Gross - Deep Field

Sea: its in the dissolution business, particles suspended for a while round sunken matter, dis cohering, smoking off in strands, and dont imagine that I want to go there. But (youre saying, in the slur and backwash of your deep aphasia where were drowning men clutching at words) were there already. Where we were at the very beginning. * No peace in your deafness, just clangorous muting. Then, by degrees: an expressiveaphasia, say the doctors notes. Too true.

As if released from ninety years of reticence, the sentences unreel in grand gestural sweeps, like starlings wheeling, a high rhetoric in which only you seem not to know that the meaning is gone, regathered elsewhere maybe but from here its all rattle and flux till a stray phrase drops from the sky, a but anywayyou know.? You know where you are. Me, Im the boy who turns at the call of a bird, that seemed to speak a syllable, his name, in the darkening wood. * Or you beat, you cant let go of beating, at a lost, a gainst the nothing-there, the not-word: stop start and unstoppable, you beat against the glass which, being nothing, cannot (though it longs to) break. * At best, its a bad line, crackling out between us. No knowing for either how much of the others been lost. Just the interim.

The straining out into the interference, waiting for a word to come clear. Be a clue. Just a clue to a clue. * You are my window, you say, suddenly word-perfect. Window, not door; true, theres no way out of this, this once and onliness, this body. Window of the senses, fogging with the effort.

Words mouthed at the glass. The ache of facesstrangers, loved onespeering in. * There has to be a country in which what you have for speech is language. Swamp land, surely. Or unsurely, because channels shift. Congealing oxbows.

Head-high reeds. Flood-wrack like nests of something strong, undextrous, gone. Detritus from the cities of wherever Upstream is. No distance. Sometimes you catch voices, rasped to almost nothing, when the wind moves and the rushes hiss, sometimes a word behind that wading willow but theres nobody there when you look, just a sodden inconclusive causeway, the ribs of a coracle half sunk in mud. All this is waiting, in abeyance, for you to create it.

All you have to do (and we could wait a whole worlds history for this) is speak its name. * A spy into your crumbling diary I track neat tight script into a week of thicket, faint scratchy capitals whose panic I can almost hear, as you try to hold to fact. No news. No you. Just weather. * One day you woke to find that youd lost barley. Oats. Wheat. Wheat.

Tried each of your five languages and nothing answered to its name. You stared through a sixty-year gap in the trees, past the farmhouse, out into the fields (all-angled, small, pre-Soviet) of wordlessness. What you were seeing there wasnt nothing. This one You tensed your fingers, upwards. And this Your fingers tremble-dangled. Oats? Yes! Yes.

And that itching-and-scratching down the back of your neck: threshed husks in the shade of the barn. Later hordeum and triticum came to you, then some English, some Estonian. But youd been back there, in the gone place, absolutely, with each Ding an sich. Youd been it, and no words between. * Stalled: the old farm horse that, you infallibly recalled on my childhoods interminable car trips, went faster, its nosetowards home. * Philosophys come home to stay in the flesh, now that a showers a baptism daily, total shuddering immersion and rebirth, a beard-trim has you purring like a king cat and the speed-bump in the drive is grand farce, every time a whoops! adventure, and the printed page a murky pool where you decline to go though you play on the edge pat-a-mud-caking syllable pies. * Philosophys come home to stay in the flesh, now that a showers a baptism daily, total shuddering immersion and rebirth, a beard-trim has you purring like a king cat and the speed-bump in the drive is grand farce, every time a whoops! adventure, and the printed page a murky pool where you decline to go though you play on the edge pat-a-mud-caking syllable pies.

Private man, youve un-aged into chatterbox child; you point, you sing in public, shockingly at home in the body now its leaving you. And heres philosophy: the first rip of a stroke in the weft of the neurones and never again will it be academic, how to word that nice distinction between mind and self and brain. *