Fragments of Redemption - Further Notes to My Imaginary Self
The sense of transience is never far away…
She lies on my soul like a molten morning heavy with the burn of silence. Daylight stars suckling in eyes softer than any fragrance. In an emptiness that pales in the light of uncertain hours and in the sun-flanked fields of her thoughts, the fluttering of wings is stripped by the fragile vows of time. Fusible by heat she is without corners. Only the salt of her tongue measures the hot pulse of day. She is an uncaptioned extravagance amenable only to magic.
George Steiner: we are “windowless hardboiled eggs.” We are what we are. We live as we live. We do what we do.
Absorbed in our non-seeing, asleep in our blindness, days and seasons are temporary. Real time is found elsewhere.
Placed in circles within circles to bear witness. Human species, however, close in on the other without horizon or harbor.
The problem is that the petri dish of postmemory – or new memory – is far larger than the circle of things and phenomena.
(Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory)
Dawn is cut from dusk’s shoulders.
A thumb in the heavenly eye pains the world into existence
Favoring the fullness of the wound like an acid kiss to the lips.
Come sit with me. Let me tell you something. I have been in the Cosmic Ocean. I have seen True Form. Sooner or later saltwater cracks the gums.
Come sit by me. Let me tell you. A blue tooth may indicate a hallowed life. But it is with intoxicated sanctity that the Holy Ghost’s pale trembling aroused the black dogs at the altar.
Come sit. Let me tell you about the rain crying over the face of the lake at midnight. The fermenting soil raised evening ghosts from our pores.
We change without permission. It is the body’s gift to madness. A chill on the edge of the wind like the touch of silver glass. The nocturnal circus is never far from our side. Come…
…stay with me. I will untie your glory tongue.
Yes, I said. You beat against the left chamber of my heart. I unwind my body stiffened by solitude. Unable to wake up from this dream, I see myself vanishing with you on an empty sea. (My love cannot be circumscribed.)
Long ago a blind man invited us to contemplate the flight of doves across the surface of his liquid gaze. Later in front of the mirror we are unfolding ourselves in reverse what we know ourselves to be: the infinity of our reflections.
Titanium gloves cannot hold the pallor of your face. The narrow bed your kerosene fruit. While salt compacts in your hollow caverns the mole cricket sings my blood’s swan.
A tender gaze is a cavity, an open wound, a white eye floating on the brackish pond of the heart.
Our freedom to be human is an obsidian ball tossed between unseen shores. Under the full sway of gravity, fired black to be a rose.
A pithy story about Pistamon in my Verba Seniorum (unpublished): In a dream an angel touched his foot. Upon waking the leg was placed high on the window ledge of the monk’s cell.
The images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past, hoping to find them there and to have questions answered, may be screen memories – screens on which to we project present, or timeless, needs and desires and which thus mask other images and other, as yet unthought or unthinkable concerns.
*(*Marianne Hirsch,The Generation of Postmemory)
At the end of the day at the edge of night the taste of you is in my mouth. Eyelid and lips together, bits of skin, the green veins under the tongue. I am adventurous along the margins of your steady throat. I push aside slices of jade weighted on your breasts. I scrape against your belly. Soon, the black branch outside the window will form an elbow in the full moon sky. Like the tree that ages in summer, I age in you. When I sleep it is the sleep of splintered weeping. Of rain rushing into the lungs, moving soft tissues to make room for a small bird’s song. I, alone, not time, braid your hair. When the day breaks, however skillfully played the night before, you were never mine.
There was a time in my youth when I became lost in the crowd of those who rarely came home as they were compelled to madness.
Darkness would obliterate me like a water bug on a moonless night.
Everything is an echo of nothing. A hole may be empty, but it can break a leg.
I discovered the invention of absence late one night when the moon disappeared from the sky and I became a shadow of a shadow that was heard whispering: each body is a veil upon the world, a truth turned lie.
A sphincter night is when the expulsion delivery of what would come was the world’s never-world.
One night Matrona wanted to chastise her disciple for lacking wings to fly. A black storm gathered tightly behind her disciple’s eyes. Matrona remained quiet as if buried in a city of snow. As long as the lapwing longs for a pulse, she thought, it chases nothing but itself. (Verba Seniorum, unpublished)
Lamentation of Sarah (II): “I am out on the limb where birds sit unable to fly, the taste of anise bitter on my tongue”. (Verba Seniorum, unpublished)
Evagrius said: “There was a soul disheveled brother whose only possession was oblivion. He waited in a ditch by the side of the road accumulating fragmentary unnamed murmurings spoken backward”. (Verba Seniorum, unpublished)
To the end of circumstance. No more horizons. The birds are gone taking their songs with them. Just things-in-themselves resting in their own dreams…
…in quiet loneliness enhancing each other.
My Soul Covets the Shade of Your Hand (Anita)
You stand on my eyelids
Take my hand
Bring it to the light
Pushing aside the dominions of angels.
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