The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.
A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.
Space,
mute and white.
The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.
Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.
/
When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.
But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.
We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:
We feel small.
I love the greatness of the clouds. I love the grass that I currently wrap myself in. I love that last night I crept, knock-kneed and uptight into the Gowanus, led precarious by expert night crawlers over the most broken corrugated and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled, scrambled slipshod in the dark grass, with wind rushing and sticky arms waving, to rest at the foot of my favorite building, the monolith, beautiful and resplendent in the faint starlight. We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap fleet-foot and leather-winged in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky, resting in the haunted gloom of the structure’s moon-wrought shadow and gutted windows like empty eyes. Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place was ordained by the crisply painted, imposing banner that crowned the brow of the beast, that shouted into the darkness: “OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.” Our singular movements across that concrete veldt were all brought into being, our skins all wriggled and our brains all turned in the way they did because that order hung above our heads.
We settled into the night like deer that tramp listless circles into the high grasses to create their chosen torpid nests; mosquitoes hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly, for something to happen. And imperceptibly, it did. The stars shifted overhead and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving time out of the blackness like two small trails of dark blood swirling in a slow and shallow drain. Various thuds passed in the night; we felt as though we were being watched by all manner of creatures, and more than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing, close-set eyes that peered, humble and inquisitive, from the bushes that sprang out of the cracks in that abandoned lot. The only way into the towering structure, full of holes and trick boards like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor, is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless, until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape that is to be swung onto as if it were the bow of the boat to your salvation (it is).
During the day I am told the light filters through the blackeye windows honey-gold like pure laughter, and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor. The light, always filtered through a smoky screen of luminescence, moted, and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing the forgotten art that dwells there the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers. The sheer emptiness of this space, its ultimate abandonment, makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a kiss. Its silence envelops you in a totality so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated that in your solitude you are more surrounded than you have ever been before. The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time and that embraces the entire space of your being. You cannot think of anything else but the fact that you are completely alone there, and that it is truly only you, for as long as you wish. You bathe in this silence, luxuriate in the way it muffles everything but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.
But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—you have stood transfixed for an entire day, and the loss of your sight, combined with the deepened attention you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself in that hallowed space, allows you to hear, with unmitigated clarity, the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice that there is a moth nearby, fluttering a muted waltz outside the window. Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left and gone somewhere else. You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable to them as it is to you. You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you that dead space. The whole house rings with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure that the momentum it gains from your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back of what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.
Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry out around the old, broken windows and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there. The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels. They become meerkats for a moment, and appear to be heralding the dawn; for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn, is united in their alertness. The katydids and other clickhumming night beetles quit their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae in a singular, momentous signal to their robotic brains. The feral cats that had come to war with the masked and bandit-like raccoons in a territorial dispute lope away into the distance, whiskers twitching and backs arched; they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.
Even the slimy fish resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium. Your laugh has caught the breeze and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges and circles it creates and spiraling down to the silted brown bottom, echoing in a muffled cascade through the green water: it has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal that was created by a rising pocket of gaseous levity, the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display. And so the fish stir too, wending their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates and rusted anchor chains that line the muddy, silty bottom, smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips light up for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them resting, to the bottom, to sleep.
The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up by your gentle laugh in this toothless, eyeless, gutless building; by the recognition that even in total solitude there is a superabundance of life, perfect and intricate in all its forms. As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—you have never been to such a beautiful place, and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there, and your heart beats newly, like it never has before: your chest is filled with the warm and solid spaciousness of the man-made building that has become a precious, organic cavern.
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this is going to become a really long poem.
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