|
The Half of It
I.
Start with the wall.
And your eyes, closed,
then opening to it.
Casting themselves down
to the jeans, the clasping,
unclasping, meditatively
restless hands, start with
them, the hands and the wall
are in a relationship.
And the hilarity may yet
ensue. Or get ahead of
yourself and start with
hilarity —the walls are
moving
away
from you, they
need space, too —will you
give them some space?
You’ve grown accustomed
to the space the walls gave
you, but now they've left &
left the pictures hanging for
real —say the work of Bosch
dangling in an interior breeze.
II.
Start with the wall
and your eyes open,
not meditating,
casting about, seeing
the pictures on the wall
but not the writing.
Close your eyes and
think of your relations
and with whom you’ve
had relations and you’re
back to the wall. Now
there’s writing, but it’s
Scrawl, or glyphs: alien,
illegible, incomprehensible
in your state of wakefulness
and knowing. You need to be
half out of it to understand it.
The relationship that you were
half of —
now you’re out of it. You half-
understand it. Start with that.
Start with the moving pictures.
Start with moving them.
You will start to see each other
as apart from themselves and you,
and you and one other separated,
halved.
Dan Coffey |
