“
Now reading
from Salt
They weighed the human soul — twenty-one grams — a tremor on the air becoming trance, becoming nimbus. No. It is a deadweight, a plummet, drawing down to its harbor beside the heart. It is Breath and Word, they said. No. It is pig-iron and salt. The dying feel its slow lift as riddance, a bar of darkness hoisting against the light. Something shifted under his skin, it puckered, as might a worm going slither-and-tuck close to the nape of his neck, then up past the cheekbone and onto the sill of his eye to gorge on the image trapped there, the last of her, the last lost thing before the sky grew dark and all the windows closed. The dead are given permission to walk among us. They smile dead smiles, they have no need for speech. The familiar goes for nothing. Each evening they hold up to our windows their silent, smiling children. Salt flats of dream of memory of dream ... limitless horizons and out on the utmost rim (can you see?) a house white-on-white abstract except for the room-within-a-room which can’t be seen but can be known, white being one thing in sunlight another under moonlight, not oblivion, not revival, and the soul’s song across that windless landscape, unheard; by night the heart-stopped silence, by day the rising glare. Graves under bramble and a wet light through the trees. A quietness something like stealth or sudden absence; it seemed to gather and disperse. Rat-run, ground for stray dogs, a place where lovers come to be swallowed whole by half-light. You could lie down here on thorn, on stone, and find your match. Wind-driven salt in the crevice of the rock is how memory works: image, invention, regret. It maddens with its ersatz colors, unknowable language, sudden reversals, shoreline, skyline, cityscape, landscape ... There are those who wake with the whole thing fixed at the forefront of their minds: a stage-set, people held in a frozen moment who will break to action soon, one fearful, one laughing, one clawing at her eyes. He was wearing a dead man’s coat: knee-length, snug, the lining rich shot silk in midnight blue. “As I thought,” she said, “a perfect fit. Of course, you look nothing like him, nor do you have that rangy, loose-limbed stride or straightness of back.” One side-pocket was sewn up, in the other, a letter. He threw it away as he left. Music at every turn, music by accident, a voice between the phrases, between the notes, calling, calling, and this not song but touchstone, blind bargain, last chance. Dust-devil, derecho, twister, cyclone, clean sweep, she is locked-off in this and the place is dark the way a pebble is dark at its center ... then her prophecy-in-song, eyes wide open in sleep, his hand across her mouth. What they did to him was unwatchable; what they did lay far beyond belief — daytime terrors, waking dreamtime, the lock-up, breeze-block walls, chain-drag, the Black & Decker kicking in: winged creatures, they sing as they work. Dust and shadow, come back to that, come back with a heavy heart. Is there nothing more: is that what you heard yourself say? Children in the garden, the headlong rush, the wolf pack between trees and snowfall under moonlight: the story you told is the story you were told: snow and a frost-moon, as clear, as pitiless. He untangled the thing that had snagged in her hair, his hand through a spectrum, spectral, blurring, a rail of fingers, to lift the thing in her hair. It would rain that day: cloud low to the hills, morning as nightfall, her window open to that. Slow sacrament of cheese and olive oil and bread, the creep of sundown-sunlight on the wall. “How safe do you feel at times like this?” Laughing, he bared his teeth. A thing flew in at the open window, bird or bat. “It’s like looking at clear water through clouded glass.” They were far off from anywhere. A salted seam, just fool’s gold, leavings of a dream wherein you give a true report of who you were, of what you could become. In rainfall you’re invisible, in sunlight the same, that’s all the dream gives up: a sense of place and sudden banishment.