Same Form at Different Hours
We do not have many walls ... so we think carefully about where to add darkness ... and then poke a metallic wound ... Hold still ... a bird has just landed ... The humidity is around sixty ... Stones hold moisture differently than unpainted wood ... The wood does not know it was once a tree ... The tree does not remember being a seed ... Olivier is burying something silver ... What next ...
A landscape appears upside down ... Maybe it waits for someone to make it humble enough to endure stains ... new water damage ... wine from a century before ... Outside world landing on evidence of a tree branch falling across an old outdoor participation ... The branch still thinks it is growing ... It will think this for years ...
The name of whoever sweeps the floor that is now parking ramp rubble ... with a missing office ... Projections continue in the minds of people who study what remains ... No one knows ... No more descriptions of shadows shifting on faces ...
That is a type of dirty laundry ... The way clothespins become satellites while the sun changes position ... The way things orbit if we wait long enough ... Obviously other places have their own business ...
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Our grandma's funeral happens during a rainstorm that has no knowledge of her ... The rain does not know it will become the river she loved ... The river does not know it was once this rain ... The word for that is closer to honest ...
Galileo misses several moons because his telescope is not strong enough ... He draws Saturn with handles like a sugar bowl ... This could be true ... The planet does not correct him ... It keeps turning without looking back ...
People believe the universe attends to their location ... Céleste walks circles around a fountain at five in the morning counting in threes because threes lean against something ... One two three ... One two three ... She stops when the water starts to sound like an apology ... The fountain does not know it is apologizing ... It only knows how to fall ...
Jupiter does not know his name ... There is a coffee stain on the page where he draws his first observations ... The stain looks like a fifth moon ... For years scholars believe he sees one and loses track ... The stain is still there ... The moon it resembles is still circling ... Neither knows about the other ...
Maybe loneliness makes us think we are the center ... Maybe believing we are the center is its own kind ...
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A rainbow is sleeping inside gray light ... We keep returning to the sound of sleeping ... What looks like one thing is actually many things pressed together waiting for permission ...
Where we come from there is a word for things that contain other things without showing them ... It is visual patience ... Also close to the feeling of a drawer with something we put there years ago and forget ... The drawer does not forget ... It holds the shape of what we left ...
The prism does not make colors ... It asks colors if they are ready to stop hiding ... Sometimes when we separate things pressed together we destroy what the pressing makes ... Gray is a home many colors choose ...
Sasha Red Wolf is lying on her kitchen floor with her cheek against the linoleum listening to the refrigerator hum ... She tries to hear the different frequencies inside ... the motor ... the cooling ... the lightbulb that turns on when you open the door even though no one opens it ... The light waits in darkness for the door that does not come ... She is not sad ...
Marcus is tasting his apartment wall at 4 AM ... Something sweeter than plaster should be ... He thinks about this every night for three years without ever tasting the wall again ... The wall does not think about him at all ... This is the difference between a mouth and a surface ...
A prism is missing ... It might be in a museum mislabeled as decorative glass ... It might be in someone's dusty attic next to a thimble collection ... Light passes through the attic window and does not know what it is missing ... The prism does not know it is being missed ... Both keep going ...
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Light touching what matters ... The waltz of the shutter ... The waltz of the chemical bath ... A face emerging one feature at a time ... first the shadows then the highlights then the specific weight of being looked at ...
A sandpiper weighs forty grams ... Less than a handful of dirty coins ... But its foot pressing into wet sand leaves a mark that says we are here ... we stand in this exact place and the light notices ... We do not know if sandpipers have feet or paws ... The sand does not know the difference either ... It holds both the same way ...
We look at photographs of people who die shortly after ... They are alive when the light touches them ... Then they are not ... The light is still there still touching still saying this is what we see ...
The first photograph of a human being is mostly missing the human being ... The exposure takes so long that everyone walking across the Paris street disappears ... Only one man remains because he is getting his bare feet shined and stands crooked long enough ... He is barely human-shaped ... Everyone else on that street that morning is gone ... The street does not remember any of them ... The photograph remembers one ...
A thumbprint on the back of that photograph from someone who handles it carelessly ... That person dies too eventually ... All this care and then someone just grabs it with a greasy thumb ... The thumb outlasts the person ... The photograph outlasts them both ...
Céleste is supposed to reappear here but we lose track ... She is circling somewhere ... She is counting ... The fountain waits for her to return ... It does not know she is counting ... It only knows falling ...
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Position determined by absence ... Where you are is the distance between two things you cannot touch ...
