A Convergence Of Birds (12 page)

Navigated by songbird

Whose droppings streak the air

Reminiscent for us of a comet’s tail

The result of yesterday’s path-strewn bird crumbs

5.

Occupants of the Etrangers

Exalted chanters with a self-contained view

Small white frame

Moon

Sustained patterns of meaning

Spindly-armed shadows stretch through lace curtains

Historians of the mind’s voyage

As with other repressions, a vestige of the animal within

Seamless continuum, therefore the bordertown Nostalgia

Her liquid limbs, she interior

To the melody alone

Unraveled eveners

Foaming grottoes & feathered

Lures — yearnings of detachment

Symbolized and effected

Travelogue of a faun’s dream

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED {HOTEL}

1952-54

8.5 x 4.25 x 2.5 in.

mixed media box construction

Dale Peck

YOU WONDERED WHY he chose to build something like this. Before that, actually, you wondered why he chose to build it here. Was build the right word? Perhaps construct would have been better, or situate; but still, why did he make his home here? When you got off the train you wrapped your scarf around your throat. Yes, you told yourself, double-checking J.’s directions, you’d gotten off at the right place. A few streetlights stabbed at the darkness, casting long shadows on the buildings that surrounded you. Tall buildings, emptied tenements with crumbling cinderblocks filling in their windows. The rain-washed remains of wheat-pasted posters filled in those boxes with strange stories involving cigarettes and alcohol and coffee and birds, and the glass that had once filled the same holes crunched beneath your feet. You told yourself you’d walked through the looking-glass, but when you chuckled aloud at your attempt at a joke the sound dissipated into the abandoned evening and you shivered a little, turned up your collar, thrust your hands in your pockets and started walking. Three children played inside the glowing cone cast by a corner streetlight. Shadows made their clothes—was that velvet? lace?—look like some kind of antique costume, and the white marbles they rolled across the sidewalk seemed to be elongated white spheres that wobbled erratically when flicked by finger or thumb. Seeing you, the trio grew silent and stared as you passed, recognizing you as the stranger you were; when you were ten paces beyond them the clicks of their egg-shaped marbles against each other signaled their return to the game. Still later, there was a low voiceless voice from a recess in a building, Hey, yo, check it out, you heard, and when you didn’t respond to the voice you heard a wheezing laugh and the brief scrape of a boot across the glass-strewn sidewalk. Two coins bounced out of the black behind you, and when you stopped to pick them up your foot caught in a fissure in the sidewalk; a glow appeared, pulsed, then faded away. You jerked your foot free, dropped the coins in your pocket, and jogged to the next streetlight, where you read J.’s instructions again. When you finally found his building, you paused for a moment. A newspaper blew past you, screaming fire and famine, and then it was gone. J.’s building, seven stories tall, was another tenement. The windows of its first six floors were filled with cinderblocks, those on the top floor with glass and darkness. The lock grudgingly received the key you slid from his envelope, and then the metal door opened silently. The light inside, as out, was sparse, and every ten steps your shadow stretched in front of you, longer and fainter, until it was gone for another ten steps and then reappeared. The elevator shaft, you’d learned from his letter, lay at the end of the hallway. The door stood already open—only one elevator, and it was on the buildings ground floor. You rode in silence to the seventh floor, leaning against the side of the box, smelling, faintly, wood. The paint, you noticed then, had been stripped from the elevator car’s walls, and in the thin light inside the car the residue of color could have been maroon or simply brown. You pressed your nose against the cool wood and inhaled deeply. Pine, you thought. Cedar. Certainly it was neither of those, but since you didn’t know the scent of any other wood from memory you had to generalize from your experience, and when the elevator door opened at the seventh floor you inhaled once more before leaving. Does rosewood smell like roses? Seventy feet above the ground (there, you told yourself, that is a fact, that is indisputable—but then it occurred to you that the building might have a basement) you retraveled the hallway which had led you from the street. Almost at its end—a paned window whose glass had been covered in paper—you came to a door, 701, his door, J.’s, and it was ajar. You pushed then, pushed it slowly because an unlocked door seemed to you an odd thing. “J.?” you called; but the only answer was your echoed voice: Jay, Jay. Inside, at last, light. Bright but not overpowering, soft but still odd. The light shone from under the couch, behind an empty vase, its glow reminiscent of the sun’s after it’s slipped below the horizon. The effect was of sourcelessness and you took in everything it illuminated in that long narrow room: the earthy seams of the wooden floor, a strip of green carpet; the couches and chairs upholstered in fabric the color and texture of cattails; the bare brownish walls; the blue ceiling. The room tried for an effect, you weren’t sure what, nor if it succeeded, but as you walked its length you