Ligature

When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave. You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says. Why? Half-lidded days of early winter. When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs will. The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what? Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments veer every which way, and who can follow? A sequence of dark non sequiturs blows in. When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed. The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject. I am inside it like a parasite. He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the one for which her face was prepared. So they inhabit their bodies like music, for a given time. And yet he continues to act as if there were times to come. I just want you to go away, one of them screams. Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house. She calls the man to a corner in the basement. Those aren’t spider eggs, he says, backing up. Those are its eyes. When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow. Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family. As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience pendant, unnameable.