Little by little she spills from his imagination filling the room—more like water, switching out of the river’s eye, coming from a source, an aquarium for his imagination. And there he sits in the corner of this flood, the soul individual, as curious as an ocean is deep into the atom, in a cocoon awakening—him.
Outside the night glows, moored to its ominous moon, coagulates along a roving cloud—glued like a glow fish; the star-scape a suspended rain in the existing plot.
On the windowsill she slips through the lava pots frozen in décor, a coral of sorts; in the kitchen the proverbial faucet inhales a clock that drops into a curved goldfish bowl—an imperfect metaphor; her words unspoken—a herald of morals.
***
In another abstract—the cantankerous racket of the freeway night; (the moon) ad infinitum, as if hammered from the senses— repaired and repaired, wheedled from the plot—the routine of the weight (the waiting). In this writing the words intone a lunar tug-of-war with the word that comes before—balancing the delicate armature of air for her support.
***
In a third, the world, the incessant idle of the spinning diesel run by hacks that sell sheet metal—all past tense. In this place she interprets and he explains.
The monotony spun like an old industrial drill. A myriad of characters appear from the shifts end—an assembly line; the cold robotics of the day unwinding the procession into as many individual highways that burned home. Most entered into the complicated framework of family; some into the medicated gauze of dependence; and one or two into the oily rag of their gunmetal gloom. All catapulted into their current faith.
Some are like puppets climbing their strings. In reality, they want something else to happen— the impossible spool. The jigsaw world is flat and run of the mill, and soon they will tire, a compost of characters with no resource from above or below.
He sees her come to pass.
***
An aside, a blind date—her fingertips, splayed in the snowflake, hard pressed to the window in the January cold. From the satellite, street grids appearing in a map bellow billowy breath clouds; pallid is the fixture—a faint death sleeping beneath; the still hold of a river in check. She is a ghost in her silky vestment on a colorless Sunday; he hides like a pearl in the crystal jewelry; his white umbrella, invisible, amongst the distinguished hats.
***
He was close enough to the dull lunar pull that he wobbled: she was nowhere to be found; and apart from the moon, drawing away, who can say. He pointed, there, towards the rising orb. She comes then from the line of his extended arm levitating in the blue wash capsizing her gaze. She walks along his outstretched arm; a bridge of sighs; a virtual touch.
Furthermore, the deeper background, the ultimate explorer, reaching for—hauling in the mysterious surrounding; a hook with a shoe that fits reeled in through an explosive sunrise; then in towards the magnetized self, through rocks and trees, cups and saucers set just right—the anchor. He falls in.
***
The drawn light engulfs the whole earth; and the world that surrounds it—caught in a complex web of communication. He is aiming at something invisible; tracing the physical face around nothing—kissing the air on the mouth. He imagines the creamy eyes of an overwhelmed sky; the calloused heels of the barefoot horizon; the individual lives racing by statuesque clouds.
***
He is filled to the nostrils with the nostalgia of holding her in the night museum under the slim artifact of the new moon—a dovetail to the whole. She measures the long pause of his frame. And then the gears resume turning. She is just beyond the reach of his nerve endings—the quill of his equation. He is naked as starlight; she peels the scintillating Braille along the grain of his wizardry—reading from birth to death—cultivating the heavens; from both sides now…
***
The mental landscape of lakes and trees makes for a long story. Melancholy loons launder the misty predawn. A boat’s wake v’s over the makeshift water—swallows shoot in through rock outcrops; geese migrate in fashion; the sunrise reels in the catch. He is not alone—the shoreline doubles; bubbles weigh up from below. She debates with her reflection, as if it were galaxies away.
He was close behind—in a way, a cumbersome spade into an intimate earth; he was inseparable, sticks to his word. On this day the clouds seemed from another planet—cumulus, less flesh and blood—more so, billowy lather caressing the sky; it was hard to tell this time.
His body plods; his mind breaks away. He has wandered into the skeleton of an umbrella under the dry fronds of a dead palm tree.
The control that snarls in ordered gardens has gone awry. Cracks in the concrete, a jagged windrow of weeds—a confusion of sins; old red velvet snagged in a confession of barberry.
He closes his eyes—his whole being tucked inside.
***
She considers his sleep from her infinite scope. He is a menagerie of knitted particles lost amongst pencils and shoestrings—an effigy from a particular time, a complex arrangement possessing his true identity, a fenced in galaxy.
She enters his nicely turned headspace trailing the labyrinth of her intricacy. He is joined to the emotional swell; pulled by an enormous moon—the muscle of the sea that carries the earth.
