home. the vague memory of cattle.
it is 2:00am on monday morning and i
read poems that tell blunt, tragic tales
that are vaguely disguised as poetry by
a woman who wrote these words some
where in the american west, surely, and
whatever her proximity to the ocean they
were initially scrawled or drafted in the years
around when i was born, shortly before i came,
perhaps shortly after. i keep thinking of the
stage, of theatre, and of hearing broad, mostly
non-specific thuds, blunt noises made with amorphous blocks or limbs of wood at center stage, but out toward
an empty sea, an audience uninhabited theatre seats, wooden
row after row of them. and there is the banging that a woman
is making as audibly as she can for this silent ocean with gnarled
arms she bangs big birch limb upon a thick and irregularly cut
hunk of birch that lies flat upon the concrete stage floor, a
sound that does not carry far, even given the echo-riddled
acoustics of empty rows of uncomfortable chairs, wooden, too.
darker, the chairs are smooth and polished, sit individually and
altogether, with much more intent than the two hunks of birch
the woman is banging upon the concrete stage that juts a bit
out toward the chairs, a stage that is, but for the woman and
the two slabs of wood she bangs as a warning before words
like “a child drowns”* and, later, “a sudden empty place/
where something was,” but then the stage is no longer barren,
there is a letter filled with “many misspelled words” and then
there is furniture. but it all disappears quickly. eventually, and
worst of all, with finality: “you are not coming.” the wooden
thudding stops, the echoes disperse into silence, the woman leaves
the stage. i am still here, thinking of death and silence. until i
have unsettling dreams of pre-existence, emotions. it is the end
of a very long day that has been interrupted occasionally by blunt
banging that mock belfries, a once-known clang. just thuds that
echo ripple out into a soon-silent void. who was the child who
drowned? who wrote the letter filled with words spelled incorrectly.
i’m disconnected. in this space. but comfortable. my eyes move
drowsily across each surrounding wall papered with what must be
the detritus of me. there is nothing beyond the walls. once there
was a web, a glistening network that stretched out beyond it.
those ooden blocks. each wall is a blockade. altogether these
make the confines of a comfortable box in which i sit peacefully,
aware that i am slowly forgetting. no remorse for whatever is or
was beyond this box. my legs are crossed upon soft cushiony linens.
*words in quotes are from Kathleen Fraser’s poems in “What I Want”
