Future Ship

Future Ship

19 Future Ship The deeper we move into the future, the more we disappear into the past, that ghost ship manned by family and friends, whole neighborhoods, villages, vast cities or hunks of them like waxen combs broken off and taken in, their human cargo thriving, who inhabit now the body’s cells, its nerveways and staterooms, open decks, catwalks, a grand ballroom filled with light slipping softly past the farthest capes. ~ ~ ~ Blink the face of Jack Harrington, lean, moronic, eight years old, leers at me, wiry hair, loud hoarse voice—like someone accustomed to yelling—his flesh already pitted, already old, dressed in bargain-basement rags, chicken-breasted torso splayed with ribs. Blink Nancy Bergen, pale face sown with freckles, green eyes, red hair swept backward in a ponytail blooms in frosty light, as her breath bloomed, once, in the scintillant air of morning. ~ ~ ~ The way out is the way in, as if the whole project of living were to gather light that leaps off the surface of the world to scorch its image on the soul— that cave we crawl into after millennia, inscribed with all we’ve ever witnessed, all we’ve known. Blink again, the solemn face of a teacher hovers over my desk where i labor sweating answers on the thin blue staves of a test book open to a blank page in nineteen fifty nine. ~ ~ ~ 20 is it true that we remember everything that ever happened to us—every gesture, every act, each person and the words they spoke, the landscape of a certain country, or a state, how our bodies felt when we were twelve?That summer i fell in love and my limbs glowed. one morning i woke in snow and the world seemed dirty and closed, a secret i might never crack. is it true the mind is endless, a lifetime lodged forever in its folds? ~ ~ ~ Someone’s weeping in the middle of the night.The light’s on. i rouse myself from sleep to find my mother sitting on a chair inside my room. Her sister’s dead, lost in a car crash at the other end of the country. The call came in, incomprehensible, late. Go back to sleep, she says, and i do. But not before a woman i hardly knew enters my head, lies with me an hour in the dark, becomes part of my life at the end of hers. i feel her stretch and settle in, bury herself in the dark continent of my brain. ~ ~ ~ Stand on this cape—it’s the last one, the one that juts out into fathomless night. out there a life passes, smoothly cleaving waves, all its gangways blazing. The dead fill every window, and the not-forgotten throng high decks, immutable, waving their arms. Blink there’s garyWoodman, still coughing, lungs withered by a childhood disease. Blink, Mandy Strawbridge bares her teeth, skin so luminous and perfect she can never die. ...