***
He is standing alone in a nameless field at the flare of a massive cottonwood—a river running underneath. The sea lost from all sides—he is in the silence of his conference with prairie earth. A slight breeze rustles and waves—motionless sunlight addressing the sashay of greens. The aspens seem plastic when disturbed; the dusty mid-day sunbeams milled through the hourglass …a crow softens white bread in the luxury of a stone hallow bath. The early birds, their soulful tunes from earlier that morning, chased away; and prior to that, the sunrise from scratch.
This story…endlessly rehearsed, excavating the jeering emotion of Franklin gulls that pull the plow, a battlefield of worms; the goldenrod roadside that nods at the lonely space rover on mars.
He sits there and waits for a ride under the immeasurable blues of the unfettered sky—the earth and the heavens along together. He contemplates the solo the moon will perform later that evening; and then imagining the same satellite with so much more to come.
***
He follows and shapes a thing unto itself. She wonders aloud, not with words, but with bone and muscle—she pulls strings and hammers through the Milky Way museum. She looks from light years away to the rotating globe and begins churning star dust. From high up in the balcony of the galaxy she pours a powder blue skyline. She is too much to fathom.
His head grew from a stem, a whirligig of sorts. He spins through millennia, one after another; he grows old and young. He throws away wizards and go-betweens. He puts up with feathery shamans and flighty gods that laugh out loud stirring the maroon blood of naked birds. He peers over the pseudo climax and sees only mirrors. He is weary of wise men; the origami of unfolding science; of artists and authors; of poets and popedom; of soft shoes and hard knocks; and finally of gardeners and gophers.
He would settle to make a meal out of a miracle but there is no bread to begin with, no hills.
***
After all this time his body has become a barrier. She sees the cutting edge between skin and air; the surviving landscape and the philosophy of his unreal interior. She knows he is still in there, climbing around the bone-works of the scaffolding. He, a space within a space, works like a subterranean sculptor. She has followed incognito, sitting still.
He is unaware of her, but the work is her striking resemblance. She can still imagine his original face; two long shafts, light cones, beaming down from eye sockets above. She continues to sit, an emotional blossom taking shape in his throat, in between the radiance.
Occasionally he moves from his work, climbing into the rafters, to check the weather further away—the unfettered moments like a ricochet of fireflies. When he returns down the ladder he is still blind to her; she is candidly kind, staying in place.
***
His head is crowded with impossible distances—with cosmic placements he can barely devise. Nothing comes in neat bundles. Even time past and time again, spent—its annoyingly long history, a scrap yard, a cemetery of clichés, seemed pitched in disarray. He looked up at the stars not sure which way the line was running through the careless universe. He thought time was a practice, and so time practiced.
He imagined time a marionette out of work—the world and sun soldered in an unmovable spot; the shopworn moon, a creature of moods, in a pail. And he himself, pulled, apart in a sense—as if from another body now unknown; in isolation evolving. Maybe he would be paddled to and settled by the next go round. He imagines the next set of inhabitants; them stealing time. And there with a terrifying claim, a flag staff rammed into his behind. And slowly and methodically his mathematics would be chopped, true to drama—trapped.
***
A magnificent lunar, full-shone, a polished bore, a bullet hole—she worked on under the long memory, fixing the worn and the wonderful; the moon in the blue painting a masterpiece—a trumpet to its lips. Patina, don’t spoil your face, she said to the moon. She gave both guns to the break. The blood kept boiling. She pushed with all her weight the stuff that gravity hates, to no avail. The thing kept spilling. Maybe if she would fill it with the big sun. Maybe—meanwhile earth in the hollows lowed in the trenches.
***
Sensitive longevity, the history of infinity—often times showing up late to its incredible date, gripping in its trinity, petite in size when in hiding, suspicious of all the gadgetry, shines on. Time, a lifelong insomniac, victim to mirrors in a fictional resurrection... forgets its true awakening; polishing its sustenance, overdosed—time in its work-wise quantum. If time could be asked it would have to admit that it did feel a little peculiar. He signed his name to this unusual tirade about time passing through.
She stands at one end of an impressive lawn of space. It is morning and the dew is woven like a carpet of ecstasy in the dyslexic sunburst; a shimmering, invisible land animal.
