It begins in the lemon-colored light,
when something else happens a long time ago,
and then suddenly one morning it comes to a halt. The waiting and
confession of the doubleness that accompanies us slowly, imitating the
chaos that we embodied intimately, as our own. There are instruments on
the wall, and other bizarre things that remind you
of adolescence and eternity. I will dog-ear yesterday's rain,
return to it later; the wet windowpanes
must wait for the sun to come out because you can't stop them from
grooming themselves in the sun as the streets
are shuttering and the children outside walk across the graveyard to school.
You keep an inventory of disquiet and frantic, half-destroyed images.
Something almost familiar in your desk
in the alcove across from the bed. Someone is always watching, you
think: from far away: at the way we look, moving about and making brekkie,
and dindin, keeping body and soul partially wedded
like two old cars welded into one and driven to the coast, any coast.
I don't know if this is the right way
to refuse to communicate,
to retreat into this kind of language that circles under water like trout avoiding a hook;
I am only one aspect of the biosphere, one slide in the global film
of organisms integrated with other life in the peripheral envelope of the earth
(blown like a ship far away from any other life-supporting stars). There's no
way to get rid of the depth: the Tolstoyan urge to confess
and develop oneself into a great personality
of action, of unrestrained vigor. The civilizing forces are too strong.
They are here within us,
synonymous with us, (and we are not rising).
Necrological notices come in the mail; the connective tissue of ideas is such
that every arrow in the thermodynamic engine points back and around
and around and around
in the general direction of death (and that's okay).
We light candles on the mountain. We sing in the mood of
Art.
Old withered heart of mine, you are so dear: breath
musical with astonishment; this dazzling unity gives us the
solace of night. But by now you understand
the point is relation
(since there is no other way to scatter the distance
and move closer).
Henceforth we incorporate into the psyche
goddesses, queens, priestesses,
warriors and shamans.
It is a muscular effort to breed ourselves
within ourselves like plant hybrids
in a vortexed greenhouse
designed by geometric truth.
At a higher level,
everything is art.
At a lower level, it is strategy manipulating and assaulting tragedy, holding, protecting, preserving,
breaking down under the dynamic metabolism of the territory we live in. (It is okay to incorporate
automatic models and algorithms that blaze with speed and motion, spatial extension into our own
thought processes. They want to be there anyway. We cannot keep them out if we tried.)
Thus, we should live like transients in hotels, driving from comedy to tragedy
to the victorious outcome of self-sacrifice,
full of expectation. Is this too much to say:
that I keep brushing away your chestnut hair?
Only to have it fall back into place again, like a column in architecture
that will not give way to strict postmodernism. We can stanch our grief for a few days.
We can be Faustian. We can be holy. You know this fairly well,
and you are not frightened.
We are trying to figure out
anyway
the delicacy and density
of the miraculous plot itself.
Matthew Gasda is a is a writer of many things in many places.