Craig Foltz

FLOATING DOWNSTREAM AND TAKING THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER WITH YOU

1. For A Minute You Thought About Keeping These Things For Yourself

At first there was just a fistful of phonemes that you held in your hand like a cluster of faded balloons. You were afraid to let the balloons go, because if they escaped they might come back as syllables or morphemes or something much, much worse.

So you clicked your tongue against your teeth and held on even tighter.

The words, the ones in your pocket in your pocket, you took them out and carefully examined them in the light.

Lest you forget, we’re talking about that curious point in time where one word said hello to another word and between the two of them, huddled together, they created some friction.

It wasn’t the friction that was the problem. The friction was pleasing and you could feel it in all of your tingly little extremities. Friction, for people like you, interested purely in physical sensation, was very good.

No. It was just that a by-product of this friction was that some deranged offspring carried on until a slightly more complex unit of meaning was minted. Your extremities don’t feel so tingly and good now, do they?

Let me start over. The friction birthed more complex sound elements, something approaching language.

It’s pretty obvious how things went from there. This new entity created some heat. A great big bonfire with charred marshmallows and timeless stumps of wood for sitting.

There’s your seat right over there, the old oak stump with the notched back.

The fire spits out new words at an alarming rate.

In case you didn’t notice it the first time: the beginning of this sentence is the same as the beginning of that sentence.

At this point, you may as well let go of the balloons.

They float off in the fumes and ash and disappear into the clouds.

2. Another Dispatch From The Green Room

One of the words follows you to bed. It takes liberties with your body. Oh, that’s right, you hid the word in your hand when you crawled in here in the first place so you know all about that.

When you wake up the word has burst in your hands and your fingers are all gooey.

And now you find that somebody else has joined you.

The heat from the fire has a life of its own. It scours every pore of your skin and when you stand up your entire body has been bleached white.

Not that anyone notices.

Another word pursues you even in your dreams. You look down at the sheets but there are all kinds of little pieces of debris all over it. Lint, perhaps?

Each of these little places of destruction marks a separate lexicon, with a pleasing almost bubbly soundtrack.

Kind of like the sound of birds after a storm passes through, right?

But first you should be aware of something. The person who has joined you? It’s their birthday and they want cake.

You know this because they begin blowing up balloons and pinning them to the walls. After the walls are covered in red balloons, they say, I want cake.

But first, they are going to need some candles.

That’s where you come in.

3. The Places We Live

In this one, the devil calls your name. You try to follow the actions of a baseball game as they unfold on the screen, but they are confusing.

Why did he stop running?

Where was the cut-off man?

How come that last at-bat had a commercial sponsor?

The person who has joined you says, Think about it. What happens when one ray of light meets another ray of light? What happens when one word transmogrifies into another? What happens when gesture is replaced by speech? What happens after the seventh inning stretch?

This person licks the icing off of their fingers. They offer you a finger as well and then put the eggshells in the compost.

Imagine, they say, that we are the two rays of light. You can be the first ray of light and I’ll be the second.

What you think that means: You’ll have a lot more work to do than they will.

Then, to confirm this, the second ray of light plops down on the couch, in the place you live, sipping scotch and giggling occasionally.

When the scotch is gone, this second ray of light mixes up the ingredients in a bowl, out in the kitchen.

You can smell the kinds of things that happen when heat is applied to butter. You can smell sugar. You can lick the raw egg off the sides of the bowl.

Some of the balloons have come loose from the wall and drift in front of the vent on the floor.

One of the words is bent and pointy and refuses to be uttered. Ever.

4. Flipping Through The Encyclopedia Of Everyday Things

Some might say that its not fair, you hording all the words. But then again, other people are happy for you to have them, because they think that the words themselves might be contagious.

You know, like a disease.

And besides you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

You’ve stored the words in glass jars and inflated balloons. You’ve hid them in the icing of a cake. You’ve got the words locked up in a super secret database that can only be accessed by moving through air and space as if there was no content or mass to your physical shape.

As if to prove the point, you pass your body through the wall and end up in the kitchen.

A ray of light, get it?

If anyone were to ask, you’d say that we aren’t actually cultivating the words, it is the words that are cultivating us.

Think about it. Pathogens? I mean, honestly.

The person who has joined you, the second ray of light says, It probably makes more sense if you called me Helen.

Hi Helen.

Helen tries to pass through the wall too, but ends up getting stuck about halfway through.

You leave Helen there and go down to the store on the corner, you know, the one that sells everything, in the hopes of scoring some candles.

In the trees outside a flock of tiny birds, tearing into little red berries and singing. There is a premeditated dissonance in the wall of sound that they create.

That’s one way to describe it.

The heat from all the pleasing friction, it stays with you, even after you step into the shade.

That’s right, you remember now, that’s when Helen came in.

You walk into the shop.

5. The Horizon And All Her Distant Cousins

After all, we’re all being hurtled through space at dizzying speeds. If you look at the world around you, it’s pretty obvious. Night and day are just two different colors we’ve invented to obscure the fact.

No matter. You know the baseball game must be nearly over because the men and women who sell food from metal carts on your street have scrambled around a banged up little black and white television to watch the events unfold.

Black, white, night, day, who cares? It’s not like the end of this sentence is the same as the end of that sentence.

You stand at the counter. It is time to exchange a few of the words in your pocket for some of those candles up on the shelf. And also you’ve got to ask for some kind of utensil that you can use to extract the other half of Helen’s body from the wall.

The guy behind the counter asks for a three-syllable word beginning with the letter M.

Marshmallow? Murmurous? Moussaka?

This guy, no matter what you give him, he’s happy. He doles out the candles and gets you a tool, some kind of shovel and pick-axe hybrid.

This should work.

Helen has managed to worm her way mostly free. Just her elbow is still caught. And her lower left calf. This lovely second ray of light makes a slow steady progress to free herself.

You don’t need reminding. That is this and this is then.

It goes without saying that you include her functions and all their processes in the preceding statement.

One of the words has the power to make everyone disappear forever and ever. You keep it there on maximum security 24-hour lockdown, just below the very tip of your tongue.

You know the place, right alongside the sublingual glands. So every time you salivate, it nearly pops out.

Helen plops down on the couch right next to you and whispers in your ear, This is dangerous.

Outside your window, the freeway is little more than a river of language waiting to be deconstructed.

You say, No wonder there are so many car accidents.

Her hands snake out from underneath her arms to caress the inside of your pockets.

But nighttime came in to obscure the fact.

You spend the next decade building a catalog of intricate words and then the decade after that editing the pile of words down to nothing. The book where you hold these entries keeps shrinking, ink flayed from its pages in fat huge chunks.

Tiny, white pebbles line the walls you pass through.

The pile of discarded words grew and grew until they spilled out of your apartment and onto the street below. They flowed out into the desert. They clogged up the atmosphere. They dissolved into the foam washing up on the beach. Some of them blocked the light from the sun. Everything closed down, even the shop with the candles. Commerce became a quaint, mythologized concept from some distant past.

Oh, there was this other thing. Objects and possessions, those became obsolete too.

Most of the poems and novels disappeared from our collective memory. And the ones that didn’t only had a few scratches remaining on the page, almost like conceptual line drawings. Everyone found that they felt much better. After awhile you even let go of the phonemes and morphemes in your fist.

Get this, they drifted out over the alluvial plane, racing ahead of all that revving traffic, up, away, and over the horizon.