The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white cotton 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.
:
But I love the greatness of the clouds.
I love the grass that wraps my calves
like a stocking.
I love that I crept, knock-kneed and uptight, into the Gowanus, led, precarious, by expert night crawlers,
over the most sloping 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,
all stretched out 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, revelation-
seeking 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
(dark fireworks)
from 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
honeygold 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
in 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—after having stood transfixed for an entire day
and slowly losing your sight,
the expansive
perception you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself
within 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 your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back if 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.
Sooty, swaybacked meerkats,
they appear to be heralding the dawn
and 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, echoes
in a muffled cascade through the green water:
your laugh, the dispersing
eidolon of its selfsame source,
has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal 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, clouded 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 the ghost
of your gentle laugh in the 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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