The Darkroom (for Callisto)

This much I know to be true

There is an arrow in my brain. An arrow has fallen in the eye of the afternoon. Against the
brightness of the sun my vision turns to a web of hot milk. Tearful, steaming on heatless metal and
in the sky, the clouds, the images I have slept too long among are calling songs from two worlds.
Arcas, most beautiful doctor! I have been too hasty, dizzying myself with so much Life!

* * *

Some place no longer here there is a mountain from which I, exhausted, now journey home. My
mind skips over the doctor’s advice:
Three days without pictures, without poetry and without music, and in the nights only
songs from childhood. Anything less risks overturning our work.
So far O.K. The mountain was so full of life, of colour; of story and song and baskets and bread.
All behind me now. My only travel companion my radio, which picks up language in dribs and
drabs as I go. Together we stretch our ears over the horizon—
Perilous white milk on marble floor
Conceals object worth my constancy
My doors dark and hiding . . . oncoming . . . approaching

Sag mir wo die Blümen sind!
Somewhere a wire is too cross. The air is up high. I feel the afternoon is out of tuning. . .
something over my shoulder threatens to empty the world of its charges. Hmmm.
I walk on, hoping to gain ground on whatever hangs behind. The light is fast fading.

* * *

Soon I am in luck! Up ahead, where the day is running scarce, I spy a small, dark room –
somewhere I might hide away from whatever storm charges in the distance.
I step inside, and all at once the light is generally gone, disappeared into some big hat.

I wait as my eyes catch up with the sudden dark. All too noisy. . .
Arcas. . . ?
—Patient!

In my mind’s eye I try to conjure familiar shapes from the black: a bed, a hook on the wall for my
coat and my radio. . . but No! All is dust, spilling through my eyes like milk. Big noisy ghost, me
who stalks this room.

Hello again, my deare it’s beene too longe!
Do I receive you well?
—Who is calling?
The wind continues. Rattling the distance and whispering through my radio. A voice is singing but
I cannot make out the words. Flimflam asterisms sounding out the day. . .
Nothing is coming to me right. Is it the world or my receptors?
My memory feels fuzzy, like a throat. I must sleep. This is too much. Too quickly. Sense will surely
return in daylight.

Don't wanna set the world on fire
Love you too much baby

I am awake but the dark is still total.

Just wanna light a flame in yr heart
Or not total. Up on the wall, above the foot of the bed: a speck of light plain as a pin. Reaming
through a crack in the masonry, dart-white arrow fixing my eye.
Daylight? No, still, brighter than any distant star. The morning birds are silent.

*

I blincke the sleep away and the light smudges across the room. Like steam on a mirror I wait for
the traces to disappear but they hold on. This is no dust. Perhaps some roaming constellation,
transposed, weary under the pull of the Earth. . .
O to have a friend so brave
So very Heaven!
The radio up to its tritcherie. Hmmmm. . .

The darkness disappears, receding like it could never have held out. . . but What is taking its
place?
You There—!

The world expects me. Outside a table is set for two.
The glass shall clinke, We will feaste and drinke—

Soon the world will be turned upside down.

*

Extending a seat at this table to you is all that is stable in this darkness.

Another world unpacks itself around me. When did I switch my bags with You, ghost who stalks
this room? Why me the object of your espying?
Here, inside, clouds of darkness obscure your origin. Who (what?) is to say what might be found
on the other side of these walls? And every crack, every seame in every stone a face waiting to be
found, water arcing to meet itself. . .
Another song from childhood:

When the sky is open / and birds begin to ring / across Heaven's unquiet bell. . .
—The morning birds are silent.

Under cover of night I sink deeper under the water, shucking up silt and clay. Every movement
obscuring my vision. Every image turned to mud. I cannot see beyond my own eyes: a heavy
ghost inside a pinhole.
Infinite possibility though movement restricted
Up above (downbelow) the speaking of cafés so formal with their hospitalitie, waiting like a
chessboard. And all that is stable [is table] in this darkeness, extending a seat to You: infinite
possibility – movement restricted.
I hear you when I am still, hiding in the fullnesse of life where there is no room for sound, for
breathing. . .
The morning birds are silent.
I hear you in the purdah, the chatter in my radio. Ours is the only song beyond these monopolies
on comfort.

You! Whose mouth receives such splendid proclamations, born one side of the thin veil screening
this space from mine, what else grows in the fertile earth between ceiling and floor?

And, all at once, the radio speaks to me, louder than I have ever heard it before:
LAY A RUG UPON THE FLOOR AND SET IT ON FIRE !
And just as suddenly, the floor is. . . lava?!
AND I CREEP JUST AS SLOWLY UPON IT, EACH TIME WHISPERING—

Ow
—UNTIL THE RUG IS TURNED TO BLACK ASH AND MY EVERY STEPPE PLANTS VOID
INTO THE EARTH, THAT BETWEEN FOUR AND TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW WILL BLOSSOM
INTO POCKETS IN THE MATRIX AND REPLACE THE GROUND WITH THEIR EMPTINESS

You There! Intransient chorister, eckoing my Love into the wide open day. Your Voice tying knots
between my suspicions, pulling me up by my eardrums!
I, ACQUIRING LANGUAGE IN DRIBS AND DRABS AS IT COMES TO ME THRU THE
FIRMAMENT, MY TONGUE SHAPING VOWELS THE AGE OF STARS, CHARTING A COURSE
THRU ANCIENT INFLEXIONS, BRUSHING UP AGAINST THE WORDS OF GODS, SUNG ON
SUCH UNSPEAKABLE FREQUENCIES. . .

