Andrew Zawacki

from Masquerade

one differing in itself
— Heraclitus, Fr. 51

20

that we would provoke a nearness, sitting inside the sunlight knowing grass was no less sunlight, nor were we: there we found already we were wrong. What vicinity unconcealed itself between us — its disposition of cautious advance, rapids a fervid assurance under the bridge — solicited the distance we sought to erase. Shoots enfolded in green, translucent foil, the ground evolved according to inarticulate parry and play, as rosebushes stood on their roses, roots awave in a zephyr, distracted by a formal mouth that moved, was moved upon. In disparity, a givenness conferred: cantus hailing a corner of winter, a summons pressed together and scattered apart. To set a preposition at a vertical affording a view, to dance with parentheses, dance with a stone, to blind and be blinded by, to make up words for what would not otherwise enter and fly in the face of: we drew closer by drawing one pace away, turning forward and turning — different — back. Sun was only a legible smear of the absence it disguised: a shirt, a dress, the red of a cloud, this wounded thing that carried itself through the maiden, the missing snow. There was no hypocrisy in the forfeit thought of a door. That we would be as anabranch to each other: air that opens and closes in air, wind that opens and closes inside the wind.


21

Periphrasis, calligraphy: a motorcyclist moving in front of sound. The risk in her disappearance into earliest resolute dark. Our being seen by what we could not see, our guile and guilt. Music that threatened to dissipate both the piano and its player.


22

What stick appear broken in water, what broken wood be whole.


23

The first planes left ahead of the sun, then light brought with it a language that could not speak of light. Inured to scant declensions of the solar, the lake was manicured with salt, insects glazed in hygienic veneer, as we waded out into childhood and chapter, up to our knees in a mirror crusting white. One plane had written a slogan across the sky, but the wind had disfigured it, minutes before, to a name with the vowels excised. Driving back to the campsite after filming what wouldn’t cohere, feral cats strayed and flung from a tree, the wheels churned marbled dirt and gouache of the catchment area’s infirm edge, its perimeter a dog fence inscribed like a musical score. Night failed to divert itself, and troubled the land and its listeners with keelhauled, anonymous noir: lineaments of a vandal alphabet, or the severed arm that drifted through our constant, captive sleep. In the static cool of 3 a.m., somebody coughed, awoke in a hurry, set about hoisting a pair of kerosene lamps: one to see the other one by.