He felt very much that the sky was shallow, not a trick but something worse, absent all human ambitions. He thought that there were clouds and then clouds behind clouds, and then just air. Where is there that’s far enough?
Then shapes took their places. Men were looking down at him. The Judge, the doctor. There was blood on the Judge’s coat. The doctor was saying something. He was moving his hands in a gesture. What did it mean? Carr felt if only he knew what the gesture meant, then there would have been something, some one thing to salvage from all of this. But the figures were become very small. One couldn’t see them at all, no matter how hard one looked.
I will tell you a thing, a thing you know, a thing perhaps you know
I will tell you the skin feat.
That I, of things relating, relate then this:
I was born — and die.
I am in between.
I leap in my skin and sew it to myself
and see how far I can follow
where leading leads
down under closed eyelids.
Every dream is startling to the dreamer. Yet when we wake,
we go about unsmiling — things don’t surprise us.
Even when they do, we imagine we prepare.
But the world is sudden — that is its nature.
We must divert ourselves into a fence, into a button, into the ivy,
the grass, the fur of a coat
from which point we can judge and say—
each day I go ashore, and from what ship?
The skin feat. .
Did I acquaint myself with it from a book?
Did I find it leaping headlong into water?
The skin feat is like the feeling of another age
in an ancestor, a grandfather’s photograph. But you are not he…
you did not even speak to him.
How heavy arrival falls upon the house of the body.
It must contain every new thing that joins it — must consent.
We think that things are what we see — but our noses,
our ears, we question. Frantic being that glows without any light—
do you not feel it radiating from your face? You are los- ing it;
it is going away.
Those that love you agree — you will soon be bones in a wooden box
and someone else passing by, beyond the gate,
will glance at where you never walked, but lie.
The skin feat is an ascension of a ladder one carries in secret.
I speak to a man on the street, a stranger, I speak to him and think:
this is a messenger, a sort of letter that I may open in private,
and so I follow him, and tell no one. I do not document it.
It is not an art; it is for no one’s amusement.
He goes down two streets, three streets, an alley,
a street, to a house. I am far away when he closes the door
but I go with him there, and vanish
and resound in myself returning
out of thoughts like barrel hoops—
like disasters one hears of on the road, and winces,
and in wincing, smiles at one’s plight.
Is there a name I go by
if I wish to travel far?
My friend, this skin, like the crow’s
feels the outer air even through locks.
And so we rush, my darling,
again upon the gates and are released, released
when wonder bids us die
and we refuse, and cease.
Yes, there are gardens that have been planted, and laid well
with stones for walks, and trellises, and arbors
and someone tends them.
I tell you this because I have seen them from a distance
and like the clockmaker, I do not understand
what grows without help in a place of safe keeping.
A house can have only one room. That is its character.
Larger than that, they are all palaces.
I feel I am, you know, like the building in a plague city
that up against a city wall, has, deep within
a door to leave the city.
The white scent of the sun cannot wake us, or else we were angels and therefore,
like pain, simply a message.
Our sleep is deeper — we cannot understand when it’s explained — wildness.
we must fear it to feel it. One cannot oneself be wild.
Where wheels ring the lake a yellow word is seen at the corner of a child’s mouth.
It is believed that things perceived as indistinct
are clear when seen up close—
but it is not distance that keeps them from us. A hurt mouth
reckons in equations of a thousand variables.
A hurt mouth is like a thicket, and cannot even be photo-
graphed without error.
I learn to wear a coat in a particular way. I feel very carefully
the matter of my shoes—
I am setting out this morning for a funeral, my own
at a place not of my choosing,
a funeral as enduring, as patient as the cold beyond a door.
The worth of a saint is felt
like the weight of a tree of birds.
Wind learns its calling at the corners of the earth.
Longing so to return there, it never can.
And we — who when called upon,
cannot even leave the room we’re in—
the one we’ve loved is calling from the hall
but we’re helpless — rooted.
Where does a saint begin this freedom
of rising from a chair
to fall dead years later in a strange place
not a moment having passed?
Cavalry charges ring the house and grounds.
We learn to play with them, you and I,
in our speaking, our singing of the skin feat,
we learn to call
and have them come.
When you become better at it than I
then I am gone back into my book,
and someone is knocking at the door
of the room you’re standing in.
Have you heard of a town baked into a loaf of bread
and given as a gift to one ungrateful?
Yes, streets, houses, squares — young men, women, dogs,
soldiers.
I was told of it too late, and when I tried to retrieve it
I found it had been broken into a flock of birds.
Our dire attentions waver so — I wish for seriousness
and confront it in my sleep. But in the day it can’t hold me.
I am desperate but of a sudden the windows are thrown open
and joy admits itself, like daring, all at once
pressing against me with uncertain gifts.
All these promises—
come with me to the field
come at this hour and then
I want to believe and I do, but all my strength rises from the ground
and when I am best — when I rise in the wind, I am so helpless that I call to my love
like leaves in fear of rain.
The skin feat, beyond defying—
It begins as a loosening, a rise of the shoulders
the muscles prepare themselves but cannot be ready,
for the nerves go beyond them — out into the air
and the skin feat resolves as the eyes shut and open
and breath reaches to the horizon, the mouth
drawing in
something of ALL the air in the world
and feeling it there, in those small bottles of the lungs.
Red thread, blue thread, black thread, white thread.
I am involved in the thought of sewing, but I do not often sew.
Needles never glance — they are already through, already past
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