, 
the twisting of your arm, the incomprehensibility of a seat-belt when you think yourself either dying or immortal (at any 
rate, not quite human) and you mused that there were adventures beyond your memory and took a genuine pleasure in 
knowing (thinking) that.  But you found out the truth soon enough, or the truth found you, and you wished that no one 
had figured out this particular puzzle, that no one had told you the answer, because here was a problem that could have 
entertained you for a lifetime: an alien song like a conspiracy, the story about the towel stolen from the middle kingdom, 
the friend who was visiting from out of town and the water spilt over his questioning—it all would have made sense in 
another moment.  But not this one, not the one that burns as we clutch it in our hands.  No, not this moment, not this 
lifetime.

	You have learned to take well to instruction or, at least, have borne advice well, knowing it was well meant.  
But I think that I am not of such a species, am not so sharp as to have gained a foothold in that way of living; the 
simplest things confound me, and that is not to say that I understand the complex, only that to puncture the screen 
requires a small incision at first, before the rending apart, dreams into ribbons, the numbers' forecast for the day, or 
animals plucked from desperation.  What can they tell us that we do not know ourselves?  Nothing, and so it is better if 
they lie, offer comfort of the moment, a smoothness of surfaces.  (If we pretend everything is all right for long enough, 
can we not come to believe it?)  There is danger in this, but one that seems preferable to the scene outside, the new 
lights, incandescent, the paint job that fails to uphold a general agreement, and is too easily marred besides.  We can 
fashion our own ruptures, our own crises well enough: you stumbled as you came up the stairs, swayed a little at the top 
as if from vertigo.  But it wasn't that, it was the long stretch of the hall, the intermittence of light that made you reach 
out for support.  I remember, you would say, when what you meant was that you remembered imagining the scene, but 
were never actually there, because that hallway only exists in so far as you believe in it, and so you believed in it and took 
up a pen or went home to a keyboard before a computer and proceeded to write.  We are not trying to mock or to make 
what you have done seem small, because we've done it ourselves.  We've known the ink, thick and dripping, truculent 
onto the page, wings that aren't feathered, but are more like a dragon's wings or the wings of an insect—the efficiency of 
that impulse is questionable, but not so the drum beat that drives it, at once loose and taut, a moral strain, or a train that 
must build its own tracks as it goes, an extra burden, to be sure, but one that grants a freedom of mobility.  Take the 
exercising of the limbs with ease, then, the testing of your strength, for we are only small things and easily tossed by the 
vicissitudes of a director's whim.  Can we see the sun rise or set as it was meant to be seen or do these tinted glasses turn 
that thought on its edge, leaning, always leaning, teetering into the memory of an afternoon spent under frost-faced 
windows, the reflection of a dream only, and sunken, now, in a belly-laugh or a mischievous cast of the eyes?  And here, 
the echo of a thing, not as memory and not as sound, but as that fleeting spark of inspiration behind the notion, the 
voice we've stolen and are deathly afraid lest its owner come to claim it (not that we fear such a figure's wrath, but that 
those reclamations should deprive us, the unrightful possessors, of something necessary, like the very stream that 
brought the forest, the landscape we would call home, alive).  What right have we to them, then, those slight inflections, 
accents, variations of tone, the thing we paste together out of expedience and call our own?  But that is not the crux of it 
either, or, at least, not in so much as we are intent on being truthful.  For it isn't so much that we feel guilty at all, but 
more as if some angel has lighted upon our shoulder, graced us with its presence, and what if it should then flutter away 
to some other, more deserving shore?  We fear, then, a false inheritance, being unveiled as an imposter, an Iscariot 
revealed, his thirty pieces of silver stolen to boot.  But we're an adaptable lot, or need to be, the crucible of the living has 
told us that much—if we never paid enough attention to the wisdom being dripped in our ears, now's the time to make 
up for it with our own mistakes, our own trepid meanderings.  The cliff edge beckons and if we've not brought rope 
enough to hang ourselves with, that's all right, the fall's a precipitous one and we've room enough for a delayed sort of 
landing, a crash that follows on the ears set back by a good century or so.  A sensation of being hunted seizes you, it 
won't let you wrest yourself from its grip, and the only thing to do is hunt right back, stalk that fevered beast of shadows 
through the alleyways of its own city, its own deserted streets, streets that cry the delinquent air apart, the shrill keening 
that holds you in its thrall.  You coast along, as we all have at one time or another, because somehow you know that this 
is the way things were meant to be.  Coasting, along the surface that meets your glance, it ought to be clear that utility 
