Friday, May 04, 2007

These Many Months

These many months ‘neath starry skies and sun-scorched celestes I have wandered through moor and heath and plain and wood, never sure if I be pursuing or pursued. And now I’ve caught up with it, or it with me, and tired, ragged, unsure, I stumble homeward in a shambles.
There, I find a stack of letters, duly sealed and signed. On paper that smells of drafts and fogs and family romance. Written in the screed of a sad man whose faculties are not always reliable. Mixed in, indistinguishable, are some I meant to send with those I was meant to receive. I read them all as if they were yours, and smile when you say curious quixotic things. I laugh that you have become so close through our letters that you begin to write like me, in my hand, of my life.
Sancho Panza is somewhere. Either he lurks in the kitchen cooking something smelly, or maybe that is just the food in the larder going bad. Maybe I left him somewhere and should have nothing to eat tonight. I wish I hadn’t, though, because I’m terribly hungry.
And in this cold, o’er-large house with rooms boarded up, whose contents I’ve forgotten, there are a great many things I wish were different. Maybe in those old rooms there are the things I’d like to know, the people I’d like to see, the Don Quixote I’ve been looking for. I think I’ll rifle there among the cobwebs.
Maybe there will be images of beginnings, of the origins I seem obsessed with, which turn out always to be empty rooms full of the things I left in there, only older, decayed, mildewed and made the kingdom of rats. I still imagine them, though, as sparkling parlors peopled with dangerous and inspiring souls and things that can tell me something about being. Bright with a light coming from nowhere. A farce taking place about
someone’s hair and violation, or a devot with a funny alliterative name. I believe the dusty disguise. I tell myself that I don't recognize my own furniture, but only see it in inklings of how I came to be what I am. And I'm not altogether wrong, anyway.

Blood and suffering and electricity. There seems to me to be no reason to differentiate registers in the humors. The material of the body, of my body, is multiplex. A multiplex.

Nothing burns like an effigy.

Slumping on my writing table under the weight of it all
Don Quixote De La Mancha

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