Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Those Aren't Spider Eggs, He Says, Backing Up










LIGATURE

Forrest Gander

When the strong drag of the boy’s adolescence pulls through them, the
family rises into thinness and begins to break like a wave.

You turned away when I kissed you, the woman says. Why?

Half-lidded days of early winter.

When he points toward the woman, the boy looks at his hand the way dogs
will.

The boy’s jaw sets. As though behind his teeth, into the soft flesh of his
throat, a new set of teeth were cutting through. A mouth for what?

Each of them adopts a private view. Arguments veer every which way, and
who can follow? A sequence of dark non sequiturs blows in.

When one, when one word, when the word suicide enters the room where
they are shouting, the system closes down, prematurely becalmed.

The man writes, I am not given a subject but am given to my subject. I
am inside it like a parasite.

He sees the woman’s face contract at the approach of other futures than the
one for which her face was prepared.

So they inhabit their bodies like music, for a given time. And yet he
continues to act as if there were times to come.

I just want you to go away, one of them screams.

Expressionless and flat as a tortilla, the afternoon moon over their house.

She calls the man to a corner in the basement. Those aren’t spider eggs, he
says, backing up. Those are its eyes.

When the encounter with the self is volcanic, nothing can follow.

Tearing open the cocoon to reveal itself, a boy within the family.

As if they were waiting. As if inside experience, bright with meaning,
there were another experience pendant, unnameable.



1 comment:

  1. 1)speaking of spiders, i read this morning that hummingbirds will eat small insect carcasses from spider webs - even though the spider has consumed the soluble part of the insect, the dry remains still have protein which the hummingbird utilizes

    i was reading about hummingbirds - specifically the migratory habits of the rufous hummingbird - as a result of a conversation with missus charley's niece's husband's mother - a former resident of alaska - who shared the folktale that hummingbirds migrate by hitching on the backs of larger birds - picturesque, but not actually true

    http://www.birdwatching-bliss.com/hummingbird-migration.html

    q. which is better, truth or beauty?
    a. for what purpose?


    2)speaking of missus charley's niece, yesterday she abbreviated the term "spiced cider" as "spider" in conversation with her toddler son (i am, in relation to him, the "gruncle" by marriage)

    2a)many people know the term "spam", prior to its application to mass emailing, originally applied to a canned meat product, and may derive from a contraction of "spiced ham"

    2b)but how many are able to name the specific spices contained in this product?


    http://time.com/4827451/spam-history-80th-anniversary/














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