Sky Saw (16 page)

Billions

Edges

Ages

Around each sound the world went on

This had happened many times before and would and would and would again

Floors and floors of doors for years held up above us and below with our skin folding into cities, waiting

Unto no threshold

I’d asked you not to come this far

I asked you suncloaked in the blanking

Those turned up backwards in the smear

Those who I would recognize even dismantled, bring them to me

Bring me those who I would not

Each of us another day for us beginning

Please, as this light is too much light for any hour with our name writ in the crease

You there folding under no night, or laying silent, or walking low on along a longer wall

Now you are in here

Now you must watch our shape revolve

You cannot see the shape but you can be it

It is your body in your sleep

It is the blood in your cerebrum

It has been always

Nights now this house is very still

The walls are walls and air is walls and you are walls and I am walls

There are the birds

Their eggs lain in our folding

When I move my mouth I hear them hulk

I hear the words they must surrender

I hear them spit up in their babies’ mouths, into yours

The words

They cream and cream inside my mind for hours

This long evening

Any evening

A song comes out but there’s no sound

What hold had come for us again, what years of frying nothing in clasp of corridors encombed, the blue long buildings in a prism captured and ingested and choked upon and bent and shat into the light to writhe again among the manner of a person, a brimming body with out lungs and load of veins milked without waking, it would not bend, it would not cease, inside the mounds I walked for hours even unnamed and was still right there with all the towers underground in tones all ending and beginning in such succession I could no longer recall having heard any single one of them alone at all and had always been only on in endless drift of furor, there had never been a wall, no edge of leg of lymph between me and my mind or child or range of age, the Cone had pulled us all apart again only for pleasure, a ream of bees flexed from our squat, the machines we had imagined in depression to have beings to have bodies to have glow, a tired light that filled the houses while all through all air the words went on and books turned open and emphatic spraying ink into the ink, any
word forever having changed unnumbered times up till the instant of our seeing and looking down and framing in, syllables in their eternal damage milked and quilted through what linings any hour could contain while through the halls our skins changed textures and changed tone and did not move and the digits flashed all through our eyes where we were hungry or were horny or were blown, the child inside the child again all screaming disease eating money humping torrents watching serpents controlling nothing in the tone’s light in the Cone’s name come down again to clasp against the blank we’d always aimed and build edges and build rooms there and resound while for each inch there were a thousand faces and for each face a thousand eyes and in each eye a thousand colors and in each color every sound and in each sound all of the words already named and unremembered where in each memory a lock, locks laid in doors and doors unending through the milk there into corridors we called our flesh of lard so large we could not shave it in the hour of the sun and so again must split again and live it and begin it and need more and never have enough in any instance to be silent and eat the magnet and live where we had already been before

I knew my child needed to need me, I knew I needed it to need and to know I knew that it had though would not always, this was the vast unending thread, this was the cord that killed my lungs each hour pressed against the houses that I knew and walked me through the beaches and the armies as I had lived them in my mind for what I’d been, there was no color I could not look in and see me stammered in there ripped apart beaten already by the machines where before I rose an arm or eye inside this light, I knew and knew and yet at no point could I be stopped, not at any aim of waver in the going I would go through would I be ended till I did, this was the vast condition of my organism, beyond the
dreamspeech and the pill, beyond the black collaboration forced upon me until I was stopped I could not be stopped, I would go forward in the meld and make of this beyond all surface before the surface tore me up, each hour held me in it and was the hour and was passed, come what way would kill in any coming minute there had already been such prior light, the cities could be crushed by any of us every of us every way again began and yet in the seam the singe was written all requiring no words, no book that could be erased or cold or fonted, no gold script on sanded leaf, black castles in a flat mirror, purple fortunes, and so must be for any rind, any eye stitched in the smallest lungs from the beginning, beyond the verb, and so among the prisms there was no fortress and nothing clawing beyond length and no moon above laughed for whoever to come reigning night in us again, say what you will but I was opened, had been conditioned, knew the stone, could kiss the stone inside my mind without permission and what beyond it I could turn to anything again my own, stuffed beyond however many of me held and wondered, every private inch to have again, to rub again and not remember if I did not wish

And so where the Cone had owned me I was ancient and I was anybody’s guess, what colors crashed could crash forever and both begin and end my face, though on beyond the face there was the field there and the field was spinning and the water shook inside my lungs and sound adhered to nothing and did not speak and all directions were the same and all names laughed thick hard ceilings bent beneath us and the fire and the mass, we burned through film and gear and mechanism, though idea and charm and make, the buttons pressed themselves and cursed themselves where they were wanted and the ash rained from the night and the dark turned over and showed where forever it’d been rubbed, bright
knives of catalogs and barking pillared in silence spent for something old to do, walls erected and dismantled and erected and dismantled and erected along the lines barfed in the seas the hour flung against the walls inside the Cone to petrify us, and so it did, and in our linings even unlined the colors burnt themselves and rose again, caulking in each bright uprising brutal prisms where the colors in their hue had always hid, beaten dark upon the day now where no day was to skull along the edges of what anyone had been, the pixels rising, the seas inside them punctured, rolled raw like axes in a snarl, the older sound of someone waking up beside you in the darkness gifted again where no light had ever been to call the urge, crashed where crashing could not happen, grown new cold ovens in a rip where for every instant the day was rising and now could open up its sizeless mouth and breathe us in, another throat inside the skin there, light vibrating, chords hammered under chords, an egg for every apple, a summer sprawling in a domed hole, where by this now we could climb

