Excerpt from Then Go On

A collection of lyric prose pieces

Forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2012

His Wrist

His wrist was not like me.  His wrist was part of him and where he went his wrist went with him.  I could know his wrist but not the way he did.  I had attachment to his wrist.  His wrist was like a movie.  Like a movie I could touch.  Between my thumb and fingers.  His wrist was not transparent, it wasn’t like a movie that way.  It reflected light.  It moved in space and time, it was a movie that way.  When the space and time in which I saw his wrist was gone, his wrist was gone.  That’s the way it was a movie.  It existed when I looked at it.  When I couldn’t see it it was memory.  An image in my mind.  Just like a movie.

A wrist that didn’t know it was.  What does a wrist know?  He knew that he had one, he knew that he had two.  If they were missing he’d be gone.  His wrists would never leave without him.

I Like Purple

                                                            for Iris Vitiello, age almost 6

“I like purple,” she says.  “I don’t know why.”

She tapes plastic farm animals to a piece of cardboard and calls it a farm.  She has colored the cardboard green.  We accept her premise.

It wasn’t so hard to understand what we’d done—

create a work in which “being” was always in question—

but the existence of the work defied understanding.

A study on narrative positivism—the novel represents public and private space, violence represents subconscious urges—cannot account for it.

Walk me through the body.

That everything be a playlet—the accordion-playing rabbit, the finely detailed plastic hippo (“West Germany”), the fish vase with the round eye hole and the open mouth, the Indonesian shadow puppet, all enact a drama on the dining room table—and we keep going, as if we knew their parts and could play them.

The truth came out:  I did not know how to read.

An ego gets formed, and a vocabulary, which may at first seem easy, even trite, may seem to determine specific ideas, may seem to prevent the transformation of an embroidered peasant shawl into a wriggling hallucination—girls lined up, one row above another, as if in the corridors of a cell block, a bar or scarf floating across their middle, and below the heads of the next row, the bars moved and danced with the girls, and it seemed the whole system might split, but it didn’t.