was never the real issue, but necessity, the need to cut across the canvas with harsh allotments of pigment, hands full of 
the toxic taste of wonder, a voice that needed to be heard in this vacuous space, carved out by circling cries, denial that 
what we know can and will hurt us.  But it's all too likely that this isn't the case, that it isn't clear.  If our search for a 
cause and an effect has not been wholly in vain, then we know it can't be the case, because if it were, we wouldn't be 
grounded here, our wings of wax and feather too frail to bear the heat of the unrelenting sun.  So we've got to wonder: 
whence this obsession with being useful, whence this insistence that we're anything but what we are, that what meager 
bit of self knowledge we do possess could insure any kind of safety if we only kept to the modest space prescribed for 
us?  Relentless pacing, then, the symptom not of an anxiety, but born of the strength of our belief, and the eye that peers 
out from behind a wall of eyes, behind the elaborate systems we've devised to keep providence at our shoulders.  That 
eye looks out onto a sparse terrain of indulgences and it wonders, doesn't it?  It does, it wonders and it wishes for 
something more than the harvest of this avenue whose foundation was set in place long before our ancestors were born 
(a feather, crushed underfoot, marks the beginning of a path around the encampment, a circling route and by the time 
your eyes have traced it with their circumspect attention, the feather has been lifted by the wind, whisked off to other, 
more needful, destinations).  Disregard the nausea that strikes you now because a voice tells you it's just that the air's 
thinner up here, in these dizzying altitudes, these velocities of song.  So you breathe deeper, suck in as much of the 
atmosphere as you can muster, feel it stirring in your lungs like so many years of dust, now brought up in a cloud.  
Useless, now, because that's what we are, and it won't help us any to deny it.  Useless, and we keep on going, because 
there's no alternative, no detour we can take, no way to bypass this approaching sense of dread that comes hurtling at us 
like a hail or a race horse that's thrown its jockey; it's foaming at the bit and more than a little angry now, and it's all we 
can do to meet it headlong, throw aside the stares and petulant questioning, the pretense that we had any idea what we 
were doing, and the scene blurs itself, shakes itself apart at the seams, fragments tumbling off the cliff of our 
expectations, because, you see, it's never what we expected it to be, no better or worse, but only something for which 
our wildest imaginations and sibilant ramblings could never have prepared us.  The shoddy welding job, the rivets that 
pop out like bullets under the slightest strain, they don't matter as much as the idea of the thing with which we began.  
(It's enough to make us wonder where we began at all, if ever we did begin.)  It's the youthful day in demise, the ashen 
sky, the blasted heath, the winter that refuses to end, and it's none of these things.  It's the place you forgot to look when 
you needed to find your keys, and so you thought you'd lost them, but oh, look it isn't so, there they are, sitting right there 
atop your dresser.  But that's not the end of it, because, after all this, there's still the lull and a dismissive attitude we 
perceive in those around us.  They won't permit us this space, won't indulge us by admitting that what is going on right 
now is something only so horrible as can be imagined in the ways we might escape it; it's as if they, sitting on their 
barstools or cemented to their chairs in front of the café, can't admit to themselves that they're going through the same 
thing, reborn each moment in a reflection caught in the windshield of a passing car or in the wake of pigeons scattering 
at the approach of that same car.  And you'll wonder, you will, about whether there was ever a time when you were as 
oblivious to it as they, and it's vanity that tells you no, no, that isn't so, you've always felt a slight nagging sensation at the 
back of the neck, an itch that wasn't an itch and a whisper that wasn't quite a whisper but more like the sound an animal 
will make to evoke pity or sympathy.  That's what vanity might say to you, but we know better, we've known days 
drenched in the delirium of restive thoughts and slumbering giants, huge slobbering beasts of fancy with teeth that 
menaced like rows of venomed daggers and claws that shined—the cobwebs of that notion are just a yesterday away 
even now, and suddenly, they seem closer, they seem to close upon us until they've replaced us.  They are our own 
sweet, humble, infantile selves; they've taken our forms, and, more than that, saturated our every thought and action, 
immersing us in their glistening sheen, and we're trapped in a way, but it's not so bad, you're not a prisoner so much as 
someone who's come to a certain understanding about the way things operate in this sea of sensations.  The imaginings, 
the ideas that come to you aren't new, but they come to you in new ways, and with that, we might be content.  Let it be 
like this and the dream comes back to you, reaches a new pitch, a choir that sings to you from beneath the grimy muck 
of the earth, calls to you like a wink and an insolent smirk, the offer of a hand (this is not something that we can deny), 