STONE SKIPPING ACROSS THE POOL OF MY OBSCURITY, THE SURFACE IS GONE,
THE FILM DISTURBED, ONCE SPILLED NEVER RECOVERED, I AM WATER IN YER CORNERS

NO LARGE TIME I AM WATCHING. I WATCH THE TREES STRETCHING, FROM THE
WATER O ! DO THEY NOT SKIP QUICKLY? THIS MUCH BY MY I – BY MY EYE SPY – KNOW TO
BE TRUE

AND YOU THERE UNEARTHED MY CALLING, JOY ! IN MY ECKOINGED ARC—AS PLAIN
AS SONG YOUR SUNNE IS MARBLE BLACK. . . I WAS TOO FULLE OF LIFE, O MATRIX ME!
TOO PLAIN IN THE WATER, SOON COSMICK HUNTING. . .

HIS BIG TRICKS MY UNRAVELLING! SHADY BENEATH THEIR MOUNTAIN, ARCTIC IN
THE TREES I AWAIT HIS ARROW AND NOW IN THE DARK OF YOUR CHAMBER— CAMERA,
DRINKING MY STARLITE PLAIN AS A PIN THRU THE BLACK, REAMING IN VERSE. . .

WALK TO YOUR EVERYE CORNER I AM ECKOING, ME AND MY HUNTING SOME
QUARTER FOUND, ASTERING SKY DOGS MAKE THEIR RETURN TO THE QUIRE. . .
EVERYTHING ONE DAY UPSIDE DOWNE !

* * *

[CRASH]
—goes the hole in the wall, enlarged and bored by the wind.
But some image remains, so easily touched. Through the widened hole light streams drunk, or
sucked in by a straw. And the image it casts is. . . sharp? obscure? A liquid?

Held constant on the clouds outside, balanced on a film, wicking off to be peeled by impatient
fingers; the sticker on an orange peel.
Water marble steady in the breeze
This storm untroubling constant sea [constancy]
An eye, a marble. . . so perfect
Taut on a magician's string
—Sing a song to sleep by
This room is now as a vacuum, waiting to be emptied of. . . me?! Certainly I am pulled to its
edges,
O! I of mine
O! window, o! empty camera. . .
Place yourself up against the glass between that world and this

No argument. I press my eye in close to the pinhole. . .

Beyond the gushing water clouds. . . Unmistakeable as memory in aspic, in cellophane; caught in
a net; ensnared behind dust in the water:

The wind is up. And the living. The sky yawns distant overheard.
Tell me where the flowers are!

I set my eye on your arrival, on else where the light is general and colossal machines dig holes in
all recorded history. . .
I am nine years old and the sun is shining behind the big house.
(The light hits me square in the eye like mud, like a greeting.)

We sit on the bank drinking bottled water. Nearby, children scream with delight at an old
man waving giant bubbles from a bucket and an old rope.
(The storm cracks once! twice! again!)

'Here', I point to the horizon and draw a circle around joy.
This much I know to be true. I feel it in my every step, heavy with the life of me. Too full of myself,
of the world. . . And constant over the horizon radars set their ears, my fingers reaming cloudy
through the tapestries of your language and in the ridges of my thumbs I carry the weight of you.
But no! I peel off the sticker and eat you whole.
Soon shall spill the meaning. O boy ! soon the cup shall overfloweth. The wine pot shall clinke, we
will feaste and drinke. And then strange notions will abound!
Enter radio

You have jumped into the idle pool of my retina. You swim with abandon, kicking up spray and
rearranging the—
Exit roof
—Hello?

The roof is up on the wind: so many arrows across the sky, a whole volley!
And the walls? Surely soon they must follow. . . There is not much time.

You There! Too long I have played host to your wandering. What business have you in this house,
or I? On some calendar long erased you marked a scrawl across this day. And here you return,
proud in your punctuality, pulling me up, up, until I can no longer see the edges of sense and I
implore you. . . elusive poet-aster, reveal yourself!
Exit bedsheets

I have built my home upon the earth and I am digging in its garden. Mired in the muck. . . mud in
my eye!
Exit bedframe

All noble diggers arrived at the surface, now stood up. Here we go:
I take my leave of all this noise! Once companion now too much. . .
Turn away violin, turn away flute, turn away quire of voices saying O! Your music gives me only
alarum. I find your airs of solidity produce in me only a lack of some thing I will never find.
Exit radio

And walls too, will you follow?
Exit walls

O! voice, o! callistine arbiter, how reckless you are with your freedoms. You pull and you pull at the
hem of my constancy and I find it now unravelled. I am naked. I have floated too far from the
vestry of your company and exposed, cælestial, I rattle against the dizzy dazzle of the day.
And how it dazzles! Walls beyond walls await, storm-born dust, cloud, air circling. . . And no more
diggers to build them!
Arcas, thank you: my hot-milk vision now unclouded; my dream-companion images in the clouds,
calling songs from this world to the next.
This new film around me retreats like steam on a mirror, the surface flat and still, the image always
there revealing itself. . . Ha!
The wall in the water: the island, the raft; mountain emerged from the deep, all now standing. Go!
Go! I listen and I go, my only luggage the word.

Exit narrator