Leonard Schwartz
Prose

How become a subject of my own discourse?

Especially if, to be frank, I prefer the ferry between slim self and voluptuous other, first appearance on either side, disembarking from the ferry just long enough to reboard the ferry and shove off towards the original shore.

A pleasure ride, not a commuter, you might say, though everyone is either commuting, commuted, or co-mute in everyone else’s coming to and fro.

Yet it is by virtue of this weak trickle, these plays of correspondence, that I become one of Your readers, part of that froth which whitens a certain sea.

Simply, I heard language and wanted to get to it, through peculiar rock and pause.

Therefore, You must now tell me one of Your secrets, how a goat was born with the fur of a wolf, or why You continue to insist on offering an elevator as trope for Thought.

The depths seek to take my place, violently.

Creek raised significantly by the rain, the right hand moves the pen.

Final causes are per force repressed, except for Your estuary, which I can’t hide.

So aim-inhibited love makes the smallest ocean and carries us on voyages far from our original, inarticulate lust.

Chaos tempered by constant ideology, large tree overshadowing the impersonal abyss: to weep for the viciousness of the culture is to feed that culture, capitulate to its viciousness, enter a logic.

(Nothing can mitigate the trees without orgasm.)

(I do not claim to speak for the labyrinth, only from it.)

(At least I’ve avoided worshipping Success, that bloated idol.)

But all those avoiding it, we’ve been told, will be left out of the scheme for Further Creation, and must instead split firewood: a steady, light snow.

(I forgot to tell You: every word in the manuscript I handed you so solemnly will prove to be unintelligible.)

(I forgot to tell You, light is not irremediably 18th century, as this wood stove proves, but here is a text that simply can’t be read, steely escalators descending into a fucked metaphysics.)

Creek raised significantly by what is now raining down (before it was coming down as snow), stillness the unattainable value.

Would that this earth had remained in bondage to its meadows.

A moth balances on the computer screen where dragon Meaning lurks and flames.

Perhaps I have stayed in one place a bit too long.

A definition of forgetting: loss of the Lady all miracles lean from.

In like manner, alas, I became the subject of my own discourse.