were reminded of a phrase from one of J.’s letters, the world is just a box, and you traveled the length of the room, at one point catching the tip of your shoe on the carpet’s edge and nearly falling. Down there (where he told you it would) the door to J.’s bedroom waited, closed. J., you thought, J. must be in there. Opening it, you immediately slipped on the sand that covered the floor. Nearly an inch deep, the dry grains emerged from under the desk, the dresser, the two night tables, the bed, as though the sand, like the leafy shag in the living room, were just another carpet. J. wasn’t in the neat room. On his desk, though, you saw a tiny box made of wire mesh, a little wider than your hand, half as deep, crammed with paper. The sand crunched under your feet as you crossed the room; even before you reached the box you recognized the paper as the letters you had returned to him at his request, the many letters that had become his epistle, the epistle that became his parable, the parable that became, finally, his story. (The words are J.’s, and appear frequently in that thing. But if it is a story, it’s a story without dialogue; you must imagine what’s being said.) Only the first letter remained in its envelope; the rest were loose in the chest. You knew from having read and reread them all many times that two hundred and ninety-seven pages resided there, and you knew also, without taking the very first letter from its yellowed envelope, what its first line reads: It’s not enough, it’s never enough, merely to understand. It’s not enough, it’s never enough. He wrote it twice: he wanted you to understand him. Quickly you placed the first letter in your overcoat pocket. Its presence noisily disturbed the two coins you’d forgotten about, and you noticed then that you were still bundled for outside. You loosened the coat’s belt, undid the buttons, unwrapped your scarf. Leaving the letter with directions to J.’s house in your coat, you moved the older letter and the coins to your pants pocket, then took off the coat and scarf and laid them across the smooth green spread that covered J.’s bed. A sound, like wind, came from beyond the second door, which stood outlined in light at the far end of the room. You ignored the wind—you didn’t understand its language yet—and instead allowed yourself to wonder once again why J. chose to create an apartment like this. But that question, besides being unanswerable, raised so many other questions that all you decided to go to the second door after all, a little quickly even, you trotted to the door and pushed through it and tripped over a sand drift and your falling weight sends you crashing into a blinding flash of sunlight. You’re blind for a long time, laying there with sand in your mouth, hands over your eyes. Sweat trickles from beneath your pressed-together fingers before you take them away. Standing up, looking around you, you lick your fingers dry. A desert lies beyond J.’s second door, a vast desert, so large that the sand curves up at the horizon and seems to close over itself like the reflected lid of a casket lined with golden cloth. But your first step into this desert lands not on sand but on a gray cinderblock, and then, as you watch, the stirring wind uncovers a serpentine cement path stretching into the desert. Can you walk its length? You don’t know. You notice the clothes you chose for this meeting: your pants, whose dark delicate fabric has been ripped by your fall; your shirt; a pair of thin black leather loafers through which you already feel the path’s heat as you step, and step again, and step again. Your clothes were ill-suited for the winter you started out in but they’re even more out of place here; still, you ignore that, and instead you concentrate on placing one foot in front of another on the path and you tell yourself that what you are doing is walking. You are walking through the desert that lies beyond J.’s door, and somewhere in your mind there is the tacit understanding that it is a finite desert because J. lived in an area dense with buildings, so sooner or later you should hit another one. But because you left J.’s instructions in your coat which remains on his bed you’re not sure. J. You turn to see how far you’ve walked from his room. Then you start to run. When you’ve run a long time without seeing anything but sand and the wasted hulls of plants and here and there huge corks the size of buoys, as if the casks they’d once stoppered had been the size of barrels, you notice that the path under your feet has begun booming hollowly with each footfall. The corks and the plants speak of some past gardener’s efforts, but where, you wonder, is the gardener, where did he get his water? But there’s nothing you can do about that, so you keep running on the hollow path until eventually the desert slopes away beneath your feet, gradually, not suddenly, it forms a ravine, a pit almost, whose far side is so steep and slippery with sand that you fall twice as you scale it, first time ripping your right pant leg, second time skinning your left elbow. Over the hill is still the desert, but not only the desert. There, directly before you, though several steps away, stands a tree. The path takes you almost to it, then veers sharply to the left. Though it’s right there, you can’t make out any of its feathers. Features, you mean, but feathers seems an understandable slip, because much of the tree is obscured by a downy layer of white leaves that are long and tapered and folded over