Читать книгу I Love Artists - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge - Страница 17

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 concentrate on what he is saying. The snow around him has

frozen into patterns of wavy lines, so there are luminous blue

shadows all around you. This is obviously an instrument for his

location which her voice occupies. It grates across

pointed places in the form of vapor trails.

t is so mild, you are beginning to confuse your destination with

your location. Your location is all the planes of the animal

reconstituting itself in front of you.

2

Anyone who is all right would not be coming in covered with fog.

It is a pattern when it is moving. When it is moving collisions

of things that happen produce a wavering but recognizable image

that merges into the ground when it is still. It is a black diamond

that condenses you mentally as it collapses. It is a black diamond

on the ground, and the diamond is moving. Then it disappears

when you look at it, yourself having no coincidence.

The ground is covered with ice.

Many holes in the ice are glowing with light.

You could say one light is a slanting plank that interrupts the ice. It

could be a bridge, except where new ice is closing it off into a small

enclosure like a holding pen or a bed. The human shines through from behind

and below seams and holes in the ice. The human hovers like a mood.

On a molecular level, the human remains, as a delicate glittering accent

on the dateline, like a light flashing upriver, which can only be seen

by the first person who looks on it, because her looking is equivalent

to clocking its velocity in a chute or a tunnel to her.

She considers these the unconscious lessons of a dominant force

that is being born, and as it becomes, its being is received structure.

First ice crystals, then heavier glass obscures the light,

so she walks back and forth talking to herself, in a white soundless

sphere past the trash of the village.

She crosses pressure ridges that form a fringe between old ice

and open water. And the ice responds to her haphazardous movement.

Snow is moving about the ice, some of it settling, some of it blowing.

She notices certain portions are ice, while others are covered with snow,

which is easy to make tracks on. And she is careful not to step on the snow.

Twenty miles of frozen ridges buckle with snow,

but when she travels under the ice, the ice would be like fog. Inside the fog,

there is a jail fire. Flames lure a quantity

of what is going to happen to her into equivocalness,

by softening her body with heat, as if the house she is in

suddenly rises, because people still want her.

She prefers to lie down like a river, when it is frozen in the valley,

and lie still, but bright lines go back and forth

from her mouth, as she vomits out salt water.

This is the breakthrough in plane. The plane itself is silent.

Above and behind the plain lies the frozen delta. Above and in

front of her, fog sinks into the horizon, with silence as a material.

So, she is walking among formations of rock. Once again, she can make

a rock in a distant wash move closer to her, where it splays out

like contents its occurrence there. Once again, her solitariness

can flow into the present moment, although she seems to know what

is going to happen.

This is an image represented by a line of ice slabs facing a line

of rocks. One rock seems a little heavier and darker than the others,

but for now, they are two lines of tinkling unaccompanied voices.

The rest can be correspondingly inferred, as a line of rocks

leading toward a distant mountain, as into a distorting mirror,

which once again grows darker and denser, crossing over into mass

for a while, before returning to the little saxophone repetition

with which it began, like rubble under her feet.

Still, anything can still happen. She is still unable to distinguish

one wave from another. This is her nervous system attempting

to maintain its sweep across the plain.

Everything is still moving, and everything is still one texture,

altered from sheer space to the texture of a wall.

The route-through tightens around the nervous system, like a musculature.

It floats like a black mountain against the night sky, although she will remember

a mountain glimmering with ore. Then it darkens for her return.

The river branches and the sea has become blank as mirrors each

branch of the river flows into.

3

Sometimes I think my spirit is resting in the darkness of my stomach.

The snow becomes light at the end of the winter. The summer

is an interruption of intervals that disappear, like his little dance

before the main dances, a veridical drug.

A wafer of space beneath the ice starts to descend, like

the edge of her sleeve across a camera lens. Pretty soon

the ice will be all broken up. There is no space left. You look

down on a break-up of little clouds over the plain, as if the house

you are in suddenly rises, to relieve the nervous pressure of light.

Twenty miles of frozen ridges become a lace of moss

and puddles too flat to see and which are breathing. Here is

a snowdrift that has begun to melt. Here is an old woman

talking about a young person who is androgynous, across a distortion

of radio waves, trying to locate you. She is only moving

from her knees down.

The snow becomes light at the end of winter. How ice changes

on either side of the boat is not a tactic. The drum is a boat.

The mail route is a line of controlled electric light.

They will scatter their clothes anywhere in this light. You leave

your shirt near the snowmobile. It is initial color on the tundra.