She draws back

She draws back in a slouch. Your hands again on your knees always with the posture of self-envelopement. Yet, resting back away from the persisting uncertainties of this night, she was ensconced even further in the dark. The seat was smothered, the dask reduced to an edge, and her posture slithering down before her inky and nebulous. Even alert, attentive to a swim in night left her gasping and fingers wrest the dash to hold fast to something in the dark. To feel as though, even now with eyes wider that to swallow her flesh with lids wrapt back all around the soles of her feet, all the sensitivities which the back of the skin cradles close to the flesh inverted in the night so that she could feel something; the pattern of vinyl against her shoulderblades, the grain of the dash against her fingertips or some pressure of objects or enclosure to hold me in a void. All I see is floating. Profiles of sheen and gloss whose coolness I can touch but whose substance I fly through barrelling ever in towards a convergence of dark, damp, my self, and all the bodies whose coatings glow and diminish, snuff out, and swim. Dawn of substantive particles rises each by each through the night. Objects grow from their edges inward on themselves with creeping luminance. Where I float on their immaterial lines I now feel mass. Where I saw edges glimmering with dusk and twilight I find grainy fields full with detail and space. Windows, drapes, frames, knobs, lattices, eaves, shade, moulding, pulls, flakes, grains all quivering effulgently aware of newness. Sodium arc lights burst across the night atop poles with orange grain cast out on high across the landscape. Still it is all there before me, around me, in the mirrors and reflections is a fleshly world, again. She looks above the silhouetted horizon. High above the lamps sputtering to light, beyond the haloes of the lamps, is a deeper orange cloaked in spotty falsehood behind which is continuous deep and impenetrable purity of misapprehension and the world again, constructed by the magic of the individual. At once the appearance of my self, I can hold my hands before a tree, fanned out, flat with my palm parallel edged to an eave, a fist blocking out the hot point of a streetlamp. Although it is torment, the whole of a realm caked in orange, in grainy pollen, it is a falsehood that my hands are raised in connection with a flat, powdery place, and I am, perpetually, defeated in my forever falling envy of weight and touch. Yet, at the very least, and it is all that she has, it is the end of a tumble through nothing. I flatten my gaze through the north windscreen, crop out the slender frames and top and bottom edges to search for an entry.

Stop. She stops. In a narrow frame a rectangle, chaste, undivided and shallow, terminal. Immediately engaged, caught by, and cradled in a starched yet diaphanous drape. In the small sheet of space beyond or before the glass in the frame I am pressed, stretched out, and I impress my body on a swirling toss of forget-me-nots with tender stems that limply cross and end, snipped during innocence, to weave an open flaccid lattice foolishly bespeaking permeability yet a coquettish promise of entry into the home or room beyond certain to be a hall of the sky slaked with cerulean and azure in the extents that the diurnal firmament can be warm this would be warm; for blue is only warm with my knowledge of the sun. Yet the sky, and flowers, are stiff when they yawn for the sun. Their tones and postures are unrelenting, uninviting, with a folly of false stoicism. Behind the drapes, even within airy stiffness is a guileless proposal that I might enter into the unspoken marriage of geometrical emptiness with already so many years of longing.


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