If all time is unredeemable
your face across the concert hall
repels me, gently as a magnetism
though our eyes met
not like two billiard balls clicking,
but something
far more fluid – the surface tension
of shadows
coalescing on walls caught in the gaze
of streetlamps.
There is a beauty to shadows that seem
to dance
even when our movements are not
elegant;
and a beauty to shadows which seem to
melt and swim,
made aqueous and thus utterly escaping
the unending tedious mathematics
of I and you, of 1 + 1
being two...
Shall we go walking in the sight of
streetlamps,
shadows overlapping on the walls even
if our hands never touch
(save for the brush of accident, so
quick it may not
have happened at all – )
Shadows translating unconscionable
desire for the exit of our coordinates
on the plane of space and time that
plot us Here, Now
wherever we happen to be. The concert
hall, or the walking home.
The smile in your eyes, or a
streetlamp's stare.
Where I walked, I saw
two lovers swinging on the playground
swings
and in the darkness they were
silhouetted,
made the common territory of one
contour-line.
In the dark, their shadows unnumbered
themselves
and curled back, unhatching into zero's
egg
(the O of origin, so aptly named!) –
and in their laughter, extending through the night
rapidly approaching that which
is undefined, the asymptote whereof
we cannot speak
though I have tried unsaying it
with the gradual silencing of a chord
or the trailing punctuation of a phrase
– in falling short,
I hoped that the Unsaid
would descend upon the emptiness I'd
prepared for it
as dawn fills in the interstices of
night
grown rarefied with blotted morning
stars.
I thought of this when I saw the snow
fall
letter upon letter, effacing itself
luminous on the rooftops its illegible
palimpsest
in ink of erasure, the colour of doves
descending with their drowsiness and
their deaf whirlwinds
the flapping-overlapping silences in
the blizzards of their white wings.
The gradual accumulation of noise gone
snowblind, radio static
overwriting every intelligible
syllable losing its contours before the
overexposure
both zero and infinite,
blank and obliterate...
I have tried to arrive at this point by
addition and subtraction
by abscinding and by appendages
yet it each time, I am merely flung
back Here,
Now – fixed again in the infernal
grid
across the room from you, across the
country
across the sky – across the concert
hall
I turn my eye upon your constellation
and find that you evade me, growing
dark
as if my pupil's shadow blots you
out...
Across the calendar and the circle of
the clock,
so it is – when I aim to recollect
your face
the moment gently pushes me away,
and my very remembrance eclipses your
smile
(made a bruised blankness much like the
afterimage
of a lightbulb's negative in my
eyeball)
and the cursive gesture of your
exclaiming hands
is over-written by my brain's dull
print
of concept, shape and name and sense
and colour –
yet what is it that I saw when I first
saw you? Surely not
such definitions and circumscribing
descriptions, surely something quick
and bright and vague
that escapes me, as it once ran through
my nerves
a brush-stroke of birds out of
darkness, unspooling from sleep
and I lose you in a burst of wings and
metaphors:
A rain falls on the surface of a pond,
calls forth a coronal displacement
upwards
and a set of circles amplifying out
damped and dilute, from your unknowable
ballistic
to the ripples of impression that I
feel
trembling warm and beautiful and yellow
absconding in the imprecision of my
utterance –
so brief, the sliver of time in which
you embraced me
half blotted-out by the blunt
instrument of my remembrance...
And when I left the concert hall, I was
smiling;
the stringed instruments of my soul
were not yet silenced
though so soon below the threshold of
our hearing...
In the drizzle I stand outside, your
brief embrace
intangible, the moment inaccessible
for my coordinates have changed – and
though at any given point I am not moving,
somehow I see you growing more remote
from me.
Why must it be so? (for if it could be
otherwise
would it be as it is, all time
unredeemable?)
If we start from the premise that all
time is eternally present
then it follows, rock-hard as a
syllogism – …
… – The lovers, on the swings near
Twilight Hall
swing like twin pendulums attempting a
hypnotism
and slightly out of time, just barely
slipping
like a heart murmur into arrhythmia...
but then a metre starts to form, a sort
of jerk
in my footsteps like the twitch of a
pocketwatch
faintly appalling as its steady tattoo
mocks the crescendo of my dreadful
pulse...
until all of a sudden they both jump
off –
not simultaneously,
but as two raindrops disembark from
eaves
to which they have been clinging.
Behind them,
the swings still oscillate unseen
half-ominous, and strangely predictable
as radio towers that blink among the
mountains
signifiers – signifying – darkness,
vacancy
and the mistranslation of interstellar
spaces
which we pass over
whereof we cannot speak...
they jumped off, slight as droplets
from a twig
and drew together under the
streetlamp's gaze
to overwrite each other's silhouettes:
their lips met like meniscus and
palimpsest
twin darknesses adhering, converging to
transgress
the laws of arithmetic which are the
laws of loneliness
the laws of language which are the laws
of entropy...
(while the swings went on behind them,
vacillating
to and fro – a tremolo, and the bow's
faltering
and fat gold time piece growing old
and a coronary valve petering out...)
While I walked past. The past was cast
behind, made a shadow long and graceful
and unseen
as I stand in the spotlight of the Here
and Now
under a streetlamp, or in the concert
hall:
either way, it is killing as a
lepidopterist's pin
for (affixed to a point with no area,
an instant with no duration)
all movement is impossible
and consciousness dwells only on the
periphery –
A streetlamp, its circle compassed by
radiance;
drawn from the zero of light's
germination at blind
Consciousness in the casting of a
backwards glance.
that catches you (a star falling) in
the corner of the eye
Consciousness of time past and time
future
is always caught between shadow and
light
in demilunes of partial comprehension,
curving crescent around blankness to
define
time in the shadowing of the moon's
many clock-faces
language in the obscuring of her
primordial silences...
If it were not so – the babble of
many voices,
and I cannot pick out which among them
is yours.
If it were not so, no surfaces to touch
with
in the filigreed nerves of our
scriptured palms...
If not affixed to the eternal present
coming unstuck, the whole plane would
collapse
with no present-in-past to be the
object of nostalgia
and no present-in-future for our hopes
to latch on...
If not entrapped in selves like flies
in amber
there would be no smile across the
room.
There would be no emptiness for the
transit of desire
no furrow of absence for the clock's
hand to move through...
And if it were not for the beguiling
inexpressible, whereof we cannot speak,
an impasse
reached – would there be any spaces
to call forth our speaking,
would there be any openness, any way to
address you
anything but the breakdown and the
erasure:
wordlessness, tonguelessness,
facelessness, nothingness:
the extremest truth over-spilling
limits of sense
yet I cannot cross, unless
I leave me here – leave names and
faces
across the concert hall
leave your smile's lightbulb
and its retinal negative.
So, my friend
I will wait out in the rain, in my
loneliness
and I will not ask of you anything more
than this:
the lovely unredeemable
eternal present...
