The Visible World by Jorie Graham

The Visible World

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface

                                                                 breaks

into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.

If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,

I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender

maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.

Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .

Frames of reference moving . . .

The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:

bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged

                                                                 and rippling

mosses. What heat is this in me

that would thaw time, making bits of instance

                                                                   overlap

shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through

                                                                         this culture

slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,

                                                                     opportunities

taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I

                                                     break it apart without

crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled

                                                                           airy loambits,

and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot

                                                                            in . . .

Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.

Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now

                                                       as on this patch

of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out

                                                                               of

sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what

                                                                     would it

take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will

                                                                         insist on

making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this

                                                                          shovelful

and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single

                                                                     clots

in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-

                                                                hinge it

from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can

                                                             eventually

abstract it. Do you wish to?

Disentangled, it grows very very clear.

Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay

hardens and then yields, crumbs.

I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed

                                                   hallucination,

mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-

                                           locking,

will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous

                                                                            veil of

echoes and muddy nostalgias will

be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me

                                                                            how large I

am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press

                                                                         their slowest

electricity. . . . What speed is it at?

What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now

                                                                                 and just begins

to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the

                                                                              dark oaks,

are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for

                                                                                         a moment

on them alone in the small wood.

White hands in the black-green glade,

opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots

                                                                                        of the moss

apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white

                                                        in these greens—

make your revolution in the invisible temple,

make your temple in the invisible

revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming

                                                            for this instant longer

like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall

                                      whispering oaks . . .

Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse

                                                               has not four

legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence

because there is no time”—and since

at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands

serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated

                                                                           fates

—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—

my hands are living in myriad manifestations

                                                       of light. . . .

“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”

“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”

“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .

Oh enslavement, will you take these hands

                                       and hold them in

for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny

                                                                      golden hands

pushed, up to the wrists,

into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light

                                                                     and airy star—

I put the seed in. The beam moves on.