Tuesday, April 19, 2011

ROOM FULL OF DUST

He stood still in the room full of dust.  He stood very still.  Shoulders felt like they were being scratched by the air.  The room full of dust was quietly filling with time and its nerves of lint.  Not a chance.  And yet each particle of abandonment clung to the surface of possibilities.  Possibilities buried in superficial reminders of hollow promises to oneself.

He didn't even recall what he had told himself all those years.  Books of corpulent sentences and serpentine paradox dominated the frozen spaces in brittle bookcases.  The volumes remained as messengers of the insipid.  The word had been spread throughout the room and caked into a powdery fungus.  He thought he was reminded of a passage from somewhere in that room, somewhere in his recollections:

Depending on the object and its teleological qualities, the seeds planted in the vicarious soil of lost . . .

No.  That couldn't be it.  Or perhaps it and the edge of the recollection is exactly where its uncertainty would come into sharper focus.  Perhaps . . .

. . . the vicarious soil of lost rhythms dialectically sufficient to initiate . . .

Initiate what?  This side up.  Fragile.  Contents under pressure.  Store in a cool place.  A cool place.  Frozen not metaphorically, but lowered mercury.  Lowering.  Decreasing more.  There has to be . . .

What?  Initiate the antithesis proposed by . . .

What was that fellow's name?  The one in that volume he  thought was toward the very edge on the right of the topmost shelf.  That spot for some reason reminded him of that hill he walked up.  This side up.  Fold carefully and several times in order to make a smooth tear.  Then you would have two pieces with one considerably smaller than the other.

The other and the antithesis that brings one to the next level or stage or whatever.  Would much rather reminisce  about that hill for some reason.  What was it?  The reason.  The reason for that hill.  So green.  Tall grass bending together in the wind. 

The light of an emerging image faded as the room emptied of the setting sun.  Like a cantankerous lid shutting him out as some bothersome insect.  He stood as a reprimanded and still bothersome insect.  In the room full of dust.


- Max Stoltenberg

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