A tisket, a tasket

3-24-08

She was going along, minding her own business. For the most part. There are always the prickles and the pixels that block the view or scratch the skin, the split-second worries--"Children get under your desks. This is a test. If this were an actual nuclear attack... ." But mostly, the little worry pools evaporate. With the right light, she can watch the particles float up and become part of the sky.

But then this thing went down, not up. It didn't evaporate. It materialized. And then dropped. Like a set of keys. A big bulky custodial set, only silent. On the ground. Crouching down to look from another angle, she can slide along that metaphor. Keys, even spilled, can still open doors. Okay, fine.

But the thing is, she's been going along for quite some time looking for the door. If she has the keys, then where is the door? She imagines it will be giant, with chipping paint, heavy and near impossible to push open just with a hand. A whole body kind of push will be required. Of course it's possible that it's just a series of miniature doors, one after the other, with life-sized locks for the fallen keys. Either way, the doors are hard to find. Unless she's been going through them ever since and only half realizing it.

Like keys. But not. Like a tissue. Like a friend. Like an envelope. It didn't make much of a sound. It was soft. It crumpled. It slid. Pigmied. She was carrying it and she dropped it. A tisket, a tasket kind of thing. The green and yellow basket. Wrote a letter to my love and on the way...

The letter. The dropped letter. It was shaped like a G.

Waiting

02-20-08


Waiting for something
waiting for some things
I hate waiting
desire paths would
wear down the wood

A little woop woop monkey
sticks his hand inside a box
a nut, mealy on the tongue
imagined umami bits
pull it through no
fist, nut-filled, can't fit
back through the hole
fading fist over fate
silly monkey, let go

Meanwhile, a chain
makes a necklace
sometimes a blow torch
or a miniature saw
trumps a walnut
sometimes waiting
turns into circumstance
think of everything
to do in a span of it
think of Oulipo
French tricks to release,
limits for generations
tie down my leg
watch me slither
into what was
unacknowledged
previously ignored

Clutch me, monkey
I want my arms around you
little prehensile fingers
squeezing mine.

Sea stars/See stars

10-13-07
Things creep along this way. Sometimes he just wants to bury himself completely. Scrape of shovel against skin, burns. Just wait, people say. They point to the layers over the layers, the places where you can draw lines together to make more stars. Superimposition. Doubly exposed. Where there’s one, there are probably many. Like mice in the kitchen. He looks down at his thighs; unflexed, they go jelly. The light will fade. The stars of course are dead. Millions of years ago, in fact. But now is now. It would be nice, he thinks, to be able to pull off a part and have it grow back. Or not.

Joy

10-13-07
This, after she was told to rub Joy over her heart.

This much

8-27-07
I’ll show you this much to start with. Then you can decide if you want to see more.

She could have been talking about a series of paintings, or carpet swatches, or even houses in a peach-colored subdivision. Something there was more of. The first in a long list. Just the fleshy part. Just what peeked out. Just the part worth showing. The part that any seasoned viewer would see.

He, of course, wanted to see more.

She led him along the curb. The carpeting rolled out on either side. Shag and industrial, throw rugs, coiled rags, braided country coverings, grease-stained scraps, and also the sort you’d make while seated in front of a large loom, threading colors back and forth, back and forth.

It was a seemingly a sterile place. The edges were neatly trimmed even though some got creative with curtains. In a few places, almost hidden, were graffiti marks. He stopped and looked at these for a long time. Parts of speech and grammar and philosophical tenets and mathematical equations and other things that belonged to smart people. He found himself wanting to scrape some of the symbols off the wall and keep them.

By the fifth canvas, he was wanting to touch something, to stop beholding just with the eyes. He was sure she had a vice somewhere in the garage, amidst the loose nails and the wrenches and the various bottles of harmful chemicals. He could get inside of it, let himself be squeezed. Gently. Or not.

She would probably have safety goggles in there as well, and she might insist he'd wear them as protection. They'd be the kind you could barely see. But they'd provide a shield not from the fumes but from the colors and from whatever was beyond the colors. The smears and the scrapes, where everything might run together into brown, where there was still blood in pools of red. She didn’t want to show him this. Not yet. Maybe not ever. So it would have to be a slow walk. With lots of stops. She would ignore his questions and say things like: Look at this house. Let’s sit here on this lawn. Would you like to make a wish? Go ahead. There’s a dandelion right there, gone to seed. Blow on it.

He could see that there were swatches of carpet she was not laying out for him. She did not want him to get too comfortable. She was afraid he might run off. His eyes flickered. They absorbed the lights and the colors, which rearranged his cells, changed him. She liked that. These quick shifts, nothing held in place but the cumulation of which would signify, over time, something substantial and true.

He liked this outdoor light very much, but he also wanted her to lead him into a basement where it would be dark and cool and quiet. No matter if the washing machine was running. The thrum might make it safer. They could hold hands. He wanted her to answer his questions. He wanted her to stop pointing and flipping for a second. He wanted to see more.

He figured in a place like that, their eyes would have to adjust to the darkness, but afterwards they could look closely at everything, all of it, for a long long time.