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Night Creek
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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215 f r o m g o u r d s e e d n i g h t c r e e k Rain-listening sluice, well washer, hurler of horse troughs against the roof, waterbody rising unnameable over the meadow-slant to burrow every secret storeroom of yellow jacket nest, dissolve the Turkish mud-dauber caves under the joists, fill the shallow pewter spoons of the horseshoe pits with ringing silence, and for one moment film the deck, soak the rug level with these insoles, unfooted and footed, and through each eyelet caress the skin arch of who sits alone reading, with now no light, the unheard transformer blown, to hum and slightly list-lift the house-bubble three inches downstream, no more, certain warning and smothered applause. The spices jostle watching from their three aristocratic rack-balconies, some wanting to flavor such a huge soup with paprika and oregano, some to just stand unopened, the cardamom, the anise seed, the dried rosemary, for there will be no delicate enhancing of taste, the while this confusion covers the first shelf, smoothing the mystical spine of Gregory over Niffari’s visionary shreds and into Sanai’s gateless garden pool, the overflow-memories immediately detaching from their fictions, where the melted cup came from, why a one-button-eyed bear sits with a snake-stick and an oddly triple-cracked budvase, how this iron skillet followed innertubes through the rapids one August afternoon, wobbling its shoulders through the boulders, and would not be sunk, foundering to some use now unrecalled, like this broken-off stalagtite compacted of slow-tears, and the second shelf with its Eskimo healing chants and Taoist drinking songs, and my mother’s college English Romantic poetry anthology underlined in red, and now my thighs suddenly peninsula 216 f r o m g o u r d s e e d toward the third, a line of Russian novels and the Machu Picchu picture book. This is how everywhere comes at once into being, sopping bookprint to an unreadable paste, with the bridge crossed quietly two miles downroad plunging past so close, an enormous swimmer made of telephone poles, flopping odd angles to the flow, a monstrously drowning dumbshow of what’s not been loved enough, the failure seen, and then there is peace in water-patches, one of them circular, balanced around my collar bone like an antique Dutch wedding costume, that because I never put it on, returns for a new rehearsal where furniture cuts loose, and endtables romp to the door, and my mouth fills with an unblinking, no-longer-thirsty rose opening its silken hallway above my forehead, the passion I swim within, a new creature slipping through the dark water, shaped like a normal breath, a trout-joy exploring what begat and will re-absorb, a slim alleluia cruising the sunk fridge, and effortless mandorla round the carpentry edges of the counter like a worker’s hand fiddling rearrangement, a faint glow of decision, parting slightly the sliding glass where morning begins its earliest spring flower pranks, the turtle-streaked music of dawn, with these lips a mere hole mouthing an invisible breast, the lure of a flooded throat when the sun comes nudging through a fine lawn of marine distinctions, its face: am fish, am drowned man, am-am-not seated on the ground like a bust of Hermes at a crossroads protruding in this taken-in and given-back water to read aloud a line of scummy leaf-bits sticky enough to adhere, while all the other runs with whoever wrote [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:43 GMT) 217 f r o m g o u r d s e e d this chair-rail of Tibetan twig-cypher: is, could, into the going will, does, are, gone, and here, and there, let remain as remains, a muck-statue of me speaking the first verse of its debris song, that has only the one,“I must stand up and see what works and what doesn’t, start cleaning, must stand and start, must, must, can’t, must . . .” and so on the mud-verbs spell around the side of the house, everything in it lonely for singing-breath. Take me with you! Naked again, and bringing more naked invitees to the hopeless expungement of wall and floor, lead us all out wherever you swim your swift enthusiasm, sleek, wivvery, sunflower seeds of...