Room.
The cold light as it issues from the snow, all its whiteness, the winter tore at her face, a tinkling in the living room, like shattered ice in the swell, beneath a sun as pale as this. The crystal chandelier, hanging so still above the dining table, folders and documents strewn about like skinned animals, ring binders with gleaming metal ribs, a slaughterhouse with meat hooks that dangle from above, along the length of the ceiling, the page and the poem I have copied down. That’s how it feels sometimes: that creative writing has nothing to do with it. You copy down what is. There’s nothing mysterious about it, not a penny’s worth of imagination involved. The object is to become anaesthetized in order that one may be thriftless with the self, to see without the, well, what, exactly. Illusions. Stories. A wish to see the world as it is, here and now. Perhaps most of all to muster the courage to desist from creating narratives.
When all sentences are hooks by which to barb the world. A pyre of nostalgia; when a home is a state of affairs, and you know it. Reconciliation with the transience of all things, the return home that resides in that. A realisation of flight, to flee, and escape being the only place in which to be; in all that is temporary, the only place upon which to stand. The only place that is stable and will not sink; an insistence on there being, for every locus of predication, every flag of adornment, a sentence that hasn’t the strength to keep up the pretence, the vanity; it’s like nature taking over, a birth, perhaps, is what it most resembles. How can a woman scream in such a way, how can anyone write something as hard.
But maybe that’s the only thing you can do, when all else is: pulling the wool over one’s eyes, talking down to the world, talking down to you.
How can a person speak that way, so cynically. But then it’s anything but cynical, anything but exactly that: cynical. Maybe it’s the only thing you can do. An open mind, advancing into the world. Either by paring away or else the opposite, by sewing the world together in patterns new and surprising; memory, conception, perception, reflection. Two movements the same; a desire to be able to see, and to say what there is.
Perhaps it’s the only thing I can say: I love you. Nothing else but that. I don’t love you. Sentences like that are only true for a moment, uttered in a certain place. From here, this is true.
A person speaking in love is the most touching of all things, if one is able. To accommodate. To sense the person within the words.
My mother cannot go outside with me, her body convinces her a person can conclude a matter, that one’s life can be orchestrated in that way. She breathes deeply, a sigh of sorts, meaning no. As if I could have imagined differently, but this is my gift: to allow her to wince. In this way, my mother is forever a child overlooked. In this way, I love her. I must. The way it is choreographed in the spine. Someone has to do it the whole time, love her; maybe that’s a preposterous thought, but it’s the way I feel about it: that she deserves a constancy of love. And my father: what about my father. Where is he.
I pull an orange knit-hat down onto my head and go out through the mudroom. Before the door even shuts I hear my mother call out behind me, asking me to feed the birds. I’m dressed for it now. I take the trash out with me and untie the knot of the bag. The garbage men haven’t been all week, they can’t get through the snow. Three full sacks up against the wall. I press the trash down slowly, not quite knowing if it’s because I’m scared there’ll be some broken glass; only I find myself thinking about some nice drinking glasses I once saw. Mouth-blown, I think, though I don’t remember where. They had a kind of knot halfway up the stem, like a knee. I wanted to have some, the glass was green, and even if you never saw them before you would recognize them when you did.
The snow goes on. In Copenhagen, a thought to which I keep returning, in the cities of Paris, Vienna, rain and snow that cannot escape. There is no room. Water rises in the streets, snow compacts, layer upon layer. Advancing up the walls of the buildings, consuming floor upon floor. No one can breathe. Towers protrude, steeples. And children standing on top, with foxes on leashes. That image — the way they drink their tea or warm milk, expelling pillars of steam from their nostrils as they sit upon the tails of rooftop weather-cocks, attic-room apexes, sharing an orange in equal parts beneath the sky.
I don’t know what it is about disasters that is so appealing.
That is what I want. To sit there. Or lie there, buried alive. Windows shattering, one by one. Water gushing in, the way horses fill a stable. A frenzied struggle for life, and what rules may exist by which to win. A matter of he who has the most wins, I think to myself, and lift the lid of one of the two blue barrels of grain, shovel wheat and sunflower seeds into a bucket. Every seed and every grain, for the birds are waiting in the branches of the trees, and the garden has eight feeding stations. Eight is always the number. Eight paces between the feed store and the manger in the stable. Some things match up that way.
We’re at your grandmother’s, my mother tells me over the phone, a month after we buried her.
How long does a place go on belonging to a person.
Does a grandmother cease to exist only when the heirlooms have been allocated.
What does it mean, my returning home to a village where the leaseholder has pulled down the rectory stables.
I replace the little roof of the birdhouse outside the kitchen window, and a moldered piece of cardboard drops out and lands in the snow. I pick it up and hold it between my lips as I put the roof back into place, then stuff it into my pocket. Everything is turning into something else all the time. I don’t miss you anymore, have never missed you. I empty the bucket, upending it and striking it four times with the shovel. The snow contains a firmament in reverse. Dark spangles in the white. The footprints of a bird are another alteration of the picture. All the time, the landscape is new. All the time, there is something else one remembers. All that comes, and all that is lost. I have a feeling of homsesickness, but perhaps it’s not that at all. Perhaps it’s the opposite, a disconcerting sense of inversion. That my homesickness is actually a home, this magnetism a feeling of too much home, a face revealing too much belonging, a flailing, headlong plunge into a landscape in which to become. Become what, exactly. Invisible. Or simply oneself. Here.
THE LANDSCAPE HAS torn itself away. Its constituent parts are in motion or else still and separate. The hill extends from the rhododendrons on the eastern side of the house to beyond the washing line and the oak trees along the boundary. A single sweep of slope. The field on the other side of the boundary, where the snow lies in elongated drifts, is another. A bonfire one summer, that you later understand to be a person. Laughter at the fact that you can spend your time eternalizing one thing and another. Art. Theatre, a conquest of land. And a feeling nonetheless of having a responsibility. They are removing soil from mushrooms with toothbrushes.
She wonders if he can remember once having said to her that she had grown so thin, that her head seemed too big for her body. That she looked like an African.
She recalls the way she squirmed in the passenger seat. It was hot, and the sun slanted into the car. The next time they stopped for gas, she ran into the restroom to look.