The Accounts
Listen: | The Accounts | (23:20) |
I. The nest was at rest for a time, not being made. Before the eggs were laid, it softened. The robin sleeping. Inside the house, the sound of laundry in the dryer, the sound of a zipper tumbling inside the apparatus, and shirts with buttons, as well as napkins and a tablecloth printed with blueberries and stalks of lily of the valley, oval, for the table with claw legs and extra leaves for guests. II. In one account, the angels come, their hands emerging from their wings like sentences staying, as long as it takes, for the windows to go from indigo to black, as long as it takes for a breath to land in the base of the belly, in the cavity wisdom tells us wisdom comes from or first dwells in, before it navigates the narrows of the throat, becomes mantra, becomes guttural, becomes spit to aspirate the language the mouth makes. The native obligation of this account to its subject is care. The form of music the wind chime makes registers the commitment of a furious system, filled with conviction, to the continued transformation of what is. Do not ask what has been lost. Ask what changed. An instrument of will, the guitar echoes this, a chord, more reminder than absolute, the hand arouses but does not create the scale, In this way what rests gets taken up. III. In another, the mind makes a decision to end its disorder. The mind wants first to end the face. The subject has had enough, one too many figures walking through the orchard, the call and response of conversation become an imposition on some world of light unbroken by the idea of different bodies, an idea one has never been convinced of, and so now it is a relief to believe what one has suspected, that separation is a trick of perspective, though such a revelation does not undo the fatigue of existing in the continuing illusions of others. And yet, the obligation to be kind, to show interest in strangers when they visit with flowers, to family whose hands are empty, and to doctors, not to mention the pain. IV. In the last account, the explosions are too small to be seen, and oxygen takes both thirst and hunger away as it ceases to find a home in the lungs, and the patient, having ceased to feel, ceases to breathe, as the heart shuts down before the brain and shuts the dreaming down, the settling on a nest of images, not feeling any form of distress. The pathways to distress are blocked, but the senses doubled, the ears know the house more than they ever did, whose clothes occupy the dryer, which voice accompanies water. V. Angels be patient with this subject. I know what she would say to you if she could speak, if she could see you just inside the window whose top right pane frames what we call a family, when the almost mother bird finishes what she is thinking about, barely but still hidden from sight. If you stopped to look at the nest you would see a sleep so purposeful the ladder of adoration would reverse and you would stay on earth.