Factorij 2.

2.

My eyes are best in the dark

abhor sun, keen in the mind

glow of rotting wood, electric

light of amber: only the light of what’s there, stuff

strafing us through their names.

Measure his back and you’ll see what’s in his hand, said the Guard.

(A chicken has three feet,’ says the Zhuangzi’s outermost chapter: thought to be an interpolation from later Mohists or Logicians, meaning thirdly the idea of feet; or not, the spirit of Zhuangzi’s mental freedom persists in the saying’s concreteness. The ground, the anthill, the ivory stair, and the chicken on it, inseparable. Language gives you away. Say anything. Just say.)

I trotted alongside her in the fur they gave me.

What is my name? I asked. 

Thing with a tail, she said,

because every name is taboo:

a banishment, because

your real name is being here,

being me, the sound of feet

under the leaves. And I stopped

listening, by an affect

of her speech. And

I heard rodents,

even here, she said,

is the partnered sea.

We trade the same knife for anybody,

he said. It was my first night at The Gate.

I’m still arguing with him. 

Moonish lustre of citrine

Merchant’s stone,

the light walks half way up the hill.

But doesn’t end. Nothing ends. And the stone

on my desk 

fades into roads

degrees, steppes of the spectrum where people

go, biting their lips

as if their fathers by chance 

angry in the East, met with broken livers and not a thought for wood.

Joyous in the South with stars in their wombs.

In the West needing only white breath for sustenance.

In the North, listening to bladders black with fear in hiding.

Look up, look in from the center. The way we do.

In and out, busy on their way to remembering.