21 December 2014

Did you think they wouldn't know?




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.”

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