Absence gives form to all shapes—Theodora Blüht
Sand and mountains in the center. The future rises before the fjord. Mercilessly. Stones in the cemetery—the expectation.
Shadows, swifter than life.
Genuflection. Skin in a symbolic state. The brow performing in a muscular cavity. Bird song between each fold.
In a corner the vestige fades: body caught in winds, nostalgia for matter.
Sweat between each page. Water. The familiar vocabulary set at random, the word lifted into tyranny. Countless suns orbiting between temples. Universe. Blossoming sleet and vowel fruits.
Expectation, flood is always the last recourse.
A turn, circuitous routes over a fleshy body. Migas or an apple writhing with maggots. Dance over withered capillaries. The sun and its judgement of shapes.
The spine motionless the pain stabs. and stabs and stabs.
Thick embroidery to legitimize the kingdom. No more melodic balm to ward off the plague. No more frozen mountain to anoint the eyes. Mud. Garden or swamp to intuit what’s been said, to return to the center. Supplications no longer raised by a girl throat. Ellipses to cheer the fire.
Notes of dry hay between glaciers. To understand the blizzard’s writing, read the sound, the scent of the crevasses.
Death becomes expendable when time can be heard.
Pierced, deep into the embroidery of white women,
whiter than Antarctic snow,
the instant.
Nation cinched at its waist.
Canopy bed amid the sound of a river coursing in autumn buzz.
The acute instant of hearing its passage. Memories constrained by a dike. Land of nearness and distance where the leaves of plum trees fall still.
Canvas, a handful of bones, votive bodies, deep shade of sienna.
Incandescent acoustics to fill the days.
Cigarette stubs. Hundreds littering the world’s path. On this side of the existential plane, the century grants little comfort, the freezer stocked with simulations. Judgments melt away just as the sheets never stop wrinkling. Reproduction of the reproduction of the same painting. Rain. June 1997. Rain. June 1944. Rain. June 2014. Rain. June 1860.
That beautiful, bad-mannered woman, runs quickly, to the mirror.
Death’s shapely figure.
Series of lights strung on a December tree. Something’s being lost. Something’s found again in the first light to flicker out. Floodgates letting fear in. The kingdom comprises a boundary of alphabets. Emotional transference in a composite sketch. Sleet. From overhead frozen flakes fall on a person’s side, the left.
No speed has quite reached this point, panicking at one’s own reflection portends the effect: everyone houses a slight deformity between their lips.
Someone’s drawing on the other side of the fogged window. Only the non-evident is reflected. The shared absence of those harboring a common fate. Cups of fruit liqueur, spices. Hand on a shoulder. Soft words on an ear. Closed eyes won’t help raise a ruin. Phosphorescent orphanhood between fingers.
Of all the volcanoes mountains deserts glaciers this one. Montage between sheets of asbestos. Hand smoothing out the folds. Corner. The probability of hydrating arid land. Revealing to the eye its inability to erect mountains of dust. Returning to the ear its depth of field, its focus.
Language sprig sweat deformed twisted astronomical laborer scribe.
Auditory word where a blow is produced. Long wounds spread over the expression where gesture / civilization festers.
These words will prove to be so valuable, so very valuable.
Salmon flesh between teeth. Sunflower plumage lighting the sky. Glimmering bronze of the national hero’s effigy facing the harbor. What color is silence? Sparklers and Roman candles in honor of a syllable. Regiments of aurora borealis playing over backs. Obedience to whispers.
Memory: assertive dagger.
Bodies leaning against nodal grammar. Escaping that woman on her right side. Softly touching her left nipple. Knot where song is moss saliva honeysuckle ivy. Emergency draws both into an embrace. Nothing will be saved. A leveling in the hour of wastes. Light shone over mud, land regaining shape. Almonds and notes from a phone booth in a pants pocket. Threshold. Lintel. Grid of silence.
No one flies countercurrent. No one files, today.
Currently reading:
Painting Time, Maylis de Kerangal, tr. Jessica Moore; The Loose Pearl, Paula Ilabaca Núñez, tr. Daniel Borzutsky; Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney; Plat, Lindsey Webb.