***
Her domestic history claims his reality; she is forever doing his dirty laundry. He is in the tub with this titanic stuff. Whole countries could fill the water world that he displaces. Satellites reach his misfortune from afar. His body is a drifting coastline. He feels the planetary momentum in his gut—she is concerned with the machinery unraveling the tides. He looks into a cloudless sky that sounded above the water, swigging it neat. Surely this was the mind’s paradise; he jettisons his baggage so he can sit higher in marine—his ballast falls to one side of the nameless ocean.
***
…awareness, the voice that saturates the illusion of individuality, carries his condition as if this world still held its teaming population, a collective recognition that fall like dominoes. He has a personal internal weather system spooning reality from his immediate surroundings—the black quiet of closed eyes and pure nerves accounting every measure of this unity. Is he stuck there, inside the shred of his being, protected from the overburden of magnitude? There are times he feels like an outsider from a further horizon—his head, above the blue marble, in the noctilucent clouds. From there his cranium swarms in disbelief full of nearly a billion cosmological intuitions.
For each second of time that reappears, that she is there, he slugs through the ponderous weight of space—the centrifugal force of egocentricity. He describes, always out from the beginning, with strides from his point around the globe. He is going to separate from himself; to know this. Yet for each step that he nearly unlocks he is more bound to aging. He lives on and calls home in the same breath of air.
***
He winds up like a sprung toy. On his own he is partial—the product of two rivers flowing from his eyes, vanishing. He is searching for water. He is running out of sand. He imagines other suns and other moons to measure from. He is running out of steam. He has hoisted gravity from its impelling mood. He ferrets time and space form the illusion of stillness.
***
His is a depression in the optics of geometry—. At most, she is somewhere nearby, an approximation of extensions in an invisible world. He can be found at the working end of a knife; she, the glint on the sharp edge of the blade as he attempts to slice the distance between them. Once he begins the division’s reform.
He drains the world of its literal meaning to come to some kind of conclusion. He stops to reflect his identity on the cliché of oblivion. He climbs a spiral staircase from his feet into the solace of his grasp; into nothing that hasn’t already been said, et cetera. Who else is in this room where shadows hang like artwork on the walls?
***
In self defense, he flips coin toss after coin toss, facing into the crossroads. He is nowhere near the sea; instead, an endless flatland pushes far out towards the razed horizon; the sunset—a slow guillotine. She sits off to the side painting the evening sky’s portrait. She has abandoned the dropped steel for a softer translation. She exhibits a gallery of patience for this model that won’t sit still. She considers the brush strokes that will immortalize his evolution. The sky becomes a rainbow of oils. She marries the observer to the observed.
The following morning he is still perplexed by the gravity of his decision. He will measure everything again and then reconvene. She, working on another canvas, is not so much measuring as placing a menagerie of spaces between crowds of unified individuals.
For a moment he hallucinates infinity within the butterfly weather. In a parallel world he is not alone—he is one amongst many and the many in bewildered return.
***
She is weaving a universe from the smallest increments—just shy of vanishing — into something worth believing. He is balancing a foothold on the edge of the growing fabric trying to make sense of this creation. Time steers and grinds polishing quantum particles. In another version, great shipyards rub steel hulls and groan—heaving bilge oil. In yet another, dinosaurs yawn and bellow in heavy machinery. Was it time that came undone and everything else followed? He wandered from his jumping point; fell and broke into pieces. Had she not promised a speculative universe with bright chemistry—pure energy; that he would be the first forged observer built from the heart of a star? She promised that forever…
***
The beginning of the story looms, across the universe, way in the outer limits. Saturated in dark mystery, up against the math—a moment of clarity; the futility of chasing light that drags time through a tedious passage…eventually leading to the discord of awareness—balls on a billiard table. This is the only place he knows so far. He is lost in the deep past; found existing in the present atmosphere.
On retrospective nights like these he is indebted to the moon. He feels as old as the earth where the phantom limb once held court. He considers the low hanging moon to be ripped from his being—he moans over the moon, a beat poet. He moons over her, and she moves on.
He is going through a state of cell division and she is swimming through the holes in this complex expression. She is inclined to whittle his makeup back to a single enclosure and start again. When she is down to his naked eye she will inform him of her intensions. Maybe she will leave him as two fingers of chemical on ice. Maybe she will simply have him meet himself at another time.
***
In a dream he is unweaving the fabric of space-time. In an alternate reality he is doing nearly the same…and so on with slight variation; ad infinitum. Yet he goes on counting; he looks now in the mirror; now from here to there. He stands between the minuscule and the astronomical. He is fooled into thinking that he has an address at this location. He is on the road with the universe in his knapsack—a true nowhere man.
