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are
comforting, they're so full. I set the table once again. The bright food sits
between us waiting to be eaten. A shaft of sunlight pierces your water glass,
the molecules dancing like fairies. If we pause too long, consider it too
closely, it will ruin, the food growing cold, the vegetables turning brown, the
three-egg omelet becoming leather. Then something or other (it's so hard to
predict) will grow a beautiful blue-green mold (not ugly like the fungus on
that bread - a ratty, beardlike fungus) or smell rank as week old garbage
broken out of incubating green bags. A new race will walk out of the microbes:
little men with luminescent blue hairs (each hair having a creeping life of its
own) if only you could see the crawling within crawling under the
microscope!
What would happen if I forgot to set the table
or we forgot to eat the food I set on the table? My days
are so much the same: a time warp to try things out. I
could not set and set the table, practice not doing and doing. Not eating and
eating, the meal not getting and getting cold depending on how you look at it.
And what would happen? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. (It's this nothing at the
inside of days so full on the outside I'm talking about.) |
If
you were sucked into a black hole you'd be stretched to the height of a
skyscraper
the width of a cotton thread (You would not know this was
happening: a time warp. You'd just know, then not know like slipping into sleep
or falling out of consciousness, the light gone out to see the shadow of pain
over your shoulder. And without a body, who could say you are dead? You would
not exist.)
Now
I ask you: How do you write about
nothing while it crystallizes brilliant green, staining the porcelain? While it
draws strange lines around your eyes and mouth that tell you how you've been
smiling or frowning these short years when you catch yourself looking sideways
in a mirror, strategically placed in a public building? While your tooth
crumples on a stone in the salad you've washed and prepared and consumed
unsuspecting the stone inside the folded leaf?
Gillian Harding-Russell
Surrey, B.C |