sticks

In earlier years, we would hold small angled sticks, a pinky thick, pinched in the interspaces of our fingers. Squeezing eyes shut and gritting teeth we would squeeze and squeeze at them, bubbling the cagina, seeing the tendon structure lift the tent skin of the back of our hand — as all true tents are made from skins. It lifts, this marvelous, small, and nevertheless super-structure above all we could ever hold. Then we’d drop the sticks like ideas. That is what they were to us.

For some reason there are few nerves there, in the interspaces, and so there is little pain. There is just continuous, gritting, yet small force. Our hands of course were even littler then. So little pain, little force in absolute terms, but much and serious effort.

Sometime later there are quiet parties and quiet adulthood, some opening scenes to Pierrot le fou, wistful... There’s a notebook in your pocket, you hope, you find, and out comes a pen, cap exploded and ink smudging. It will more than do. You write:

There is an old ritual in the forest, from down in the brushery. There’s no light and rapture and it happens in rustling dark. Tree-dropped sticks quiver out from under leaves and, like twinkling static, coalesce together in a dance. They form bodies, gesture, move throughout the trunks like they are markers in a graveyard. Once I beheld it myself and the vision caressed to forgive and tell with wind chime music. On and on they go, through the night. It is too dark to see, but hear them there with your ears and skin. Hear hard and they will go on.
Until the quiet comes.

Originally published at willzeng.com.