Stories of Lightweight
by Erika Howsare
Also built
She steps onto the sidewalk. Things trade places, lines and what they may
draw: a leaning fence that traces a hidden electric line. Light leads. The
city follows. To invent a city we set concrete on paper, let drawing leak
the light. The letters in the city’s name bleed into paper like tiny
mountains. And leaves are blowing down the furrows. To invent a map, as carefully
as a camera would measure the fallen light on the newspaper pressed against
the slats of the fence.
The drawer
The city learns its own ways through process of elimination. Information leaks
from cracks in the sidewalk. Do you mean to indicate groundswell? The paperboy
won’t answer, preoccupied with a route fixed in ink. Everyone studies
the city but reaches no conclusion. Do birds looking for water record city’s
debts and cravings? Is filigree a mark of what city remembers from when it
knew nothing? Two people approach, nearly collide, spin off without a word.
A man passes the house where he was born, not thinking anything.
An afternoon of danger
In houses things try to become perpendicular. On tabletops the papers and
coins are slowly moving. Another phrase for what is seen at the exact moment
of the window closing, the van driving away. The coins roll off the edge and
a face cuts the plane of the mirror, a square. On a radio dial the marker
moves in one of two directions: waves are curves and ripple through all the
houses. The names drop off the mailboxes and are carried northward on thousands
of flat coins that appear, from above, to be a river.
What is seen from high ledges
At night city sinks into ground to find wells and bootprints, the graves of
the captains as a catalog of soil. The walls of the wells are stiff in the
wind. People make mirrored movements on two sides of town, unaware, the wind
dividing them. Lights ask: are captains awake? Do lights spell names of rivers?
answer captains. The water sings under soil but does not reply. The wind waits
for morning before it slides under the bridge.
Future plans
City shuffles off leaves and loops of twine. City swallows jugs and coughs
needles. Mirrors wander the streets. City needs support. It sags with pottery.
Someone tries to translate blankets into milk. Someone bolsters soil structure
with layers of glass. The buildings grow and this drives away categories of
light the dogs had insisted on. They sniff out found objects trapped behind
screens, surrender, memorialize. From under sod, jars break the surface
.
Bones
When the city snows the blood in the trees makes a sentence. Fences where
walking is slower. Shining bluffs. And small slopes of breathing white, sift
the light in unbloody layer. A scar on anything makes a word into moveable
lines. The snow is polishing the air and a scar will be invisible, a darkness
in a drift. To make air whiter over a city, fall through snow.
Tiles
A day in the city breaks into equal and opposite pie-shaped shards. Vases
of stargazer lilies pass through stages of grief. The rooftops move, bump
edges, never quite mosaic. Someone pours a thin stream of oil out the window.
The water grumbles in its bowls. The oil runs downtown where the points of
shards meet dangerously, lubricates, eases the way for an influx of angry
ticketholders. They demand entry to the next wave of sirens and lights. No
one can decide what the day should be called. No one can locate its ending.
Exercise
City lays like a dog on many sidewalks, pants steam, licks concrete for obedience.
Once time is up city runs for the shade. Personal objects like porches and
jetties groan under city’s disorganization, hoist their lungs like heavy
fish. City wants touch. City wants funds. We find a place to lay our heads
on city and we all wake up.
Sex
I stand behind a railing at the top of the cathedral. Below a woman poses
with her back to the door and a man photographs the two of us, the flash a
smooth volcano. That is the waiting. Certain states float in frames, for example
hand on scapula. We draw the same lines again and again, for a road, for a
poolside, for a cast of slope. There is nothing to say so we keep on saying
it. If you stand in the back meaning tall. If you put your name on the list.
Look what we’re doing here in this room. The closet glows sometimes
with sideways light, more like a drawing of a spiderweb. When it shines on
the eye you could see the blood there.
Advice on travel
There are lots of reasons for sirens or for breezes. The street goes uphill
gently then steeply down and they all said to stay on this side of Steeple
Street. Across town it may be a smokestack babbling flame or a red flag in
wind. Or another street called Steephill. A city is two collections, one of
boxes. It is a slow fugue in a number of keys with a large but not infinite
number of endings. To watch for city to break through clouds. It walks through
wet leaves and into the street and holds up a hand to stop traffic.
--Erika Howsare (Providence)
