Christine Gosnay

Tremendous orange things are happening somewhere. I lay a wooden stick for stirring on the white note on the desk. I lay a stain on the clean note. Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea. Somewhere you are lying in a white bed. The clock on your thigh is ticking. Somewhere a human form is being lifted from the ground. Somewhere, yes, and I am counting. The clean note with its numbers has changed. I will remember. You are a location, with a bed. The road ends somewhere in the flooding river at dusk. Why here, strangers. A cartwheel in the stow hold of a ship. A stranger who wheels it on the ice. Somewhere the ship has frozen. The ship has frozen in the ice. A frozen form. The ship cannot be lifted from the purple sky at dusk. Stain in the somewhere. You are lying in a white bed. Why here is the river. On the thigh. Remember what we did with clocks. Orange and purple. Lovely trees in the frozen sky. Holding somewhere and threading thighs. Strangers. I lay a stain on the white bed. Remembering what tremendous purple things we did. The mind ends every thing stirring. Somewhere the ship is being lifted from the desert. Marvelous. You will change from the river location to the sea. Somewhere, things are happening. You are lying in the white bed beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed. Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.

We are of one mind and too much has not been said about all the quiet afternoons childhood offered us, lit gray like a cat, or blue, and cursed with an early moon. When father wore an apron or crept like a bear, we screamed. Nothing is so gone. Where is his record player or the channel that forked a distant year toward us, kind, slow magnet? There was a song we shared without your listening, you widowed soul crawling away on your elbows. I sing it to my child, with a full hand I flick its rapeseeds everywhere, clear, and slow, with all the sincerity its author indeed felt in his ten-gallon hat and his thin, whisky-soaked shirt.

Gravel path stirred by the rain fallen hard through the sweetgum trees, path that leads to the bend where the trail splits open in air: Everything is lighted evenly. It is a queer hour. The difference between light and shadow is the jealousy turn in the eye. The sun is all in the bottle cap that glints in the silt like a djinn’s brass hilt, in the way some lea  is frozen unto the air, some warm leaf heavywet here, and in how, just there: The strangeness strangely passes. And evening mounts. I can’t get the life out of my head. There is no glamour on this path but if I return I will find it in the thought of how I looked for some. I stoop to look at the veins that sweep like Latin roots in the satin of things, dream: The difference between something and nothing, which is nothing. The gravel lies on itself like dust lies on water. No, no, there are no mothers here. I bend to see it all, the little stones cast-wise. Things chase themselves away from the mode of things. I find a quartz, milked clear: I could not hear its accent if it sang, no matter how far off it formed. What dead hand I should feel if I lifted it.