Brook Emery

I seem to wake and sleep ambiguously, to see and misconceive, to feel on the brink of something that doesn’t end, beauty that is more than beautiful, meaning that is more. The present is all around me, dreams, a panoply of crimes, smudges of erasure, memory made of clouds, camels, weasels and the unlikelihood of somewhere within and beyond this world. Here’s light, angular, ubiquitous with the milky pigments of belief. Here’s plodding time, breathing hard. Birds fly up, perch on branches, peck seed from the grass, (tug worms from the soil). I am not what I imagined, here I am the illusionist and dupe of my illusions, making the angels disappear, wishing them back again. Stories that shifted in the telling once were true: a virgin birth, a resurrection, a tiger who regained his human form, a crocodile who didn’t. I’m pitching words against the sea, it drags them out, flings them back again still freighted with my weight. The waves are red with blood, brown with shit, yellow with the sickly light, anything but blue and green. I am an insistent fizz and drone, deft, adroit, as elastic as necessity and chance, one more clay figurine with beseeching hollows where the eyes should be, as different from the others as I am the same, no more evolved than a roach, no better than a rat, happy as a labrador in the sun. This is grace, the rest is commentary and I would let it go: in millennia I’ll chatter metaphysics with a chimpanzee, now my thoughts are the antlers of the Irish elk, the wings of flightless birds, peptides spelling out the phrase very like a whale. Most organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive. Nothing can follow that. Something will. Blunt heads of rain, faithless wind, the stricken sun at dusk, knock-kneed girls somersaulting on the beach, the commonplace surprise of making love face to face, the heart breaking apart, an instrumental eye and instrumental mind rejoicing, a last cacophony of birds.

It’s possible I misconstrued you, laid too much emphasis on the uniqueness of a birth, failed to acknowledge circumstance could corrupt, sustain; I indulged myself in accusations against an absolute. I don’t believe what I then believed. You are not responsible for Leibniz or the Lisbon quake, for the twenty-six-eyed and sixty-arsed box jellyfish, that the cosmos is shaped like a soccer ball; or for the dosido of right and wrong around the garden bed. You are not the monster I thought you were, not by definition or necessity the one immutable. You are a creator caught in a creator’s net, in fact a creature. Every horror has its own pathology, the disease infects the flock. Prey present as predators, the malefactors replicate even as the angels experiment with cures. Each encounter pulls against reductive story, says I will not, I am just (an instant, an instance), and reference skews on maps not drawn to scale. I know saintliness exists. It’s all around me. My next door neighbours in their simple modesty, the lady down the street who is always helping someone older than herself. Even the slow judicial process conceives it natural to be better than we are. I’m trying to shoo the gloomy birds away but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost when I was drawn from the womb?

I can’t get my head around it. How did we devise a concept like just war:the slain of the Lord are dung upon the ground. I know there are distinctions it is important to make and I don’t expect perfection but the chicanery of subtle thought . . . if I pick it all apart will anything be left to sew back into sense? Cleverer minds are reconciled. Cultured, poised, the government official (Should I give him spectacles? Should they reflect the light?) pauses and replies: The President regrets . . . but consider the alternative … would you offer succour… and I can almost understand. I sleep with reason as my lover, wake beside a monster in my bed. I fumble beneath the mask, shape my lips to the prospect of a kill, feel your thigh against my rump, your fingers at my throat. Oh, Rakosi, I’m still strumming on my lyre. Is there really so much wrong with that? I’m embarrassed by the flimsiness of my resolve, the silliness of saints and monsters, conversations with a being who can’t plausibly exist, this mockery of flagellation: this is my defective heart, this my amputated foot, this the bandage from around my head. A monster dies in the middle of his trial, another denies the power of the court, two more evade arrest: in politic’s parlour game, each day annuls the last. 9/11, I say, and Afghanistan, Bali and Iraq, but I can’t fix a year to each event, what is, what well might be, are steam against a bathroom mirror: I see bits, an eye but not its double, the other ear, a chin that lacks a jawbone for support.