Tuesday, February 17, 2009

I am thinking in unchopping ways right now, feeling the urge to fill back in those notches I made on your side with my axe, patching you up with butter and pomegranate seeds and rainbow trout and stuttery apologies. Everything I scraped off and filed away suddenly feels not so easily disposed of. As though by chopping I made all of those little pieces that much more meaningful. The parts separated from the whole, and therefore better.

It's not that I feel bad for all my chopping, because I don't. I landed that axe precisely where I aimed. It's only that everything else has become...hazy. Something in the grainy rub of my eyelids after too many late nights killing too many bottles with too many strangers. Start to feel a little discorporeal, dissolve in the tips of fingers and backs of knees.

But I remember a feeling like a time capsule buried and forgotten, other moments layered over the satisfying thump of the parcel at the bottom of the hole. And I have been thinking that once you lose a time capsule the best person to find it would be a farmer tearing down the house nearby and clearing all of the stumps for growing other things. I think that a farmer, finding an old time capsule nestled at the bottom of what used to be a tree, would look gently through the contents and then place it back under the ground, let it sit below new roots that would soon be growing.

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