mind

There was a time when, sitting in a parking lot, I could make the parked car in front of me dematerialize. Could drive straight through it, if I wanted to. That was an unwashed time, birdcalls trapped in drawers, matching sets of months when a face could never move a face again. Dematerializing the parked car didn't take faith, it just took thinking about advancing in a particular calm, fierce way. A passing-through that was a dispensing with storytelling apparatus: focus on the object then harbor it no more and move unencumbered through reverie-made space. I could drive through the thing if I really wanted to. A fish might swim under a continent, a bird thread flight through a root system. I never test-drove the knowledge, but not for lack of confidence. Whatever sky there was. Whatever sky there was was. Whatever sky there was was flinched with chainsaw synapses. A while ago I taught in a top floor, small room full of left-handed desks. My students and I all leaned funny on our left elbows when we talked about "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Perhaps I have always been of three minds. I guess I never drove through the parked car because somehow I knew, in passing through, it would hurt somebody, but I couldn't figure out who.