Having been here once here now once again. One could actually reach and touch where in the air there before the eyes the center of the body had been bound by bone staves, heavy kettle of innards slung below corseted bellows; reach where once a winged shoulder moved at eye level, so surely there one could lay one’s head against the scent of the past itself, nestle in memory, cradle recurrence between curved palms: one really passed here once before, each interval of space sprocketed, gelled, sound-striped, imperceptibly variable yet not film but real life or, if not that, time itself imprinted in air and fragrant earth: that snakelike mark in the still damp mud where the tire pressed beneath one’s weight marks the passage not of time but the meaning of a life, a phrase as weighty and as lost as the echo of one’s passing, passage, past.
I tread here once and am once again. What could this mean?
My daughter was in my stomach once. Young man’s variations in the same nave a dying man did once. I was in my ex-wife once. My husband also within me. Her within him, her her also (it’s possible) and him him. I rode a bike here yesterday and walk where I was then today. One flew east and one flew west, deathward away from death. One knew least and one flawed quest. Whither goest a witch of a wind, neither madeleine nor mandolin. The stench of my shit once within. I have to go my dying mother said. My falling father gripped the lamp. Glenn’s gone north on wide town car tires. Count k sleeps, his head spins down on the hard disk. Each Sunday as Johan once before him Antonín’s organ pipes mass into the light of the world at Spillville, solid state of Iowa. Porched in twilight, she’s dying & he’s crying. More or less morphed we remain mortal more so relatively remorseless.