Meditações - measuring time in a unit known as the snailsdeath...

1

A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from

factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag

me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect

 

massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants

havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed-

fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell

 

and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger

as they inch up stems. Through the bulkhead door

I can hear their spirals plunk into the sluggish south-

 

bound current and dissolve therein with such brutal

regularity their dying has given rise to the custom

of measuring time here in a unit known as the snailsdeath.

 

The snailsdeath refers to the average length of time,

about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first

snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly

 

equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human

throat, while the adverb here refers to my person

and all its outskirts, beginning on the so-called cellular

 

level extending more of less undaunted all the way down

to the vale at the foot of the bed. I often fear I’ll wake

to find you waiting there and won’t know how to speak

 

on the subject of my production, or rather my woeful

lack thereof, but in your absence, once again, I will begin

drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves.

 

2

Daybreak on my marshland: a single egret, blotched,

trudges through the froth. I take its photograph

from the rooftop observation deck from which I watch

 

day’s delivery trucks advance. I take advantage of

the quiet before their arrival to organize my thoughts

on the paranormal thusly: (1) If the human psyche

 

has proven spirited enough to produce such a range

of material effects upon what we’ll call the closed

system of its custodial body, indeed if it’s expected to,

 

and (2) If such effects might be thought to constitute

the physical expression of that psyche, an emanation

willed into matter in a manner not unlike a brand-

 

new car or cream-filled cake or disposable camera,

and (3) If the system of the body can be swapped out

for another, maybe an abandoned factory or a vale,

 

then might it not also prove possible for the psyche

by aptitude or lather or sheer circumstance to impress

its thumbprint on some other system, a production

 

in the basement, or in a video store, as when I find you

inching up steps or down a shady aisle or pathway,

dragging your long chains behind you most morosely

 

if you ask me, the question is: Did you choose this, or was it

imposed on you, but even as I ask your hands move

wildly about your throat to indicate you cannot speak.

   

3

After the memory of the trucks withdrawing heavy

with their cargo fans out and fades into late-morning

hunger, I relocate in time to the lit bank of vending

 

machines still humming in the staff-room corner for a light

meal of cheese curls, orange soda, and what history

will come to mourn as the last two cream-filled cakes.

 

Eating in silence, a breeze in the half-light, absently

thinking of trying not to think, I imagine the Bethlehem

steel smokestacks above me piping nonstop, the sky

 

wide open without any question, steam and dioxides

of carbon and sulfur, hands pressed to the wall as I walk

down the corridor to stop myself from falling awake

 

again on the floor in embarrassment. If there’s any use

of imagination more productive or time less painful

it hasn’t tried hard enough to push through to find me

 

wandering the wings of a ghost-run factory as Earth

approaches the dark vale cut in the heart of the galaxy.

Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction

 

visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture

what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand

in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes

 

rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples,

or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that

surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it.

 

4

(Plunk) Up from the floor with the sun to the sound of

dawn’s first sacrifice to the residues of commerce.

On autofog, on disbelief: rejuvenation in a boxer brief

 

crashed three miles wide in the waves off Madagascar,

cause of great flooding in the Bible and in Gilgamesh.

Massive sphere of rock and ice, of all events in history

 

(Plunk) thought to be the lethalmost. A snailsdeath

semiquavers from pang to ghost where the habit of ghosts

of inhabiting timepieces, of conniving their phantom

 

tendrils through parlor air and into the escapements

of some inoperative heirloom clock on a mantel shows

not the dead’s ongoing interest in their old adversary

 

(Plunk) time so much as an urge to return to the hard

mechanical kind of being. An erotic lounging to reanimate

the long-inert pendulum. As I have felt you banging

 

nights in my machine, jostling the salt from a pretzel.

This passion for the material realm after death however

refuses to be reconciled with a willingness to destroy

 

(Plunk) it while alive. When the last of the human voices

told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping

list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats.

 

That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy

albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern,

yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.

 

5

Graffiti on the stonework around the service entrance

makes the doorway at night look like the mystagogic

mouth of a big beast, amphibious, outfitted with fangs,

 

snout, the suggestion of a tongue, throat, and alimentary

canal leading to a complex of caves, tunnels, temples . . .

