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Forrest Gander Page 2
Knife on a Plate
If there is any relief from it, any slippage — though
wait
while the phalanx of children streaks across the basketball court, bending to pick up an eraser at the foul line, and rushes back to the squealing, eruptive start. Colorful wicks flickering in the afternoon. My boy is on fire all summer and losing his extravagant high voice. Earth’s mantle scatters beneath him. Look where he stands casually leashed to the greyhound beside the hydrant, a royalty of self-absorption, yanking the dog before she’s through, yanking her into the literal present, an uplift between intention and accomodation, where hours have yet to be rendered into days into weeks into months with names like January and February scrawled into a Daytimer, into circumscribed feelings. The fact of the tag turned-out from the neck of his pajamas attaches itself to me like
a burr. The audacious
originality of the ordinary sometimes suggests an opening, and to enter is to hear the measure not of nostalgia but nearness — that fetching lack of doubt and perspective, a world zoomed-in close enough to count black ants under dog-stunted spirea. Before capillaries reknot in the eyes, before the dishrag hanging from a ring on the cabinet door under the sink is too badly sullied, the brightest dark and the darkest dark open huge their mouths. There is a disturbance like a kiss through which cognition disappears. As always, I am sitting in this silent room alone, or I am reading to my son, propped against the headboard. A donkey finds a magic pebble. And the boy knows there is no one world we approach by approximations. Only choose and choose and choose cracks over us. I jolt awake — but no time has passed: I am turning the page with one hand. I am fingering the boy’s unwashed hair.
© Copyright, 2011,
Forrest Gander. |