Each thing has its own centre so that the infinite, or something close to it,
is written into every part / a pattern
So of the one guilty of these repetitions, I must ask for an impossible reply,
how many variations of you are written into a minor amount of matter?
I know not whether to tear the ground or teach my body to fly so as not to leave too brute an impression with a misdirected pace,
that veers too often and may press too strongly into the lightness of every recurring “here, I am”.
Out of you, I must make a place / now become direction
And must unlearn the code by which gravity toys with desire
the way it deceives with a natural law
that all things arrive to a point decided before the fall
There remains the task of simplifying resistance to the thoughtless ability of causing limb to overcome the metaphysical,
that a course may change in a momentary break in walking,
that a mouth may be fooled by silence as water, full and escaping
through invisible pores.
this confidence in language [for you to be]
the word, a push, a seeing
[of which being is made]
your appearance is rare /
and your possibility as heavy, as ancient, as relentless
as the urge to scream.
so it is absurd that you may not exist without
that carefully lettered [assurance]
that you must be some defined thing, and may be encompassed in these
small meanings
leave with/out word, take language with you
and I will continue to imagine a logic around what you might be
giving it [myth] so that it may hide in sound that is irretrievable and
pathetic upon utterance,
that you may take on a primitive shape in the order of lines and their necessary values, that our intersection finally to come to a place
but to keep this silence is [perhaps] a braver refusal
is to lose the symbol in the liminal sea, fundamental and terrible
and ever
these words with no writing
words with no sound
words as the unutterable idea
border
becomes the way in which the sacred is lost /
to define / an unbecoming
a promise of de personalization
un self un place / less one
place through language, otherwise void
between the physics of a body, its laws and anticipations,
and suppositions of a history
memory in bone to retract
the body exists in a silence
so that dreams of flight may come on stone wings.
: : : : :
LITAL KHAIKIN is a writer and editor currently based in Ottawa, Canada. She is a contributing editor and writer for continent. journal. She has poetry published in Berfrois, and essays published in Afterimage and REDEFINE Magazine.