Frederick Nitsch
from the night

seen from underneath covers
away in a room to find the world here
then uplifting eyes and clouds
fade the view the scene is
pulled to one
comforting almost when such strength
of vision is laid to waste and we see
what we do not in faraway motions
against the backdrop of no color,
the morning.

an unraveling thread stretches further into the night

flung from thoughts to words to the world
pushed by lungs and indelicately blurted forth
a sparse sea of
              "so I told her" and          "at the restaurant"
"a few dollars short,"           "hallway," and "hospital"

unfolds
          folds up like patchwork
and the drops of sound converge
making a single, catastrophic splash
like the new and bitter taste
of not being able to name anything
"nearby"

like thread untwining across this
distance innumerable distamcelike noticing a house beyond the borders of the road
that seems strangely like a dollhouse
with one wall mysteriously absent
but this time
time is passing and all is moving and
there are no silly postures of frozen lives inside

and I know that each thing I think about is thinking
and I feel as if to speak

but choose silence instead.

a house here now and there another, and another,
until a row column grid sprawling chaos invades my consciousness

and
there is no proper response to the magnitude of it all.

so I stop (improperly).

                         and wonder (improperly).

maybe there is a house in which a man lies motionless in his bed
except for the blood swirling beneath his skin and he is kept awake
by the prospect of sleep

and maybe this man thinks to himself, on the verge of dream,
     I feel cold, i feel alone, I feel the death of another day,
     I feel that tonight is bare, that nothing could make me less blurry

than I already am
               (possibility parsed down to a particular point,
               and now lying on the verge of absence
               only to be swept back into tomorrow

until, at last, his self has become so think it doesn't even exist)

And he wakes up in the middle of the night,
switches on the desk lamp, tries to settle his mind,

and struggles forth sentences:

Almost a stillness.          But not quite.
(the spiderweb hangs off the lampshade, trembles
               in the wake of my last breath).
Calm at night, the house while all sleep.
As is mine, the only thoughts.

-- then -- foreign memory of an instant,
driving along the highway in the dark,
when he felt as if to speak:
And I, distant from all, pass unnoticed past them
and become even more alone than myself.

-- a few seconds, only, web floats and light around corners of the fragile line,
fear to break but none strong enough, so continue aimlessly into the night --

<< Back to Issue 6, 2004