‡
“When I was young, I was in an accident and someone died,” she said.
You could see traces, rock-strewn visions, her wild survival, etched nightly in her eyes, rapid dilations shifting among the forces of her sleep. Backlit, a refraction, a leaning-in her visions as they came alive. In a collection of points, she diagrammed the missing as if she looked up into the constellations. Above her sternum she positioned a double dagger of her own making, the last broken sword, the Lorraine cross. Her eyes gleamed against the slick grass of the sky. Both open earth and iris blinked in a frozen varnish. Her complexion, water’s torrent at the edge of a far creek bed, flushed as she slipped back into the trees. I could see snow-mounds sheltering an ice-frozen house. It was so close to her skin’s surface as if looking sharp down the barrel of a shotgun.
I wanted to go back, to tell her, and when I say “I”, I may mean you or she or him or us. I wanted to tell her to stay put under the cottonwood’s sway, to remember the elder’s provisions, but consciousness, in truth, is not resolved along a singular directive.
The road was bare when I walked back into the night, but it was difficult, as if marching through brush. We’d fused under the bewildered weight she carried in her throat as she tracked her reflection over the floodplain’s blue mirror. We’d caught the tide’s trance, a traffic she claimed among the rusted military waters and ibis’ footprints. Her voice, in totemic patterns led us through ravines of wet grass. Love’s hunger dissipated desire. No longer masked, a triple signal between ghosts rose from lowest joy as a tremor between us, and amber grains of dust thrust up through her lungs. She spoke to us, as if she spoke to the guides. We knew she may be the one. The envoy to annihilate the last of our dead. When we reached the base that morning, the partisans summoned us one by one.
§
Abruptly, yet still gently, she brushed off the forest air, half-awake, her hands warmed the half ruddy-skin on his left cheek where he’d slept against her chest. They were alone now.
And at the forest edge, drunk soldiers stood. The crawl space between one mind and the other, just less than three feet wide, was a perfect calm through which she might stumble. Yes, she stumbled off into the other dimension, the next life, as she became bold, and unfolded into the center of the snipper’s gun. He thought quickly and how quick it was to take the living out of the body. Quick always were the pre-crimes, the post-crimes. She’d been, for this while, the one to survive amnesty’s possession. But now she knelt over a flat body. Her body, which lay flat under the flat insistence of rain. She lay in the space now without a child. She lay her infant beside her still living body. She streamed between strangers, and held them in the picture where they waited, the double current where the unsung are kept.
In every cell, in the line of sight as her first line, she at once made peace to it.
Yes, it is very sweet, the body once it has found peace, purer into the unseen where she thought her loved ones were looking. In the molecular night, a spirit provoked an energy from her body. Her body, as she hid in grass thickets. A widow’s throat shut out the whisperings, the trees chattering, as if she was guided into a small room.
Is it you there I dread? The voices crowding the room. Is everyone in the room leaving? I suppose I would like to die. When eyes will allow it. I imagine it’s like a solitude that doesn’t happen. But I’m not expectant. Not restless. I have use of the voices still, of my own voice. It happens. It happens. I am consoled now. I will leave life just as if I were to leave this room.