and off we are again, the ground shifting beneath us, our home reduced to rubble.  It's hard to find a castle that won't 
falter or topple when storms such as these reach their most fastidious edge, the maelstrom that lashes the brickwork 
asunder, sends dead leaves scurrying for the shadows of mountains.  Tell me that you understand the world and the way 
it works, its many-splendored ways (not that I think it possible to understand, but that to know that someone can be that 
sure of their place in the effluvium of experience gives the rest of us some measure of hope—we need a myth to make 
our living sane, and if that myth be that our living can be sane, then so be it).  

	Elementary school exercises have loosed the dogs of our demise, their unwhispered promises are men in gas 
masks who prohibit entrance or allow it only to entrap us within those labyrinthine halls, the linoleum that shines like 
surf or like the sea, calm or current-tossed.  And we know now that we could rule the world if we could only describe 
the taste of mint, if we could only escape the gods' brazen-armed grasp, the hands that render distance futile, the all-
encompassing hands that are the scope of our gods' sight.  Mint is mint as a rose has never been (nor will be) more than 
a rose whether with the brightness of fresh blood as it is blooming or ashen in decay.  The gull wings its way over our 
heads and you'll say graceful, but the bird knows the effort taken to remain aloft, the strain of that endeavor, the forces 
(apart from gravity) that would tether it to the ground.  It's a reminder, then.  A reminder, surely, of what we struggle 
against, of the nature of conflict, of why this conflict is such a dire necessity (we dreamt the zero sum of summer down 
to the bone, the sun, cold and undying and days the taste of medicine).  The message is one we have learned to recite by 
heart so that, if we are slain, there will be no physical copy to be seized upon by our enemies—in the event that they 
should capture us alive, a cyanide capsule hidden under a false tooth will suffice to keep our secrets with us to our graves 
(it is less painful, one imagines, to die by cyanide poisoning than from torture).  And so, at times, it seems as if there are 
many, many ways to fail and only one way to succeed, but allow me to try again: this is something that begs you to 
overlook the occasional misstep, that tries to rise above being the mere sum of its parts, and if it falters, it falters not 
because of the infirmity of its foundation, but because it is an arrow that aims for too high a mark, forgets the 
calculation of wind, of gravity's pull; it's tried to loose itself from what binds it here, among us, and offers up a page that 
cannot be seen (never written, never rewritten).  And in as much as you would subject this page to your critical gaze, you 
deny its very existence before you as a thing, absolute and pure, beyond reproach like pain, the cessation of it, or the 
innocence we perceive in animals, small creatures that make their homes away from the stench of cities.  And you may 
say this has gone on for far too long, if there was a point we've got it now, or we've missed it and will never recover the stance that would 
have unfolded it before us, but to that I would say I know, I know that we have gone on and on and tested your patience 
beyond the very verge of decency, but this story neither finds its end in your attention span nor mine, and I'd not waste 
your time (and mine) if I didn't think it necessary, most necessary, to paint the scene in its entirety.  Once, it seemed as if 
everything was going well, (you'll think I'm depressed, that things aren't going well now, but they are, only it rarely seems 
it) and one wonders whether we were conscious at the time that we could only have been fooling ourselves, interpreting 
the signs in the ways that pleased us most.  It is a strange thing to reread a poet you once discarded as being not to your 
liking and to find that the poet in question is now a voice for all the unsaid thoughts that have flitted through your skull 
in the intervening years.  This is a marker, proof that you've changed, or that the world has changed around you, for 
surely the words haven't rearranged themselves for your convenience?  We've carved a hole in the apparatus, seen 
straight through to the cut lines, impermanent manifestos, and carefully bartered steps; it's like the moon is this portal to 
some other plane, flat, pale, dimensionless, only we've reached it, pressed our faces up against it against the surface 
where the stars and self-illusion intersect.  What we've got for our trouble is the polaroid of us making funny faces 
pressed against the window, but it's something at any rate, and who's to say it isn't worth the evenings spent wandering 
the woods alone or even the encounter at the top of that hill with the creepy old man, the feeling like you'd been blessed 
or cursed or maybe both when you saw your name on the billboard, only it wasn't really your name, just close enough 
that you'd mistake it for yours, and you'll find this isn't a poor picture of the situation at all, because it isn't just a scene 
that I'm trying to paint for you, it's more an act of love like the dead pigeon the cat leaves at your doorstep, his feline 
face looking up, expecting praise.  And, anyway, how's the cat to know you haven't got a predilection for dead birds? 


