The Forest

Andrew Mossin

We come into it, leave it, as if it had neither beginning nor ending.

—Traherne

“The images have to be contradicted.” Our mind cannot bear it. When the house is brought down and the pathways submerged. When the materials lodged there are purged of design. A paradox of initial feeling. Failing this? The garbled epitaph that rises from misbegotten directives of earlier speech.

“Language is not a consciousness of ourselves, but rather an inherence in the world.”

The body floats across: dull, nerveless, a child of whatever comes toward it.

_______

There was some truth in the assertion of fault. Rift that gave way to an activity of precipitous neglect. The leather strap lifted and applied to a boy’s bare back. A sirocco wind jostling lanterns. The preeminent and disguised faces at the door. Each in sufferance of part of the tale.

_______

I meant to carry something over, to inherit the uneasy balance of memory. Which could not define what was remembered or comprehend the signals as anything other than scrapings on the wall. Borderland opprobrium. To which no just response could be given. Marred dualities. The egotistical infrastructure that labeled what we did “labor” and called for its erasure even as the semblance of a name was put forth. The indulgences of remembrance that was neither public nor personal but apocryphal. Drawn forward in the phantom voice of a sender. A movement caught up in the anathema of disowned birth.

Feral nights dream. The signature of patrimony. Cool lairs where we took cover. Opportunistic orphan of its unnaming.

_______

A bird sought out in the wilderness. Blue latch of its throat. “I dreamt I died inside your arms. Your hair absinthe mauve about the lips. I held your hand as I went beneath the wave. A colorless fluid inflecting your breath. What terminus did the words impart. ‘Seven times the bounty of your dismayed grace.’ Foreknowledge of the aforementioned One-Who-Is. One-Who-Is-Not.”

The original precision has been lost. Wayward allotment of its relation. “All the intendedness of what we call each other.” Beautiful deceptions. Garbled interpretations.

The glamour of unearned transcendence that has marred so many previous efforts. “Anthropomorphism in tatters.” Out of earshot the drum is broken. The calendar lifted into the sky. Heartswork on the threshing floor. Your shy whistled-for self. This unmended script that harbors the intellect of another.

“The sentence is moving in every direction.”

_______

I confused your name with a platform of uniform address. Spoke tablet mater at the water’s edge. Age of the forefinger brought to rest along the arm’s vortex. Bead of sweat traced down your breast.

Atonement was buried in a cycle of flame. At the root of an olive tree, a fable of unreadable passages. When have I allowed myself to risk the necessity of their unfolding? Far from where I was I saw you emerge: visitant or communal stranger. The idiom of loss held in abeyance.

_______

“Awkward under such american skies to read this re-positioning of self and subject matter, its auto-fictional inquiry, markings in the margins of a book replete with omission. That in your hands the drama remains wholly subjective. As yet an indefinite part of contentless past. Mirroring continentless future. That what was forecast from the beginning, grape flesh and sea wave, wayward in their progression, was never more resolute than now. Distillate fragments of disowned knowledge. Until the integrity of address was lost. What did you give to arrive at its indeterminate shore? As if to conjure the presences of those who once came toward you (shadeless nights of no moon) were the same thing as to attend beneath shadows of depleted record. Your lateness that enters into the grove, muted, apart from what injured you, and makes from the remnants a mystery. Ceremonial affliction of the last-to-arrive. Morning’s suspended radiance across the eastern line. Mauve and green interchangeable in the dispersion of grass and salt. Drift and accession of another’s spirit. The body in pieces or the body cut free.”

_______

the voice is recognizable

as fragments

of a greater language,

a live and changing

face

Wherein we read again of the public love necessary to continue the journey. Its violence and unboundedness that strike at the center of what any of us might do. The question of who has been speaking turned on itself, as circumstance and measure redefine the grove of foxglove and hollyhock. The personal ethos in which the materials depict, not an idea of self, but the gamut of relations that compose experience. “A cosmology,” as you suggest. Labile instruct of the numinous mark. His “unfigured manhood,” stripped of locale or reference, only his willingness to proceed. Invocations of the arcane self. A ritual of pre-possessive encounter, forcing contact along the perimeter where “you” and “I” are helpless to do otherwise. Armed with what took us there: images of the first conduct, the residual span. To invoke the memory of its loss is to re-encounter surfaces of mouth, aureole, lip, tongue, palm. To suffer again an incompletion that is likewise the offerance of a name.

_______

Insuperable logic of the cast-off. I could not have written you otherwise. Nor viewed the momentum with which we would meet again and again in this book. A perpetual re-search that is folded by an inquiry. An injury offering accord. Sea-salt on the tongue. Betokenings of primary care. “That we are only

as we find out we are”

_______

Glyphs along the wall. You who hide among the ferns and are lost there.

. . . . incense of the tree . . . .

. . . . the thorn covered and hidden . . . .

_______

Not to have known the son who emerged. Tamarisk in the garden without water. The crown knocked from the wall. A childlike grief squandered over a lifetime.

_______

“I saw you there, desolate, not the vision of yourself but the orphan mask inside a cutout. Everything about you altered. I dreamt of the great address, house of dusk in the countryside. I dreamt of your permanence and your forsaking care. Your body lodged between the ceremonial and emblematic registers. I could do nothing for you. Your hands papery along the edges of old linen. I could do nothing. Everywhere I saw the mesmerizing signs of grief. I knelt with the women in a far corner of the room. At mid-evening I crossed myself among your elders and watched the water drawn across your brow. I ritualized the suffering and saw myself transposed by the logic of summary retrieval. A crescent leaf held beneath my tongue. The waxen effigy carried past us on a bier of straw and wire. Your inward gaze as I succumbed again to the manifestations of form. Your scarf and blouse removed so that all could see. The eagerness with which you dipped your palms into rose and jasmine. The conjured spectacle of ‘public’ when you lifted your mouth to the cool plate of leaves and took from each corner the wrapped rings of silver.”

_______

There was commerce in our desolation. A change overcome by what had instructed it. The lens through which you appeared, in old age, sympathetic yet far from paternal. An exchange of content in which the privative gave way to “a longing for completion.” Abstract and unreal: city of my birth that you understood long ago as central to the appearance of design. The divided archaic presence of it.

Images without reflection.

_______

Singly the assertion of a letter. “Just there She must enter our hearts.”

My mouth idle in its chamber. Sinister scrapes along the uppermost cavern. Burnt salt of affective emotion: your horn and silver band.

“dwarf morning-glory twined around the grass blade”

_______

I catch myself beneath it with a version of you: eyes cast to the ground in search of articles of clothing. I hear you say “O garden of my twenty-seven years.” Your hands pressed over your eyes.

_______

Nightfall between episodes. Knowing the event, could we have prevented the outcome. Knowing the outcome how may we retell the event. You wrote to me in admonishment, “Nothing so particular is refined by a language of momentous inconclusion. The role we play is secondary to what must come from elsewhere, from the very centrality of our natures.” Absorbed in the trance of it, traces outside the common speech of everyday, I saw how you had become instrument: a messenger enclosed in the cloth of summer.