Marianne Boruch

He was touched or he touched or she did and was, or they were and would. Or the room could, its three doors, two windows or the house on a slant touching, touched by the drift down street, cars pressing quick or slowing. All along the town touched a river, the river the filth falling through it. What was clean— a source pure as rumor—a shore touching lake touched by wind above, and below, a spring. All touch blindly further water. That blue touching blacker regions in the sea so weirdly solitary, each to under, to every sideways past deeper, where nowhere.

It’s mostly someone long dead who gets curious all over again, who once told a book, the book picked clean to glow on a website now, an address with double slashes in it. Suddenly I love one detail: the way they harnessed horses or hammered copper, what seed — cardamom, rye — kept its small heart aloft for a millennium. Voices in that dark ago when I open to room light, lamp or window on book — old friend — or the new computer screen. It’s not technology, either way. It’s something in the brain first, an inkling.Not yet yours to know.

Birdsong, face it, some male machine gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage keeps doing, the world ending then starting, the first word the last, etc. It's that etcetera. How to love. Is a wire just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say. So many fewer, by far. He's showing off to call her back. Or claiming the tree. Or a complaint—the food around here, the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs, in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen from a distance, a mistake. But fate has reasons to dress up. Stupid and dazzling have a place, a place, a place though never. She can't sing it.

Day after day of rain. A ticket straight to the mild-mannered hell of rethinking whatever, the drive to EconoFoods: not a lot of grief in that. You need staples — bread, rice, eggs. Here’s a list: almonds, yogurt, all the little anti-griefs add up. Did I tell you? my grandfather sings from the grave. They have my old Philco here. I know all about your world of godawful and too bad. I keep driving. In rain. Some luck required. Stop light. Flashy cars on both sides playing radios too loud. Ear damage! I used to shout out the window, my boy in the front seat trying hard to shrink, not to know who is that crazy at the wheel. Grandfather likes saying: what? Half-deaf even now. Half a lot of things, anytime. Half, what gives? giving way. If there is a we or a you or an I finally. He’d cup an ear if he had an ear. So it is, the first anti-grief, a feather he picked up. My childhood, walking with the oldest man I ever, 1874 his start date. Alarm and Should Have, two roads he would not cross, and Consequence a street over, he ignored completely. Always an eye out for the great small peculiar. A feather. Sometimes handed to me. Or he’d oil a clock with it right off the curb. Into a pocket.

They wore out the a in the letterpress case only after a few thousand hits under the inked rollers, pulling the crank, turning the giant wheel. Must have been 1820. Thereabouts. Wanderer, glory-run of letters:thereabouts. Hunger took its due from the belly of the a. So? All kept reading it as a— those who could read — and anyway, a bite out of that apple proves our kind mortal. Rare good paper into page until most everything about the a was shot. Practically prayer, humility, a great foreboding not just bare-bones frugal. Simple aaaa from that a— First letter loved, to hear it ache and fill even at half breath. Look, it’s standard. No one but a divine being or two makes perfect copy. Real case in point: my now and again body so poorly echoed off my mother, my father out of a broken skull simmering in a bog, BC probably, long before AD pretended anything in order. Earlier, our whole dark hole of a planet copied unto itself via earthquake, flood, star shard, raging molten ball in the middle, some big bang’s idea of a flawed, proper start. For a while there, the tiny a wounded. What it does. Doing, to herald every human sentence.