Involuntary Beginnings

84 Involuntary Beginnings Richard Jackson I have imagined you beginning this by candlelight, so I have let the rain scribble itself across your window, written how your flesh seems to breathe like the petals of a flower, how my fingers trace the shallow pockets behind your knees, because, in truth, these lines could lead us anywhere. If an abandoned wind collects in the trees where an owl seems reluctant to fly, I can already imagine the path he’ll take, imagine the mole trying desperately to reach its burrow. In truth, I haven’t decided yet if he will retreat to his own nest in time or be lifted into another world. This morning, while the turtle retreated into its shell as my car approached, I imagined a dark world where the stars clamor to be inside us. Whatever we invent becomes the history we have to live. In truth, it takes only a handful of history’s shadows to commandeer our dreams. It takes a famine of the heart to empty the streets of our words. It takes an imaginary terror to rid ourselves of imagination. That’s what Dusan said, reciting the story of an ancient bell buried beneath Lake Bled which only a blameless man can raise to rewrite the world. But I can’t imagine a hero for his story. I can connect the bell to the mole’s nest, to the room, to the turtle shell, but I haven’t invented a way to raise it, haven’t invented a way to bring you closer. It is our incomplete stories that turn on us. Wherever these lines began, there must have been a hidden image that surfaced, perhaps, in the story of the mole or of Dusan’s bell that leads now beyond the candlelit window to the story of Luma Sinai, raped countless times by soldiers, then disfigured into incontinence in the Congo where men are forced to rape their mothers or daughters, by one rebel group or another, where women are carried off as slaves and forced to eat the flesh and 85 Richard Jackson excrement of their murdered husbands. In imagining that I remember why Dusan said most of our genes originated in viruses, and I wanted to hide beneath his lake. In truth, I could have ignored that story and turned your attention to the turtle and how it needs to begin again each time it raises its head to distant stars. In truth, I have imagined that the turtle stands for you, collecting pieces of a shattered sky, shaping a shell filled with constellations no one has yet discovered, for it is the turtle, as legend has it, that carries the earth on its back. In truth, I know it does no good to lay these words down among the dead, it does no good to begin again. The moon starves itself over the city sky. The forest loses itself in forest. What we love when we love is time, and what love fears is its loss. So this is why I have written that it is you who notices how the candle flame always points upward as if it were trying to escape the earth, why I have imagined it is you who says that the stars tapping the window are insects set suddenly free, a dream I would like to invent for Luma Sinai among all her broken syllables of silence. In truth, one love can barely burrow through all this darkness. But this is why I imagine it is you for whom the bell at the bottom of the lake sways its silent song, you, without whom any of these beginnings would be unthinkable, would be, in the end, intolerable. ...