THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS
I do not like old water.
The water in the ocean is old
The lake is old
But maybe it’s not
Subject to the logic of time, of old and new.
Water.
Because in the kitchen, it’s difficult to lie
Because the yearbook photo shows long straight hair parted down the middle, Marcia Brady-style
Because in my son’s mind, he has only one dziadek & babcia & that blindspot diminishes me more each day
The earliest, from my brother (June 2007) was twelve seconds long: “Hi, it’s me—aww, fucking-A!—Hi, it’s me, call later, I guess.”
Then the first day of August 2007, twenty seconds: “Hi Amanda, this is Ollie, I just saw the news a bridge fell down in Minneapolis—I hope you weren’t on it. I guess that’s why I’m calling. I’ll try you later. Okay, love you, bye.” I was working at the café when I missed the call.
The road where I lived went in a circle. Inside the road circle was a circle of grass. Inside the circle of grass was the matter I looked through And looked at, waiting for whatever moved in from the edges And came together in the middle of the circle.
heirloom hairline sugar lips what’s up gas lit you’re holding the match dirty mattress book rhythms
No one could remember when the hole appeared. Some thought it had opened overnight—spontaneously, like a weather event or an idea—while everyone was sleeping. Others claimed the hole had always been there, but small and shallow enough that no one noticed it. Only as it widened and deepened over time had it taken shape in the village consciousness. Whatever the case, since the hole emerged at the center of town, where everyone went and everything happened, it became impossible to ignore.
Not in a place considered a place. Farther out. On the road nowhere. Where a place had been. There was a smokestack. Not a place on the map. To get there, keep going. Kept going and missed it. Missed it but kept going. There was a water tower not considered a water tower. In a place once considered a place.
Truth is asphalt—you, too, should wait for it to cool, as slabs of it can and do get personalityish.
The world makes little sense, which is to say that it constantly exceeds understanding.
The grass has that sandpapered look and by it you know it is no longer summer.
who put these angles in usyes angleswe attend to their impossibilities that they become
if not possible, light-legible, which bear load
Precisely a week ago, a stop sign at the intersection of Jefferson and Polk was painted green.
The crime was not a case of simple vandalism. Rather, it was part of an experiment by the person who called it in, a local amateur psychologist who is exploring the nature of incongruity.
The Rachel stands tuned to multiplicities, aslant in a territory of longing, where she becomes foreign.
What has she found? She listens, acknowledges another sound, diffuse, multiple, pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings, never only one.
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
Where the trees blackened, I saw,
Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.
It seems, although wildfires rage
Out of control, this world remembers
Some portion of its first purposes:
Superfluous beauty
