Read Online An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick - Free Book Online Page A

recognize you because you recognized me, whoever it isyou are, who knows what it is you know of me. The Furies pursue names through the desert places, the guilt on the names, repeating the names between each other, Daniel, Daniel, Allan, Allan to incite each other to volcanic anger, spitting the names out ahead of themselves to run all the faster, Allan, Allan , pursuing the guilty names. A writer (I’ve learned to make no mistake about it) is a lesser Fury—writing down the names while a moth climbs back up the leg of the chair it fell from—not accusing someone else of his guilt, of her misdeeds, but participating in the guilt, recreating it so as to relive it, to share it, not to judge it; the only accusation says in its fated tongue you were there without me , but now I am there with you, faulty and necessary witness, fictional but true, here I am with you, Father, Father, call me—
    Dear Daniel ,
    I am in my stateroom on the only boat that would take me as a passenger. If I didn’t have money to offer, where would I be? The captain doesn’t trust me, nor do the men .
    I won’t say sorry because I know you understand. I know you will understand. These letters will help you understand .
    It is hard to write on the desk as the boat rocks on the waves. I hope you’ll be able to read all the words. I’ve discovered many new aspects of the scroll since your mother died. Her death has helped me as a translator. I hope that doesn’t sound callous to you. It made me understand something about this language I could not understand before. Maria, her name, when she was alive, I could speak it and she would come. Now I cansay Maria and mean her exactly, but because she cannot hear me, she cannot come. The same word still calls out, even into death —Maria. This is one of the scroll’s lessons. Living makes us think that every word ends at the thing it names, but it isn’t true. Things live in the middle of their names to distract us from all a word says that is not discernible. We’ve learned to stop at what is at hand and be satisfied, a child asking for a bauble. But death removes from us what we love, and then the word pushes out past its normal limit, drops its reference from itself, and its sense turns into a singing in which a word ceases to mean any one thing, a singing that opens up abstraction, the interstitial connection between forms—the way an apple seed is also the apple tree is also the apple blossom is also the apple fruit, but more, the way it is also the pollinating wind, also the bees, also the child that, plucking a fruit from the branch, bites into it. “Apple” is a word in the myth. I’ve spent the morning translating it. It cannot be written down, for writing stills it—a kind of death. It must be held in the mind in all its singing complexity. Then the word contains in it all its history, every utterance is in each utterance, a line that stretches back to the first time it was spoken. The word is a realm that includes us all. The mythic word, the ur-word, spoken unknowingly by the fruit vendor on the street, by mothers and daughters, it reaches back to that first saying, when to name something was to create it. A dictionary—no one teaches us this—is a book of ontology. But a spoken word springs forward, too. To say apple predicts the countless times the word will be said again, forges the connections that do not yet exist, a man not yet born giving an apple to the woman he loves but she also does not yet exist; tosay apple includes them. A word—and this is why your mother’s death has opened me to my work—has nothing to do with time. We infect our language with our own mortality. But the word is outside of time, and refuses to do time’s work. Some poets know this. “But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.” A word is a small thing in the