Contiguity
It’s winter.
Schopenhauer describes how during this cold season
porcupines nestle together
to find warmth
only to experience
the pain of one another’s
quills.
The dilemma presupposes
an optimal distance
and so the animals move
back and forth
in search
of a bearable closeness.
*
I didn’t know
at certain times in the Arctic
there is no horizon,
nothing to separate
earth from sky.
You didn’t tell me.
*
I am only wanting
to reconcile (inside my skin),
to arrest the tissue
of language. (Oh I know this desire will return to haunt me).
One of these days
one of these I’s
will spy
a well-lit street sign
and reclaim the throat.
*.
The weather hardly matters.
What matters is this:
a morning is no longer
a missing, my skin
no longer subject
to spines.
Last night I saw a cat in my sleep. The dream book urges caution, declares cats to be gentle when they want to be. Oh dream, you are beyond late to this party. Perhaps my unconscious was biding its time, recognising my inclination to disregard detail that refused to sit comfortably inside my carefully constructed story.
How do I say I am culling a residual
that is alive in me?
How do I say I am mapping
an incessant egress
as I stare at the coffee
sand acrylic canvas
to remind myself
what materiality is made of?
And if I say I do,
how do I?
*
In the bottle green library, I run
my fingertips along the spines
of books that have been touched
by more hands than will ever touch me.
Desire nascent beneath the crust.
Inside the sealed glass of my body
the red line of mercury once more poised
to rise, to ground
the circularity.
The smallest shift speaks eloquently.
See the variety of blues the sky expresses
any leased day.
Look. Just look.
*
A single photograph doesn’t speak
like a sequence. Resonance
has its own mouth, its own tongue.
No spots of time rest in the accretion.
The surface of memory effaced,
how the pumice grates hard skin.
Only the softness remains now:
early spring,
the first runnel reacquainting
itself with the fissure,
ready
to fill it in.
Here now is where articulation begins.
*
Biography
Eimear Laffan, Tipperary born, lives and writes in the mountains of British Columbia where it is, of course, snowing.