lengthwise, like the feathers on the ruff of a crested cockatoo or the wings of a paper airplane. No, no, that’s too much: there is nothing about this tree except itself and the words printed on each leaf which move about too quickly for you to read, and you are afraid to touch it, to grab a feather and hold it still so you can focus on its message. Instead you circle it, and a quarter of the way around the tree your foot accidentally leaves the path for the first time. The sand pulls softly on your foot; it’s hot, but cooler than the reflected heat of the cement. It’s scratchy though, inside your shoes, and you take them off. Three steps have you directly under the tree. Those white leaves cast no shade, no shadows. The trunk rises from the ground in a single column (there is that flare at the bottom; for a moment you see inside yourself, into your own darkness, roots reaching underground, connecting with miles of soil below the sand, with water too, and other trees). The trunk gives way to three branches which twist about each other once before going their separate ways. Did you notice that the bark is pearly white? Like ash, you think, or aspen, or perhaps a very young elm. Again you’re limited by your experience; this tree is neither ash nor aspen nor elm, nor is it like them, but your experience, your memory, is all you have to go on. The three primary branches each give way to three more branches and these to three more. You go through and count them all again to make sure you haven’t misread: yes, there are three and three and three each, but the effect isn’t of some dull masonry-like order because the secondary and tertiary branches take their time appearing and don’t rush anywhere, coiling slowly out and about before digressing, finally, into three more branches each. It’s from these final branches that the willowy white-leaved lines hang. But not just hang, you notice, for they swirl around each other in pairs and triples and more, loop back to curl around the larger branches, or hang loosely in the air. But this is all you can understand without touching the tree; this is all you can see. You try to read the words on the leaves again, but you can’t. The leaves are too far away and twist out of your vision, and yet you know they are words; you just don’t know what they say. You sniff, smelling for a floral or a woody scent; there is none. You cock your ears, listening for a rustle of leaves in the wind that might tell you something; but there is neither wind nor words, except for those printed on the leaves, which you could read if you pulled a branch closer to you. You reach out a hand, then pull it back, then take several steps backward, your feet digging in the loose sand. The tree remains, only three or four times taller than you, balanced like a black and white fountain on a slender column. From such a tree you would not be surprised if a serpent descended to speak to you in its seductive whisper, or if a parrot perched among its branches to riddle you with repeated words. Some thought like this is in your head anyway, and even as it bats around your brain the tree shudders once, twice, a third time, and then all of its leaves fall from it in a body, into a body: the leaves are assuming some kind of shape, but before they can coalesce into some new creature to menace you, you turn and run again, your bare feet burning with every step, your head hanging, your tongue dry and swollen in your mouth, your eyes on the sun-baked earth which booms hollowly with each footfall, and creaks as well, and threatens to crack beneath your weight. You can feel blisters form on your feet, feel also the skin on the back of your neck burn in the harsh light. When you scratch it, the skin flakes away in white scales like the leaves falling—no, you remind yourself. Like skin. Simply skin. Sunburned skin flaking away under scratching fingers. Watching the flakes drift to the ground, you stub your toe on a step. You look back and see that the ground you trod has collapsed in on itself and the resulting chasm is sucking up all the hot light from the desert. Then you turn and see a tall staircase, not immensely tall but a good deal taller than you, running up the side of a high wall. You can’t see the top landing actually, because a lamp hanging from a pole stuck in the wall snaps on in the falling light, burning so brightly that it blinds you and again you close your eyes. You reach out with your left hand and remember, as the loosely formed scab splits, your skinned elbow. With a wince you grab the banister; eyes closed, you take a step, and then
another, and then another. You keep your eyes closed until the lamp’s heat is behind you. When you open them the glare is gone; the earth has consumed the excess light like a sunset, restoring harmony, and the grassy plain stretching out before you has only a naked man to interrupt its surface. Because you notice that he’s naked, the first part of him you see is his cock, soft and white against the bottom part of his belly. He’s hairless, you notice then, except for his head, covered in bleach-white strands which mix with the shadowy grass he’s laid in. His eyes are open and he’s not breathing. Is this, finally, J.? It might as well be. Is he dead? What does that mean? You find in your pocket the coins you found a long time ago and take them out. A bigger one, a smaller one. (The adjectives are comparative, I know, but they’re all we have to go on here. Is the one big as coins go, the other small? You