from “The Shirt of Nothing In It”
1.
The fact remains that the world will change and has no meaning.
Sailing along the coast, we see as far in front of us as the sky anchored
to the background.
Subtraction is simultaneous with the approaching landscape: forlorn,
empty, but still there.
The city walls, the leaves on the trees, the clock which falls back on itself
at night.
The image of a bird for the augur in a village is no different: they
enshrouded me like the coolness of rain and I began to think like
someone else, my relation to things interwoven and non-temporal.
As I drew near, I saw static rooted in an element of the city wall. I rubbed
my eyes. I could see faces.
2.
The furniture in my room is hundreds of yards away, an optimum distance
for satisfying the visuals of my memory.
White walls, paper in light, color qualities under different conditions.
Through the window, a blue tint endows each glimpse with
an appropriate significance.
Isolate the color itself, and it loses its logic and weight.
I never brought it up, but the material within me is synchronized to it.
My skull is discovered in the moon’s light, suspended in a stable kind of
soft ground. Its surface is run through with tactile marks. Putting it at arms
length, the beholder is met by a touch of color, lodged in the silence,
unnoticed at first glance: my life.
3.
My personal life merges with the remote future of vanishing structures
in the landscape.
Like me, the world itself lives and disintegrates, afflicted with
the spectacle of dementia.
The person who speaks to me draws close: we are in a relationship,
her name has lost its setting.
The world, in ruins, forgets the significance of roads, villages, books,
faces.
Embrace the point of view I am repeating, masses of cells appearing
anterior to my face to compromise my body, pantomiming dialogue
with the natural cadence of normal speech.
On the other hand, I can recognize my particular privilege.
The city is glowing.
5.
To learn to see ourselves, we must finally look at pictures of the sexual
act, at every stage, until the result is no longer attractive nor repulsive.
Biology is abstract. For example, in most cases of orgasm, the last
paragraph escapes, no longer dependent on the body of another.
By losing my voice, I keep the memory of my stroke at arm’s length,
the same arm whose hand I lose my power to draw with or half open.
I close my eyes, listen to the anonymous tongue in my head.
The desired person, unspoken, disintegrates and is lost to the
spontaneous process of music I know so well.
The heart is sound. It is not clear why.
17.
On the page, an object moving away grows smaller more quickly than
in a photograph.
A painter stands like a screen between its size and a distortion in the
leaves.
He is capable of exchanging his situation, but tempted, he must forget
the operation little by little.
Depth is merely an ingredient, a pattern beneath realism, a spectacle,
a stable point.
Somewhere in the distance, I see light snow, an image in the reversible
darkness.
The audience upsets some stones, which makes faint song.
The bird in flight is already an object at a distance, which leads us to our
central problem: the drawing is real.