|
Forrest Gander Page 3 A Clearing
Where are you going? Ghosted with dust. From where have you come? Dull assertiveness of the rock heap, a barren monarchy. Wolfspider, size of a hand, encrusted with dirt at the rubble’s edge.
What crosses here goes fanged or spiked and draws its color from the ground. Xanthic shadow at the edges. Where are we going? Ghosted with dust. From where have we come?
Stretcher loaded with clods by a spavined work shed. What does it mean, a cauterized topography? One step forward and he is with us. One step back, another realm absorbs him.
The sense of epoch loosened, unstrung. Each one thinking it is the other who recedes like a horizon. The miraculous cage visible under his skin.
I cannot be discarded, his eyes say. A flute that plays one note. A face. In the open pit at noon, men waning in brightness.
I can be read, say the rocks, but not by you. The air burnished, almost mineral, like a thin peel of mica. Mound in the photograph, iris in the eye.
What does it mean, a cauterized topography? To salvage rocks the color of all else from all else the color of rock. I can be read, say her eyes, but not by you.
As if the land had abandoned itself. Rain-flushed from denuded hills, soil powders in wind. One step forward and we are with them. One step back, another realm absorbs us.
Don’t pick up the rocks, he says, because rocks belong to the dead. Xanthic shadow at the edges. The distance flat as horsehair plaster, all depth sponged away.
Black knoll of tailings. There is nothing between his eyes and ours, not even invitation. Each stone carrying its death sentence into the animate world.
Fly maggot eating the red ant’s brain. The sense of epoch loosened, unstrung. Light broken off in the air.
The twig’s shadow has the same quality as the shadow of a man. Glance held, an afterglow. All depth sponged away, the distance flat as horsehair plaster.
Iris in an eye, mound in the photograph. Don’t pick him up, rocks say, because the dead belong to the rocks. Encrusted with dirt at the rubble’s edge: wolfspider the size of a hand.
A man’s shadow has the same quality as the shadow of a twig. What crosses here goes fanged or spiked and draws its color from the ground. The air burnished, almost mineral.
Ligature 1
When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence
pulls through them, the family rises into
thinness and begins to break like a wave.
You turned away when I kissed you, the woman
says. Why?
Half-lidded days of early winter.
When he points toward the woman, the boy looks
at his hand the way dogs will.
The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth,
into the soft flesh of his throat, a new set of
teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what?
Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments
veer every which way, and who can follow? A
sequence of dark non-sequiturs blows in.
When one, when one word, when the word suicide
enters the room where they are shouting, the
system closes down, prematurely becalmed.
The man writes, I am not given a subject but am
given to my subject. I am inside it like a
parasite.
He sees the woman’s face contract at the
approach of other futures than the one for which
her face was prepared.
So they inhabit their bodies for a given time
like music. And yet he continues to act as if
there were another time.
I just want you to go away, one of of them
screams.
Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the
afternoon moon over their house.
She calls the man to a corner in the basement.
Those aren’t spider eggs, he says, backing up.
Those are its eyes.
When the encounter with the self is volcanic,
nothing can follow.
Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy
within the family.
As if they were waiting. As if inside
experience, there were another experience
unnamed, pendant, bright with meaning.
© Copyright, 2011,
Forrest Gander. |