toeimage by toe
toe
Not knowing how to begin,
so penciling lines up, up
the long page. Cut off
your toe! When you are
Queen, you will no longer
have to go on foot!
Two phalanges in the big
one; the others, three each --
base, shaft, head. But why
this nature, with these laws?
Not the loneliness, but the
winter, the room. Not knowing,
so turning the pencil point
on its side and smearing
one line after another, up
the long page. But what
would that final equation mean?
Abductor hallucis, flexor
hallucis brevor,
abductor hallucis. Stopped in mid-flight
by an atrocious pain in
the big toe;
the
feet independently lead an ignoble life.
*****
I’ll explain when we get
to the funeral parlor.
This
line, this, another, sweeping
up,
up the long page. Repeating
cycles of the stance phase
and the swing phase. She’s
no longer in our world.
Gravitational. Electromagnetic. Strong.
Weak. Rook
di goo, rook di goo!
There’s blood in the shoe!
The shoe is too tight;
this bride is not right!
However, in his account, hardly
anything happens: the struggle
isn’t
between good and evil, but
really between boredom and faith.
*****
If I know what I’m
doing, there’s no reason why
I should do it: if
you know, there’s even less.
This funeral parlor is quite
like a diner turned into
an apartment. In our world,
she’s no longer. Their committee
promotes the construction of a
monument to entropy. Melanoma eventually
metastasized to his liver,
lungs,
all the way to the
brain. Doubts.
Dirt. Daydreams. Not
the roundness, but the moon.
Lumbricals, quadratus plantae,
flexor digitorum
brevis, dorsal and plantar
interossei.
The wind is on the
other side of the world.
And as the boy sat
there in gaping, silent shock,
the driver gathered the five
bloody, muddy toes.
Picturing a
solid stress ball encircled by
its event horizon. Good and
evil lie one over the
other; like oil and water, never mixing.
She thinks
about thinking without language, without
thinking.
*****
Why can’t gravity-big and
gravity-tiny
get themselves together? The big
toe, ceasing to grasp branches,
is applied to the ground
on the same plane as
the four others.
That angelus
bell, hardly audible through
thick
fog. Daydreams.
Dirt. Doubts. Grace,
to dig down so far,
to God. She occasionally wonders
if anyone has found her
opal ring setting that bounced,
once, off the perfectly flat
marble museum floor. Apart from
the big one, the others
are broken and curled under the foot, which
is
then brought level with the leg, and the
arch broken.
*****
Up, up the long page,
thick graphite lines, which -- if
even longer --
would converge. The
fact that the physical world
is comprehensible is a miracle.
She and a museum guard
spend a good half-hour hunting
for her opal, searching until
she begins to imagine what
his life must be like,
after work. Went to market
means what, exactly? Stayed home
means, precisely, what? Under his
toenail, a dark lesion, wrongly
diagnosed as a soccer injury.
Might as well go sermonize to fish.
*****
Picking up the phone, then
remembering that the other end
is dead. One is seduced
in a base manner, and
to the point of screaming,
opening eyes wide: wide, before
a big toe. These
tiny
vibrating strings might produce
gravitons
behaving under the laws of
quantum mechanics, while carrying
gravitational
force -- oh,
and there’d be
at least ten dimensions. No,
she’s in our longer world.
The child took the toe
into the house, and he
and his barbaric family, ate it for
dinner.
*****
Kepler believed in it literally,
that the universe is singing,
reverberating with music inaudible
to
human ears, but as real
as gravity. He died ridiculed
for this conviction. What
do
those golden leaves look like
on the lake’s bottom? Eyes
closed, she beholds fire
spitting
through a soul, five swords
slicing another. Bandages wrapped around
the feet, pressing broken toes
tightly against the sole, ends
of bandages sewn so that
they cannot be undone -- all
with no anesthetic, with no
painkillers. Eyes, ears closed,
she simply cannot see or hear spirit
hymning to God.
*****
Up and up, among the
vault’s corner shadows, movement
of
slow wings. The fellow is
made entirely of oxygen; when
you’re near him, you get
burned. Abductor
digiti minimi, flexor
digiti minimi, opponens digiti
minimi.
No judgment, no sinners, no
just men, no great and
no small; there is no
punishment and no reward. They
claim that under every building,
beneath each lowest foundation,
lies
a leathery, fetal corpse. And
so we arrive at the
final, incredible page, the closest we
have ever come
to experiencing the act of dying, of
giving it all up.
*****
Gravitational framing for
galaxies, something
unseeable. In our longer world,
she’s no. At four and
a half weeks, rudimentary foot,
followed by toes. Slow wings,
invisible descent, until it
finds
one of the lonely ones.
I am sweet as honey,
and I am called Gabriel’s
Bell. One’s
self --
shadow blocking
all of God but a
thin crescent. Half a millennium
after his death, radio
telescopes
have detected the product of
supermassive black holes colliding
in
the early universe: each merging
pair produces a different low
note, all sounding together into
this great cosmic hum, the
universe singing. The
majority of
those physicists are certain
that
their goal will be reached
within several decades. Cage of
thick, black wire, as long
as she is tall: it’s
mine, and it’s for me;
it’s where I’ll live -- her
words continue, an aria that
doesn’t fade, even after the
accompaniment ends. Disgorging of sin --
noisome, huge. Naturally, indulgence is
given to one who says
the Angelus. The slowness of
that last page is terrifying:
adaggissimo; then langsam,
ersterbend, zögernd,
and äussert
at the very end.
*****
A human, who has a
light head, raised to the
heavens and heavenly things,
sees
his foot as spit, on
the pretext that this foot
is in the mud. It
might all come down to
a fish. Funny old fish --
old, green --
sickly green -- jade
bled through milk --
old, sick,
barely moving, teeth trailing seagrass
in two strands, one up,
one down. Anybody can choose;
St. Francis, St. Anthony might
have chosen; anybody can -- one
strand, the other, neither, both --
it might matter. It is
terrifying and paralyzing as the
strands of sound
disintegrate. One
by one, these spidery strands
melt away. We lose it
all. But in letting go,
we have gained everything. Then
it slips in, behind those
lonely eyes -- there
in a
rear
pew --
and it becomes those eyes as well as
all at
which they gaze. This entering can be
called
grace. Everywhere.
Everywhere.
—Joel Chace
