A Miniature and an Origami

120 LISA ISAACSON A MINIATURE AND AN ORIGAMI I determined, God willing, to start off myself when it was day. —The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India Plans change. One calls off an advisor— And pursues a rebellious son oneself. An emperor of India found and chained one such son, and sewed two bad influences into animal skins, so as to suffocate but to humiliate also. The son lived and paid respects daily to his father. From the cluttered court several miniaturists recorded beside this brutality an occasion of a traveller’s homecoming attended by a blue horse, a Jesuit plainly black robed, and an elephant’s bejeweled mass. Quiz: what is the form? A miniature, across two pages of a book. What is the function? To record in one’s own hand. One day the traveler returned home. On a plane with all of its recording devices I dwindle to my body and insert my thinking into a small screen with my ears stoppered up. Clouds marble, respiration Becomes swollen shapes on the plane, lord, on margins of a church. 121 Sundays, Of fled eternities, origamis Of exact breath, folded, fluttering Tipped by scratches of air, into branches strung Up and bare above Loose unused clotheslines. Piles of those nerves of birds. A prayer was something a weird woman once Said, like, “would you like one of these origami birds” in a sequence of omissions. All the meaningless naming that comes between One called Reigned and one called Followed forever, What it is You cannot pick it up by its ends, nor by the middle with a stick. Always: There has been so much spending into human holes, All the holes obey the eyes then 02 deprived I sent out on every side . . . Withheld by nothing and by no one ...