If it is true we must do these things
We must cut our throats

The fly in the bottle

Insane, the insane fly

Which, over the city
Is the bright light of shipwreck

—George Oppen, Of Being Numerous


	Magnetic clock, cold metal tick-tock. tic. talk. time on demand, at our beck and call, and we haven't the time for 
another catchy slogan (catchy because they catch us, let time slip by unmolested).  The residue of that conversation 
adheres to something in our souls, an assessment of threat, and the proper measures taken to remove that threat.  It is a 
threat that works its way into the mind and, once there, refuses to budge and it is a charm, a magical amulet that exudes 
a beat, a dialectic, disco beat, syncopated, awkward, even, in its paradoxical turnings.  And the man in the green suit is 
not a man, but only the icon of a man, swathed in green, like the icon of a woman might as easily be a Scotsman in his 
kilt.  But do you know the man of whom I speak?  Do you know that he is one with an intensive purpose?  He is a man on 
official business.  And did you know that a white van fits his purpose as well as a black one and that the vans don't hide 
hippies intent on changing your mind, but, often, something more sinister?  The story takes a turn, fades into the 
obscurity of years, neglected for a space and then returned to with the realization that the facts are all wrong, the names 
have been changed to protect the guilty but, really, to protect all those who have had anything worthwhile to say.  We 
never needed a straw to drink this message in, we have soda in a plastic cup, overflowing with ice, and we have cigarettes 
to pass the time—to pass the time as if time were not already passing us.  Then a secret smile, the secret burden of that 
extra mile in search of something and it's a silent smile, silent as a vacuum of words is not.  Silent as a holocaust is silent 
(demands a cry, of sadness, of rage).  And there's a ligature, loosed upon the mind, careening across the metropolitan 
dreamscape of our intent, streets that gleam in the aftermath of rain, that gleam like hood ornaments or like gold.  A 
system chosen arbitrarily, or a system that chooses us, and we look on.  We look on while others flare across their 
moments of darkness and it's a soulful moment, a hopeful moment in which dreams are allowed to breathe, to grow, to 
wander through the gaps in the dam until the flow finds its own end, dissipates itself.  The weather in this moment 
makes you feel clean, awake. Whole.  Whole, as we haven't felt for some time now, and it's a strange thing to think that 
we're always needing something outside ourselves to feel whole.  But there it is: the weather, the texture of it, rough 
against your tongue, the locus of the storm, surrendered as one might surrender a holy relic over to the care of the 
church (but which sect?).  Our shoes and socks were soaked through from splashing our way across a minefield of 
puddles, and you said you liked playing in the rain but didn't like getting wet and what the hell was that supposed to 
mean?  And age, what age to tame the swarming tide, to apprehend this dilemma the way it was meant, what age that 
brought on this air of seriousness?  You said it came out of traveling abroad, the exposure to another way of life that 
made this place seem so petty to your jaded eyes.  It's a serious man who wanders these halls, watches the clock as 
minutes slide by, imperceptibly.  It's a serious man who worries about the future or about the past and, even more, the 
present.  And it might be true that we haven't been serious enough or what we'd like to tell ourselves is that we've 
already thought this course through to its end, and the necessary conclusions have unsettled us enough to make us want 
to forget.  To forget or to remember what it was like not to have drawn those particular conclusions, not to have 
interpellated ourselves into this realm of midnight delusion and caffeinated synergy.  A dream pokes out from beneath 
the page, the neatly ruled lines, the florid prose: the crown didn't quite fit your head.  It was too large, slipped too easily 
around your neck (like a noose), or, worse, it was too small, made you look like an idiot, and so you had to give it to your 
nephew, and everyone thought he was the king and you, merely his advisor.  Maybe things turned out better that way, to 
let the affairs of state be run by a seven year old, and you, free to enjoy the rewards of long career of empire-building 
and plunder.  What had the royal tutors failed to teach him by that age that he would need in ruling?  A respect for his 
elders, surely, for it hadn't yet been a month into his reign when he had you thrown into the dungeon for "embezzling 
from the royal coffers."  The insolent little tyke had the nerve to lock you in a cell just for knowing how to spend his 
money better than he did.  But that wasn't as bad as it could have been.  The royal mage was still loyal to you and he 
