Organ donors

It’s a forest alright. You see trees even I see them and the undergrowths dense obtrusive swampy patches miniature in size but not malice and there are insects and leeches and a pack of dingoes an occasional leopard a shallow river a kingfisher now visible now not and it’s  an organ donation camp we will be donating our old kidneys valves an occasional heart and they even have arranged for harvesting neurons.

It was bitter there you see low income groups living in ghettos eyes set in grills and limbs masquerading as jacket hangers voices crooning tunes detached from lyrics snatched in miscarriages and then came the psychoanalysts who would teach us about anxiety about totems and a chilly river that they said flows through our nerves without us ever knowing it and that dreams are for all and winter is for those who could afford it.

Of course no one can afford winter no one can afford burial under a leaden sky dispensing wet ashes when no coal smolders anywhere in the known world yet we die of asphyxiation in this rarefied dreamworld that didn’t need any taxes be paid you see we even grew beards and shaved looking at each other for no object can describe itself until another object comes along to describe it and it’s to the tune of something Geroge Oppen once said dear old George who would chisel his way through a piece of wood and would see how the edges clash and the meanings lost in shavings resist cadence and cadence in music is about finality that’s a what a nonnative English speaker like me should know for finality is almost always about acceptance about inhabiting a dead space while the shavings fail to burn and simply rot when the affordable spring raises its head from under the snow.

Scattered in benevolence that’s what shavings are and then you obscure them with feelings with pain not realizing pain is a lonely expression that fails to touch though its concept travels from face to face in a charade ever oozing vague memories contemplating pain as such and then you enter into night picking up pieces in dark not recognizing any but picking up anyway crumbling some in eagerness.

 ‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’ George Oppen, Of Being Numerous: Section 1

Yes, I remember the ruined window and even sitting there looking at a dusty carousel broken scattered giant cogs the animals faded only the memory of their rotations clinging somewhere indeterminate in their frozen stances as if they all will come back to life if they could afford a winter but I don’t remember the old town the abandoned shacks and the earth and the salamander speaking you see the Spring obscured it all.

You see the forest and even I see it even through this confusing transliteration and a leopard returns with a rabbit in its maw dripping bold gray lines all over it was and it always is about the grace of the hunter versus the grace of the hunted hunger never figures in it and when it all ends mercy is just distant cicada drones and we are here in this organ donation camp that even has a facility for preserving empathy.