Harvest
Seurat
oil on canvas, date
Rural France
The fluids get you in trouble. When life demands attention, you think about how many hours you spent answering the sky when sky tied you down and sat on you. Flood is an easier way to talk about it, but flood doesn’t say all you need to say. You could look everywhere and not find it because it’s here, just here, and has no interest in the future. There’s something you want at the edge of the sack it’s all kept in, twigs and sticks poking and pointing and wanting out. You know you want it, but you don’t understand why, except in the same way you know how a snail will move away from you if you get close enough and wait forever.
Have you never heard of the eloquent digestion of a goat, its rare vulnerability attributed to angelic illness dancing across the forgetful brow of Spring’s horizon? Or the clovers’ intentions, candid with pollen? Soon enough, your sack will be empty, and when you’re dead, the violence of more life won’t attack, but the rain there still spills far beyond human evidence.
Have you noticed the way the landscape sleeps flat and busy and not so far away as you might have thought in daylight, and then the day gave something it had been saving to the next night and went away? Have you noticed bodies like adjacent meadows?
The only thing nothing emptier than a vacant bowl is an unused road. (If you live in darkness, you don’t have to close your eyes.) The farmer’s black cat might seem an imperious hitchhiker, but she won’t interrupt the dice of the small assassins diagramming the plan to overthrow the government unless she suspects them of becoming prey. No, they’re children, playing tic tac toe, which might be the same thing in their world.
When your thoughts turn darker, and the clouded sky seems farther away, so that you can’t see the moon throwing around a beautiful second-hand brilliance, the drunk lifts a finger to his lips to say that he’s not going to say what he’s already said. Only one disguise is necessary, and it works best if you don’t know that it’s silence. If only we didn’t have to watch our higher purpose prancing about at the party getting higher. Who are we to question anyone’s intent? We come to the invisible table with a private hunger.
It’s not the color made by dots that excites, but the color filled with holes. The lights are resting. You can smell them breathing in. This too is fluid and holds the spaces between.
Rich Ives has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Thin Air Creative Nonfiction Award. His books include Light from a Small Brown Bird (Bitter Oleander Press--poetry), Sharpen (The Newer York—fiction chapbook), The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books—stories), Old Man Walking Home After Dark (Cyberwit--poetry), Dubious Inquiries into Magnificent Inadequacies (Cyberwit--poetry), A Servant’s Map of the Body (Cyberwit—stories), Incomprehensibly Well-adjusted Missing Persons of Interest (Cyberwit—stories), and Tunneling to the Moon (Silenced Press--stories).