freed you, putting a sorcerous doppelganger in your place.  So, he helped you escape, and you fled into the countryside, 
lived out the rest of your days there, content with instigating a number of small uprisings. 

	What it's all about is the hope that perseveres even though it's disappointed again and again, in every moment.  And if I 
say what it is that I hope for, it only begs for more disappointment.  But I'll say it: I hope that we haven't set ourselves 
up for another disappointment.  It's all about apologizing (which one can do either too much or too little, but never the 
right amount).  It's about knowing that you're missing something even when you don't know what it is you're missing 
and going out and looking for it even when you know that doing so will only bring about the loss of other things.  It's 
bright outside, the sun spreads across a clear sky, shadows darkened by contrast with the light and it's the morning after 
a crisis which you were never fully aware of when it was occurring, a car crash, a sudden sensation, not a fear of physical 
harm, but the pure feeling of momentum—the car swung and you swung with it and the other driver had the nerve to 
yell at you without even asking if you were alright, which, if he had asked, you weren't, but you were too stunned to be 
upset at him for yelling at you, too stunned, even, to speak.  And we imagine an unheard nation, fed on silence, those 
mute by accident of fate or those who had chosen to become mimes.  We imagine that these people would know the 
force of a gesture, anger conveyed not by a raising of the voice, but a shifting of posture.  These things find their 
reckoning in some index as well, some codification: a yes and a no, a nodding or a shaking of the head.  Would it be 
surprising if one day the raising of an eyebrow by some precise measure communicated a doctoral thesis?  I suppose 
that's a bit ludicrous, but who really knows the extent to which those looking for something are willing to go to find it?  
What are you willing to do for that which you desire most, how far are you willing to go?  Perhaps you desire nothing; 
still, to reduce your desires to nothing, to me, seems a long way to go.  I'll say that I'm willing to go past that next hill, at 
least, if not through the woods beyond it, and I'm willing to see these lengths rendered futile, because, after all, it gives 
us something to do (if we're doing something, we're not doing nothing).  But at least this business reaches a tolerable 
end in that it's a way of shielding yourself from the consequences—having seen what a withered face is, having seen and 
renounced or foreseen or with what a withered face has been seen and pronounced: a confluence of souls, flood of 
souls, of souls, narrowed and thin and gathering around a lock and a barter of boxes, one for another, for another, for a 
reasoned excuse, for a card and a suspicion and a fear and a death in the eyes—to think that you've been playing a game 
all along, and to know, now, that these are real people, real emotions, real outcomes.  And what becomes of the 
experiment, then, when you know, or if, knowing, you can decide not to know, but to feel it like the onset of a sneeze or 
a cough, a sensation that seeks relief, wind that pushes its way through the corridor, through the crowded concurrence 
of portents, and it is important to tell yourself that you have not stopped caring and to tell yourself why.  Why, indeed, 
the mice busy themselves at the treadmill and is it because, if you surround yourself with enough chaos, you become the 
eye of calm at the tempest's flailing heart?  But we would pray as if we believed, as if we had never believed before, and 
we knew not to whom we prayed or what it was for which we prayed but that, just once, you could understand your 
situation and be content with it.  Insanity in small doses, slips of paper, placed gently, upon the tongue, or the fortune 
from a fortune cookie that reads: beware of false omens.  Ultimately, though, it's a story about the demon in the bottle, 
anxious to escape, and how someone unstoppered it, hoping to find his reward in a granted wish only to discover that he 
had unleashed pandora's box upon the world and we knew then that hope is a four-letter word, a gunshot or an oilspill 
that stretches out over the soapy surface of your expression.  But what you wanted was attention, to see your name in 
the cold glow of neon as we glided, silent, across the landscape of the night, the current of electric life that flowed like a 
rivulet of quicksilver, a desperate searching for shelter, a place to stop and rest, but there isn't any—the movement, 
relentless, and there's a man who approaches from across the street who's a part of it, tryin' to keep it real, and what 
comfort have we found in these distances, these tunneling distances that coil up and away like springs or like prayers?  
