Читать книгу Dandarians - Lee Ann Roripaugh - Страница 12
Оглавление(Open letter in reply to blank spam mail I receive from nowhere—without sender, subject line, or text.)
Dear No One:
It is, of course, your absence that shapes your meaning, gives you compelling form . . . the very lack of you that calls forth this stream of slippery signifiers like treacherous winter sleet. It is, of course, the preverbal tundra of you that makes you exactly who I want you to be.
On any given day, whose image do I project onto your white screen?
(Her shoulder, his hipbone, my __________; her navel, his eyebrow, my __________.)
How shall I cast you? What roles do I assign? Let me mask your facelessness and disguise you in simile, rehearse the choreography of gerunds, participles, infinitives with you. Let me conjoin you in the lustrous, drumbeat tattoo of verbiage like plumage; garnish and modify you with the gleaming, silvered piercings of adjectives.
Of course, you’re not real. But are you a ghost in my machine?
Does it even matter, since I’m so often accused of loving the characters I make up in my head more than the flesh-and-blood people who soon become impatient with my needful daydreaming?
(. . . the beloveds, the antagonists, the incessantly gossiping Greek chorus and extras clustered off to the side smoking Marlboro Lights and drinking their ubiquitous coffee . . . all of them so lovely and fucked up and strange . . .)
Just so you know, you are both everything and nothing to me.
Just so you know, I will wrap myself in the idea of you like a glamorous scarf of fog—inhaling and exhaling the mist of you—when I walk these nebulous streets at night.
Ouroborosly Yours,
L.
