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Erik Anderson
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from The Identity Event
Days pass. Uganda continues. This struggle
between significant things: believable worlds or a breakdown of order I took for a chance
encounter uncovered a cache.
The names lay scattered under a seersucker suit. I yawned. Grumbled. And counted to ten.
With no land no body no word for taking you in as you came
Interruptions have this effect: that you must hear my voice, or am I a tension that cannot know
it is a tension:
circular and incomplete, how it tends away from the cicadas. Its
incompletion is itself incomplete
Can we change the subject?
Under one trade wind, two words merge—and then they disappear
a boat I’ll call a tanker takes off from an unseen port
its cargo—marvels from a fuchsia past still interesting in this regard:
how long until that boat arrives at your museum?
And if you were to film its course or paint it, would it look like puzzle pieces
on a cut of silk ravens on a kimono?
Asked how she came to marry my father my mother told me: a star by itself isn’t a star
The past is a character who only appears so the present will turn
down the alley, etc. We stain ourselves, bleed
the ground, white clothes, each other. The war will end or won’t, the bees go back
to their circular relations. The discrepancies become
yet another part
of the still accruing whole.
This is about where we live. In a body, or we are bodies of something non-literary in nature. The stuff of omens and portents.
And “we may say that the proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad” but that one cannot have one’s face changed then change it back again
In Hades only drastic measures help. The project becomes the interrogation of the wor(l)d. You make it up—what’s human—as you go along.
You carry your life with you, the world in your whirled clouds of event, horizons of mismanaged response & you call me Recidivist?
Let’s tack west towards the armory windows or the rococo scenes in the seminary
We can eat kumquats, and kiwis, and starfruit wear Russian wool, or like trees dress ourselves in gaudy colors even as we lose our leaves
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Erik Anderson's recent work has appeared in The Laurel Review, |
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