The Cataracts
Page 3
The panel with the left hand, the mirror with the right.
Peer through the hole in the panel and see
the baptistery of San Giovanni!
Slowly bring the mirror into your line of sight
and see again the baptistery of San Giovanni!
The place and the reflection of the painting of the place.
The same, the same.
Even the clouds move across the polished surface
of the painted sky.
I will show you where it is because of where it must be
Of objects in space, consider the rate of their motion. Because I could not keep my eye on the ball, because I could not see the ball until it struck me, but could keep my eye on the ball metaphorically—could focus and attend. Because I could climb but could not see the ground beneath me and would rather sit in the limbs of a tree or at the top of a slide than venture down, since I could not see how far I might have to fall. Because my handwriting was imperceptible without magnification, but, magnified, proved impeccable. Because I could not magnify everything by standing right next to it, I knew leaves but not proverbial trees, knew vague light but not the actual moon. In space I was at a loss but saw in space other spaces. How, I asked, am I supposed to know what things are if I can’t know where they are? He sat me down at the table where we liked to draw. He showed me a drawing of a place called Castrovalva, but I only heard castle-valve, and thought of village as a machine, and when he said look at this and tell me what is strange about it, I stared and stared but didn’t see anything strange. I stared until I moved into the village I saw, I saw through its walls, I turned the drawing upside down and saw a mountain crush the village into the lake of the sky, I saw the villagers come and go. One day I saw that there was no difference between distant and close in the castle-valve, that difference the undrawn world must inevitably possess, and I didn’t understand how that drawing was possible. Is this what is strange? I asked.
He read, “This is Castrovalva from without, but even more so it is Castrovalva from within.”
He said, I will show you where it is because of where it must be.
Castle-Valve
the city of castle-valve sits or grips the mountain’s edge
so that its walls orange and ochre both
hold down the mountain & structure the sky
anvil-upended clouds & the four-cornered towers of castle-valve
capture their rains
the clouds billow and dissolve as they race
overhead & underneath
the city that hinges the mountain shut
door that opens to the sky
that pours and constricts water from rain to lake
city of hundreds doubled city of thousands
castle-valve cloistered
four corners four windows
inside & out
above & below
a door with two sides and no exits
you cannot exit the castle-valve by means of entrances
beneath the city of castle-valve lies Castrovalva
tunnels and sinks
one’s city is one’s home
the home of one’s home is also one’s home
the valve of the castle opens upon the castle
the script of the city finds us outside its walls
and requires we fall through falling
though falling of the slowest most masterful sort
wind-bent branches of the gorge
gross of grapes & pine
loose stones fill the valley carved by larger looser stone
run down the mountain to the crevasse
from altitude almost airless to moss & pine & peat
damp the holes in the stone made by fern & branch
the atrium’s arteries full of the water fallen
from the heights upon the heights of castle-valve
& sprung from the rocks beneath it
if you turn in the air as you fall you will see the clouds
gather over the belittling city and the tinsmithing women
who fling water over the wall
its drops & rivulets racing toward you
as you race away & break or breach the surface of the sink
the sun shudders in the dim disk of the sky
the ring of rock at which center sits the city of castle-valve
reflected and broken on the skin of the sink
reassembled as you descend
the tunnels and caves of castle-valve
flooded with water
when you emerge you have entered the city of Castrovalva
when you submerge you have entered the city of Castrovalva
you cannot get out in that once out you cannot think
your way back in
above as below
doubled
sororal
you see yourself seeing
one sister sees in her sister a seeing
and says as they fall welcome
if this city is not my city
if my sister is not my sister
if her city is not my city
where then shall I go to make a home
Makers
ghel:
To shine, with derivates referring to colors, bright materials, gold, and bile or gall.
Gleam. Glimpse. Glint. Glimmer. Glitter. Glisten. Glister. Glass. Glaze. Gloss. Glance. Glad. Glee. Glow. Glower. Gloat. Gloaming. Glide. Glissade. Glib.
Working a forge for gold, working a fire, a blacksmith or glazier will cover an eye.
A cyclops cannot tell the difference between a painting of the world and the world.
A glassblower risks cataracts.
The problem with cataracts is glare.
Cataracts
When I asked him why he had to go
to the hospital, he gave me a new word
cataracts
and I turned the word clicking under my tongue
like a lock’s tumbler
it fell fast like its other meaning
and rather than explain cataracts with words
he cut out a pair of lenses from some draftsman’s opaque sheet
and taped them to my glasses
Is that what you see I asked, barely able to see now at all
and afterwards I wasn’t afraid of what would happen to him
in the hospital but of driving walking being tempted
to look at the sun made dull and frosted and clouded
I was sure that even with cataracts the sun would kill him
but when he went to the hospital to receive new eyes
by having an aspect of his eyes cut away
instead he was told that the film of his lungs
was as milky as his eyes, which though white
on the sheet as shiny as the draftsman’s film
meant bad
was like bad fruit, spotted and black
and so they put him on his stomach and cut him open
and broke and cut out his ribs and left something better
because it was emptier.
Hospitals are for the sick but also where the sick get sick
and he was so wounded and so tired
he became sick with unwelcome life
every time he came home he went away again
because new things required breaking and he kept getting sick
so while he was away I learned to wake up very early
and to boil water on the stove and to make tea
alternately lemon or mint though too sweet in either case
and sit in his chair and wait
and I learned to practice feeling his death.
“Nearly dead” is an impossible condition as I realized
even then
because he would be dead or he would not be dead
but we were told many times that he was going to die.
