Unclean nothingness
The act of seeing, River said, could be divided in several ways. That night, River gave me
the following list of ways to see:
1) Seeing letters 2) Seeing stains 3) Seeing the thin blood vessels behind my eyelids
4) Seeing the main character’s face while reading a novel 5) Seeing the undulation of sleeping
jellyfish 6) Seeing eyelashes where sky meets earth or sea 7) Seeing, from underwater, a
lighthouse and its keeper 8) Seeing, in a mathematical formula, the patterns created by lines
and curves 9) Seeing my parents have sex 10) Seeing a bee drowning in a swimming pool
11) Seeing oblivion 12) Seeing something before it can be seen 13) Seeing, with eyes closed
in prayer, the moment in which the prayer is answered 14) Seeing mist without seeing through
it 15) Seeing exactly what my companion sees as we take a walk 16) Seeing everything so
as to do nothing 17) Seeing without fear — and River told me that these ways of seeing had
varying degrees of difficulty. What River found most difficult
was to see one minute into the future. To see this future, they had to both see and act one
minute in advance. No seeing could occur without acting. One minute was excessive and
insufficient, and yet exactly enough, so River didn’t know what to do. They hesitated. Wandered.
Closed their eyes. A faintly visible minute into the future throbbed underneath a piece of paper, a
blank piece of paper made bumpy by the future, and if nothing were to be done at this moment,
the paper would stop moving and the unburst future would drip from the paper and wet both the
dream and the wilderness.
Listen
I was a spiraling, deepening
body of water
Swans drifted on my surface
Swans drifting into sleep
Swans like bare hands
and splitting into a thousand streams
and having forgotten almost everything
Someone watched these swans
then closed their eyes
and I flowed out of those eyes
Hands dipped in my body
cupped me to wash a face
Crashing onto the face
breaking on that human face
The swans drifted helplessly
on my surface
The night, River. You might be me. While I am you. River, you might be a curve. Or a
tangerine or a magnolia or a lightbulb, or a triangle for that matter. You are an apartment building
with your lights out. Homework scribbled on the back of a hand. You might be the queue of
headlight flashes appearing and disappearing from the arched ceiling of a tunnel in Seoul, or you
might be a mottled pupil, River. You might be the mottled, swaying blades of silver grass on a
riverbank in Africa, just as you might be the gunshot heard on a battlefield, or the brief cry of a
bird startled by that gunshot. But you might be the gesture of turning a head turning away from
the dead. But you might be a staircase spiraling like the concentric waves created by that
movement, or the skeleton of a building or its windows or its hallways, or a water buffalo or a
strawberry or a tuft of moss, but we
lengthen.
Our soft lines
beautify the hard.
River, you are
human now
so lift your body.
Come down a different path.
Come down the path that looks different.
◆
Breaking broken time
A white picture
It’s a white picture
I thought
but it was a door
A light glimmered
so I opened it
White dogs on white sand
They ran
as if dancing without
a body
The dogs
held their breath
and into the waves
and into the waves
they leapt
White horse crumbs,
white horse crumbs
were afloat
in the sky
while my eyes
looked up at the birds
twinkling in the sky
and my body
lay on the ground
Oh, here
One strand,
two strands . . .
Someone was plucking
my white hairs
A white hand
was staining my hair
and I felt dizzy
but their right hand was already
rummaging through dark seawater
That chilled hand
I should grab it
I thought
but it was a cloud
One strand,
two strands . . .
Unraveling between fingers
Here,
between sky and sea, a soft border was broken
by clouds of breath
in which the boats
moved horizontally
without ever approaching us
A light glimmered
so I went to the forest
Under our feet
was sand
Twinkling in the sand
were tree roots
Standing on the roots
they told me a story
(with some hesitation I copy the story here)
about a rich man who built a forest
for himself, by taking all the world’s tallest trees
about the roots, tens of meters long, dragged
down an asphalt road, about the villagers
who chased after them, weeping and praying
for the tree
for the tree
about the uprooted thousand-year-old tree
and the dark abyss it left behind
and the prayers continuing to circle this darkness
Wanting and pleading
here
in this world where
wants and pleas continue
along a bumpy surface
upon
the horizon
. . . . . .
From a distance, the sound of waves
aided the rhythm of prayer
White dogs,
go, follow the tree
Follow the memory of the tree
White horses,
you follow the tree, too
Follow the prayers of the people
White birds, you’ve already flown and gone
They tell me that one strand
is twinkling white
and moving toward me
Actually,
that my whole head’s turned white
when in fact
my hair remains such a dark black
it vanishes behind tonight’s darkness
◆
Salt sea
A black pine forest
dense on the hill I climbed
for a view of the sea
Pine needles made sweet sounds
when they brushed my bare skin
A salt evening
A salt horizon
A salt star above bared its tooth at me
The tooth became a windowpane
falling and wedging itself in the sea
One thousand pines aroaaar
and asway
From behind the windowpane, a wave
stared at me until it broke
This helped me realize
that I am a white turtle
My head and tail stretching
into yesterday and tomorrow
Whose giant tongue was it
that took a lick of my back?
The dirtied soles of my feet are black
Two pine needles are dangling
I said
“I don’t know”
“I don’t know”
and crawled
all over the white beach
Someone opens their mouth to read
the long engravings on the sand
Slowly the voice becomes the sound of rain
Slowly the sound of rain becomes the voice
They must be boiling the sea
The sea fog is shrouding me
◆
Whitevoice
(Letters are patterns humans invented to restrain the world.) (One half of the lake is in ice, the
other half inside a picture.) (You look like your thin layer of frost.) (Who was the first person to
tell apart darkness, night, and sleep?) (This stop is the airfield.) (I thought I’d uprooted the fence,
but I was lifting the horizon.) (The noise of one language is easy to move into another. The quiet
of one language is difficult to move into another.) (One person came to the phone and began
growling.) (A cloud peeled off another cloud.) (We are together.) (Eternity is a assembly of
permanent and repetitive extinctions.) (I could kill you. But I won’t.) (Drying a wet letter.) (You
bring things like snow and ice and put them in my hands.) (Look, the white stuff is snow and the
clear stuff is ice.) (Not words, but the moment words shatter.) (A day on which I hurl an apple.)
(Yesterday, by chance, I saw the bony back of light.) (Ash trees.) (Pebbles, pebbles, pebbles.)
(Look at that owl. It’s upon the sky. Beyond the sky.) (The red sign of the picture shop on the
street corner.) (I ran holding aluminum foil like a tent over my head.) (The lotus seedlings held
onto us.) (Title the film. But you must never film it.) (Ash trees.) (The empty auditorium has
become a beach.) (The chirping has become sobbing, splashing.) (Imagine your hair follicles
widening.) (Muscles and wind, things that are rising.) (Mom became sunlight and poured down
on my back.) (Pinching and twisting a cloud.) (Feelings outdoing feelings.) (A trembling river,
my dead friends’ wrinkles.) (When a leaf sprouts from under your fingernail and sways in the
wind, imagine one of your pupils turning into a small sun and shining on that leaf.) (Sunset
coloring the window frame.) (When I go thump, you go.) (A dream where I lose my purpose and
utility.) (Dividing one alley into eleven scenes.) (Water and tent.) (From steam to screen.) (Agua
viva!) (Walking around the absences of Seoul.) (The future alone is not a dream, and the future
alone does not pity us.) ( ) ( )
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