the sky have been washed away, leaving milky traces of themselvesand of their trails, so your poor map is now a circuit of spirals you
can only decode into chrysanthemums on a sleeve moving past cirrus clouds.
You are a blur of speed concentrating on heading in one direction.
It is the bank above you standing still, because you are being
held back. Sometimes in your path you see darkness that looks
like smoke. When you come to the edge of it, you realize you are
already veering away from it. You have to concentrate on the
dotted line of your lane, which is foretold in threes by the light
and ticks like a meter from your looking at them.
Sitting up, you think someone has been splashing water on your clothes.
Picking up a dash, which becomes a warm beam in your hand,
you arrange them on a board, oblivious to the sky, because
you conceive of yourself now, moving on the board or behind the board.
A square of the board lights up and becomes the single headlight
of a car, indicating another person.
If the gravity of this moment outweighs your knowledge of where
you are, that is pathetic. That is what makes the space above the
ocean so attractive, but you still know enough to travel in a
straight line through a patch of fog, and continue to walk when
you emerge, with some fog clinging to you, up to your waist.
Each time you forge an off-shoot of the river, you are hoping it
is the river. It is a little mild time. You see a row
of gulls lined up on the ice, their chests puffed toward the sun
which is the color of apricots on snow.
You pass a man lying on the snow, moving his head up and down
and singing. At first the monotony of his movement makes it hard
to concentrate on what he is saying. The snow around him has
frozen into patterns of wavy lines, so there are luminous blue
shadows all around you. This is obviously an instrument for his
location which her voice occupies. It grates across
pointed places in the form of vapor trails.
t is so mild, you are beginning to confuse your destination with
your location. Your location is all the planes of the animal
reconstituting itself in front of you.
2
Anyone who is all right would not be coming in covered with fog.
It is a pattern when it is moving. When it is moving collisions
of things that happen produce a wavering but recognizable image
that merges into the ground when it is still. It is a black diamond
that condenses you mentally as it collapses. It is a black diamond
on the ground, and the diamond is moving. Then it disappears
when you look at it, yourself having no coincidence.
The ground is covered with ice.
Many holes in the ice are glowing with light.
You could say one light is a slanting plank that interrupts the ice. It
could be a bridge, except where new ice is closing it off into a small
enclosure like a holding pen or a bed. The human shines through from behind
and below seams and holes in the ice. The human hovers like a mood.
On a molecular level, the human remains, as a delicate glittering accent
on the dateline, like a light flashing upriver, which can only be seen
by the first person who looks on it, because her looking is equivalent
to clocking its velocity in a chute or a tunnel to her.
She considers these the unconscious lessons of a dominant force
that is being born, and as it becomes, its being is received structure.
First ice crystals, then heavier glass obscures the light,
so she walks back and forth talking to herself, in a white soundless
sphere past the trash of the village.
She crosses pressure ridges that form a fringe between old ice
and open water. And the ice responds to her haphazardous movement.
Snow is moving about the ice, some of it settling, some of it blowing.
She notices certain portions are ice, while others are covered with snow,
which is easy to make tracks on. And she is careful not to step on the snow.
Twenty miles of frozen ridges buckle with snow,
but when she travels under the ice, the ice would be like fog. Inside the fog,
there is a jail fire. Flames lure a quantity
of what is going to happen to her into equivocalness,
by softening her body with heat, as if the house she is in
suddenly rises, because people still want her.
She prefers to lie down like a river, when it is frozen in the valley,
and lie still, but bright lines go back and forth
from her mouth, as she vomits out salt water.
This is the breakthrough in plane. The plane itself is silent.
Above and behind the plain lies the frozen delta. Above and in
front of her, fog sinks into the horizon, with silence as a material.
So, she is walking among formations of rock. Once again, she can make
a rock in a distant wash move closer to her, where it splays out
like contents its occurrence there. Once again, her solitariness
can
