home. the vague memory of cattle.
it is 2:00am on monday morning and i
am reading 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, but
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 (almost an auditory hallucination)
broad, mostly non-specific thuds, blunt noises made with
amorphous blocks, fat limbs of wood at center stage, the sound
moves out upon an sea of uninhabited theatre seats, wooden
row after row of them. and these noises seem to be from a woman
onstage banging these two boards for this silent ocean. with gnarled
arms she bangs on big stub of birch onto a thick and irregularly cut
hunk of birch lying flat upon the concrete stage floor, a
sound that does not carry far, even given the echo-riddled acoustics
of theempty rows of surely uncomfortable, also wooden chairs.
darker, the chairs are smooth and polished. they sit individually
and altogether, rowed, with much more intent than the two hunks of
birch this woman is banging at 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 (before each thud she sends a sort of warning,
like “a child drowns”* and, later, “a sudden empty place/
where something was,” then suddenly she warns that now
there is a letter filled with “many misspelled words” which grows
into furniture: a couch, a large bookshelf (which each quickly vanish).
worst of all, with finality, she warns: “you are not coming.” and the
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 as if from a mock belfry. the thud of a once-known clang.
echo thud ripples 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 wooden blocks. each wall a blockade. altogether they
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”
