ANDER MONSON


Impedance
Atlas of Particular Grief

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Impedance



Shape of a scarecrow propped up in a field just seen through the falling snow and the remaining light, and you are inside with static on the radio but you like the hush, that sweep that sounds like winter or a curling brush on ice as shown on CBC that television that comes over the lake from Canada. What can you do with light now that your mother’s gone and you still sit on the couch thinking of her. What can the waning light do with you as it comes through snow, emanated from the sun a thousand miles away. What is your father doing upstairs in the attic with the transistors and the geodes and the lighted dials, the microphones. What is your brother dreaming of on the couch as he sleeps and leaves a sweaty mark which will show when he gets up. What is in the mouths of all the taxidermied deer propped up in terrifying poses—if a deer can be in a terrifying pose. And what is in your thoughts on Liz that unknown X.


 

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Atlas of Particular Grief

 

Being left behind is a mine a dollar hidden in the sand the sand so close together it becomes a clot a tiny galaxy a buzzword circling its dictaphone hive.

Receiving a postcard from you a week after your departure. Like your leaving on a propeller plane out of here, unpredictable and sorry. The postcard was a misstep, a misaddressing on the label. Maybe it was meant to indicate your intent to go right through the skin to penetrate the meniscus like a penny slipped into a glass of water.

How do those people win the catch a penny in the water game at Taco Bell? Rotate the cylinder and track the coin’s descent. Catch a coin for a free and speedy treat. It is slippery the penny moves too quick like an index how it jabs back in forth in some order like a drunk like a series of telephone queries by prank callers.

A nerve is not responsible for any information. Only a brief electric pulse coming like a wake from the body, just behind a trail of pain.

Pines jut up in the evening, hastening the sun’s descent. Prevent your brother now from going out after dark.

You know where the dead letters end up. Degrees of misadressed-ness. A skipped zipcode digit. An alternate apartment letter. Wrong number rural route. Old name. Missed time. Some emotional parallax.

Some get through. It had little substance. Only wish you were here-isms. Made more plaintive / ironic by events.

Ferrous means containing iron. Iron killed this country. Now offers it redemption. Riddled it with mines, incisions. Think of it as body. Think of it as the humongous fungus in Crystal Falls—a mile-long lichen. The contiguous think and living carpet. The pangea theory. Convergence and contingency.

We all come together at your funeral. Everyone’s got their eulogy they want to give. Lilies seem pixellated in this light. Like they’re fake. Or made of crystal strands that carry light like fiber optics. Everything revolves. Is on or off. Like light like here like this.


 

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