The hours drag and drawl, the vision blurs and fades. The world is more at once, this flight of wing and flower, this litany of sudden silk and tiny spiders as the greens elaborate. The words lose the trail, tire chasing life’s fierce ebullience, assailed by the earthly urgings imposed by a yard lush with threatened labor. So we steep in these invariable aches and solemn smudges, caught in that spark before the wish, the streak across a settled sky while someone’s favorite song is selling souls cheap. The words silent for fear of waking up.
The kitchen light is on, but there’s nothing cooking. The stove sits cold, a wiped down skillet and a dish towel where a few cat dishes dry. The evening pulls its threads, the habits given to habitats, the fire devouring the fuse. The stories stack like bowls and plates in the cupboards, the stories there in boundaries and degrees. The ones I think of as I wish the dishes, the faces I see as I feed the dogs. Object permanence and the retinue of ghosts, Aristotle’s causes in kind clinging with the mind, each memory an apparition and a map. Curtains close and exits and entrances join hands.
It isn’t in the instance to harbor the art, providence found in the process, the hackles immodest imagining that which awaits as the labyrinth slowly unwinds. This sticking of landings, this noodling of scales, another oblivious witness scouring the dirt and the details as the world rots and teems. The evidence sails across the sky, the evidence pushes through the writhing earth, the reckoning of every direction at once. A white rabbit for every hat and every hole. I post up and pace the tangle of shadows and fluid blues, a scribble of whim and impulse in the endless deluge of lore and tongue. The ending just as it begun, the words wasted to leave words unspun.