One small commitment and left of center
wrote the still pines. That was last
year’s yester line. Or, finding that a
constellation had formed, as rain drops one by one curdled around each empty
trope, carrying on and on as if she didn’t know the weight was too much to
bear. Here’s where I found her next,
Bern, reading Greek mythology and staring at her shoelaces, floating lifeless
in the muck of a puddle which had amassed one bead at a time, as the crabgrass
drank, as it so chanced, earlier this afternoon, to do, greyly what it had
collected on the sidewalk. Could there
be anything else for it? Would a salve
cure the wound left by time, open and respecting not one lick the fundamental
laws of gravity. Welcome, Bern thought,
to the Cartesian theater. Admittance:
free. Access: direct. You don’t know?
she would intone. Heavy emphasis on the
‘know’. Scolding like her mother did
when she tried to turn the radio off—just for kicks. She loved the music it made, but loved better
the click of the dial resetting to ‘off’.
So often she’d, and just for fun remember, turn the radio off. Mother: No!
How was she supposed to know what everyone’s preferences were? They were not
after all written large on the faces or foreheads of the strangers or
intimates, friends and family, or complete shoulder bumpers, nudgers passing
longways and casting looks of “hurry up” as they lurched to catch that last
train of the night.
No serpent knew she had gone alone to the
bank of the river with her stockings full of stones to skip. She wanted to be alone with her stones, and
her thoughts, and the morning, heavy as it was and growing somewhat less so, or
growing at oblique angles from where it began on her shoulders, moving to her
sides, now then her hips, and ending at her knees. “Bloody knees!” A boy shouted. How did he get so close, she thought, without
my spotting him, or spotting the approach anywise of a boy-sized thing, capped
as he was with a garish red beanie.
Hair, black as coal, poked out from behind his ears. “Skipping stones?” he asked, rudely, she
thought. “No.” He wouldn’t be having any, anyway. But now there was the bother of having to
wait for him to leave, when everything about his body said he was settling
in. Not a talker, she hoped. “You live around here?” he asked,
stupidly. “No” she lied. “Visiting relatives then?” “Yes…and they’re probably wondering where
I’ve got off to.” “My parents don’t care
if I play at the river” the boy proudly stated.
Why would they? She almost said
it. Was there something good about him?
she wondered in the silence that followed.
“Yeah, there aren’t many kids around here to play with.” He picked up a stone to skip—oddly
squarish—and not at all the skipping sort.
Plop. It went under, disturbing
the silt below in a great cloud that blinded the fish, gills and gravel, while
up top water bugs scattered. “Alright,
you’d better get back to your relatives then” the boy shrugged. She handed him one of her stones. “You know what to do, right?” “Of course.”
He let it fly, and it hit the surface once, plop. Pathetic.
She almost said it.
Are humans sentient? She sent letter after letter to the man who
killed her husband, one night looking for drugs, closet, rope, car keys. Left alone, bound, he returned to the scene
of the crime. It was a crime after all
to let so many letters go unanswered.
That’s how every speech act goes in this world. What substrate is there? What meaning, pith, pitch, asphalt,
underlying fundament, basic, intrinsic, deep depth; we’re born that way. What lies beyond the seeming of things? Beneath the seams of a garment there’s flesh
and beneath that? More sensations, I
guess. Far away stars on a mouthless
afterthought. But that’s how we’re born,
after all. Beneath the seeming of things
there is more seeming and then…bum bum bum…reality. Monads, basic particles, less seeming than
so. Thisness. Primitive. Brute. And there in the underseeming everything goes
on like you might expect it to. The
world, after all, conforms to our expectations—especially here. Warp and weft, ways and patterns all already
imagined, prefigured in our prehistory, now projected. Pith.
At bottom. It’s how we’re borne. But…then…it occurred to her that the world
might not be made for us, or for her specifically. Those stones she used to create her
miniworlds were so many non-entities, so much in the way of being nothing. Anyway she began to think less of them as stones
and more as a constellation. Parts
disparate and orbiting, connected in the way that parts so often are, or parts
go piecemeal one after another. She
kissed the boy without warning. He
turned beet red. What a strange
reaction. She lifted her skirt,
revealing her black knees. She’d been
praying all day in the muddy river bank, collecting her sucking stones one by
one, a tribute to some long dead Scotch man who sometimes fancied wearing a
turban. A ladies man then. That’s what he was, standing struck stupid
near the passing waters of the Nile. No
serpent new, nor crocodile. “What was
that for?” he asked. It wouldn’t be the
last time. He was slow to develop, slow
to start. But once he got going there
was nothing for it. No one could ask questions
with the same degree of ingenuousness.
Because he really wanted to know, or had to, or couldn’t tell the
difference between wanting and having, or had to have the difference explained
at any rate by someone who could tell.
Could tell and would tell. At any
rate, someone who knew the difference between possibly telling and its being
possible to tell. Taxes, then, one
could/can not pay them, for example, or one cannot pay them. The difference is large enough for the
distinction to be worth maintaining. Or
the maintaining makes it worth the difference.
At any rate there seems to be a distinction between the two. On the face of it at least.
It was getting cold. He was facing home and said, “can I walk you
there? To the point the road goes over
the hill and disappears on the horizon?
I imagine it will take us forever, but by chance that’s how long I want
it to.”