The comfort of a slow disintegration: trees to stone to rocks, ground to dust, to dust and, with rain, to mud—mud, the 
primordial puddle from which we, again, arise. 

	The root, worn out and thinned through time, and these are misguided triangulations: the cars parked across 
the street, all six of them will make me want to ask you what you were doing at noon today, what were you doing that 
would bring these thoughts upon me, resonating as a crystal to the slightest of harmonies.  It is, in a word, intimidating, 
an abscess or a sore that won't go away, but festers and, festering, seeks an incalculable outcome in dried dirt, the 
detritus that clings to us as we rise from the stagnant depths of the earth.  But discharged of that particular responsibility, 
we feed, we gorge ourselves upon the scraps of thought-worn days and the air warms at our approach and we need to 
hide things from ourselves so we won't use them all up, so that there'll be something left of us for the hereafter.  Your 
trenchant stare reveals the stratified remainders of ourselves: results of some glorified exercise in long division and we 
would have been done with it so much sooner if only we'd memorized our multiplication tables like they'd told us (but, 
of course, we were too smart to do that, weren't we?).  A razor's edge of logic, of fingernails and our profound misstep 
at the level of the tongue; in our psychic surgery, what we conjured up out of the sheath of the body was a paradox 
instead of a thing of substance.  The best we can hope for, out of the aftermath of this, then, is to give birth to a 
literature of adjustment, an instruction manual constantly in need of revision (connect parts A and B with parts C and D, 
only parts A, B, C, and D somehow failed to be included with the apparatus).  These volumes, decanted, produce a vital 
substance as life is like a fixed thing, assumed in the motion of light of the tops of buildings.  There are terms that need 
to be defined, localities that weep long tears of abandonment if we leave them unexplored and this is the situating of the 
mind between the differences of discovery (apotheosis or the self or absolute rejection of god), the knotted truth that 
accretes in the spaces where we linger, and, lingering, we've bled the wounds of the savior until the screams of lunacy ran 
clear and thin as urine from these things that mark us, that mark us like dead bugs mark the windshield of a bus traveling 
across the boundary-line, threshold of meaning, the line of meaning supposed in the illumination shed by a candle's 
solitary, flickering flame.  And maybe we've just been passengers, perhaps we've sat on the sidelines too long to know 
how to direct ourselves towards any specific destination.  We do our best to remember the things we haven't noticed and 
it doesn't help (the line we've crossed is the fine line between being oblivious and noticing, but not caring).  

	We took a fall coming back down the stairs, efficient footwear enabling a split-second recovery from a more 
embarrassing fate, and there are no options when we are in control.  There are revolutions being plotted out across 
chessboards, the latest orders disseminated in the form of crossword puzzles (the clue hope finds its answer in a name).  
