IT WILL TAKE ME TWENTY PACES to get to that tree. Meanwhile, William James is boxing somewhere in the corner. I can see his pony from here. I say: next climb onto that bridge and wait there William. At night some things can reappear.
Like the time they told me to make a doll out of clock parts but instead I made a strobe light and sat on it for a while.
The whole scene went something like this: a man, seeing a transparent dog walk on air, walks off the edge of a hill and falls into his world alone. He says: “my hand is red and on fire.” We are using someone else’s night voices.
At night a woman wears blue and forgets about weather.
In this next scene William is trying to convince me to build a clock out of doll parts. When I say: I want to trick William into the very air, I mean: I need a benefactor the size of his ghost. I water his birds but still he will not let go of cloth and lend me his gown.
I DON‘T THINK I CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR THIS: the whole house was in pain but we went to the market anyway to spend our dimes. At the old fish-breeder’s William recalls how: in his youth he had been haunted by trout in the Great Bering Sea.
But a man is a doll made out of tiny bird parts. “There is a sort-of animal-shape hovering above,” he says. William says “What!” then eats a very tiny salted cracker. His whole second body expands inside his first. “All is well inside the first and second bodies,” he explains. “The world held together with rope, various beams and rope.”
Still, a woman wakes up and feels a wilderness. She says: “I feel the wilderness moving inside of me moving outside of me.”
But a man is a doll made out of tiny bird parts. “There is a sort-of animal-shape hovering above,” he says. William says “What!” then eats a very tiny salted cracker. His whole second body expands inside his first. “All is well inside the first and second bodies,” he explains. “The world held together with rope, various beams and rope.”
Still, a woman wakes up and feels a wilderness. She says: “I feel the wilderness moving inside of me moving outside of me.”
It’s dark.
A man is listening to other people’s animal voices. “Williams pony is red and on fire” he says. Then places whelk in his ears and collapses to the floor of his inner visions.
We’re at the old Jungian Theatre touching walls. I want to build a trout out of bird parts but William wears a girls ugly face and says his orange juice tastes like potatoes
and can you make orange juice out of potatoes?
I tell William no I cannot make orange juice out of tomatoes. I am wearing my Gettysburg hat. It’s winter. The snow forms a sort-of doorway into the ground.
With any effort a man’s face is a bud of light.
He’s floating and at sea. In a deserted plaza his face is an academy of pure holes and plaster. He says: “I don’t believe in a secret-real self. But it’s far too dangerous.”
A woman wakes up thinking-violent.
Her fingers move toward the dead eyes of a bird. She says she feels the animal moving outside of her moving inside of her.
A film plays on screen. It’s a fast-motion action-documentary containing a close-up of the whole world and a still-frame of a very modern-day pony.
Sara Lefsyk's first chapbook the christ hairnet fish library is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Her work has appeared in such places as Bateau, The New Orleans Review, Dear Sir, Phoebe, and The Greensboro Review among others.