We find this comforting ... We find this very comforting ... Actually we are not sure what we find it ...
A navigator dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean counting waves in threes ... One two three ... Trying to find a rhythm that calms his hands enough to hold the instrument steady ... Dancing with geometry while his body forgets how to make saliva ... This is the wrong place for a waltz but he does it anyway ... The ocean does not know it is a dance floor ... It only knows how to keep moving ...
The instrument requires a horizon ... What happens when there is no horizon ... When you are in fog or blind or crying too hard to see straight ... The tool fails when the reference disappears ... The fog does not know it is erasing anything ... It only knows how to arrive ...
We keep losing the ends of sentences ... The way an unfinished sentence keeps going in your head after you stop reading ... A fishhook caught in a sweater no one wears for eleven years ... The hook does not know the sweater is unworn ... It only knows holding ...
The instrument for finding position is named after its incompleteness ... One-sixth of a circle ... Imagine being named after what fraction of something you are ...
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You climb high enough and stand in fog and your shadow falls on the clouds below and becomes enormous ... A rainbow circles your head ... You become a giant made of yourself ... This is not a metaphor ...
Desta walks backwards from her apartment to the grocery store ... Seven blocks facing where she has been instead of where she is going ... She says the oranges look different when she finally turns around ... More committed to being orange ... The oranges do not know they look different ... They are the same oranges being seen differently ...
In our place this is called a message ... The mountain trying to tell you something ... Maybe that you are larger than you think but only sometimes and only from certain angles and you cannot control when ...
Marcus who licks the wall is now nowhere ... We forget him on purpose to see what happens ... He tastes plaster and bitterness and something gray-sweet and then he recedes ... The wall still tastes the same ... It does not know he is gone ...
Most people never see their own shadow crowned on clouds ... Live and die without that particular accident of atmosphere ... The clouds do not know they are crowning anyone ... They only know drifting ...
Someone leaves a harmonica on the summit of a mountain ... It sits through three winters filling with ice and thawing ... When another hiker finds it and blows into it the sound is clogged with everything that passes through ... The hiker says it sounds like weather trying to remember ... The harmonica does not know it is full ... It only knows the breath that arrives ...
Bower Brrd has her beak against a frozen doorknob for fourteen minutes ... Tasting brass or steel or the difference ... What is behind is not described and will not be ... The door does not know she is tasting it ... It only knows cold ...
The harmonica ... We should move on ... The harmonica ...
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A candle is small ... It cannot save anyone from rocks ... But if you build the right kind of glass around it ... curved and stepped and patient ... that small flame becomes visible for twenty miles ... Becomes the voice that says come home come home you are almost ... The flame does not know it is a voice ... It only knows burning ...
We think about this more than we should ... What kind of lens gathers other kinds of weakness ... The weakness of forgetting ... The weakness of being afraid to call someone back ... The weakness of knowing what you should do ...
Louise Campilla is cutting her own hair with kitchen scissors while standing on one foot at 2 AM ... She wants to see what happens when someone deliberately unbalanced makes the cuts ... Her bathroom floor covered in hair that looks like punctuation ... The hair does not know it is punctuation ... It only knows falling ...
The glass in a lighthouse is shaped like stairs that go nowhere ... The light climbs them anyway ...
And here where thinking about lighthouses should continue something else arrives ... A French waltz ... The kind that sounds like it is written in a kitchen after a funeral ... Accordion doing something almost too sweet ... A woman's voice moving through the melody like someone walking through a house they no longer live in touching walls to remember where the furniture is ... The walls remember too ... They held the weight of shelves that are now somewhere else ...
The song is missing now ... The melody is missing ... What remains is the shape of missing it ...
One two three ... The lighthouse and the waltz share a rhythm ... Both saying here here here ... Both saying we are still ...
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The word gaslight means putting flames in glass containers to light city streets ... Making darkness into something cities can push back ... The darkness does not know it is being pushed ... It only knows where the light ends ...
Then the word changes meaning entirely ...
Now it means controlling what someone is allowed to see ... We do not like that the same word means illumination and erasure ... The word does not know it has two meanings ... It only knows being spoken ...
Ann June is standing in her kitchen holding a photograph of a river she never visits ... She holds it so long her arm starts to shake ... The shake makes the river look like it is moving ... She is crying now ... Not because of the river ... Because her arm hurts and she can put the photograph down but does not want the river to stop ... The river in the photograph does not know it is shaking ... It only knows being still ...
When you control what can be seen you control what can be known ... When you control what can be known you control what is real ...
