Carla Panciera

Kant says time is neither event nor thing. Well, I think. That’s that. But then Teresa calls. She’s found my old letters. There are dead dogs in them, old boyfriends; the miscarriage is happening (has happened) and I have to catch a plane. The plane has      (not yet) taken off. Sundials, T squares, heartbeats, and the equinox. In places of worship, incense burns. All to mark no thing. Here, wind moves water in one direction, then another. Some mornings, nothing ripples, not leaves, not iridescence on birdwing, beetle back. Some mornings, both: stillness, unrest. Last season’s loon calls. And sometimes? I can’t remember the lake where I first heard that sound, though the vision of it rises through a paint-flecked pane. On my morning walk: a hawk perched on a telephone wire above what used to be a hayfield: rusted New Holland baler, bobolinks and meadowlarks saved from the mower. That was a generation ago, dead farmers, dead cows. Now is not the time, moles, voles, mice, to dart into the light. Nothing stops in stillness except solstice when the sun stands still in declination. I should tell someone this, that we are not propelled beyond a moment of observation, even loss, into something else: field edge, lakeside, motherhood. But that, instead, we are always on our way. On my return, the wire’s empty. The hawk has hunted or not, is sated or continues, hungry. Hunger, at least, returns. Once, in different water, my daughters waded naked after mussels. Appendages, these daughters were. I was accustomed to the creases behind their knees where I kept their pulse. Keep these, too: ships’ bells and steeple chimes, an hourglass, the pharaoh’s water clock. Now, on a floating dock, my daughters sun themselves, swing limbs above water that soon enough will be ice. These days, you can lift saliva off the back of a stamp, determine who licked it. And that woman? That sender? She will have stopped and she will not yet have stopped        and she will still be bleeding.

Some things no one says aloud. But he was there if he says he was. Bleaching fields and buttermilk. The stench of breweries and lye. Two-thirds of his life before this one? Sky. His current city rises off a river not Lek, though here in the gallery, a train ride away: The impossible familiar. The somehow known. The curator has written: On the crowded ferry, cows attempt to drink. But anyone can see that one scratches her neck, a good-sailor cow, sickle-hocked, not parched. Cows like that. Yes. He remembers. Also that, downriver, float the fishmongers’ baskets of haddock and crab. On the way home, this will be also his view, the river running toward its source, a reverse birthing. But now, he sees that Rembrandt has wired coils of light into the shipbuilder’s ruff. He remembers shipbuilders, the horizon upon which sailed their fluyts, and above which: homesick. That was what we call a long time ago because it has to be called something. And now? The guard warns him back from one world. Rose hip. Willow. Sea salt.       The infinite clouds.