mmmmmclxxvi

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”