Single gloves everywhere ... On sidewalks and bus seats and crooked parking meters where someone places them hoping the owner returns ... The optimism of putting a lost glove on a fence post ... The glove does not know it is waiting ... It only knows the shape of a hand that is not there ...
Ann June holding the photograph ... We mention her again ... She puts it down now or she does not ... If we describe her again something collapses ...
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A building in the process of becoming ... Iron for bones and glass for skin ...
We wonder what it feels like to stand inside ... To understand you are inside a question ... What if walls do not have to be walls ... What if inside can also be outside ... The glass does not know it is answering anything ... It only knows letting light through ...
The building breathing in threes ... Light coming through in threes ... Visitors walking in threes without knowing ... Glass cathedrals where god is replaced by visibility ... But is visibility a replacement or is transparency its own kind of sacred ...
A crystal palace burns down ... What is missing is the building ... What remains is the idea ... For a while you can stand inside visibility itself ... The fire did not know it was erasing anything ... It only knows consuming ...
A necklace drops on a staircase ... Chain falling in a straight line down three steps ... Then someone's foot catches it and sends it spinning ... For a moment it is a spiral then a circle then something that has nothing to do with stairs ... Then it lands and is just a necklace again ... The necklace does not know it was briefly something else ... It only knows the weight of itself ...
Back home the best shelters let you see out while keeping the wind from getting in ... The wind does not know it is being kept ... It only knows where it cannot go ...
There is a stain on one of the surviving photographs ... Brown and irregular in the upper left corner ... The building of pure light stained into partial darkness ... The stain does not know it is history ... It only knows where it landed ...
One two three ... The building breathing in threes ... This paragraph happens before ... We repeat it because the building burns and repetition is a kind of rebuilding ...
Olivier is burying spoons this whole time ... While you read about the dark room he buries one ... While you read about Galileo another ... He is the bassline underneath this text ... The first spoon is just a spoon ... The forty-third spoon is forty-three acts of faith stacked on top of each other ... The earth does not know it is receiving faith ... It only knows what is placed inside it ...
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The same haystack painted at different hours reveals that objects are more like verbs than nouns ...
This is the one we think about most ...
Painted at dawn the haystack is one thing ... At noon something else ... At dusk something else again ... The haystack does not move ... The painter does not move ... Only the light moves ... The haystack does not know it is changing ... It only knows standing ...
Can light change its mind ... Does light have a mind ... Or is the mind somewhere between light and paint and canvas and eye ...
Olivier is still in the garden burying spoons ... Tonight before he buries each one he presses it against his closed eyelid ... He wants to know if spoons can record eye-pressure ... He knows this is impossible ... He does it anyway ... The garden smells like turned earth and the particular green smell of grass that grows in the dark ... The spoons do not know they are being asked a question ... They only know the shape of what held them ...
What is missing from the haystack paintings is the haystacks ... They are taken apart and fed to animals ... The hay becomes digestion becomes manure becomes fertilizer becomes new grass becomes new hay becomes new haystacks somewhere in a field no one paints ... The hay does not know it is becoming itself again ... It only knows being eaten ...
Our grandma has a word for this ... We cannot remember it ... The word does not know it is forgotten ... It waits somewhere in a language we used to speak ...
Nothing holds still ... Everything is being repainted constantly ... The cathedral we see in the morning is not the cathedral you see in the evening and neither of us is wrong ... The cathedral does not know it is two things ... It only knows standing where it stands ...
Grief does not stay one thing ... Love does not stay one ... You yourself are being repainted by every hour you stand in ...
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What Is Missing
The sound of any of this ... The temperature on any of the days described ... Our grandma's name ... The word we fail to translate ... Céleste who we lose somewhere between ... Marcus who tastes a wall and recedes ... Bower Brrd's beak still stuck to the knob ... Whatever is behind ... A harmonica's true sound ... The name of that French waltz ... Every haystack we have ever known ... Every lighthouse never before painted ... Every grief that stays neutral ... Every question that does not separate into an answer ... A crystal palace ... The room where light first enters ... A man getting his bare feet shined and his reason for standing crooked ... The world's largest thimble ... The purpose of a pencil sharpener ... The number Céleste reached ... Louise Campilla's lonely reflection ... Ann June's desperate decision ... Olivier's filthy grandchildren ... The forty-third silver spoon of colonial privilege ... The twentieth desert bush spear ... The waltz that keeps playing with no one in the room ...
You ...
If you're here ... hello ...
If you're somewhere else ... you're in good company ...
Oyparaploo
From a remote place ... still ...
