Certain beliefs hold that the serpent, while swallowing itself, writes its history on its intestinal walls, passing along lineage and gods, but the most vital notion for the ceremonial inscription, the sun-is-upward convention, that which opens and closes the circle.
Outside Is Trouble
Rooms fail because we made them.
Comfort comes from lack
of architectural detail
the hotel-quality nowhereness.
We descended the stairs. We might become bound to a carpeted purgatory, leaving behind the genitive rituals that ushered us out. They take us lower until there occurs the landing, which leads us nowhere further: Longing. And nowhere is this illustrated better than the idea of the balcony.
*
Low water, auxiliary dark: no rumor
dies so long it keeps preserved in a deep ore
or interior of the mine
impressed in the mountain’s exterior stratification
recorded in the very base level of the fossil record where no axing no hammers cut stone
and yet recollection funnies
up the fucking thing and be spoken
again no rumor dies
After the mouth of the snake, more snake.
*
No matter how much coverage my hands provide my face at
the sight what-the-fuck-is-actually-happening, no matter how
tight the seal I attempted, tears and drool and snot escape the
orifices. Dirty the ground is from my emplacement. (This not
actual weeping and I knew this because it is
a category idea to place common acts on common values
on common people and their common )
*
Form we desire because it means
the thing has yet to rot.
Build/surround/ yourself with
like relics. Sit. There’s ruin here.
The best invention, morphine.
*
Never does / always does. Crouched in the mountain’s base
during our incorrect accounts of the past, our
lies, our “but I misspoke”
*
Balconies are often the site of high gesture.
Here is where the beloved appears, delicate and pale as an apparition, in a brief moment on a balcony where the voyeur gets an intimate eyeful of their cherished object, and that glimpse on the exterior represents the interior chamber, most certainly the true desired object of the observer.
Being drawn by it, lustre,
only to unlearn glimmer and shine duration
five years from now lustre over the unfinished
sculpture or ceramics project or a veiling cloth. Facts obscured so two methods
evidenced here: to inspect oneself / to despise oneself. Having heard there’s
long grass where there’s endless numbers and a twenty-seventh
letter to this alphabet, she does not open her mouth to talk to me.
The wind operates that way too. Little I can do to change that. Nothing, I mean.
*
We live in the stories that structure our world. The nearer the
future the nearer the loneliness, and the simple realization
that halting, that waiting for something to occur possesses no
stage value. Provides no tragedy, no communion.
Forced into caesura thinking again of how the beloved
disappears at such crucial times and we wait, watching the
muslin wrinkle as she walks away
Can I, in any way, compare this to the
reflection of the fire seen through my
window on the solid wall? Seeming,
of course, contained within that wall.
Deep within as is the distance of the window to the fire?
Down come
the marching orders:
Snake your path through
the mountain range
each place you need to
alter slightly,
and then make four lefts
at any arbitrary crossing.
Motive being to change
course from destination
into an itinerary of impossible.
As it trod / so it lies
and never hope to
(…can we…?)
mine the minerals
in the mountain
only might be able to bury rumor deep
hold its death in our mouth, swallowing always, deny resurrection in silence.
*
The balcony induces melancholy. It tantalizes. It makes longing represented. The distance known to everyone. The way a gift is separated into three distinct possessors (the giver, the recipient, and the void between the two), the unity of love is seen through the fragmentation of it on the balcony. Balconies tend to occur no higher than the third floor, because they stand as the middle point between the observer and their god. From terra firma, terrestrial and common, the raised beloved is separated from god in the exact degree the observed is separated from the beloved.
*
THERE MUST BE A DIFFERENT WORD, YOU SAID,
for swimming or flying back
rather than adding prepositions. And there
must be better words for the condition of falling
from falling in and falling through…
To my knowledge, ah my dear, I know there are
only the acts we perform here where
…with drunkenness and a joke’s perverse perfection:
tap-rooted shipwreck upon an aberrant
mountainous form, last link in the chain; Right whales
filtering around us; and the ruderals slivering
from the pinnance back into the bay. The vessel rotting
black from the center like a dandelion.
Here, my love, I can’t say I’m alive but that I live with you.
By seeing the vapors we know the boil.
The cause and the process are one, and I am calm
here where our scintillation back to
the tidal flat and the imprints left there so we may fall
on our backs, brined, in copper gloam
beginning in the East, waiting for the rush underneath
our bodies from the morning tide, knowing
the dunes where spiders catch ticks and flies remain there
for us to cross. Again, here where your
face rises from darkness and your brow and cheek
establish contour and symmetry.
*
When learned patterns cease to be performed extinction begins:
The sadness of Juliet’s balcony would, if catharsis it is, make all of us Juliets when we step out of the window or Romeos when we see from the street.
Ethan J. Hon is from Omaha, Nebraska. He is a co-founder of . His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Screen and Paper, The New Inquiry, Dossier, Tin House, Cimarron Review, & Cannibal. His paper “It Is Easier to Raise a Shrine than Bring the Deity Down to Haunt It: Beckett in the Blogosphere” was presented at Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive International Conference. He teaches at Hofstra University.
