Living On

Consider what one might learn by meditating on a corpse: how the flesh can crawl, the bones of a beautiful face break the crust of fantasy like little moons out of the ground, vacant snail-shells still glistening with an off-white rheum. Or consider swallowing two squares of LSD & looking in the mirror: what perfectly disintegrating visions might be yours, & with what slight effort.

It’s exhilarating, really, to find this blind matter – that it somehow coheres despite its utter insensitivity to longing or loneliness. It gives itself only half-grudgingly to the chance mouths of the shark or the brown bear. True horror comes disguised as cold necessity: learning about cells in the fourth grade, our bodies began to dissolve into prisons or office towers populated by soft- walled cubicles. Then atoms: solar systems with pin-prick suns, barely enclosed eternities of inner space. The schoolroom clock made a mockery of turning.

To know that emptiness, they suggested, was to know ourselves. They could have said that matter is incredibly rare, a temporary resting state for energy. They could have told us about fictons, their mad spinning that somehow keeps the lover’s caress from encountering a null set, bodies collapsing into a shrug of cold fusion. What a comfort it would’ve been, maybe, to learn about the stubborn corpse rippling outward for millions of years, if only in bone shards or a line of footprints in some fossilized beach that come to a sudden end: indelible record of buoyancy, & the killer wave.