don’t know.) Using the edge of the coins, you push the man’s eyelids closed. His eyeballs recede in their sockets under the pressure. First the bigger coin, then the smaller; with that one you can’t help but touch his skin. It’s warm, porous; there’s sweat on your finger and his skin seems to absorb it. Then, his eyes closed and held shut by the coins, you look at him again. But what is there to see that you haven’t seen before? No, looking at him isn’t enough, and suddenly, without thinking, you run your hand over his box, his body you mean, you let your fingers trail down the smooth expanse of his stomach, flicking aside the cock when you get there and traveling down his right leg. The skin at his knee is no harder than the rest of his skin, as though he’s worn clothes all his life, never had occasion to cut his knees on a gritty road after falling, never stood too long on bare cement. He’s so warm, almost hot! Though the body itself invites interpretation, you can find no answer to your question: what happened to this man? You can find no answer to any of your questions, but everything, you are forced to admit, has made its own strange sense. Everything was as J. said it would be in his directions, or at least as far as you followed them. The progression from one step to the next has been clear and logical, and if this final destination seems at an unexpectedly great remove from your journey’s starting point—if indeed this man is your destination—well, you still don’t feel lost. Confused, maybe, and tired. God, you’re exhausted, as if you and not J. have gone to all this effort to stuff the world into a box. You step back suddenly; the smaller coin has proved too light to hold the man’s eye closed and his right lid snaps open, tossing the coin in the grass where it disappears, but even as you step back you think maybe it was you. Maybe you put everything there; maybe you threw it away. The man still doesn’t move though, still doesn’t breathe, but you take another step back, as much to escape the sight of the silver coin as the gaze of his single open eye. Understand something quickly: he’s not looking at you, and even if he were, his vision alone can’t affect you. Do you understand that? You must, because the wind is blowing now and licking at your ears. You feel it tell you goodbye; is it, perhaps, speaking for the man, the man you call J., who rolls now, rolls over in the wind? He rolls once, then again, and then again, taking with him the strip of grass that he passes over. It grows larger and larger as he blow-rolls away from you and you look at it and think, inside that core of earth and grass is a man you have touched with your hand. You look at your hand, spread the fingers, see between them the pale glint of water. Where the man and the grass were, there is now a long dark strip of clear water. You have choices again: you can go to that water, or go instead to that bowl there, a wide, circular, nearly flat basin enameled blue and painted with a black pattern (things just appear in this world, you’ve noticed that; given time, anything might happen). The basin is filled with water too. You could go to it, drink from it like a horse, clearing it of silt with one breath, sucking in water with the next, or you could raise its awkward shape to your lips and drink sloppily, spilling water all over your chafed skin. Or you could remove your clothes like you’re doing now and—you’re way ahead of me, you’re diving into the river created by the man’s rolling body. (You don’t see the one drop of water from your splash that makes ripples in the painted basin, but that’s okay: you understand enough already.) You wonder briefly why you brought J.’s letter all this way only to abandon it in his closet, but that thought is interrupted, then erased, by the prickly sensation of water mixing with blood in your elbow. You grab and turn the handle at the bottom of the spring—pool? river? the difference between words is enormous, but inconsequential as well—and then you’re washed in a flood onto J.’s bed, and after the roar of rushing water subsides you hear a coin plink once, twice, and then a third time on a floor washed clean of sand, and then the feathers start falling. Thousands of them, like warm flakes of snow, sticking to your wet skin and giving you not wings but… what? Perhaps J. will know the word you need. Perhaps it’s not a word you’re looking for (and you close your eyes then, lest you see them written on the feathers, on your body). It’s as if you’ve looked all the way through J.’s world to a mirror at the back of it, a mirror in which you are surprised to find yourself, and you suddenly understand that though you can go left or right in this world you can’t go wrong. You can go forward or back but you can’t leave anything behind. You think then that each new thing that’s appeared here has been an admission that apocalypse exists even as it was staved off a little longer. Esoteric creation is just a parody of annihilation, a joke at death’s expense, and when you finally see that J.’s included you in that frame your choices seem neither limited nor, more to the point, fraught with something so limiting as meaning. New words come to you, words like connection, exclusion, relationship; the word object serves only as a reminder of the world’s flux, and all you can do, really, is wait. So: wait. For J.’s appearance, or his continued absence, or some other miracle. Because waiting, after all, is just a way of letting the world come to you.