37
While the GPS recalculates, one becomes a resemblance. What one is experiencing is not time travel or teleportation, but a tone generated within the ear itself, which one associates with the presence of an undetected third party. One fast-forwards to the catastrophe. The impurities are skimmed. The databases over-mined. The stitch of memory is concealed. Entrusted with dis-ease, one endures it. When science and metaphysics were not separate disciplines, one had an easier go of it. The late-August meteor showers are breathtaking; still someone in the crowd finds it necessary to read the subtitles aloud. Stumbles over multisyllabic words. The names of constellations. Masked, one rebreathes one’s breath, becomes ingrown, a carbon dump. Is shame a side effect of desire, one wonders, or is it the other way around? Mold darkens the toppled wheat. Fate is woven on a jury-rigged loom.
40
A line can divide and enclose a space. A reflection darkens the water. In the end, it is all busywork. When one’s mind races like this, whiskey helps. And after that: a little three-lined verse that follows the prose to cleanse the palate. Winter is the only season to keep its covenant. One notices that the pollarded trees look like archaic crutches. The paint is faintly brighter where the picture once hung. When the ancestors return, they speak a different language; they talk willingly, without bribe or sacrifice, but one cannot understand a word they say.
Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently Not Yet Transfigured (Orison) and The Future Perfect: A Fugue (Tupelo).
