I have giraffes over my chest of drawers and there are icons looking down at me at rest. It is a coincidence of things and objects that should not belong together. It is the desire to bring the distant close, summon the absent to our present place.
The days, they race toward autumn, and my melancholy sets, these thoughts of parting and of death. He is himself impassive, participating in a process where there is no distinction made between himself and all the other things that now have found their place. It is the scraps of language that collect.
This precondition for annihilating self. I’m just a mouthpiece for these bits I’ve conjured up and glued and set to rest. I have found a different body borne by fish.
And the shabby things are now becoming precious. He will work with what he finds, an old crate for bottles of milk, almost an antique, worn but somewhat fancy, that he found at some bazaar, made of larch, and the lid, he went to the dumpster and he found some glass, little rectangular panes, a neighbor, it was a neighbor, he saw it from his window, was a man, who threw them out the night before, and miraculously they remain, sharp-edged, intact, his fingers have been bleeding. It is filled with unmailed letters, filled with pictures, filled with objects, filled with notes.
He refers to it as Shrine. He takes it out from underneath his bed, this crate, he says, a crate for milk, where I contain my life, and reads, and for music we have the sea, or is it the rhythm of the sea, the sea I splatter over news in blue and pink, and feel over my body when I try and rock myself to sleep. I kept this notebook with me when I was in Rome and then on Ponza.
What I can offer you, he says, is the memory of church I had as a boy. What I can offer you is something that right now does not exist. He remembers the church of his childhood as a special place where care was given to make a beautiful world.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
