sound – Cache Culture

when the line breaks

We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.

—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”

personal screen capture from film, DERRIDA

What calls me this morning is dark matter.

It proves its own existence by showing up.

Interred is in the news, again.

Transitive, it needs an object to be understood.

***

In a land of myth, timelessness marks its specifics:

- - There were no people here before us.
  - We made this place useful.
  - Our destiny is unbought.
  - You belong here.

****

This place is measured by its sunlit hours.
Warm colors seem closer to the observer.

Apologies are evidence: absent presence.

*****

The sky is percussive.

Rain falls in delight.

******

There are exactly ten Sundays left this year.

Is this concession, a thing conceded,
or translation of a revengeful confession?

The point is to be inside entropy, a sense of border and calculation.
Not quite religion and the opposite of science, something more
like keeping time and understanding place as landscape, salt, and glare
of light regardless of season. It is the sound just beneath
your most emphasized words that hums a necessary undoing.

*******

Topographically speaking, a saddle is the gap between two peaks.

Offset, understood in this way, is why distance is a hungry ghost.

Kiss the back of my knees like a desperate symptom of anger as luxury,
as a transitive verb and an exercise in yielding when the line breaks.

ransom

“…those who fight against prophesy only draw it more tightly around their throats.” —Madeline Miller, Circe

First, I heard the whispers—then screams. A public audience
formed opinions. Within that poetics, an image burns beyond
what used to be memory. Like a curve seen from a highway.
Not quite perverse but ordinary as a Sunday. After the crowd left,
I heard the graves sing. I thought about sugar, fire, and energy
taking the shape of a ransom. Formulas of demand and release.
Nervous echoes continue to fill the gaps. To receive, I take.

pigeonhole (gossip)

“The absurd does not liberate; it binds.” —Albert Camus

I catch a rainbow in my hand.
You remind me that even in stillness
light breaks sound. I take that fracture
and bury it deep inside myself.
I want my darkness to mean something.
You stand desperate. The concept of “self”
broadens into a flattened “we”. Self-appointed,
I anoint you and under faith’s observation
we begin to believe we matter.

counting light

Can’t quite get to the sound…
— See You at The Movies, J Mascis

Untitled, Holland, MI 2015, Victoria Crayhon

Between us and god—
open mouth, open paw—
we count the seconds
inside a clap of thunder
and crack of lightening.
Someone spills a prayer—
blushes of winter sun—
troubled by the quiet break
in diminishing sound.
That switch to without—
pause, absence—
eclipses the gathering light.