I thought everyone likes a good likeness and cultivated analogies to fill the
emptiness within. You cultivated the occipital cortex, in the rear of the
brain, which guides attention to the visual world.
You dislike the net of ‘‘this reminds me of’’s that I let spread to the infinite,
though our universe has slowed as predicted. And lack of cartilage in my
joints acts as a restraint on motion.
You don’t mind that analogies make the air transparent for things not in
front of our eyes. But that these manifestations of the incorporeal keep you
from seeing what you see. Blot out the body. Your mother’s, for instance
whose both eyes were fixed on the hidden side of the mirror. And whose
mind stood apart.
You want to be shattered by the cry of the bluejay, the scent of lilac, want
to see, even if it’s “Bank of America” lettered on a one-story brick building.
Because, you say, reality is always in doubt.
And though you take abstraction for granted and play among symbols, you
keep firm hold of your hand. In order to feel it touch the sheet of paper, the
pen, to see that your fingers are long and thin, and the nails clean.
You would allow all things their own weight and value. But know that they
only appear solid. That the elements keep reverting to metaphor. So when
you said, in a moment of distraction, I’m flying by the seat of my pants. You
furtively checked if they were zipped.
I admit that analogies may settle into an economy of reflex and moreover
contradict one another. Still, I enjoy placing their overlappings next to each
other, letting the contradictions point outward like porcupine quills.
But now I’ve seen a pain in your face that isn’t like anything else. Because it
seems to belong entirely to itself. To have its own dimension. I’m unable to
understand, as if trying to hold a mirror to what has no image.
When you try to talk about your pain it’s as if you had to speak a foreign
language. And the words are forgotten a moment before they are uttered.
In that language you remember all the bookstores you’ve been in, all the
changes of seasons back to your birth. From that distance you tell me you
once had a German wife.
And I’m not sure if I should tell you. I am that German wife.
I have never felt one with leaves, wind, rain and able to cry. Not one with my
surroundings like the California Wintu walking upriver, hills to the west, whom a
mosquito bites on his west arm. And who on the way back, hills still to the west, scratches
the bite on his east arm.
I’ve filled my house with many different things. As if to create an ecology to encourage
diversity of experience. The way areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species
are said also to have a greater number of languages.
Yet I’ve retreated into the two dimensions of page and perspective cavalière. Turned my
back on the window in favor of definite articles on perception. Of introversion and
subcutaneous shivers.
As if there, within my mind, I could conjugate myself and my desires. When it’s clear we
need the world and its obstacles in order not to destroy ourselves. And even thinking is
the inrush of other voices, like Mary’s conceiving through the ear.
I is not my name, is anybody’s, promiscuously. Language, which is all difference, proves
that you and I are not one. Are, though every sentence hopes for love, each wrapped in
our own quilt and alone.
When I clear my throat of words and just watch a blade of grass. The green is too strong
to be seen. Open myself to wind ripping the air, cars honking and squealing, the sounds
are noise and stop at the left ear.
My mind dissipates into dismal mush. Until I return to the refreshment of verbs,
pronouns, conjunctions. And the world returns with the dependence of clauses. My
senses are inept without auxiliary words.
It’s words let me see what I see, feel what I feel. Even what isn’t quite feeling yet, but
weeds combed by a stream. Only a tip rising here or there, a reflection, a ripple.
Even if ink is the color of where you are not. If putting one word next to another cannot
close the distance. Doesn’t even a syllable on the tip of my tongue call you across oil spills
and gusting winds?
How could words be mere echo or mirror when they give shape to the air? How could I
be deceived in thinking that it’s words bring me to myself? And reach out, reach, albeit
sideways, through twists of syntax, the strangeness between us?