To say sleep works by accumulation is to disregard the weather in my head. It makes a genius of the pillow, an apt anthropomorphic redundancy. When the story stumbles into its fearless costume & everyone at the edge of the woods is worried their waiting- room bravado won’t open to anything but the same door on the same house that seemed a little off in the morning, every anecdote has an empty object. When your own name’s written on the gate, negation is just something we do. What’s redundant about the human personal? The urge to cull an animal pronoun from a procession of wedding guests? At least reductive absolutes rivet you somewhere closer to the actual rainfall, adjudicating ultimatums or handling the ounce of mulch it takes to cover any experience worth calling tactile. There’s nothing sharp about a knife in a movie. & doesn’t it make you fearless & brave to say so.
From The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, Ahsahta Press, 2004. Used with permission.