Lip of Light

16Jan07

If a new day is a line dividing time — a swift lip of light sweeping, at the speed of the earth’s turning, across the earth — upon what is it drawn? The day is the bright night? Is the thin perception of waking, the perception of the sun moving? Is the perception of the ecliptic, our solar system’s plane upon which the bull’s face, the scorpion’s tail, the tied fish, the brothers’ embracing, and the solitary lion famously travel, the perception that we are loving? In the way that they are extending and subject to location and time, and fragile in that as soon as they are not chosen or communicated they cease to exist — yes

Ben’s voice on the phone was shaky, and when he answered fucked-up, I thought first of when Emily got pregnant, then thought that he and Alyssum broke up. Then he said Terry killed himself, man. There was a lot of silence and a wide-eyed reiteration of horror.

How quickly his suicide became a series of practical questions for everyone near him. Starting innocuously with how did you find out? leading to the more difficult how did he do it? and why? Last night and the night before was spent revisiting the notion that my mind might get around or a grasp of all this. I then had to remind myself his mind is unattainable… How can I approach the thoughts of a man that for three days after writing of his suicide would follow through? What personal death lasts for days? What desert of the mind has no day or night, or cannot differentiate the two? How can narcissism envelop someone to leave what is everything? to jump from a bridge? What mind is between bridge and rocks? Certainly his fall time was only a sliver of his intention, of the time from within a profound solitude.

Filed under: Composition, letter, poetry, writing   |  Leave a Comment