Onion Songs

SATURDAY

You know you have misgivings but you cannot articulate them. Your mind is a flaming bird alighted on a sinking boat. Some days you can feel neither hands nor feet and it is your eyes and tongue desperately grabbing. This is what happens when the world finally changes, when it shakes off its hide, and everything invisible slides from its pores. You can barely catch your breath and you are so afraid if you breathe too deeply you will take in something living and then what will you do? You might attempt to blow it out of your lungs or vomit it out of your stomach but you know the aggressive desperation of the invisible, its need to hang on, so how might you expel it without it dragging some essential part of yourself along?

These are the cautionary thoughts of those living at the end of the world. These are the tales we tell ourselves as the lights begin to dim and the cold creeps down from the mountains. These are the preparations one must make when everything unseen, unheard, and once thought merely imagined finally make themselves completely known, descend from their attics, crawl out of their caves, smash their windows, transcend their closeted realms.

All week you have felt deceptively clean, your skin scrubbed, your collars ironed, your socks fresh from their packaging, your rotting breath disguised by some cancer-causing sweetener. All week you have smiled and nodded and showed your appreciation. All week you have attended to your chores. But now at the end you can hear the whispers issuing from your cells. Here at the end you can see the face of all that was turned away from you. There at the end you can smell and taste the decay in your own spinal cord.

Here is the place you have lived in most of your life, these walls this carpeting these horizontals these verticals your pants your shirt your cocoon your packaging. Here is where you huddle against the winds that scrape away everything. Here is the one warm spot derived from your own body heat. This is your pinpoint on the map of the universe.

Your bed writhes with recovered memory until you can no longer stand it. Rising up on impaled feet you stagger across floorboards oozing the debris of lifetimes, every forgotten toy and lost dime, fevered notes to self and all, the infinite divisions of trash and discarded skin, every misplaced acquisition vibrating now with the power of wasted energies.

In the rooms of your apartment, furniture floats through a porridge of dust and air before bursting into tired old flames. The photographs recording your life revolve into tunnels and doors as old lovers and family and friends whose dissolving flesh irritates your fingertips pass from the warehouses of desire into this small booth of regret where you have lived more years than you can remember. Here the phone rings day and night and either you ignore the summons or pick up the receiver on a thousand miles of empty air. Hello Hello your syllables break without releasing sound. The letters of your attempt make scratches in the jellied air, which fall to the floor where their segmented legs carry them away into the mysteries of the baseboard.

So this is what it’s come to: dead hours waiting for an exterminator at the end of time, your furniture gone to fire and everywhere you step is a worry of vermin. This is everything your parents warned you about with their very lives. You wander your empty rooms railing and shouting speeches in some language even you do not understand. You beat on the sealed door of your life until, tired of your whining and complaining, it releases you to lobbies and corridors where your fellow inmates howl at the bars. Down flight after flight the stairs fold up behind you, the rooms close to nothing and the halls telescope one inside the next until the moment you step outside, everything that once protected you is a sloppy stack of cards in a trash-pasted lane.

Despite the inexorable forces which threaten to pull you into rags and sticks, you take a moment for this glorious sun, this exquisite warmth you’ve never spared much time for, even though, finally, when memory and passion and your last hope for the attention of another human being fades away, it is this distant holy fire you will miss the most, and the unpresuming embrace it makes of everything you’re still able to see. All around you the air boils and brightly colored threads rise and fall through the texture of it as if attempting a repair. Here and in the distance the arbitrary plantings of grass and shrub, iron and concrete forms launch themselves into sky where they blast apart beneath the gaze of final perceptions. The crusty hardscape of the world withers under the countless, minute cracks of your awakening, becoming fine as powder then blowing away on the winds that raze generations.

All that is left is everything that came before you, before all that you knew and all that they knew. All that is left is the rock and the fire and the loamy decay, the powder of stone and the powder of knowledge. All that is left is the space between there and the there you will never reach. All that is left is the space owned by the invisible.

Now, at the end of your week in the world you have nothing left but the invisible to love you. You have nothing left but the sigh of the empty and this unknown world’s forgotten gaze. You have nothing left but the desperation under the tongue and the eagerness in the palm. You have nothing left but what you have no voice for, however wide you open your mouth and work the exhausted muscles of your throat.

For at last you have arrived at nothing, understand that nothing binds these threads of flesh together, that nothing holds nerve to bone or gives direction to your vanishing blood. Yours is a religion and a politics of nothing, and you find you have nothing left to say.