Читать книгу Stranger - Adam Clay - Страница 13

Along the Edge of a Season

Distant roads brought together

in a way described

as anything but pliant. Instead it seems

normalcy might suggest a stifled inspiration

destined to exist

as a hallway exists:

hidden between the rooms,

the Iowa of a house,

the Tuesday in a week with no Wednesday.

Somewhere a truck

does not turn over. It seems

there are no middles

anywhere—there are only

logical lists in sensible places.

Perhaps calling my view

of the world palindromic suggested

you wanted a window to work

both ways, that you

wanted coffee to put you to sleep.

Disregard the snowbanks in your mind.

Remember that ice expands

as it freezes—its memory doesn’t

defer to urgency or to what

we desire. Snow

and legs keep moving through

the world listlessly. So much

for floorboards. So much for

absence that I once admired

or even desired as if

the world was in my shirt pocket

waiting to unfold

and scatter into the space between

the two of us. You suggested a shadow

could be musical

or that the neck of a giraffe mimics

the way some trees

stretch toward the sky,

free of knots and free of

the mark of history

upon them. It’s easier to say

the word quaint than to be that way.

Was your attempt at sensibility

a worthy one? I don’t know.

I don’t know how to place the weight of a breath

behind the eyes. Money is a strange sort of memory:

remember the market with nothing for sale?

Remember how we corresponded

for a month straight with words

corrupted from their meanings?

An ashtray wasn’t anymore.

Arbitration became so apparent

that suddenly knowledge (even a thought)

ceased to be incredible.

Take the words apart

and determine what a grin can be.

I’m not suggesting that grace deserves

a particular place in the world.

I’m suggesting that limitations

are rarely deserved by those

who impose them. Absence deserves

more. You said waterlillies

when I’m pretty sure you meant

something else, perhaps something

more distant. The sky was tinged

the color of a hangover that day,

and I knew better how to talk

to myself than to you. And then somehow

it’s Tuesday again

and a school bus speeds down

our street between the parked cars

like some kind

of generous distraction from

whatever mundane thing

was hanging over everything else.

Maybe that word was empire? Perhaps

you were hoping or desiring

a bottle to place this house

(like a ship) into? I’m

hearing one thing

and speaking another. My

shirts aren’t pressed. Hell,

they aren’t even clean

and their colors

have run elsewhere.

In my mind, I see them bounce

on the laundry line

and wonder why.

I didn’t understand what you meant

at the time, but it made sense

when I saw not a single bird in the woods.

The climate dissolved overnight

and you couldn’t have been more disinterested.

A squelched fire hangs in the air

and in the memory

for years to come. It’s a terrible thing

when we stop

and consider how having enough

means something

different from even a year ago. Think

of a swallow flying

from one tree to the next

and think of something from your own

life that runs parallel

to the experience of the first tree. There’s

nothing. It’s afternoon all of a sudden.

It’s afternoon? If it is

it’s a weird one, a place unfit for a poet

but not a place

unfit for other people

who calmly disregard

everything but winter

in a terrifying way. An idea

along the edge of a season

means much more. An idea

is one born from nothing

and destined to tunnel

its way into a hole meant

for a creature or for air seeking

out a place as only air does.

Overwhelmed? That’s only half

of it. You can replace me

if you like. You can look

straight into a mirror and feel frantic all without me.

When I say idea, I mean content.

If you thought this was both the ending

and beginning of things,

you were wrong. It’s all up

in the air, all past, future,

and present at once. One thing is certain:

we can’t see past

speaking, and if we could,

it would only be a thread.