Laynie Browne
from The Ivory Hour (a future memoir)

Bea

Today scent of cardamom cures all and the list endless, things to do, how to grasp and still to remain within time. Not to be merely the person ticking off the list of what must be done.

Work is an amalgam of thinking. If I am prevented from thought a scent of cardamom draws me back. The breath of a boy, his hand in mine, we cross the street. Whose birth is approaching. We know this and therefore abbreviate nothing. Between cooking and exhaling, a practice built upon where we are to live in the future.

The moment of picking them up is such a bright moment. And so confusing. Never having accomplished what I’d thought.
Thought is a medium difficult to describe. Still, we think in it. What difference does it make how many skies I may design? She looks up, and sees the wisp of a moving patch of clouds she has created.

Do you know where we’re going, she anticipates asking the driver? The driver meaning, the one steering her own consciousness, as she stands waiting in front of the blue door, beside the other mothers, in her slightly worn shoes.

She thinks, reading you is intersecting. You meaning YOU, and meaning the absent. The world is rash and blight. She thinks, I am not what you call ravished. Furthermore the world is this work and something is gripping. Where my children become and gather themselves. So listen.

This evolves in its own primacy.

It is difficult to remember that correspondence is and isn’t my work. Research is a mode of existence. How we wander into erasure.

Partially into the thought she stops. A red herring. How many books of promise. Therefore who we have become. Sentinels.

She used to describe it to him this way. Him— how many summers dead in a photograph? What is a summer? What is a photograph? It makes no sense to her, but the photograph keeps responding with a smile. She thinks, words feed themselves to me. When they arrive I am so glad. I am simply an escort.

Thought is secondary to immersion, taste. There is nothing clever in staying inside a word garden until something recants intent. The fingers crumble or become edible. What sprouts from your decibel is no longer an ear fit for wrapping.

Where are the places which lag and lack? How to re-enter sky? Will it speak to me? I have been been absent so long. Not knowing what to draw, who to become.

 

Busy Intersections of Anti-Matter

Bea reads this on the way, on the way, by her way she is on her way. She is holding the thought in front of her face as she is about to step out into traffic.

Things converge meaning to say is it the additional hidden after effects of global warming, now referred to as the rising warmth among us or RWAU effect, as if meaning to say that this represents some wonderful sign of affection.

The recurrent cry was all to the good. No one is accountable. Go and buy another high emissions producing vehicle for land, air or sea. Go find new non-renewable sources of fuel to your delight. As your delight is tantamount, is it not? Your delight. And think not of the delight of generations to come. They will inherit your appetites as well as your well -being and alacrity and there is always a way. The (sky) and (sea) and your powers of navigating are infinite and indestructible.

(Containing forbidden words, she gasps) What do they mean?

Everyone is asking, what is S-K-Y? What is O-C-E-A-N?

ENTER MIRA:
This is what was fed to you? asks Mira, disbelieving.

Bea asks, forgive me, but where were you born? And how is it possible that you wouldn’t know? The forbidden words. Are always to be in parenthesis, now defunct concepts. Not useful, even as ideas. Being obliterated from history.

Is there a corner of mistrust?

And simultaneously, Bea has left the office and again opened her news scan account. Is she listening through a wireless device or is she intuiting what once amounted to radio waves, or is she glancing at a hand held device with text in code. Is she touching it in colored waves along a surface?

No matter, it was as if she had held in front of her face, the ancient device known as a newspaper, screening her view on every side. It was as if. And she did not look and she did not see what was in front of her.

Or was it as if, time stood still while many considered this matter. Do not step out into busy intersections of anti-matter while considering some disaster or other, some dishonest disclosure which has been held back and is only now appearing. Do not be so startled so as to take a step blindly.

And along the same deceptive path leading to the same eventual goal, to not be so ecstatic that you step out forgetting to survey traffic patterns. Be not so unkind as not to consider your neighbor.

Consider your neighbor, thought Gray. And he knew in that instant it was time to set out toward home. Was there a reason?

Not unlike an undeniable urge to create carbon emissions, to water one’s lawn to default, to implicate enormous decorative fountains in a region of drought. Dare he say doubt, while speeding along toward the heavily trafficked intersection.

Intersection, do you dream of prosecution? Do you dream of being implicated in a waltz, a scene of civic disobedience. Do you visit with your many visitors in an ecstatic hope to be done with vessels being dropped into your gutters. Who has been lost along your borders and torn among your slabs of stone. Hanging one’s head is a missive. None despite. Did I find? Is this the breadth and the length of what has become?

A book is a thing which becomes us, or which may be hurled into oblivion. The other captivity.