***
Certainly realized, he considers the contingent possibility of not existing. He tries to wrap the actual structure of an idea around not having ever become. Each time this reality speeds head on into walls and jumps off towering bridges. Impossibility struggles to let go of the reins. He imagines a non-universe; the current of time cupped, captured like a sparrow of words; for simplicities sake, he fantasizes a single, solitary particle; a life propelled without peril or ripples.
His memory is transient striving to find home; all the while time fails to keep tedium at bay. Is he the only stream of communication currently living at large? Revisited and reworked he visualizes an ocean-side face off with the sequence of lubricated surf. He is patiently reading the disappearing curls in the scurvy of oil.
***
How near is the future’s end; clichés bending? He turns inland, wingless, churning out a fragile language to mix with his bones. He is the next number to zero—a mere addition problem. He heads north into the electric structure of the aurora. ,p>
He sees different views of the ceiling; he is like a cluster of beings; excited light releasing electrons…the borealis screaming the spirit long gone. He is dreaming of a simple curve. And he is the only one dreaming—an idle blister of a letter.
As he travels into the service of the cold he contemplates return. If he was totally ruined within the millisecond of this thought, he would risk slipping back into the speed of light. And not even the pubescent rocket of the relative consideration, when he is still alive in his contemplation—his cellular composition …but more so, as if, he couldn’t exactly say…as if light was the only true conversion; he was letting his eyes do the thinking. He would, free of his burden, plow through the heaven’s that was for certain. He would go on and on.
At precisely the moment that he tripped on the scales; he rhymed. He would sit at the bedside and then walk on, away from the poet, past the long dead concierge, and into the night; he romanticized.
***<>
He was, within the correlation of time, intrigued by her gravity. He reflected on the whole show; the sky’s blue wholesale. He returned, circling his orientation within his celebrated legroom. He is born together in this prospect of drawn boundaries breathing throughout the long conversation with the empty cosmos.
He imagined himself by some trick of nerve endings exploring the silence—when his own reference goes nil; when he gets away from his present being. He impossibly deems to rub himself not out, but into the future…and then to retrieve his hand, a tool without a mind, caught at attention, without a word.
***
He forgets himself. He slips up his history. He slides through the insanity of what it means to be alive; the unknown, unknown. He looks deep into the mirror at his beard. He is as crazy as it takes to be human—as is. As if he was designed to laugh and cry. Alone, he tinkers in dreams with the machinery.
She is the thread to the bolt and he is the nut.Pictures of earth from space
***
He runs the medium of raw air from beginning to end—the prairie behind him; serendipity, possibly…senescent, yet he is not an old man over the hill. He visualizes a spectacular wheel. He is concentrated; all of awareness in his body heat. His complex hourglass is honed and tooled without a tinsel of waste. He holds this figure—her solar warmth—together their fires burn through to a thinner atmosphere.
She stalls for a moment, as if taxed. As if she where him. Still, he is wrapped around her, and he waits until she resumes her wind. And together they ascend over old highways and meadows.
Down to the bone there is only land; the sea as if welled invisibly below the horizon. They ascend towards the hills from life on earth—a numberless of small beginnings. He moves beyond what tends towards demise—a myriad of symbiotic endings, full of her fuel. Slowly the trees wither towards nothingness.
***
Century after century earthbound and restless, boulders climb a steep incline towards a snowline. He ascends hoisting his mind; broad shoulders, big brained—taxed. He pushes himself out of this realm, even if breathing is no longer relaxed—a small flame aglow. In a sense he is climbing the landscape of his own body to stay above ground—putting two and two together—a skeleton key into the thin and quiet atmosphere.
He has all the time in the world to stay alive—nerves, muscles, and eyes. What is this?
***
The mountain, silent in meditation, a volcano in waiting…explores the surrounding cloudscape through a telescope—through gorges to zigzags and hairpins; the wheel of time driving.
He is posed, as if a base camp to the summit—he has reached a place. The glacier breaks snow forcefully—tumbles and responds. The vista of mountain and meadow is unspeakable as she weeps into the spilled air; as blue breaks from the brilliant sky and the inkwell pours; as she draws her heart to a critical point. He was kept in miniature under the full-bright disclosure of the sun, at least for another day—interwoven rivulets, snowmelt switching into the nameless river; spilling into the stunning moment.
The author is a Canadian native who's worked in collaboration with recently-deceased compatriot surrealist artistMarcel Debreuil. Check ACR archives for more of Harold Janzen's evocatively poetic reflections, like Verse to Music and thesein poet/publisher Jennifer Ley'sRiding The Meridian.
