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Forrest Gander Page 4
To the Reader
Although you were looking for something else in the mirror, you can’t avoid them can you? The wrinkles of sarcasm, the crowfeet of insomnia, and the bleary-eye of hesitation, and the silent voice saying look what time it is, and your name, and why don’t you lie down so you’ll be rested for work tomorrow. Then the dream snaps on. And yet a distant hope keeps you awake. You are still awake, aren’t you? Although it is late now and the question you were asking, has become something different. How has the tactual amnion of habit failed to protect you? The night discharges itself into hills, into the river’s fan gravel and swallow holes, mangrove roots thickening around lost fish hooks. In the gas station sign, Pegasus lights up and flickers out and lights up again and muscles twitch in the attendant’s jaw as he stares into the bay, a timing chain part number on the slip of paper in his hand. While stars flare and the waitress crumbs the tablecloth, are you just opening again to the lust to be filled with something? What is it? Around you, the nameless, countless things hullabalooing in silence sop up your looking at the very moment of contact, at the critical instant when your line of sight, lifted from the mirror and gently set down again into a groove of the revolving earth, catches and appearance pours out like frog song. It was me, yes, following when you led and when you fell behind. How long it took us to get here, we who belong to this time in all its thin passages and in its fullness. Only let me press my mouth to the back of your hand before you move it from my face.
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These
poems appeared in books published by
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© Copyright, 2011,
Forrest Gander. |