|
MATHIAS SVALINA TRUSTFALL Once and for all it's Orpheus when there's singing. —Rilke On the other hand, now & then, you get to cross a seven-mile bridge, slowly, on a bicycle, the tarpon swimming single-file, one sea turtle surfaces, spins, neck stretched, then dives, & I track her through clear water before she vanishes into color. Should I make a list of questions I can't ask, while sitting in the shade near the beach, one ibis walking circles around my bench, her curved beak poking into soil? The world is made out of attention, surrounding us, lighting the self from within, mornings in that big house in DC where one summer twelve of us lived, sweat-tacked skin sticking to surfaces, & the dawns greeted (the zoo one hill over) by the morning calls of gibbons: it was that sound that made the day real. The stranger's spit slicked down the lips after a drunken kiss, was that wet cold pleasing in the moment? & in the end it can't matter, what matters & what can't. I would reduce myself to the silence rising between the needle's touch to the record & the blossom of music, a silence in which no atheism could be claimed. Then a pigeon walks the same dirt as the ibis, pecks the same unseen somethings, but I don't care, because it's only a pigeon, & not an ibis. |