Joseph McElroy: Plus

A silver flashlight bobbed around. It was a weight itself and also a means of searching weight. It was both a thing — a hardware torch — and a thing for hooking light to deeper things. A map of motion sprung from the level of stem and encircling it with

a small and radiant crown. The flashlight hit on a flower. Whorl was a name for a number of things. A small circle completed in a fingerprint. A small wheel in a spinning wheel. A corolla of possible colors. The increasing idea of becoming someplace

else. Foresight had made this appeal but who knew where it would next spread open or what sacrifice it would ask of those who would have stepped up to mind it in its full and unoccupied transparency? There were other places to be. Transparency had

never moved entirely beyond the scope — had sorted through earthbound feelings very acutely in splinters some had more accurately called slivers. That a piano fitted with an apparatus might play itself beyond the roomy absence of whomever.

Dart-shaped holes along the rolls made everything accumulate and play. There were other places to be. This is what the slivers said. Ground would keep requesting but Ground would never compass the request. How had knees bent? What were bird knees

for? If knees were to have a role in locomotion the direction of the knee bend would have had to have been settled far back with reference to affliction. Humility was a map of motion — a piece of the dark one could hope to go by.

We are the trees whom

shaking fastens more

Radiance had never been far from the truth or the riding upward phenomenon figured as gooseflesh or the off chance a seat became available on a northbound train departing a wet city that had now set about to recede as so

many bounces of light. There were other places to be. A seat facing north along a river too familiar to name with a window to the left still traced with water. Time to one’s self thought this was a good sight, a good start towards transparency however impossible

it was generally agreed to be to capture something of there from here. A sliver would be enough. Two slivers would start to motion in that particular way that could universally denote addition, a sign that said in every language put this all together: join it up

and keep all your joinings increasing until you hear the weirdest dearest pioneer singing down the final coming down of sums. Every harm would receive a feather. In the secret reversal of torn, affliction would power flight. Dust would name the particles

now caving into psalm. A song that only a body could make for the outlasting mind of that body. A mind to love and praise the time its body did. The sparest constituents of transparency were these slivers — though so much finer than strings — still

taut and contactable as music in the memory of fingers. How we loved that sound of addition. Each silver lacing through the brain. How it lit through and scrimmed across all the dark cascades we could hope to remember. Our erratic starlings now round

now wheeled at a kiss — a kiss destabilizing the bodies we thought had only been there to work — as shore had worked to water or as shadow had worked to flight. This describing was being. And being was describable or not.

He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself, but felt it was more.

It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around. He was Imp Plus, and this was not the start.

Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. This lifting was good. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good.

Imp Plus remembered there was no skull. Yet knew there was no need to be thinking this. Nor to think of message pulses coming from Earth on the frequency. No need to think about the other pulses going to Earth from Imp Plus.

There were birds around, and they were still as shadows. Imp Plus knew birds, but not so still. Birds with tails longer than they were. The tails were right.

There was a brightness. It was more outside than inside. It was also everywhere.

Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing.

With sprouts, maybe.

Imp Plus did not have sockets, for if there were sockets where would they have been? There was no skull.

Sockets was a word.

Impulses from Earth had kept coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle. They were messages and Imp Plus had inclined to receive them. They asked for levels of light and of glucose.

Imp Plus had no sockets and knew it. No sockets to hold or lose the light. No sockets to man.

But there was a brightness, and it folded. Or Imp Plus folded it.

These sockets in the skull were called orbits. Imp Plus remembered there was no skull.

None but the place Imp Plus was in.

Imp Plus remembered having prepared to remember. And the word vegetable . And a green thing like an idea. Imp Plus remembered words that he did not know.

The brightness bent off and came back. But what were the birds around in the shadows? The brightness could move. It had always been there. Now it was new. He knew he was right. It had come out of darkness that was not new. Imp Plus had not wanted words for the brightness, and now the words Imp Plus needed were not the message pulses coming on the frequency from Earth asking for glucose readings.

But the brightness was not only brightness. It also turned to something else reaching Imp Plus. The green thing was not to eat. Imp Plus knew eat . Imp Plus made the grade. The green thing was not to eat. It had eyes and they ate.

Maybe not eyes. Yet as much so as those of Imp Plus, who did not have eyes.

Imp Plus inclined to think the green thing ate light. Imp Plus had prepared to remember that eyes developed from a need for nourishment. That was the way, but the word for it did not come. Not at first.

Imp Plus saw a shape and used a word, vegetable . It was not a man.

The shadows were not birds. They were shadows. He did not get rid of them.

Brightness was not the impulses that kept coming from Earth. Imp Plus had been in another shape, its word now gone. Imp Plus knew the word word and the word idea , but not what one was. Imp Plus made the grade.

Yet as for sockets, Imp Plus knew there were no sockets, for there happened into the head of Imp Plus the picture of a man. The man had years of bad teeth and he had loose white pads on each eyehole. The holes were running. But the eyes weren’t seeing. There were sockets there, not here in Imp Plus.

Imp Plus had no skull. He had grids.

Some of what he had meant to remember he did not for some time. He recalled stalks. They were long and he did not see any around.

The impulses drew Imp Plus with their messages. And Imp Plus drew them. Through the brightness the messages inclined along a gradient. Imp Plus inclined to receive them. He inclined through the brightness. The brightness was good. It folded. It folded the messages. He could send messages. He could talk on the Concentration Loop. The brightness packed around him. A part of the brightness became him.