A year later when he came home and when we knew he would stay
he had acquired the habits
of soap
operas and antibiotic soap
with which we all had to wash our hands incessantly
and with warm water and antibiotic soap
we filled the cavity of his chest and gently agitated him
and then drained the solution through the hole
they had left in his back for just this purpose.
Other things changed as well
for when you are broken and know you have been broken
the act of breaking can make you kind or cruel
and while he was made kind
because we were all broken by the cost of his having been broken
as a group we became suspicious of the unbroken
while another year passed
while all he could do was ask me what I was reading
what I had seen
and after a year he said he was going to the hospital again
and when I asked him why he said
cataracts
though he had in the hospital been broken
and wounded and made sick enough to die
many, many times
and though as a result of having been broken and wounded and sick
for a year
his hands with which he drew were for the act of drawing destroyed
curled into claws barely able to grasp a pencil
and the job for which he would have been required to draw
was gone
and the reasons for which he needed to see
no longer mattered
broken diminished exhausted unable to work
he still wanted to see
and so went back and was cut once again.
I remember he was delighted and astonished
to have the detail of the world restored
the brightness and the light simple lucid radiant
and he lived for years and grew tired of much
but never of sight.
After he died I dreamed of him twice
and in the first dream he had acquired the power of flight
and flew with the same delight with which he saw
but in the second dream he was sitting
in the very chair I sat in the year he kept dying
and coming back to life
so I bent down to look up at him and the irises
of his eyes were the white of unsplit light
and then they faded like coils of cut filament
giving up their heat
and it is the heat that makes the light
save for when the light is expended
when I was small and wanted to look at the sun
he said if you want to stare at the sun
and not go blind you look not at its light
but what it illuminates the world the moon
never the thing itself and always its reflection.
Unfurl
Your souls, if you have them,
depart without having spoken.
They issue reels and loops
of thread, filaments lengthened
by longing, coming apart
in the sky like the tails of a shower.
When it speaks, a soul sounds
like this looks: a boule of copper—hot,
falling to ribbons, the core
drawn finer and finer, until
you can see its tongues, hissing.
Fortifications of the Land of Grasses and Flowers
It seems like summer will kill the city,
that this city will be the last city,
whatever left standing a radiation shade
of something unutterably prior.
Sunset behind the last city
is fourteen thousand fingers of shadow
creeping across the river
and attenuated rivulets of light.
Sunset behind the last city
sets the westward walls on fire
or the illusion of fire trapped
in the glass.
Sunset commences and no one
steps outside to welcome it
for no one welcomes it,
not even orphans or urchins.
These, who have toiled and scurried
in its glare, know that even
its absence will leave the stone and steel
boiling, the oranges scalding in their skin.
Drawn thin as a needle the sunlight
punctures, the buildings shimmer and bake.
The people who leave them will stumble,
like children disgorged from an oven.
Replica of Vintage Sleeper Car
I prefer the company of someone who says I am sane, but the world is insane to the company of someone who says I am moral, but the world is immoral. This is not because I believe the world is insane but not immoral. It is because in narrating how the world is insane, the person who believes in her sanity will admit how that sanity is compromised by the insane world, whereas in narrating how the world is immoral, the person who believes in his morality can grow even more convinced of it, the more he details the moral failings of the world he occupies.
The time and expense that this reconstruction required: immense, and effectual. But the motion is approximate at best, and what passes for the sky fails to be the sky almost perfectly.
Look Up
For a model of a gravity well, picture an actual well.
That the moon is minor, that the moon is lesser:
do not pity the motherfucking moon because it orbits you.
From the bottom of a well, whatever sun you can see
looks like the moon. Most of the plane of the sky?
Tiled with darkness. What interrupts the moon?
The face of whoever threw you down this well.
You cannot have a fair fight from the bottom of a well.
Whoever sits at the well’s lip can tip pebbles upon you.
Gravity does the rest. You can collect the pebbles, yes.
You can throw them out of the well lest you drown in pebbles.
But try to throw a rock from the bottom of a well.
Gravity does the rest. The moon is sick to death:
the object of the moon is tired of being objectified.
Look, you are bigger than the moon. It’s measurable.
But you are not so big you cannot fit down a well.
The moon goes away and the moon comes back.
That great floating weight in the sky? It is the sky.
It costs the sky nothing to fall down upon you.
The Commons
The revenge I wanted to take was not an eye for an eye
but for an eye, a mind.
The opposite of property is theft, but so is property.
Property requires the occupation of space by matter.
I regret all the property I trespassed
and having curtsied ask for an apology from the law and an apologia for it.
Trespass to person, no, or only incidentally.
Trespass to chattel when I am the chattel myself, no,
for working in the place gives possession of the place, or should.
Trespass to land and the chattel of the building that stands upon it.
There was nothing in anyone’s house I wanted to steal,
no sleeping body I wanted to see,
for it is perverse to want such things and of all
with such wants are none who should have them met.
This property was public
and I thought it was dumb luck that I was never caught or killed
in the act of walking in and out and over and under and around.
It was not luck but status and it was dumb to ever believe otherwise.
But it is an old right, to wander, and should be everyone’s.
In compensation for abiding the rules of this building from the hours of 8 until 5
we should claim it with the sunset.
The cooling tar on the roof,
the infolding plants of the botanical gardens,<
br />
the whir of the machine that cleans the pool,
and the time stolen to keep it all standing.
Fontanel
In the first story
I am in a terrifying fight
but when you talk
about being in a fight
people want to know
what the fight was about
or be stupidly reassured
that the other person started it
but it never really matters
or it matters before