Moment: in the gravel pit I step outside the stream of time
and it collapses all around me, like a lawn chair
or a neutron star, turned inside-out by its own gravity.
Here,
all calendars are overlapping:
the cycles of ascending and descending.
Now, on Chipman Hill, October Seventh
(an arbitrary mark in the Gregorian)
I stand atop the lid of the reservoir
where once I stood before, begging the gates of heaven –
no, rather, the gates of Time
to let me through –
perhaps they did. Perhaps at a moment
of imperceptible discontinuity,
the lightning split me like a hazel twig.
You see the yellow warning signs?
CONFINED SPACE DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMIT
and: DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE AREA
They do not jest.
The one who enters has overstepped the margin
of what is knowable to us. The one who enters has torn the page of the atlas and the calendar.
It is not even terra incognita; there is no latin script or compass rose
to name and orient its Nothingness. Past
the last gasp of semantics, the contortionism of Is
and Is Not – a remoteness
of suspension bridges lost in mist –
How am I to know
if I got through?
Love is a way of knowing, has its limits
like any instrument of measurement --falls victim
to the vicious parallax that obscures planetary movements, love
is a language we must learn to speak though the sense of each word is always incommunicable
and we live in a state of constant mistranslation. Where is the end of this, my love
My love, is there no other side of the suspension bridge obscured in mist,
is there no comatose blur into unconsciousness
that unifies and resolves?
The polarity of looking-in-your-eye becomes unbearable, as it
darkens with the night and leaves me astronomically
alone: is there no window
where the mirror shatters, is there no quadrant where the asymptote
impossibly transgresses arithmetic? I think if there were no measures of location,
no time or space or other dimension to define us, I think
if there were no words or anything
but the image in my dream
the song I sang up on the hill
when all the dandelions bloomed around me – surely
I crossed over then, surely
the Cartesian plane collapsed
for an instant, and left me dancing
with relativity – –
I crossed over, and I left me here.
Limbs, hair, heaviness
the body like a bowstring trembling with
the violence
of what it has just flung out from itself,
the insomniatic
wild-eyed frenzy of such impetus.
A kind of exorcism, amputation
as if I have split the world in half
as if I have split the atom
dawning comprehension
blinding me – the love of extremity
is the veiled wish for death. The absolute love
is apocalyptic fire. The lover
is a shelter
and a veil.
The absolute love: electrocution
the lover, nonconductor:
WARNING DO NOT ENTER
the film reel's terminal overexposure
the iconoclast, the deconstruction
The lover is an eidolon, the lover is a phenomenon
(imprisoned as I am in the observer.)
On Chipman Hill, October Seventh
the view opens to me. (It could have been any other
umbilical marker, any other centre
of infinity – ) All calendars overlapping: and I,
at the juncture between
watch the mushrooms burst through the fallen leaves.
The leaves are moments,
fallen to the forest floor, fallen irrevocably through the bore
of the hourglass. The shed skin of the year
becoming translucent – lacework, lamellae
becoming momentless, becoming timeless: becoming palimpsest
rendered obliterate. The absolute memory
becoming oblivion. The love of extremity.
You can arrive at the same point
both by addition and subtraction: you can arrive by remoteness or by too-closeness
to where it breaks down. You can travel in any direction
on a spherical surface, and you will make your way round
to it: on Chipman Hill
the eternal moment – where we found us
when we left
our selves – walking along the path amid the last periwinkles
merely two bodies in impossible motion.
Notes to this poem:
'the love of extremity' is stolen from Milan Kundera
'impossible motion' - see the Fletcher's Paradox
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