I cannot say what was or was not of things I saw then, what fish were real, or where it mattered. I cannot make sense of pronouns, of he, or if it’s the same he mentioned somewhere else, or, again, in a moment.
These things are all secondary to this: flight is a built-in logic.
Everything we say grows a body and chooses a side.
To him I would say, were he an animal, lay your head here. capitalize nothing.
*
Carrion. Or the ways land use isn’t.
And what I hear next comes from a mouth without teeth, the body of a woman with the head of the fish he drew, again and again, on the concrete walls of the emptied pool, when he gestured, sit by my side. Come to the small place where we need nothing.
*
A wide white room.
A man says : When the whale threw its body out of the planet’s deepest belly, I watched the harpoon slide between its ribs and part red tide.
And it must have been like a flag, that wash against white sky. Or the shape of a continent splitting under its own impossible weight, the agony of borderlands, or a single scarlet wing, ruined.
*
Benefit.
In front of him, a different current- the collective lean of faces anxious to be a part of the moment where art reaches a hand to dead whale’s forehead. We bid to make gesture, at prices lower than a piece of a body fetches on a market gone black.
We are all wearing sweatshirts, bought in different stores, manufactured in the same cities, who burn the factory oil that the whales leave heavy in the brine.
Water was here, where electricity fills things up, in yellow glow we all listen, and what we hear speaks volumes: nothing. He is forgotten as soon as he is done.
*
But in some intangible way, we all feel it: loss, breathing from behind the frames and hot white lighting. None of it can stop the sling of the weapon from trigger to gut, massive body of salt and tendon, dead, brushstroke after brushstroke.
Should we be men, let us throw our bodies between blade and belly. Let us burn the art to the ground. If only for the fuel to get there.
