From “Fictive ...

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BY A JA CO UCHOI S DU NCAN

try again. so the lesson goes. less a foot. an arm. an eye. easier to lose
one of two, to split a pair, to untwine.

other injuries are more difficult. a broken septum, an amputated tongue.

consider the spleen. once ruptured the body is maligned, capillaries
flooded with something other than. the greeks considered the spleen
the organ of compassion, but the french recognized melancholy, the
mottled flesh, the ache of. it is not, after all, the heart but the spleen that
is the source of our greatest suffering. the heart is that which we cannot
live without. it must be whole, intact. if our heart breaks, truly breaks,
it must be replaced. but the spleen, that abalone nestled behind, within,
can be carved down to a sliver of itself. it can live on somehow, a mere
fragment of.

every day dawn finds herself naked and wonders if she has not in fact
lost herself entirely in the night, her clothes, precepts, selfhood. what
comes of a preposition, of love, some penetrated interiority. in this new
and sudden opening, there is the fragile pink of sky, the lip of wind.
dawn is not alone in her discomfort. the sun too is heavy with the
previous day’s misfortunes. neither can bear the tentative movement of
the other. she would withdraw safely into the darkness but sun is thick
limbed, blocking the door. dawn walks backward toward the window,
her legs shimmering with light. she will fall — she always does —
 upward, into the buoyancy of it. there will be witnesses. it does not
matter who. for dawn there is only the swarm of light, the heady rush
of it. everything else is incidental.

there is a story we tell. a story about suffering. not because we are only
suffering, but because that is the story we have been taught to tell. take
a beetle for instance. it talks of nothing other than the leaf it chews. the
angularity of it. the soft brush underneath. there are many beetles. far
more than there are humans. somehow our voices always drown them
out. take crows for instance. they have been known to fish. not with
their beaks but with fiberglass poles left idle by drunken fishermen. or
maybe they are just sleeping. either way the crow speaks only of fish.
the cold flesh. the fragile meat. in the story i tell myself there are often
buffalo. not because they are prolific, but because they occupy the
expanse of my memory, its continent. the buffalo are only a metaphor.
snow is also a metaphor. bodies blanketed in white. freezing. we are all
rigid with it. the story. tell something different. something about the
rain. the sound of it. like walking skyward. away from one’s origins.
what has been culled from one atmosphere falling gently into another.

energy is an attribute of objects. we often mistake the boulder for

something other than. he is drawn to the laboratory dome, a concrete
formation sitting cross-legged on the mountainside. as if protesting
movement. as if unmovable. he finds breathing difficult, the opening
and closing. he avoids people who demand such things. there are those
who objected to nuclear fission, to anything being split in two. inside
the concrete building, he finds the guts of the machine, metal tentacles
wrapping around the bulbous head of an octopus. he stations himself at
the tentacle’s tip and measures the distance electrons travel when
driven from their source. a hundred years ago scientists believed that
fission could split the world into sequences of light. they were right. he
scatters particles, drives elements far from their nucleus. to create such
structural injury. we continue to.