The Inside of Stumbling
Ellen Dillon
We live half-stunned by emptiness and the effort to stay on a
horizontal plane in a circular situation.
Oiled prime numbers coiling at our feet
have tripped us up and sent us tumbling
from this world of gods who were men
into an under-one where no man ever stood.
Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall
time has been caught up, or up with.
We find ourselves adrift in it, or hanging
off its hands like lengths of twine.
The hands of the clock have walked clean
off its face and grabbed us from our places
to do tricks with us, our malleable filaments.
Stretched like gum between its thumb and forefinger
we might snap back any second, any third.
Any force in us might ricochet unstopped forever.
we/ do exist, half out of way of chance
Turn your eyes from the spectacle of burning
a screaming man is not a dancing bear
and making suffering our spectator sport does nothing
but ensure a steady stream of men on fire.
A great ball into that area of uncertainty
may be enough to keep us in the game
though we’ve stumbled out of bed and onto
the pitch without asking who or what
we’re playing. We fucked up the coin toss
somehow, it’s hovering on its edge in the
air the singularities I emit must form beautiful
integral curves it hums to itself as it strains
to hold open an area between A and B,
midway between impossible and inevitable.
that long threads/ tangle, never slip through cloth
Nothing certain, in this newly opened space,
but that the earth had her in its pocket
nestled in its seams, swinging with each movement,
the smell of the gorse and the look
of the gorse and the apples falling
(furze she would have said, not gorse
but the smell and the falling are the same)
and the swinging through space caught up in
the earth’s curve. It has a hole in it.
She can pull threads through unseen,
embroider something on the surface visible from space
or up a tree. Do not try to unpick it.
She’s forgotten to reverse the letters so
the message rests illegible outside the pocket.
and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting
Between the mud bed sown with bronze daggers and gold
fibulae and the lake’s surface, the monster lurked
or so you had convinced yourself, just as
you had known those tarps dredged up by accident,
immediately scuttled unopened, held republican guns.
A less sure soul might have looked to check,
might have ruffled the moment’s laminar flow
with the torque of an open question,
tug of an opened bag. Lagging behind us
by some seconds, forever catches up, can’t be
shrugged off in the decision not to look.
In the rowboat someone whispers from the future
hold your temper loosely or like a fish
and you know that kind of holding is beyond you.
babbling upstream like an echo, fragment,/ utterance:
calls you out of the wind, finds you
at last a cave of sound too flimsy for a home
but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing
so invigorating you have learned to overlook
the many discomforts and minor threats to life.
an oily calmness floats out from the east
gathers power, pours through you, floods your cells
with a spacious sense of great well-being.
This is the place, this here is the place
you will stay, that will still you
to settlement, like sediment in lemonade.
Agitate gently and watch as a cloud is made
rising right before your eyes in tantalising pink fizz
uttering metallic tang among the bubbles.
Walked to Chedder. Slept at Cross.
Crossed a threshold that can’t be seen outside our mind.
Come take a listening walk and admire your hand twisting
torquing sound from air, airing it out so we can see it.
I can never see it. Sound or vision, never both.
What secret is at stake when one truly listens
is the question whose unravelling will take us
all our twisting hands and lives. Taking knives
to gordian knots is not the answer, ever.
When we pick at them they come undone
wind through our fingers in strings of song
and diegetic sound to feel and hear but never see.
Seeing the leaves move as the sycamore swishes
in a zephyr too puny to call wind
is a call to close your eyes and listen.
A Note on Italics
(Fanny Howe, Jean Valentine, John Ashbery)
(Amelia Rosselli, Aimé Césaire, Gilles Deleuze, Tim Sherwood)
(Laura Jensen, Samuel Beckett, Jorie Graham)
(Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, callie gardner)
(callie gardner, John Ashbery, Herman Melville)
(Dorothy Wordsworth, Fred Moten, Jean-Luc Nancy)
Click here purchase the issue in which this piece originally appeared, or subscribe to receive all future issues as soon as they're published.
You can subscribe to our infrequent newsletter here:
