To read is to be, for a time, text, but how? Say a text is allowed to enter the self and establish its distillment and pattern, why does this cause things to happen?
Five geese rest slack
as plastic in the text.
Discomfiting, perhaps, perhaps illuminating or predatory, but nevertheless the text shakes out its tent in the skull. Between self and text, energy is indisputably born. Out of nothing, a genesis, a will that is more the text’s than the author’s will, more the text’s than the self’s.
Their webbed feet dangle in the current,
their bills tuck up under feathers
in an autumn dusk that’s like a wire
electric to the geese’s heads.
Soon, the text is a minor kingdom, and upon the self’s approach, these new lands rise animal green and cacophonous, a now hulking verge.
At its surface, the moving text
is darkest, a barren muck
of no-light drifting downstream,
and on the far bank, above the geese,
the day’s final light is spun up
like sugar in the trees.
Note, this brief is not using reader (abstract), but self (particular), as only within singular globes of bone will this happen; there is no exterior.
Follow the text downstream from
birds to marina where boats
are shrink-wrapped in white
plastic, and all winter
the spaces around the empty
masts crinkle and are hollow.
As if stepping on land creates land, the self enters the text (the same way text enters the eye, snakes in, and projects). Being sequential makes it experience (timed), a singular route through an animating thicket. Image, statement, parameters, logics, plots, patterns, all to build the text’s empire.
Migration, like a second animal,
pulls in the slumbering
birds, exhaustion is a second
body in their bodies.
Text conveys its language by conducting the sensorial flecks of memory the self has spent a lifetime (so far) collecting (this one remembered goose for all geese). As long as the self is text, its sum interior, every weathered fleck, is in orchestrated play.
Like hives in dusk, they crinkle,
hives from the Old Norse hufr
for hull, where honey
was hoarded for the voyage,
and on the far bank, an abacas
of decay ticks lopsided
from one side to the next.
Words pile in like a long-distance derailment behind the self’s attention, which is in a dead run, sorting its armfuls, building its replica. When the text clicks off for a time, it is sorted and sifted, but mostly lost, the words melted back to raw chemical. Then, a flicker and a lurch, and the conveyor belt starts up again.
In the now-dark forebank, the glaucous
purple of raspberry brambles burn,
the color of green frozen
and thawed, frozen and thawed,
and the equations are ongoing,
like a second text in the text.
Eventually, there is no new text to incorporate, and the conveyance is disassembled. The now gestated and orphaned replica is cinched off and set adrift into the self, where it flickers and is hollow.
A feather loosens
downstream, the boats
rock peril, fault,
peril, fault in the tide.
And mostly it hangs, invisible, a faint node in the self. Periodically it is reanimated and staged, it is imprinted onto flecks and strewn, but mostly it settles back into its shape.
Complexity and stasis caught up
in the trees and set against
the hard vein of sky, reflecting
in the text, an impenetrable
vein that takes and takes.
Any moment of survival—as memory or self or text—is an unethical choice of awful logic (and really just a brief commutation). We have little understanding of any of this, and still it happens.
The geese wake, drink, slough
their wings into the air
and are gone.