There are rooms I won’t enter, at whose threshold I say

 

this is as far as I go, no farther, almost as if I can sense

there’s something in there I don’t want to see, or for which

to see means having wanted already to forget, unless

 

stepping into the mouth at last, pressed into its damp,

the advantage of not knowing is swapped out for the loss

of apartness from what you’d held unknown, meaning

 

you don’t come to know it so much as become it, wholly

warping into its absorbent fold. I can’t let that happen

if it hasn’t already. What draws me on might be thought

 

canine, keen-sighted, but it’s still incapable of divining why

the constant hum around or inside me has to choose

among being a nocturne of toxic manufacture, the call

 

of what remains of the jungle, or else just another prank

on my gullible anatomy. Am I not beset in the utmost

basement of industry? Is that basement itself not beset

 

by the broad, black-green, waxy leaves of Mesoamerica?

And haven’t I parted those selfsame leaves, discovering me

asleep on my own weapon, threat to no one but myself?

 

6

Asked again what I miss the most about my former life,

I remember to pause this time, look left, a little off-camera

an entire snailsdeath, an air of sifting the possibilities,

 

I eliminate certain objects and events from the running

right off the bat, such as when their great displeasure

brought the gods to turn to darkness all that had been

 

light, submerging mountaintops in stormwater, the gods

shocked by their own power, and heartsick to watch

their once dear people stippling the surf like little fishes.

 

Or when the flaming peccary of a comet struck the earth

with much the same effect, waves as high as ziggurats

crashing mathematically against our coastlines, scalding

 

plumes of vapor and aerosols tossed into the atmosphere

spawning storms to pummel the far side of the earth,

approximately 80 percent of all life vanished in a week.

 

Or when we squandered that very earth and shat on it

with much the same effect, and more or less on purpose,

emitting nonstop gases in the flow of our production,

 

shoveling it in as ancient icecaps melted, what difference

could another make now. And so I clear my throat, look

directly into the camera, and even though it will make me

 

come off bovine in their eyes, I say that what I miss the most

has to be those cream-filled cakes I used to like, but then

they prod me with their volts and lead me back to the barn.

 

7

After the panic grew more of less customary, the pity

dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility

from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense

 

that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually

moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing

visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it

 

or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much

managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography

will come to show: field after field of untouched white.

 

After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare,

too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge

that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale

 

turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle

tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only

imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens

 

and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather

over time might deaden one all over again, unless being

changed with death means not only changing past change

 

but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards

that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change.

That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from

 

change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it.

In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once

given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph.

 

The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back

from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness

towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little

 

time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave-goods.

When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth

released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay.

 

I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from

what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour,

even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.

   

8

The noises from the basement were not auspicious noises.

I wanted to live forever. I wanted to live forever and die

right then and there. I had heard the tight, distinctive shriek.

 

Here again and now. I no longer have legs. I am sleeping.

Long tendrils of tobacco smoke, composed of carbon dioxide,

water vapor, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen cyanide,

 

and 4,000 other chemical compounds, penetrate the room

through the gap beneath the door and through heating vents

with confidence. They are the spectral forms of anaconda.

 

The ruler of the underworld smokes cigars. A certain brand.

Hand-rolled. He smiles as if there is much to smile about.

And there is. He is hollow-eyed, toothless. His hat, infamous:

 

broad-brimmed, embellished with feathers, a live macaw.

His cape is depicted, often, as a length of fabric in distinctive

black and white chevrons. Otherwise, as here, the full pelt

 

of a jaguar. On a barge of plywood and empty milk cartons

he trudges through the froth. He is the lord of black sorcery

and lord of percussion. He is patron of commerce. He parts

 

the leaves of Mesoamerica, traveling with a retinue of drunken

ax wielders, collection agents. His scribe is a white rabbit.

Daughter of moon and of night. Elsewhere, you are having

 

your teeth taken out. There is no music left, but I still feel held

captive by the cinema, and in its custom, I believe myself

capable of protecting myself by hiding my face in my hands.

Timothy Donnelly