But the very idea of revolution is squelched in that it is permitted, and this is the last chair, the last chair left in our game 
of musical chairs.  Haven't you noticed the halting strain of violin violence plying its course across your ears?  We're 
walking in circles now, waiting for the last caesura, the anodyne millstone that will grind away the last of our drunken 
regrets.  A brush of headlights against your eyelids, and you blinked just in time to avoid that predicament, to avoid the 
full on glare of the automobile, rearing into the inky blanket of the night.  And now, we're face to face with it, with the 
mistake of vision, the thing seen as a specimen in a series.  Our attention has somehow isolated one iteration of the 
question, but not the question in its entirety.  So we're sitting again, trying to eke what warmth we can out of a cup of 
coffee, what warmth and what comfort we can find in idle conversation (We've tabled the simplest decisions before the 
committee, cast our secret ballot and waited patiently for the outcome.  And why?  Because it gives us something to talk 
about).  The teeth grind against each other as if chewing, the articulation of the gums, drawn back, and it looks as if you 
have the enlarged canines of a vampire, but what you have, more or less, is a paraphrase of the situation as if a voice 
were speaking to you from outside yourself, through yourself, through the shards of your eyes which have fallen away to 
show the moon, gleaming like a pearl floating atop an opened hand of cloud which is none other than what we see, 
molded into a halo made from a coathanger as if that were enough to assure our ascent.  What we hope we've hidden is 
the caricature of ourselves (features exaggerated to make a point), and we've pushed the watchers past any possible point 
of focus, tried to heal the wound with talk of sleep.  Sleep, the feeling of it, the hibernative trance, feeling of incubation.  
And what we'd like you to do is to sell us the world, an ocean, your soul, or your eyes, fitful in sleep, or awake.  Awake, 
talking silence, silence scraping, scraping across us in the purple cast of light and this, too, is a disguise, a clay figurine 
masquerading as a totem, hieroglyphs that speak of the power of a signature, the devil who returns to paradise because 
he's better now (he's become a more civil kind of gent, a more sedate fellow than before).  The diesel fumes remind us 
of the smell of cedar and the sound of metal striking metal is silent as babylon tumbling by amid the rushing sound, the 
sound of moving water.  

	The stream rolled on and the fool that tried to reign it in got wet, and there were dances to be danced and are 
still dances to be danced, only we dance them so carefully now.  It's the buzzing in our ears that makes us stop and sit 
and think (too much thinking, too many words that topple over each other, a snake that circles around to bite itself, only 
it's not a regular sort of snake: instead of a tail, it's got another head, and the second head, it bites back; the poison is 
almost immediately lethal, first it causes paralysis at the point of the bite and then the numbing sensation spreads 
outwards until the venom burrows its way to your brain and then all life functions cease).  There's a sky that returns you 
to your origin, a certain composition of clouds and light, but it takes a day out of you or a lifetime if you're unlucky.  It's 
like an offer that must be refused, as much as we might play along and pretend we're about to relent.  What the aperture 
reveals is the man who lives on the corner of your block, the one who sleeps on a milk crate, delirium tremens 
accompanying him in slumber.  Zoom out for a wider picture, figure out why you've been placed in this situation, an itch 
that renews itself even when you resist the urge to scratch it.  There's a clear vision of what bounds this plane, frames 
your portrait existence, and if you could only see outside of it, it'd be clear to you, but here, try this instead: read the 
incantation aloud, by candlelight.  Allow its soporific lull, its ebbing, hypnotic rhythm to soothe your senses, obliterate 
the nagging questions, and if we bring the problem into focus, it's with that feeling of inconsequence, that we can do 
nothing about it save flush our surprised prey into the open; our rifles won't faze it, our ammunition comprised of 
useless turnings, formal greetings, things followed out of habit, but ultimately without teeth, without the sharp bite of 
meaning.  But I suspect you know that bite too well, it's caustic sting, the dull ache that lingers in its aftermath.  You never 
recognize me, you said, and I pointed at you and spoke your name; but beyond that, you replied, you never recognize me the way I 
recognize you.  But you're wrong.  I recognize you.  I recognize in your eyes the fierceness of a cougar, coiling before it 
pounces; when you cup your hands over your eyes, I recognize a pain within you, and it saddens me, for there is 
precious little I can do (I have been forced to watch decline, the eyes fixated on the process of erosion.  It is an 
unpleasant thing, not something one would choose to repeat).  Do you remember the story about the Spartan that hid a 
ravenous wolf under his cloak?  It ate away at him, scratching, gnawing at his innards, and yet he stifled any expression 
of his anguish.  This is the cat inside you, the one that hides behind the careful steps, the hands like paws, your slowly 
withering gaze.  The moon is out tonight, luminous and full, like a dinner plate or a glass of milk.  And I recognize one 
or the other: you or the moon, for it seems to me that you two are such as cannot inhabit the same plane; the one 
renders the other profoundly out of place.  But wait.  Now, I see that I was wrong.  The moon becomes a saucer of milk 
as easily as the feral cat is tamed, and it's all about the framing of the thing.  My greatest worry, you see, is about your 
health, that you've made the same mistake I made at first, that you've let yourself get trapped in that way of seeing things 
and lost the vision of the moon to the pain that festers inside you.  I could tell you that everything will be alright, but 
that would be a lie unless you believe it.  I believe I've walked many a mile in your shoes, seen the life that seeks its 
freedom beyond the marbled surface of our days, the river of misgiven directions that have stained our paradigm, 
steeped it in this somber hue.  I believe this but, at the same time, know it isn't enough, can't be enough, to change 
anything.  A melancholy descends upon me, then, but what we need to remember is that the living owe it to the dead to 
live as best we know how.  So we continue, we find a way: through or around or over or under—that which doesn't bend, 
breaks.    

