Читать книгу Repetition Nineteen - Mónica de la Torre - Страница 10

You’d like to keep things simple, elemental.

Avoid tying yourself into knots over what you can’t

come to grips with—

dark drives, miscalculations, the facts around the clock.

Or else, arrange your twined strands into arresting patterns.

Or else—

the ring of those two words roping you in.

Roped off is the alternative,

but you know it’s pointless to keep things separate.

Pretend you are given enough rope.

What will you do with it next?

Rope-a-dope.

While you consider options, I salute

how quietly you defy flatness,

your multipurpose materiality.

Who’s you by the way?

It’s difficult to say.

I tangles up easily.

*

“the incidental beauty of non-objects”

*

A reluctant shaman in the guise of a nuisance—a screeching child—promises to purge us subway riders of our general discontent. Let the wind of change speak through his squalls and babble. Dada. Think of it as anti-poetry produced by tiny but sturdy windpipes. He too embraces the formless, rejects the regime.

*

Mobilized is the experience

of confusion where the familiar is made

unfamiliar, and vice versa.

A woman massaged by her partner on the subway platform,

his fists hot stones: “You’re a scared animal.”

Did I mishear that?

Stone in Korean 돌 is also anniversary.

Precious stones are reminders but other types of petrifaction

commemorate the past too, change it into object.

Take stones dangling from a wood beam, they

appear yielding through sheer optical effect.

On the opposite end of the spectrum

are monuments.

Puddles undo their monumentality, turn

statues and towers into shimmering surfaces on the sidewalk.

It’s slippery outside. Hovering cautiously, we too

negotiate between gravity’s pull

and our vertical aspirations.

A mirrored image is a non-material

photograph, an event.

The same goes for the choreography of banners waving

in the air. They announce nothing

but an otherwise invisible presence.

It’s audible, though, as if chasing away something.

Earworms, for one.

What the wind has to say today it says only in passing.