microtomb

[echoes-ofthecosmos]

[microtomb]

3.

So that a person leaves his body and appears in your dream. And he is in his body, sleeping. He doesn't remember you. But you remember him in your dream at dawn by the sea.  And you can patch him next to the woman's long black hair. If you never see the woman again, you can believe  you are not seeing him, although he is in front of you, and he is anxious. Here is an edge of what you ingest in the process of your combustion. If it feels like a desire, then everything is flames and you are not flames.  Your eyes are a vanishing point outside the patches.  At first she remembered a volume of light you look out across, charged with the feeling for the person you are looking with,  so that you wave back and forth in front of the person, as if other people  could see through you to the person,  because there is a patch of feeling, and patches of the causes of the feeling adjacent to each other, which seem to reveal each other translucently.  So that a woman leaves her body irradiated in an upstairs bedroom in the west and appears to you in a red sweater,  and a woman appears to you with long black hair, who has no body,  and a man leaves his body sleeping in a historic Bostonian house, and appearing to you,  reacts with embarrassment.  Everything could be flames emitted by decay or combustion if you are thinking about it, except that you are flames, too,  with the physiological coordinates of a body:  such as,  A child in a blue dress, repeating the name of his dog. The dog is old, and traumatized by the arrival of the child into the family.  If the child does not know the dog is old, then the child's ignorance of that decay is an invisible place, through which you see the shadow of the branch uninterrupted on the wall?  A space above where 125 tulip bulbs failed to grow.

—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, "Kate's Talk" [excerpt]

[microtomb]

i stand beyond a rift a subtle tear, very thin was i before once crushed beyond weight and mass through a point so narrow?

[bandtshirt]

learning to think, anthony gormley, 1991

[microtomb]

And then there are illusions every illusion needs a face a decapitated body does not exude transparency It’s a slow winter we talk more about the nature of stories appropriate for a winter like this about coiled springs emotions a distant frozen harbor dead images of dead ships buoyed up to float buoyed up to last   We wonder if transparency is truly a reflection that beams with a certain sense of assurance I don’t have much problem with my transparency then   It’s one gorgeous winter for a springloader in search of strategic structures   immortal faces  that came out to bask in paltry sun

—Sabyasachi Sanyal, "Bracketcity" [excerpt]

[microtomb]

The wind dies down, lord of the ancient sorrows, Shall I be the last to wake up arms for the dead? Now the fire stirs only memory and ash, Sound of a dead face, sound of a folded wing. Do you consent to love only the iron of gray water When the angel of your night closes the harbor And loses in the still water of the harbor Night's last glimmers caught to his dead wing? Only suffer through the harshness of my words And I shall conquer sleep and death for you, For you I'll summon in the breaking tree The flame that will be both your ship and harbor. And raise the fire which has no place, no time Wind seeking fire, the summits of dead wood, The horizon of a voice where stars are falling, Moon merging with the chaos of the dead.

—Yves Bonnefoy, "Threats of the Witness V," trans. by Anthony Rudolf

[microtomb]

The voyage during which topographies deserted by their south are reinvented is first an unfinished stretch of land

the presence adjoining hypothetical regions of runaway identity now on the verge of spilling out into a new rectified interrogation

I alone am responsible for the blank exegesis and the ash beginning with an observed sky withdrawing into the depths of pseudonymity

the shore established from here to the mnemonic when the moon glows with dull light of oracular bones that in moonlight statues up to their knees in water parody periods of angel shortages

and beneath the precariousness of clouds the entire constraint of the landscape such as it fell at the first flight of suspended morning

—Mostafa Nissabouri, "Approach the the Desert Space," trans. by Guy Bennett

[microtomb]

i'm hollowed out, i'm old dead withered, dry old gutted mine no gold or silver left to give. workers packed up, industry dead, slow methodical creep of plant gone dry, save wiry scrub lingering, gnawing slate bones.

dream for water. thirst in rain; all fizzles in evaporation scant slivers above my tomb geology. nothing here, all solemn sighing wind whipping dust.

[microtomb]

the future and the past intermingle ominously at the present, like fog and mist in a damp night forest; whatever distinction there is between these two already ephemeral states is rendered to nothing more than gradient and density. what is the density of the past? the future? at the present, that sacred fleeting place that links all times, the subjective experience determines the characteristics of past and future. regret, and the past is leaden; worry, and the future is gargantuan. thus the present serves as some nightmarish crag upon which sentients gaze at the whole array, pressed between two infinitely massive epochs in a suspended chasm of infinitesimal width; a single pore through which time itself shrieks, a jet stream of literal age. with each passing instant a whole ephemera of thought, sensorial data, action, and reaction is forcefully shoved through this perilous pore, through the other side, from future to past, each moment a new monomolecular layer in some Sisyphean mineral. every moment forces its way through us, mind/body/whatever else, and we suffer its passage each and every time, a thin wall of glass shot right through our bodies, right down the fucking center.

[microtomb]

It was a bird cage who called me to come. The bird was confined in a coupled mirror. When it tried to see its back, an eye entered; the universe was disturbed.

—Megumi Matsubara, Une Soirée Avec Megumi Matsubara, 2012

[microtomb]

transcendence is a white-hot conflagration that burns through the world at a cataclysmic pace that peels back the flesh and sears the mind in arabesque harmony and supreme clarity there is a single rush in the bottom of memory from which we can recall this feeling of an endless outward screaming, a blessed and explosive keening through the heavens that announces our arrival/departure from one space to the next, like the halo of light on a catholic icon anything that can look you in the eyes with some burning yearning wears a crown of invisible and regal fire

[microtomb]

some theories posit that a single step takes a person through trillions, quadrillions, infinitely uncountable numbers of two-dimensional planes stacked on top of one another to form our world. sometimes you can feel it, a fleeting feeling of flatness, endless flatness; i have felt myself fall many times into these slices of the world, each one a little different but all giving that feeling of a thin chasm. i have felt as a living specimen on a cover-slipped microscope slide, infinitely stretched and compressed, bathed in light strange and bright

[microtomb]

Configuration is parthenogenetic. We’re talking fate here. High flying biology. Bios mating logos. Flowering, percipiently imaginarily auto-eroticallyspeaking. It sees and knows what it’s doing not a moment before.  

We call back to our other us through the air pressed into sound.  I’m just trapping animal life in its resound here.

Our group gives the dream time.  A date’s charge belongs at heart to anytime.   

Our only mythical bird is fleeing the page as we speak.  It makes a very very very fast line out.  Sculpting hands in the saying.

Not every finger is instantly intelligible.  Signing principle, it calls itself, and hands itself over.

—George Quasha, "Speaking Animate" [excerpt]

[microtomb]

internally windswept

i feel downtrodden, dusty, dull

a human gobi desert

just sand and keening wind

[microtomb]

inside me was night streaming, streaming night whirling and starless Not a single human star

—Göran Sonnevi, trans. by Rika Lesser

[microtomb]

moments of blazing, transfixing clarity in which the body falls away as a representation of physical existence, unearthing the arcane endless halls of minkowski space

all things form an endless cathedral of light in light in light, where points of infinite density shroud themselves in mystery

and still i dream of wide open spaces, infinitely thin yet paradoxically vast and mighty

[oliviacirce]

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she Did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used— She stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late, Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and Would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and Found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering Questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag— And was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers— Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands— Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped —has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”