Dispatch #51
Garden Level
Garden Level Night gives nothing back; it only appears to cohere. What’s locked in dissolves without pause. An animal rattles mulch and twice-dead leaves piled against the window. I know the walls are there for the sounds they sift into the room—the room that inhabits me—underground. + Sun in the shape of a quadrangle on a wood floor. Curtains blown horizontal split it in half. Dust divots air, dents the pale afternoon. An hour isn’t like anything, not even itself. A window, a patch of lawn, a street for the tide of its noise, for measure. A stream of particulars undoing the room. + It can take all day to filter out the debris of a dream, to see a thing contained by its terms. Call it clarity. You have to almost stop thinking; get up to the edge of the clanging at the back of the brain. Go dumb to the light. + Three weeks in and the season begins to click. Weather to word; word to weather. A bird circles, punctuates a bloodless sky — the husk we’re under. The street a monochrome stream. Cold enough to numb thought. + Snow light at dusk, the deepening bruise; a blue that hums. A soundless ringing between the eyes where all things sink and disperse. For once we’re reading the world without the names by which we dream it. Nothing to say; nothing saying us. + Everything comes to a point along the horizon; every limb stripped to a line. Even the clouds sharpen, shaved against a mountain. A pond duplicates the scene — if your gaze drops. To suspend the senses in the drone of geometry. To forget the traffic here. + The way the mind bends to receive injured weather, the sudden warmth, as though half awake and watching a place — a room, a field — assemble itself one object at a time. A syntax expanding beneath fanned rays of gaping sun. Center everywhere, circumference nowhere.
from A New Silence