Image (Five friends writing in a room)
A room makes room
for its inhabitants.
Questions that word: inhabitants.
Possessors of the room and its lung.
Its lung being the breath
that fills it—that keeps it being filled by things
like mud or brick or slime.
And one of the five bodies—if you’re counting just five bodies—sits on a couch now.
The couch—if you count the couch—makes six bodies.
The rug is seven.
The horse in the corner—yes, there is a horse in the corner—can only rock with the weight of body one or three or five, but it is body eight.
Its body feels a constant warmth from body nine, the flames; a proximity to fire that fills the room with mud, and brick, and slime.
The bodies are warm and touch warm, though they don’t choose to do so.
They touch warm because warm touches them; comingles in the air that fills—or keeps the room from being filled—with the parts of hands that feel things.
The parts of shoulders that touch the fabric of the clothes; that touches air; that touches flame; that touches warm; that is or isn’t body ten or twelve or twenty.
Do we become one unified voice?
After all, these are the outermost times.
The people left were breath, or were they
nothing more than breath?
Were we stranded in ourselves or were we birds asleep on shore?
We ingrew on each other; this is such a troublous walk.
This is such a troublous walk, and yet I spend my time in stammer.
Like a crane or strand-bird, wading; like
a sanderling on shore.
Who shakes the droplets quickly
through a crooking of its form.
Who leaves and who leaves blooming — ( I said this to you once
as you lingered in the doorway for —
and how to know — the last —
was it bastion? Were our suppers? Are they
ever not the last ones?)
I synonymize myself with you, a process
known as “dying.”
“The outermost” you
told me; we’re on the verge, or we are verged.
On two questions from Rilke
i. Does the infinite space we dissolve into taste of us then?
And if you tasted were there tablets
of a truth in that?
Were the rain—
those liquid stones—once hidden
in a cloud, dissolved; or solved; or
uninvolved in our exchange?
I
extended like a sparrow from a bow;
like an arrow nurseried in its wings,
you nest.
The sparrow is browned
with its gratitude; you are either
crumb or bread.
And are not two sparrows “sold for a
farthing?”
Is not a none of me a one
of me no more? I
was carried by words like a hearse
to its winter. Like a verse rehears’d
its grave.
ii. But who would dare to exist just for that?
Who would dare to exist? Or claim
existence as a choice?
I breathe
and therefore tremble. I wake up
and I move.
The cat looks at me for his morning, and we start the day in bed.
The cat looks to me as an evening, so we end the day in bed.
But what’s evened as the day goes
on? We ended
not the same.
I breathed a lot. I walked around.
The cat accomplished play.
Did we
dissolve into our living? Or were we
ate like bread?
Did we eat our breath?
Our solitudes? Did we “exist” the air?
I exist for your breath which comes out as giving / you exist for my breath which comes out as prayer.