a five-way out

But when I would enter the gate

Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait
For the vision to reappear.
Fata Morgana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If she walks through the door and faces the mountains, North, she will find herself staring at a mossy wall that stands twenty feet high. The smooth lip of the wall hangs not over her, but over the other side. The shades of green, yellow and brown are reminiscent of the colors in this scene: collapsed by a stream, the tiger is submerged in mud, and mushrooms have sprouted from his side.

She steps back from the narrow wall, and sits down on a soft mound of moss. She allows her face to turn toward all sides of the structure. The wall she gazed upon earlier no longer seems to be a wall, and instead appears to be the corner where two long, curved walls meet. Imagine two cupped hands with the pads of middle and fourth fingers touching. From where she sits it is dark in that corner.

She finds it strange that her mind questions whether or not that sliver of a wall was ever parallel to her body. This question in her mind raises other doubts, and while observing five different white stairways leading out of the basin in which she sits, her mind teases out five memories of the hours she spent in Oliver’s garage.
The five stairways can lead to five plans, sensations, five imagined deaths, places, five rejections, tribulations, or one memory, five times…

Contemplating the stairs, her assured uncertainty extinguishes the fear of an infinite regress. She comes upon no reasons for knowing or choosing.

She does not know and does not choose, and so, her vision dims dark and her visions grow bright.


I.
My head was at the foot of the bed and the soft mattress held my hand.
Tossed the blanket onto the bed, uncovered two cockroaches dancing.
Oliver’s breathing was quiet, slow almost like dead.
He sleeps on his side—I can’t remember how he sleeps anymore, and we woke up in the same bed every morning for two years.
The air in the garage was thick because there was so much dust, so many spores, heavy particles in the air which sat on my head, putting pressure on my eyes, and my eyes, adjusting to the dark caused my brain behind the bridge of my nose to…
I can’t remember my body but I can remember Oliver’s. His skin was a light cream and incredibly soft, with beautiful scattered moles like sunspots on that glowing, burning core. A little patch of soft golden hair on his back, and the hair on his arms. The hairs on his arms were soft and light brown.

II.
Oliver is walking into the garage with a plate and two mugs. There are six pieces of toasted bread, four faces with butter and marmite lying like a cross, and two with butter and raspberry jam. The backs of the raspberry jam pieces are getting soft with marmite. It’s heavenly. He spills some earl grey tea onto the floor, and the thirsty green carpet soaks it up. He is smirking. I am sitting on the bed in the movie theatre we’ve made. I let the movie resume its unraveling. We hear, together, this rasping incantation over an image of dry, mid-Sahara: “The gates of paradise are open to everybody… you slake lime and are chosen for this by the rich.”

III.
Woke up in the night, in the freezing, sweat stinking garage, needing to pee.
I move my unwieldy body across Oliver’s to get to the floor from the molding bed. Before my foot touches the dark green ground, I see four cockroaches galloping on the thin crusty carpet like animals on a dry field. They are so heedless; I try to wake Oliver up, but he never wakes up for me.
In the middle of the night we peed on the grass in the backyard. There is a yellow patch where Oliver aims. I never killed the grass because I moved around. To save my thighs from supporting my tired, squatting body, I peed next to the cement stairs so I could half-sit. In a half-dream, the filth did not matter. What mattered was that while we slept and were tormented by nightmares, huge cockroaches were playing on the floor not far below us.

IV.
The tiger tried to remember
seven prayers some heavy
some hard to remember
The dying magical tiger
Right before he died
looked up at the sky
The dark grey and black
sheep and goats were
making hideous noises
desperate sounds similar to
a pair of brown eyes
half white—
Too dumb to fight off the
reflection of the sky on
the surface of shiny
eyeballs.

This magical tiger, as orange
as the moss hard on the
rocks green spots orange
spots and black stripes
like the deep brown mud
waiting for the sky to
open up green like the
ground—the sky is supposed
to be the ground The
place where he sits into
an expansive light
powder like dust.

Stumbling across the path feet
falling upon rock after rock rock
upon rock
Desperate to walk on soil
on an even ground, the
tiger looked for the next
spot to lay and look at
the sky—away from the
smaller noisy animals—
This creek running fast
and little bugs carried by
traveling plants
tiger collapsed on a sharp
green and orange rock
and slid down the dark
brown mud to the edge
of the running water
the plants lay down
understanding his weight
there is something in the center
of the tiger’s paw that needs
to snap back into place

It is a sharp and painful imagery rehearsal:
the tiger lain down,
waiting for the hard sky to lift the walls around him
and for the ground to open up beneath him.

VI.
The key to the swing door is on the shelf in the southeast corner of the room. Sometimes if the door is open, you cannot see the three-legged shelf. The overhead door is the west wall. Tonight I accidentally pushed the up-and-over door button instead of flipping the light switch. The only white wall in the room started moving up, and heavy cold air was slowly drawn in. Heaps of objects shifted, and the door would not shut again. There was a sliver of air between the door and the wall up near the ceiling. It was freezing, we sealed the gap with colorful rolled up blankets and sweaters, and talked about how nice the colorful stripe of stuffing looked in a room with three green walls and white doors.


If she approaches and grasps at the recycled days and images she sees, they will vanish away. So, she will leave in many directions— through the lonely fields, through the crowded thoroughfare, to the place where she can wonder and wait for another vision, the next recitation of the world, in its infinite regress. She climbs up a set of stairs, and will climb others on her many ways back.

Salomon saith, There is no
new thing upon the earth. So
that as Plato had an imagina
tion, that all knowledge was
but remembrance; so Salomon
giveth his sentence, that all
novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII