J.L.Conrad
Groundworks
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I have lost the language of music, threads of sound that cross hearing, in the coffee shop somewhere in California (again), tables gleaming dark and brown, glistening with drops of water in the shape of cup-ends. There was music and-somehow I do not want to write of this: jazz, the purple-shirted guitar player with hair that fell sideways across his forehead. Someone said the word "surreptitious" with a glance to the side, and I do not even know for sure it was your sandals we left and I mailed later in a brown envelope. Nothing, in the dark, ever seems enough, and yet-something looms, undiluted, in the two feet of air beneath the ceiling, the way I always used to picture God: a layer, more easily apprehended. Outside, less certain, watching the concentric movement of water on throwing a stone and sitting on the small green tongue of land that seemed ready itself to lurch forward. We saw a heron in reeds at the stiff edge of lake, leg-stilted and standing in front of a sky so pink and orange it seemed a backdrop for something "about to happen," some enactment that could not be known apart from the boat's slow path. The scent of crushed trees in air.
***
Aren't we all in the same boat?
Fair does not mean everyone gets treated the same.
Fair means everyone gets what they need.
Resistance is necessary; it is not rude.
Maybe a little fear isn't necessarily bad.
***
The sheen of floor-tiles: remembrance. "For example," he said, "hunger." The weight of paper, slanted rocks, fountains quiet in the morning. Faded blue hills, yawning cracks in their surfaces. Green shade under the chair: I fell apart here, among trees not belonging to the shallow hills of Monterrey, acanthus blooming on the trails. The last thing was the precipice: the way it plunged toward aqua water. A storm of clouds, waves whipped to a frenzy, evening sky lowering to meet the cliff house, spires shooting like fish spears into the vapors.
***
Sparrow-colored darkness. Heat thickened and thickening. Stalled traffic, the day a lamp. The bus will come, or not, the spit of air brakes hissing, the spit of land that lurches into water. Hues of darkness like the skin of plums, and larches the shape of understanding: careful, fragile entanglements. Someone standing under wears a red dress; someone else, green shoes. No one has a coat. It's spring, finally. The spring of what imaginings? So many tongues. The many-tongued night.
***
The faces we wear...
The sun fidgets its way across the sky.
Light from light, and hand.
It seems, and then...
The sleeves the air is wearing.
Divine as in "not human."
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Some enactment like betrayal, the two false hands the moonlight places on the wall. "I never liked the sun," she says drawing the curtains. She wears a hat. It is Sunday and cold. This is the winter my grandfather dies, stretching his life so thin it cannot cover more than the bed in the living room's corner. They carry him. He is cold and cannot say what it is he wants. The silos across the road are holding-what? Hills like the teeth of a zipper, and all I can think is Mexico, the saddle-backed mountains, and the pony I rode all my childhood: who wasn't there the day we went to fetch her. "They thought she was a deer," my grandfather said. She was a white pony, brown-spotted, the ghost of a deer, and a solid one at that. We carried the saddle back to the car and the once-living skin of it lay across my legs. Need I say? I never saw her after. I can't remember the last time, as it is often possible to remember the first. What was our last parting like? I'm not talking now of the pony. There are a thousand such departures.
***
Various warning symptoms:
sometimes slight, sometimes pronounced:
Such are, fullness in the head, headache, giddiness, irises in the ears,
confusion, slight lapses, numbness or tingling in the limbs.
The following phenomena: the individual falls down suddenly and lies
without sense or motion, except that pulse keeps beating
and breathing continues.
He appears to be in a deep sleep, from which he cannot be roused;
breathing is labored and accompanied by puffing out of the cheeks;
the pulse may be beating more strongly than natural,
and the face is often flushed and turgid.
Reflexes are abolished.
***
Indigent strands of light, the blue-white sheath of lightning breaking into awareness. Or more correct to say, the air a sheath, lightning the knife that severs ground, limb from limb, setting the grass aflame.
And: how the poles seemed like matches in the fog. Blue sparks at the top waiting to ignite the air like desire, paper-thin, and no less than the skin of awareness: our own. Downcliff, the ocean breaking itself in a thousand flickers against the rocks.
***
The amphibious restlessness is itself a thing: seeming to breathe so the world rests within its lung: moist, the earth a sieve.
***
Realizing, after completion, it was built at a time when the level of the lake was unnaturally low, he considered adding material to ensure that his work would be visible more often.
A horizontal structure for distributing force,
"the true earth-line of human life."
Defensiveness is not useful because it makes the problem
all about you.
Basically, it boils down to calling people what they want to be called.
The day like a fish.
***
Another season and it's hard to say just what transpires. The hills gleam with a coat of snow in sunset: truth be told, the world is cast in blue: gloom to match what we feel, inside the house, the young starlings fluttering away in the chimney. Fully formed, a kind of sadness loops around the throat, then falls away, caught in the gasp of air from the door's opening, then closing. The moon's dandelion head offering a sort of "If not this, then..." above the single roofline.
***
Until what subsides?
The sense of conversation.
Air that is "like swimming."
That every singing is a sort of silence.
***
And what about "the thread of his life?" Or ours, silver strands, we're told, like parachute silk. The moon is a face, shocked with this raw wanting to hold the shadows, the sounds of passing cars like distance.
***
Pods from the locust paper the drive: dry September, sounds of machinery at work in the fields. Brittle stalks of corn that will become small fences to hold the snow in place. Whoever thought the wind would come among us so soon: shoots of air, or tendrils, like the wild grape that snakes its way among the cherry limbs. How, dragged down, it can be woven. Fashioned into a basket or a circle to be worn by a door: holiness, a kind of sorrow.
***
Light splits the plane between two hills:
the glazed fenestration above that is the sky.
Through which light passes-
The dog's voice a warning.
***
And back to Mexico: dust and dry roads. Sudden, immaculate arms of Joshua trees, bases held in dry earth and cactus-fenced yards leaking chickens, the houses a thousand permutations of the color "blue."
***
The color of a suitcase: green. The color of glass in the night-washed California air: sudden. The winds and then, night-driven strands of summer threading the window screen, the shingled roof sloping down to the next level and, below that, another, the door to the basement and the cats leaping one to the other and standing, finally, just outside the kitchen sill, so the cat inside does not know what to do, faced with their calls, cat-height, paws placed on wire mesh and holes to show their passing. There is a white cat, a nose like a dog's, and the orange one with a tail that I saw in the passageway between two houses, looking enough like the cat inside that I thought it had escaped. This only true the night I carried trash to the curb and it crept to the porch, hunched under the tallest of the chairs, tensing at the same moment as I, holding nothing new, saw and prepared to pounce.
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