	Straight into the demon machine this time, with no regrets, no look backward before the leap, a plunge into 
murky depths.  And what's festering today is a fear of death or a fear of distance or a fear that these might be one and 
the same.  It isn't that this distance is upon us in any physical way, not yet, at any rate (though it will be), but to know 
that it fills us with almost the same dread as if it were already here.  An explosion, then: a shattering, a fragmentation 
outwards so that we might preserve the idea of an origin in traces of light upon the retina.  There are cameras that watch, 
but they work in black and white because it's cheaper that way and they've no capacity for recording sound.  So what 
we've said shuffles by unheard, and to the camera you or I might look to have the same skin color when in real life we're 
different.  But stand back a minute, hold these formless bits of sediment and gathered dust to the light and watch as they 
scamper away, as a spider does when you pick apart its web.  And there's an archway, a threshold to be crossed, a penalty 
to be paid for passing the bridge before the time is right.  You cross only to find nothing on the other side, reality 
construed at a pace slower than your own.  The headlong rush into contemplating the consequence, this, too, is dulled, 
the edge of it blunted (pencil marks on the crisp whiteness of the page, too easily erased, the way paved for others 
seeking some other formulation).  

	Eye death—death of the eyes, of vision, of sight, of sight that sees and, seeing, spies the solitary spike of time.  
Time to remember, to remember time and time, remember pain, remember sorrow, remember anger, remember hate 
(which is different from anger.  Hate, bitter hate) remember hate, but remember love, remember beauty, remember true, 
remember pure, remember sunlight, remember sunlight lighting upon your face, remember your face, remember your 
name, remember who you are, remember the things that have made you, remember the things that have made you who 
you are, and, most of all, remember time, remember time, for these are things that stretch themselves out across time, 
accumulating or fading over time over time, stretched out like a dog in mid-yawn, remember boredom, remember hope 
remember tears—remember.  The calendar is sufficient reminder that our days are numbered, and, perhaps, one could 
think of remembering as a waste of that time which is like sand or dust (which are not the same), arid sand and errant 
dust, sand that dwindles in a spire and dust that breeds and breeds, and I remember your smell, your breath, your hair 
your lips, your tongue, your voice.  To know that should you vanish, someone should remember, this is a necessity— 
this is something we need to know, something that keeps us where we are, and, ultimately, this is what lets us know 
where we are.  And, if we are to change ourselves in every instant, which of us is remembered?  Inevitably, something 
(much, in fact) is missing from that memory, from any memory, and as the sand trickles like a leak in a dam before it 
bursts and the dust gathers itself into clouds, more and more will slip our grasp, and who will remember what it was like 
to see you on that day at the bus stop and waiting for your bus even though I wouldn't get on it or even approach to talk 
to you, waiting, you see, just so that the image of you might have a few more moments to press itself into my mind, and 
who will remember yesterday, today, and who will remember tomorrow?  And tomorrow, who will forget?  But go 
ahead, ask the question out loud, and you'll see that you were meant to