150. Penetration / Evacuation

PERVADE

To dream of filling or soaking
The space between space and spacing
Is to imagine oneself water,

And what flows out of those thoughts is the instinct to suffuse, to become a diffuse substance, to accumulate breadth and indistinctness over the physical need to be narrow and compact. It is in this way that we regard ourselves as properties over actualities. Imagine, for a minute (for that is all the time it will require) that your sense of yourself were not ingrained, something you were awarded at your birth, naked and wet, into this world, but ingrown, an ingrowth of your own self, as if you were injected with this sense of yourself, something that would dig into you as it was trying to grow out of you, or grow away from you.

REINVADE

To enter again with force
An object of intention and fact
Is to imagine oneself a pike blunted at its point,

And to go into something it must move outward and away from a source of energy, for only the physical pushing allows the dull point to puncture the lip of a doorway, the hip of a wall, the chin of a roofline, and thus break the skin, crack the bone, crush the muscles and organs within through blunt force and create the trauma of the body’s pain of the mind’s pain of the heart beating but broken and beaten and the blood running out with the remaining pulsing of the heart, that simple fist of muscle that squeezes blood through the tubes of the body, the blocked and hampered tubes of the body trying, as they can, not to transform into stiff and bloody pikes themselves.

EVADE

To sidestep and avoid
The lunge of the pike,
The contagious spread of water
Is to imagine oneself a thin stalk of grass in a barren field

And to remain in the presence of danger even when the wind blows you sideways enough to avoid the slice of a scythe’s blade, the unseen snath swinging it hard like a wind set into a circle, a weight at the bottom of a sack swung out and away from the central shaft of the body and gaining heaviness and force as it does, a wide foot lain flat against the moist and giving earth, the falling of a felled tree down in scattering and twinkling fragments of ice and wood, leafless though leafless, and hard and heavy though also in tiny tender fragments of wood that settle through the air and down, soft, onto the earth that smallest bit of distance from the upright blade of grass who is you.

COUVADE

To imagine oneself rested,
As a spoon against another spoon, in bed
As your wife bears your child another bed away
Is to be frightened by light and imagine oneself a leaf

And floating, open and also down, rocking and twirling, spinning against an axis, from one of only a few trees, now far below us and growing in distance, to have broken and blossomed into flame, an orange or a form of yellow indistinguishable from orange, as the leaf itself slips far enough that it rests, sleepless but dead to the world, upon the earth now moist with autumn and accepting the leaf as a sheet from a book, two pages of translucent onionskinned bible becoming transparent against the sweaty body of the earth ready to take back to her body the infant she has only so recently pushed forth into the world.

INVADE

To imagine oneself a bacterium
That enters the body to unmake
The body’s delicate balance of flavors

Is to be the smallest thing having any effect upon another
And something invisible to human eyesight and so small as to seem incapable of fermenting any change, but then to be the greatest reagent of change, bringing a bubble of fever up out of the bowels of the body to the head, due north of the heart, to cause the water of the forehead to seep out and bead into a crown of pain and, with painstaking care, to swirl that invisible witch’s wand within the cauldron of the slick and sacklike stomach to create a churning maelstrom, captured water of the body, edible and eaten flotsam and jetsam both, and move the contents of that aquifer up and out, as if the spilled and florid words, fluid but scattered with sharp and jagged pieces that no artesian well would need pull up from such depths.

VADE

To imagine oneself the end
Of a long and vibrant day without reckoning
But allowing the reckoning of one’s own consideration
Is to be whatever fades from sight and touch at the end of something else

And to be the quenched flame of a candle, its last breath curling upward until it dissipates into total night, until the scent of that breath, as a tiny burning of the odor of wax, hot and liquid to the touch, a puddle of wax bright as an eyeball or marble or even the tense and convex tent of water high atop a glass, disappears into a memory of what a memory used to be when the brain worked better and a slicing headache didn’t obscure from view the scent of candlelight, the sight of candlesmoke, the sound of candleflame, on the last day available to count the fingers of the feet to see if one could walk again, and upright, if possible.