thereafter
The sediment that had always sunk rushing to show itself again would no longer gather. Your very warmth the only reason to continue trudging through the brush only to find now that we had never picked up burrs nor brambles. Without a snag, scrubbed; unfettered, spun. Not even the finest of refuse, like some grainy detergent to clinging, could resist dissolution. Nothing made it past a bright moment of evanescence. Those of us who remained so attached to a furtive kiss, or to that itchy summer by the sea, could only stand glumly before this unequivocal light, and regard it as something we were utterly incapable of attaining. Yet even sentiment dragged us on toward whatever came next. The poison of remembering diluted, absorbed by the current until even the last conjurings became shimmering diffusion over the rocks and pebbles.
To live in a dappling. To dapple myriad. A moment cum irreducible threshold, when the metabolism gives out. Turning a corner and happening upon suspension, levitation, flight. Scattering my effigy, the semblance I had forged from my own phlegm and frothings, to the four winds.
I am flock now, like an archipelago of strewn clouds. I slowly wisp and thread the welkin hue as light streams through me. I have become a stitch that hems the dusk, insinuating traces and bereft of bluster, slowly no longer opaque enough to occur.
grave
What was it he was trying to scratch into his head? Why break the skin, why bruise the bone? What could possibly be worth chiseling into his very cranium?
Apparently his copious physical presence wasn’t enough of a statement. Perhaps he didn’t feel it at all. The full frontal nature of his arrival, I mean. Still, even for him, carving a sort of billboard splash into your forehead must have connoted, at least a little, a certain amount of overkill.
At the time, there were a lot of arguments going around about the choral nature of his reality. One can’t but wonder from whence such visitors had been gathered with their whispering to then be invited to intrude and become the very flesh of the juicy inner fruit of his pate. Wherein the murmur of it, wear out the mere living of it. Is the unseen conductor responsible for the odd crescendo, manifesting itself as an altercation in the cymbals? Is a tremolo across the winds to be answered by violins glissandi, to finally go off all pizzicati upon the sphere and harmonic arc of his material observatory?
Others seemed to have information about a disease that was eating away at his face. Sad mumbling taking refuge behind a sagging curtain crumbled. While this may have been true, it was surely a parallel condition, and not the cause of the renovative performance he launched upon his own dome.
He had joked that his aspiration was to keep himself in stitches for as long as possible.
It is hard to resist the impression though, that, in fact, he wished for us to read something there, for some resulting legibility. And this, it must be admitted, had not been achieved in any clear way.
He was cuffed and led away quickly, so the presence, the keeping tabs must have been in place already. Still, his semblance gave signs, in the weeks that followed, of his continuing his labors and advancing his cause in entirely private sessions within his home.
The sliver of skin peeling away from the burin might have been just an echo of remorse curling off the burr’s prick of a memory. Or was the whole thing habitual, repetitive and obsessive, unconscious and curiously pleasurable, like worrying a scab or picking at a callus?
Whatever his motivations may have been, their result was plain to see. He had managed to dig a crater into the side of his own bowling ball. Actually, they were more like chips or divots in the hard curved surface. He had, quite literally, the appearance that something was gnawing away at him.
It is not about knowing. Only halfwits pretend to know things. It would betray a ludicrous enthusiasm to go fumbling through potential motives at this point. Maybe the day was too hot. Or maybe the neighbors were being noisy. Or the time had come to change his medication. Or it could just be that he was tired of sitting on his balls all day.
Whatever the reason, one fine morning, just after breakfast, he put a wood gouge to his forehead and pressed as hard as he could. Blood began running down the side of his nose.
Sign or erasure? Further distinction or farther inconsequence? Commemoration of some loss on the most permanent bit of matter at his disposal?
Whatever the driving intention, he began moving the gouge in one direction and then another, as if describing a number or a letter.
Whether aberrant, radical, or brain-damaged, it was clear that by being the author of his own wound he had forfeited the right to be counted among the useful.
It did not matter how many times the near and dear slapped his hand away and whispered harshly, “Enough!”, he just kept at it.
It was as if he were convinced that this elaborate gash would at some point dovetail with another surface out there. That by nestling his forehead into that intuited socket that awaited him, he would finally somehow fit completely, and be able to rest.
coda
The flesh mechanisms that generated those ideas are now gone. Given wilting, withering, the falling away of that which in May bloomed so bright, where would these ideas, the pungent bouquet of subtleties this unfurled inflorescence has given forth, practically emanated, whereabouts would they, said ideas, be wont to waft? Given especially that they are no longer even these, but rather already those ideas, at arm’s length, but a tiptoe from the objective light of a weekday morning? Is civilization but a sauce to be cast out once the principal protein it so pithily enveloped has been consumed? If so, we find ourselves compelled to navigate the darkness of an out, where all that will ever remain resonates its myriad manifestations between the surging waves.
Once again, we are left with the darkness, the sifting our way between and through the persisting shades that spread and superimpose upon each other. The longer it takes to find something again in the dark the better. Finding things is grossly overrated, and anyway it is the dark itself that schools, that sharpens sensation and lightens the step. Beneath a blind vastness, the dark is cluttered with ideas. My arm might pass through two ideas to reach a third. Although history might beg to differ, most of the ideas I have run into, so to speak, have been herbivores, even when a pervasive coiling silence has exerted itself and tried to squeeze them into action.
In any case there is only one place left, off the screen, outside the image, deep into the margin, in the silencing unseen darkness, the ringing of the end note, a where distraction cannot find, and it might be worth a word or two to discover its boundary, and have the wherewithal to be a good for nothing and high ho heave what is left of the voice over that tiny sphere at the end, over and beyond that last period.
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About the Author
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
