Sleep slithered up out of a hole in the floor. His horns were rubber and his tails were silver. Leaving damp spots on the carpet, he moved from here to there, making motion with his belly. When he got there, he turned his form into a balcony. He felt quiet and central as a balcony, so he rested. His mental spaces alternated with iron spirals, making a structural stability and a barrier to distraction. She came over to kneel at his railing. Sleepwalking. Her senses were lax and hair unfurled around her neck. She came to kneel in the presence of the fog.
“Remember oh most gracious fog that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”
Fog came close out of curiosity, but then resumed his implacable distance. No one had ever spoken to him that way before. Balcony felt her praying elbows in his neck and wanted to dissolve. When the pressure became too intense, he did. She fell down and down into the upper flower bed where the workmen had already trampled the peonies. “Ah, my peonies, you are dusty,” she said. She shared their dust by rubbing it into the skin of her breasts. “I kiss you, my dirt, my underground alertness,” she said.
Open your mouth! I implore you. Don’t just sit there with your face melting, tragic over trash and the cold wind.
Make a shape. Any shape. A sound. You’ll feel better. More possible. More like tomorrow than today.
Wake up, honorary roadkill! There’s still time. Name your comforts: dark rooms, standing up, Wanda, oranges and almonds.
Sweet, sweeet, sweet, sweet, sweeet, sweet the distance. Remember, the distance is sweet. Memories are dusty, but plush, lush, but cold. Cold and sweet as ice.
Wrapped in ice, I am telling you this. This is me, the one from the porch.
There you are, absence, there you are, soothing, black, and gone, there you are, more quiet than the thin dark mushrooms rising in a circle on the lawn at night. I call you and I draw you down, draw you close.
Emptiness, emptiness, I lift your black host in my hands, in honor, arms tense. Fingers long and shaking, I stroke your lack of outline and smell your faintest odor of cold and rain and the divine. I enfold you in my hands — look there between the crevasses created by my thumbs — I see you, your dark honor and your dignity. I have you, emptiness, I take you every night to my room where you assist me. You snuff out the candles and croon no lullaby, blacken my eyes and take me silently to dreamless sleep.
Out behind the barn, along the dry gray boards of the barn, near the dry gold grasses of late August. Grasshoppers skitter in the weeds. She sits back there for hours, still and quiet, playing with grass stalks.
Five pennies are embedded in the cement floor of the barn entrance. She would like to pry them out but they will not come loose. The cement floor feels cool on her bare legs. Sitting on the cement marks her legs with fine pox. Gray cement dust gets on her clothes. She’s already dirty again.
Dust coats everything in the barn. The heat intensifies the smell of dust. She doesn’t explore. Normally she would explore. She knows there’s a scythe in there, a big old-fashioned hand scythe with a wooden handle. They use it to cut the golden grasses. There’s an old washing machine in there, with a mangle mounted on top. Your hair could get caught in the mangle and yanked right out of your head.
She looks out of the barn. The barn doorway frames the edge of the flower garden. Giddy sprays of gladiola, orange and yellow, start inside the frame and then shoot past it. The gravel driveway curves partly into the frame, then exits.
They’re all inside. Taking naps. Hanging up clothes. Folding clothes. Putting away clothes. Clearing up after food. Making more food. There’s a plate of sliced tomatoes at every meal. Someone is usually crying, starting to cry, or getting over crying. The others talk, but their talk doesn’t draw her. It has no shape and no weight. She doesn’t want to go inside. She doesn’t want to move. The door frame holds her.
She wants to get exactly into the space of the door frame, the space that’s not the barn, the space that’s not the gladiola garden. If she gets there, she can disappear. None of it will matter. The untouched dust. The embedded pennies. The hard eyes. The no words.
I stopped at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes after passing it twice. The stations of the cross are built into the hill. The whole place is full of rough wooden prie-dieus. The large number of votives flickering heated up the inside of the stone and cement grotto and made it seem alive. The quantities of hideous statuary winked and mocked me. No faith, no faith, they said. I said Ugly, ugly, in return. Mary had a garden-ful of beautiful well-watered fresh bouquets at her feet, including a dozen red roses in a glass vase. Over in the woods there was the burial plot of the dead flowers. This moved me. Also, one remarkable hydrangea bloom [in the grotto], all dusky, green, mottled with faint purple and blue. I touched it. It was real. I didn’t want to light a candle, although I thought about it—to what? to the goddess? to the new? to the future? No faith, no faith. I left there.
Mingling. The savvy of words, the sail, the shine. Soulsolid, brainlit, fingerplucked, earbent. And that’s before clothes! Talk to me.
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Warmth of the Body
Something to notice – the warmth of your body imparted to objects you were touching, but no longer touch: your bedclothes, your underwear, your necklace of stones.
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The Furry Inquisitive Snout
I understand that writing is a furry inquisitive snout, poking itself into small and cluttered places, searching for choice bits of trash, unusual secrets, maybe a fragment of sky blue egg fallen from the nest. A furry inquisitive snout, a naked prehensile tail.
Qarrtsiluni offers electronic delivery of original poetry, prose, and art, organized into regular, themed issues, with a new post every weekday. You can find us wherever you go: email and IM, iTunes, feed readers, sometimes even print. Read more...
Congrats to qarrtsiluni authors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman @wendylvardaman for their appointment as poets laureate of Madison, WI. · 1 week ago
Yesterday the last post in our Worship issue; today we begin the Imitation issue. Follow by email & never miss a post. http://t.co/SUwVwMqZ · 2 weeks ago
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