constantly engaged in transition, but she desires to enter a body of material by talking.
In Sumer and in Egypt in the 3rd millennium B.c., speech was spoken like an arrangement of stars,
an orderly procession of luminous beings, who counted poetry with sound,
until speaking gave way to a duration that would not reconstitute, so she may appear
as a large masklike close-up and as an immobile figure in white on the bed,
who actually absorbs space.
One can paint stars on a black lead background,
equivocal stars casting carpets of desire here and there in the middle of an errand,
which up to then had proceeded in the state of non-imploring urgency of a body in diagonal,
an image of outreach or hailing. For me, it seemed love was a spiritual exercise in physical form,
and the diagonal was glints off an inferred line of sun lingering, as spring
synchronized with the double space of her desire and her desire for their presence
to be hieratic, not wholly expressive, a standard of grace in the corridor of a day,
with narcissus. If it is through counting that speech is connected to time,
then crossing an inferred estuary of this conversation is a rest in music.
Alakanak Break-Up
1
To find out the temperature, she tosses a cup of water into the air,
because it will evaporate before it hits the ground.
She goes outside and tosses a cup of alcohol into the air,
and then she keeps looking into the air.
When her attention is discontinuous, this no longer means that
she is inattentive. In the same way, they can measure the plain, now,
although plain and temperature are vacuums her heat sweeps
across, even before she has turned.
When she turns, the ice she had been standing on is changing into
foam and is about to drift away. It rumbles as it is changing.
She watches it recede, until it is a slit of light entering the brain,
because the brain is protecting itself against the light.
Here is the event horizon. You can focus on a cone-shaped rock
in the bay. You can make it larger and closer than the ice
surrounding it, because you have the power to coax the target.
This breaks up your settlement in a stretch of infinity.
Then you tie some string to a stick and toss it in front of you,
as you are watching the rock. Then you keep drawing it back.
Sometimes the stick disappears in front of you, until you draw
it back. At these times the rock has become yourself,
wearing soft bedclothes and with burned eyes.
You balance three horizons. In the same way you press down
on her shoulders and gently push the person into the ground,
which is constantly changing in the current and on the tide.
This is where they have concentrated you. All that time
you had been noting the direction of snowdrifts and stalks bent
in the south wind. Nevertheless, a storm can distract your attention.
Your attention becomes the rasping noise of a stick drawn across
the edge of a bowl at a party. It draws attention tenuously
from your fingers, the way your body starts to hurry in the wind.
This is where they have concentrated you, in order to be afraid
or in order to re-create the line between your mind and your mind
on the other side of a blue crack in the ice, so you can sit
facing each other, like ice floes folded up and cut up
and piled up against each other, and so you know enough to stop
as soon as you lose your direction.
Then, if you are on the ocean, with poor visibility, with no wind,
and you cannot be seen, please go around the outside of an ice
floe, because the ocean has dust particles, which will sparkle
and indicate the direction of the sun, she says.
When you look up, you see a heavy frost has formed on the window,
which had been damp for a while each morning, and then would dry
up and crackle. You pass the window. Ice begins to melt and drops
of water travel down the window diagonally, because of your speed.
You take the window and place it in your mouth, and meanwhile
fish line attached to a red bandanna jiggles in the dark,
because you are losing consciousness. It swarms around the rag
when you look up at it against the sky.
The dashes you had applied so carefully, in order to record rotation
in the sky have been washed away, leaving milky traces of themselves
and of their trails, so your poor map is now a circuit of spirals you
can only decode into chrysanthemums on a sleeve moving past cirrus clouds.
You are a blur of speed concentrating on heading in one direction.
It is the bank above you standing still, because you are being
held back. Sometimes in your path you see darkness that looks
like smoke. When you come to the edge of it, you realize you are
already veering away from it. You have to concentrate on the
dotted line of your lane, which is foretold in threes by the light
and ticks like a meter from your looking at them.
Sitting up, you think someone has been splashing water on your clothes.
Picking up a dash, which becomes a warm beam in your hand,
you arrange them on a board, oblivious to the sky, because
you conceive of yourself now, moving on the board or behind the board.
A square of the board lights up and becomes the single headlight
of a car, indicating another person.
If the gravity of this moment outweighs your knowledge of where
you are, that is pathetic. That is what makes the space above the
ocean so attractive, but you still know enough to travel in a
straight line through a patch of fog, and continue to walk when
you emerge, with some fog clinging to you, up to your waist.
Each time you forge an off-shoot of the river, you are hoping it
is the river. It is a little mild time. You see a row
of gulls lined up on the ice, their chests puffed toward the sun
which is the color of apricots on snow.
You pass a man lying on the snow, moving his head up and down
and singing. At first the monotony of his movement makes it hard
to