Rekdal - The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

A house of stone.I wanted to give lightso that every simple form could be converted,beautified by being combinedwith an inverted image of itself: soclick, say the gems in their golden cell Im out for inversion, invention, re construction; myself disunited yet same enough to point any hour across the room and still say, Me. The drug youve given me is not working. Or working in a way it should not be working: blood sizzles and the brains gone champagne; where the sober headache was, only fizz remains, resists, the way consciousness resists this power surge blackening out my body every twenty minutes, turning the mind to a beach in France and the senses to a lighthouse beam in fog. Whats the angle, angel? you ask as my mouth goes (again) slack and my head lolls against your pillow dusted with cat hair. Nausea, is my reply but the word spins within me, clicks and rattles up against new syllables: Sauna, followed by Sane Seas, followed by the Gaelic, Naes. Outside, Dublin whirls in rain-slick streets goosebumped with cobblestone, the heavy, chocolate scent of hops and filthy quays, the slaughterhouse behind your flat. On windy, windowless nights when I press my nose against your naked neck I can smell the blood beside the bloodIve learned to love the meat of you.

Last week, they tried to set off a bomb on Grafton. You arrived outside my dormitory in an Austrian military jacket stiff with rain and spilled tea, packet of opium stuffed deep into a bouquet of flowers. I hatehaving been born Catholic, you hissed. And looked at me with such envy then, my blank, ahistorical gaze overseas To be American is to avoid everything, isnt it? youd asked. Your bodys slump perfectly symmetrical with my broken desk chair. I suppose it is an accident anything is beautiful.

So click, say the gems in their golden cell Brewster, 1830, postulates: Onlythe same apparent magnitudeand nearly the same intensity of lightare conditionsnecessary enough to the production of symmetricalthus beautiful forms. I suppose it would be better to describe than define him: hours assembling the lush egg whites bleeding into pockmarked blues, red pearls bubbling out of whippet glass, the millefiori and metallic bead festoons feathery gems, ampoules of yellow oils. His son giggles in the crib. Brewster plucks then puts cat whiskers in his first object case. Even the slightest tiltchanges everything but everythingjust slightly, he writes. It is possible this obsession makes him admirable. It is possible to point at this person from across history and still say, Me. What I knew: the pill looked so anonymous.

One fat tablet the color of cicada wings, coffee crystals, moth antennae. Six hours later the walls pulse. Reds and pockmarked blues, ampoules of yellow oils. Even the most disgusting forms, notes Brewster in his book, exhibitchaste combinations of shape and color. I wanted to reconstruct, re member myself out of shards of glass. I said: I wanted to write a body out of light. click, say the gems in their golden cell The body of a man on his green knees on Grafton, the bodies of police waving everyone back: back from the bomb cover like a yellow helmet, the mans clever fingers nimbling under it The stone exam halls cleared, students and I stand smoking cigarettes cheerfully outside the lobbies.

We wait for the explosion that never comes which is why we feel safe waiting for it: millefiori of splintered glass, cement tumbling in dust like a billion moth wings. This could go on forever, the newspapers said. During choir practice I saw you cross the square humming the requiem you loved, the notes of the fathers shattered body commended to God and death. At least youre trained to believein something, Id replied (stupidly) to your Austrian sleeve, misunderstanding the desire to not believe, to shed words like figurines; to whirl a meaning outside ofnot myth, not hopesomething more primitive: form. (Naes, naes, naes, whispered the trees.) You, I said. Yoube Me.

With the large car and secular education. A sudden rumble, a split in the air and all of us raised our hands above our faces and ducked, sure that somewhere fire was raining upon us. I said: I wanted to push the body into light like a rabbit through a felt hat, a ship through a lighthouse beam click, say the gems in their golden cellI believe in one God, Brewster remembers trying out, licensed minister upon his first pulpit, but the forms of words cheated him in knowing: it was all a swither, a mistake; a discourse sticked as soon as it beganthe syllables like fists of lightning illuminating only the science under which his tongue and brain might crouch, muscular Niobes, children under their stone veils, single arms upraised before their faces our faces pointed at the sun. The fields a lethal green and you are telling me about that other woman you left me for, then left again to return to me, about: