“Unable to say ‘I’ in either past or future. Yesterday’s face, almost unrecognizable. Tomorrow’s face, barely thinkable.”
-Edmond Jabes –
“One evening, pulling photographs from his youth out of a drawer, he quoted a dialogue between a child and his grandmother, who was showing him a picture of a very pretty woman:
“Granny, who is this lady?”
“Why, it’s me, darling, when I was young.”
“And who is it now?”
“And he said to me: ‘You see, in this Who is it now? lies the riddle of a life.'”
“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting? Choose, why choose?”
-J.M.G. LeClezio-
a blank page
“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”
-Michel Serres-
Choose. Why choose?
Deep in love
the sight, the thought, the feel.
Look around.
Over here a line comes singing, her misting whispers, behind the ear.
Bold graffiti in the midst: the faces, the lettering.
Trilling of a baby’s babble.
Choose. Why choose?
I build my shelter, I fashion my tent of language.
I might hide here. I might scribble the wall.
Curving words, like celanic, like ocean.
I choose.
Why choose?
To shelter, to bloom.
I build a barn of story, the structure to hold it in.
This body, its experiences.
This wife, and hers.
Seven starling children, darting out and in.
And things: stuff, books, ideas, smells.
Dreams and hopes; fears and memory.
Do words burn?
I make a sprinkler, and a hose. I fill them with water.
There is a fire there. For warmth.
To build a well.
I am speaking tools.
Choose. Why choose?
To erase disease-words, and plight.
She says color and I leave it on the walls.
Call and response, they’re in, through the windows.
I sing a night with rain.
I sculpt a bed of vowels.
We cry out in the form of wings:
Take shelter.
And choose.
Why choose?
“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know.’”
“People really understand very little of one another”
-Anne Carson-
You might say we studied one another through a thick fog. Or learned one another in the dark, guessing, reaching, feeling our way.
For many years.
We were determined.
Recording nuances, memorizing beats, mimicking rises and falls. Taking fingerprints with our bodies, collecting snapshots for official documents. We created and invented artifacts together in order not to know – who was who and which was which. We merged as often as we could, and more than often asked.
We still remember general shapes and movements – tones, colors, outlines. Each a sort of negative of the other – surfaces accepting imprints, continuous translations.
You could say we were scholars and specialists. At times we counted hairs, many times while splitting them. From observation it is hard to tell bodies tangled in fighting from those wrestling in love. Unfettered laughter from convulsive wails. We learned to do so by watching them changing one to another and back again. Momentary gradients. We were able to dance on thin lines.
In earnest we catalogued vocabularies by rote, genetics, neuroses, causes and effects, our marriage a lab of research and experiment. Encycopedic and replete.
Through interference of weather and evolution’s inexplicable leaps we adapted apparati for morphing data, constructing theses. Compared and bickered notes and conclusions, matters and intention. Interpretations varied.
More astrology than –onomy, more alchemy than chemistry, we carried forth our quest. Meteorology, geology, archaeology we sought of one another, growing compendiums of analyses and flow, catalysts and katharses.
Our distance became cosmically microscopic, mythological and rite. You might say we were studying one another in a great fog. We kept on receiving each other in the dark.
All my Words are Silent 