Blake Butler: Sky Saw

BLINK

She passed through seasons. Through the living. She passed through decades framed in gauze and water rising through long flat black packets held just beyond the edge of sea all slick and black, steam rising from it in a cold breeze as children dug their knees into the sand along the lip of water and let it lap the cells off of their arm, laying the layers against the ridges in the weight, while far beyond the water, under shrieking sunlight, clusters of white buildings without doors or windows rose high and thick into the sky so tall among the waters they could not be told from where they pierced whatever and continued on beyond all vision.

BLINK

Inside the wet, her body blinked and blinked. Behind her lids the years were strobing — she spoke their image on the air — they made more white surround them — they burned it open. With each syllable spent uttered, her body grew another creaming yard — yards of lash and lung all overflowing. The birds becoming hyper-larger from her too, feeding off her body of the cells choked down into them through their bird veins in what maze, and shitting right back out into the house’s walls in symbols pooling ageless from her whole: …this bloat opening inside me… this whole width of my mind’s need… these… these… these folding floors…

Outside the house it roared a dry white lather. It rained down rubber horizons, wide floors of paper, bags of cold. A wider section of the air glowed in small eruptions, mirrored leanings, half-hung burn. The earth went beat with hammers in the lungs. Liquid forms coating the lengths of what had been where hours uttered, covered over in the shaking of themselves. I mean the day inverted, as it could not have. Every inch filled with itself. Dirt rubbed its holes and called for filling in where it had been filled in already and filled again until the sound enslaved its sound. Rocks expulsed some human wish, as if in them, in their dark flat flesh, there was someone who once had held a tongue inside another. For certain lengths that house would fade. Prismatic mechanisms lurched on through the long dark, made of sleek metal, no lights, no pilots, scanning the nothing for the same. The rip of sky went on unfolding, the sky’s clipped segments made to lisp. On the air behind there’d stay a residue of the sound and dust the house had held all naming nothing.

The sun beat the spit out of all else, bare. The scored face of the weird land around the house now in the light was scored, nattered with insects of pixels scratched from their encasements, shook off the foundation’s creaming seams. In blue hordes the sound of the enmassed men crawled upon the long smear of the folding ground where the house disappeared and reappeared, rotating through the order all surrounded with what bodies full of sick sound noise and vomit, aching blistered, bumpy, long. The sludge was full of men and they were full of sludge. For each word we’d ever spoke the tone came on and on again around where we had been or never been.

BLINK

The sound of glass bowing and swimming up in shapes conditioned moments stretched by hands and putty. Sound of splinter and of long light and of the walls becoming throttled, bending in — the resin sledding off the ceiling, where for years their breath and speech in layers had collected in cold cells.

BLINK

BLINK

The sound shook the son and father in the same room, inches apart in different air, folded over face to face in variation. Each turned their heads as if to see and seeing nothing, they continued turning, their bodies corkscrewed with their flattened heads. As they turned back together, at the same time, they could not see there where the other had just been — some softened walls where the house’s split clear between them, though the rooms seemed the same size. The son could hear the way the house was ripping, its room rubbed against one another in quick friction, birthing bolts of brown steam up from the carpet, tiny knobs. Through matching holes burst in the several ceilings up above him, he could see outside an upward awning spreading open over all — some off, charcoaled color. He felt the awning also rushing in him, pushing at his organs, on his teeth. He could feel his arms all stretched and draping as his colors fled to change.

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

A revolving architecture, wallowed in wallows, guns erupting in the night, legs of cloth and paper money powdered a dense fog through surfaces of silt for your foundation of the day.

BLINK

On the air beyond the house and in the house surrounding the men adhered around a single point — where light and air and sound had been before them the men’s men knitted — the mother’s flesh no longer crushed between. The bodies filled in around the house, warm pressure born in their want of light and knives and ice and ages and raw power and reform and trees and windows in dark summer in all our rising cities and the night above their heads and the night inside their colons and their past and future eggs and semen and their nipples and their cocks and wombs and private infestations and consolations — all they had and had not had held in the light there, contained in liquid, wrapped in skin.

The men burst men each from their seams, leaking others of them from the holes they carried. They caked their way upon the air. The woodwork around the house bowed and smoke, rutted with flesh from where they all wanted in at once. The splinters wedged into several skins, lifting their skin up, showing the coal black brunt of their disguising.

In the men’s eyes were other eyes. In the eyes behind their eyes there were more eyes, fountains bursting liquid whips of water. The men were made of water that had once made up other men. Person 141 or Person 511 or Person 700,012 or Person 0, those before and those who’d never been. People of numbers without numbers or syllables in the bent strobe of their lungs, where as they struck upon the air they seemed no longer to remember they were there or ever had been or before already pressed forever in this moment in all hours pressed in the pages as the days’ language changed around it.

Soon inside the house the force was so great that you could drop a thought and it would hover. You could speak your name and it would catch inside your throat and choke you as with rope and it still felt as waking up in a clean, familiar room. Every present instant stacked in calm uncolored prisms fused for miles en masse compressed in wordless urgeless milky moan.

The photographs of air the air was made of melted. The day gave darkness, a rind of black fitting the world.

BLINK

The men in light and men inside him in the room of the coil inside the house filled in around the space they called the child. They shot their bodies singing, and opened his mouth and looked between his teeth and gums for what was softest, for where they could feed on into the last. They searched the lids and lips and skin to show his hole after giving in his body or someone might hide something sweet. They shot his teeth and looked in along mites seeing moored in his craw. The son was gagging sounds. The walls of the gorge with ropes of saliva fragmented with hands covered every inch of him and through him all his family. His chest and shoulders blackened. With his eyes could see men. He could see everyone at once. In each man saw himself and many fathers — the injured father or father’s eyes with broken glass and flowing pleated white beyond recognition — his father, the father remains under the other men in other years. The father had a lot of him, one for each mother hid in the mud around the house.

His hands were eddies in which men repeated, in which lines went where he began to bend — through the elongated body and through the many fathers. Numbers on their eyelids and his eyelids. His body leaned across the room into the room. The walls of the house began to loose convulsions. When all of him was empty, men filled his body with their old throes.