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Woman with a knife in her foot lies asleep naked on floor as if she had fallen there, foot on a chair to anchor light, and I can’t see her fine face made of lines and scratches.
The heart is a glass dog with a fire in its throat.
The idea of the woman on the floor covers the dog with moths & flies,
things that crawl, things that die.
I close my eyes, surrendering my loneliness, and in the dark she walks the skeleton of a child across an attenuated picture plane, he points at the world where it falls out of color, line and landscape into an unfinished world made of paper and imagination.
We become variations on the page: man without labels, and the personal, the subjective, the private, are fake bridges leading to, not away from the chair in the largest room where waiting is the language of all questions and skin runs out of numbers, technical catalogs and ruins measurements because there are too many things, too many histories leading to the image on the floor.
Her body is unconscious, still. Knife draws no blood, as if she was made that way. Breath is repetition of creation. If I were to record its idea, slow it down, the light in my mind would be unbearable and the secret of decay would no longer qualify as a concern.
I want to have sex with her, to be with her, as if this desire would reproduce fire and confuse the glass dog in my chest long enough to keep it from forming letters, and unnatural verbs.
I can’t witness her face.
I must wait—to change anything is to destroy significance.
I must abbreviate the world so as not to lose the way away from the room or the dream, to free the heart of the obsession of hands reaching toward.
The heart wants to pose itself in different terms:
I am the animal, incapable of rehabilitating human design, left with the unthinking breast and confession of participation with its secret sounds, and the whispers before birth prepare you for the light that heals not the light that wounds.
I put my hand on her flesh and caress the politician in her sleep to submit, to play, to forget the damage she must born and inflict and erase the chair from the blindfold of the world and follow the light we invent into the shadows and transparent awareness
—a culture of flies.
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barefoot on a drawing of the sun
jj blickstein |