| “Air has no Residence, no Neighbor No Ear, no Door No Apprehension of Another Oh, Happy Air! Ethereal Guest at e’en an Outcast’s Pillow— Essential Host, in Life’s faint, wailing Inn Later than Light thy Consciousness accost me Till it depart, conveying Mine” —Emily Dickinson “A broken opening in the wall of a bombed building, by a process of natural magic, becomes the head of havoc; the horrible head of devastation itself, brooding over the ruin that faces a society which cannot control its own destructive impulses. Also, the space becomes reversed—the opening in the wall becoming more solid than the wall itself.”—Clarence John Laughlin, photographer, on his photograph The Head in the Wall, 1959 |
CHAPTER 1
They slowly rolled along beside it, daughter pushing mother in her chair
a carving up into the air and down into the rocky soil, staring in one and then the other direction.
The wall was no metaphor. There was no transferring to another side, another meaning
No way to pass through
What the air had become: a barrier
And what about that other wall, silent owner of supplications
Her mother called out,
“Where is the end of it?”
CHAPTER 2
The daughters were making their bodies into islands, imagining the world a sea
Going under ground and becoming worms, crawling under it
A subtle routine, this imagining of nonhuman elisions, receptive shapes and continuous terrains
Like water, earth, and air, flora and fauna, nonhuman axes, bats, gazelles, or coral
As insects they could crawl under, get outside, inside, or as vines
In a vegetative ecstasy of persistence
Leaning, falling, pushing, living back
against the wall.
CHAPTER 3
They could crawl
dry up on it in the desert sun
It is no figure, no monument, it is there to be breached with prepositions, to climb
over, under
To live
despite
They sit down under the shade of it
light a smoke, a light, a smoke
under the gun
under the sun.
CHAPTER 4
The children concoct dissolution recipes
Build up and then kick down
a pretend wall.
Or lie on their backs with their heads facing opposite directions, kicking each other
breathless
Until whatever was between them fell away
On a walk, they find
signs of abandonment
some animals pace, others, resigned, slump
no water
Only war,
nor migration corridor.
An intriguing whorl protrudes
Digging they
uproot a broken chair leg mostly buried in sand
Looking up they
Throw it as high in the air as they can.
CHAPTER 5
They find
a picture album with broken hinges
filled with photographs of windows
through which various people see
events occurring on the other side
in the distance
they have
intimate and faraway
looks
and
some books
The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier
Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih
These they gave their mother
Who slides into the books like an eel
As if a book is …
… a way out
something real …
CHAPTER 6
Wedge of disruption
jutting up from the dust
an aerial track
to the sun.
In a seated position under the wall
a dry abrasion in her throat
she sees a way to
carve it.
CHAPTER 7
She makes
one cut after another
excitedly she strikes
to make the pieces fall out,
carving a head,
a face.