The ice of higher folds was brighter and held us closer and chewed our shapes, it bent around us and began us and ripped through the seam of any page and any inch of what a house was or how many and the linings of the word crapped and tottered in our centers already growing, it licked the bubbles from the ash, it turned the keyboard over and typed the flat side until the frame broke and in the center there was flesh, it kissed the flesh and all its wires in splitting systems while we held inside it still and watched, each old letter lapped into us as centuries of rain and rolling planets, we closed what eyes we had remaining, we closed behind those eyes and eyes behind those until there was no visible retort and at last the field now could be centered and in the colors we could see no phrase of blinking or bright desire beyond the instant of us would now begin, no menu
in the choir, no shrieking digit, where in the frame each inch of film had prior passed the wanting left to lay and lurk over one another in blessed dementia so that all the black was all the way, there knew no gesture to the definition now required, there were no hallways and no floors, no box to open or cells to splinter in our body to persist, we did not have to wait to be restarted, we did not have to wonder to be washed, who and who the who was held no question and the ice of all our ice was not in pain

No layer here was destined nor not destined, no layer here had not been lost, the cold worked inside the cold and flayed it outwards though not extending as there was no space beyond the way, no phrase beyond the softing though in the water of it we could walk and could go on in any way we wanted and have been so, any day could seem the next, I might look down and find my arms there typing language and believe the language and know it was or I would look down and find the words there in my body written always, I could hold my body as a book, I could put the book down and walk into the next room and see the walls there and touch the walls and hold their sound, the sun above the fields would rise and fall like any way of us had ever, I could touch and be touched, hold and be held, could speak and be spoke into, could spread the word all through my blood, where any shape here appeared it always listened and when I turned it turned around, each line inside the field forever shifting in my vision as I needed without knowing that I did, each old color in the presence of its colors, waking, slaying, being, in the warm name of any coming memory of skin

Each new fold became again folded newly as they folded where each shape coursed for my veins and eyes and wandered fat, it shook around it what was
mentioned, it gave me children and gave cities, it gave me diseases and great panic, it gave me a soil in which to lie, the same such soil in which could be placed any other of me that I needed to be held there beyond my body while shape and sound would work it down, you would call it years but it had been years already and already once again, it is okay, where we would walk the days would let us, the walls would not fold beyond our time, though what our time was in this feeling could not seem endless until it had ended and we were taken by the hand, this was the gift and the decision, it had always been agreed, our name in the white books in the white ink arousing fires for the purpose of a dark, a shape of any shape suspended in a glowing before around the edges it must burn and become ours

Yes we were loved, no there was no specific reason or body who could love us, yes the days surrounded us beyond our need though they were not days, yes we might have liked to stay inside the house inside the hour aching spindled in a rash, the persons in persons piling in us until there seemed so many the color came upon us on our own, yes the light would size around us like all the clothes we’d ever breathed inside of or against, each sound funneled through and through the sound surrounding aboveground, like all the humming through the beings, for every inch where we’d been brushed and every instant we’d been flooded, every wallow of the ash, we could can hold the word inside our shape inside the evening for as long as we would like unwound, and the light will hold us and the shape will hold us up

The time between the tone goes on the prayer goes on the flesh goes on the day goes on the want goes on in all this folding the milk goes on the soil goes on the
thrush goes on the bark goes on the gold goes on the tone goes on, there is the day, it is any day for all of us again where we have folded and must fold and so again, you don’t have to raise a flesh you don’t have to turn a page and yet you will or you will not and for all of this I become you and we become you and the word is in your lungs, you cannot breathe the word

The rooms in here where we have centered and the hue around our having, the split of skin where all have entered and the crush of sound commands a sound split from which there has never been a silence and never would be, itch for itch and light for eye, node for pink inside the insect of what incoming as it exits from its sleeve in dreamless meat where no one sleeps, a cream inside a cord, a lung inside a slowing, each day shaved beyond its prior phrasing’s aping woke

Where what had been forgiven is what must be forgiven, what had been forgotten must be lost, cold long char of brain meat crushed between two words until the field is flatter than the rind inside a floe burst from bursting uncommanded before the mouth could open wide enough to give the body air, the cells aflutter, the dust aflutter, where to flutter is to want

The grain in the game of the soft of the nape of the wet of the gray of the back of the scape of the showering conundrum pricking open and surrounded and surrounding all absorbed all cracked agate in the earthless furnace tongued with expectation

Waved to spark the seizing through its surface past the stirrup and the phase, what could have stung itself in pleasure lifting the lids on what had held

So long carried on in bulk repeating the shape began to look exactly like itself

All hours pressed in any instant

Now

Blake Butler lives in Atlanta.

Thanks to Dawn Raffel of
The Literarian
& David McClendon of
Unsaid Magazine,
where portions of
Sky Saw
previously appeared.