A Piece of Paper

A piece of paper blows through an empty park. And you stand there, this is what you watch. Is it transparent, translucent, is it opaque? It skips the air like a child's knees. Though it is tiny, though it is nothing. You realize the word empty is loaded. The way you stand and wait for an "all clear" from yourself. The tree branches bend down to the earth in heavy wind then. You know then what it is like. It is like dolls with diamonds in their wooden knees.

A Piece of Paper

The piece of paper with a child's crayon drawing on it goes blowing down a winter street. It cannot decide whether its drawing, the child's world, is on it or in it. The landscape with periwinkle wraps and rouge people. American Indians doing their laundry in the sky. Some such. Oh, and chimney smoke. Always that. Blue grey squiggles of autumn rising over the simple house. This landscape with lightweight people wraps around your ankle a moment, not long enough to bend down and take it, not long enough to have it, and then it continues skipping the air down the street. Strange that the trees you see lining this long street at such correct intervals are all anonymous but not random. The branches of these trees are the secret home of this drawing.

The Returns

A man walked into a sterilized room and noticed it was filled with a bunch of returned suicides. They had been arranged in a rough circle (which primitive superstition asserts is the opposite, talismanic shape to suicide's unbounded anti-circle). They were all sitting on fold-out metal chairs. All the chairs were one-size-fits-all. That is how suicide is, thought the man. The chairs looked as provisional as life felt to the returned suicides. The returns were all ages, all sizes, all colors and creeds. They had all tried to buy the farm, but their eternal mortgage had fallen through. They were here to explain but not apologize, a tightrope act. Now it was going to be something like credit counseling. There would be condescension masquerading as love or at least civility. Some would later decide to save themselves or others. They would become bankers of life. Others would bide their time, visualizing isolated tree branches the way some have porn films playing in their heads all day. No sooner had the man entered the room than he announced himself as conductor. He showed the returned suicides a small baton. He smiled at the string section and they all jumped out the nearest window, en masse. 

Story at Eleven

     There was a bridge that crossed nothing.
     A crowd of people arrived at this bridge and were afraid to cross.
     "Why are we afraid to cross this bridge which crosses absolutely nothing?"
one of the terrified assembly asked her terrified traveling companions.
     "Perhaps it is because some idiot called this a bridge," one of the other
petrified travelers ventured.
      And no one was willing to set one goddamned foot on the thing.
     So they remained camped there for years, waiting to see if something
would rise from below and swallow the structure, or whether it would sink
into something below itself, either way proving it truly had been a bridge they had
been facing all along.
      The journey itself was forgotten in favor of the terror of the bridge
(or whatever it was).
   

That Was the Year

That was the winter I went around making false graves. I would tie sticks together into crosses with twine and plant them in the earth in the middle of a forest where few would pass. I was often on all fours clearing snow and leaves with my hands, which were like paws in my big gloves. The gloves were ancient. They were so ancient, they remembered you.  Or I would erect little cairns with white stones. Once, I made a memorial cross using an old bear trap I had found. Such a horrible mouth to think of there in the darkness. In the night. Often, I wrote first names on these monuments, Christian names mostly, but sometimes I chose names that used symbols from other alphabets or languages that are ideograms. Google would help me make the graves. Sometimes I used the names of characters from novels who had meant something to me. I laid these beloved characters in the earth, on which they had never truly lived. For instance, I made a grave for Bartleby. Sometimes I would want the people who would stumble upon one of these hallucinations to think it was an animal's grave rather than a human's. Or I would want them not to be sure. Many names have this ambiguity. The important thing is the feeling the person would have and how the grave might change the person for an instant or longer. I don't think these made people afraid, although it probably did make them wonder. And fear is leaven, anyway. This had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being a person. This is, I suppose, a failing. The thing I didn't want to tell you is that you have to actually dig a grave for this to be convincing. Even if there is no one, no animal, no human within it. But this is good exercise. My blood pressure came down that year.


--after a photograph by Walter Stoltz

She Turned Her Nose

She turned her nose up at it. IT COULD BE the meat was rank. The beasts of the field or beasts of the sea's magnetic fields. It might have been rank. It could be that she hasn't filed her teeth lately. I felt a slight in the night. For it is a risk for me to go out there to put the food out. There are shadows that become beasts very quickly, if one is not armed at all the cardinal points of the body. It has become very hard to explain my life. I saw a shadow through my legs when I was bent over to release the food, out there in the night, where there is also gunfire, and it could have been the end for me right there. And would you have cared, would you have written the epilogue for my poor form? I doubt it. The shadows I see between my legs looking backwards are like the shadows of people who died in plane crashes. The shadows of people who died in plane crashes are like drawings by Nancy Spero. It becomes harder to explain my life, which no longer has a doorbell. She turned her nose up. It was all a drawing of the night. Even the absence was a drawing, so I drew it close, in dearness. The beasts of the field or the beasts of the sea's magnetic fields are sex. They are sex and they are drawings of sex. Let's face that. I don't know what to say. I was preparing to do some paintings on these blue tulle circles. Little feminine tondos. You can see right through them, they're thinner than eyelids, thinner than paper. When I bend over, the shadows I see between my legs are a sea. The sea has no epilogue and neither does she. I could go back out into the night with a file and offer to fix her teeth. If she comes back. If she smells the food and thinks twice. Her body is a terrible armature for something I like to think of as her soul.