#joriegraham

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run, in our motel room half-way through Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past the importance of beauty, archaic, not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper into less. They leapt up falls, ladders, and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river, and a blue river traveling in opposite directions. They would not stop, resolution of will and helplessness, as the eye is helpless when the image forms itself, upside-down, backward, driving up into the mind, and the world unfastens itself from the deep ocean of the given… . Justice, aspen leaves, mother attempting suicide, the white night-flying moth the ants dismantled bit by bit and carried in right through the crack in my wall… . How helpless the still pool is, upstream, awaiting the gold blade of their hurry. Once, indoors, a child, I watched, at noon, through slatted wooden blinds, a man and woman, naked, eyes closed, climb onto each other, on the terrace floor, and ride—two gold currents wrapping round and round each other, fastening, unfastening. I hardly knew what I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that world it was the one each cast onto the other, the thin black seam they seemed to be trying to work away between them. I held my breath. as far as I could tell, the work they did with sweat and light was good. I’d say they traveled far in opposite directions. What is the light at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls, the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies, illuminates, antique, freed from the body of that air that carries it. What is it for the space of time where it is useless, merely beautiful? When they were done, they made a distance one from the other and slept, outstretched, on the warm tile of the terrace floor, smiling, faces pressed against the stone.

Act III, Sc. 2

BY JORIE GRAHAM

Look she said this is not the distance

we wanted to stay at—We wanted to get

close, very close. But what

is the way in again? And is it

  too late? She could hear the actions

rushing past—but they are on

another track. And in the silence,

or whatever it is that follows,

  there was still the buzzing: motes, spores,

aftereffects and whatnot recalled the morning after.

Then the thickness you can’t get past called waiting.

  Then the you, whoever you are, peering down to see if it’s

                                                                      done yet.

Then just the look on things being looked-at.