Four Portraits

Not true—time will not tell. It has no mouth, no language center of the brain. No brain, either. What do these locals of the human array, these Weaklings of a World to Come, mistake for the linear progression of their flesh through velocity and space, if not a gradual blooming of their enigmatic core?

Make a fist. Enclose around that fist the other hand. Now ask—which makes a better self-portrait?

*

Kosha repeated the word again to sample its buffet of syllables: “schlimmbesserung.” It had begun that way. A man in New York had e-mailed a woman in Chicago, who had CC’d her into the spreading fractal chain of their complaints. Some horrible event, the burning of a building and its inhabitants, a meth addict laying his head in an oven, the friend of a friend drinking to disfigure the child in her womb, had made its way toward her across the ever flattening plain of uninformed innocence—that she had eaten a fine dinner last night, enjoying the kale, the Siracha tofu, had slept as if atop a carefree summit, and had the next morning, eager in her flesh, woken in a ball of warmth and dry rest, only to be snapped back into a blameless link of vividness.

Schlimmbesserung. Time will tell. But what will you ask it, she asks—not of herself, nor the earlier addresses in the e-mail, but of the air itself—about such things, what would cause it to evolve so well?

*

He was striding across Lucera Ave., Charybdisian traffic around him, was ticking off in split lightning instances things to be seen. A digital ticker advertisement in a sandwich shop window. A man feeding a dog a banana peel from a public waste basket. The well-tanned left profile of some girl’s lucky, heavy cleavage. When, with the suddenness of aneurysm, something unnaturally still stilled the speed, caffeine, the frantically multiplying branches of overdubbed conversations in his brain, and for a second he stopped short of the next step he was taking—two-thirds beyond the slice of on-coming traffic—and heard a word, a last name, Russian? Greek? Gentile? Jewish? unite the buried drifts of his day.

Yuodzukinas. What a wonder. One word over another makes a name.

*

Can you hear him? He’s barely breathing. When he speaks, it’s a whisper, a whisper that shifts side to side and doesn’t stick, like two kinds of dust rubbed together.

This is the sage, the last weathered blade of grass growing outside the kingdom’s gate. Armies have crossed the plains only to stamp him flat. Herd animals have wiped rump and shit on him. Dream-headed country daughters have fallen on their backs in the fresh reach of so much free grass and spied young men's genitals in the shapes of clouds overhead. The sage is and was always there; an accident himself, by nature he accepts accidents. The trajectories they plot from nothing so much as one hour expanding and expanding, like a drop of ink in white cloth, as one sits and stares, are more necessary than acceptable: by these invitations and ruptures, lives and whole cultures rise and crumble. In the end, giving spine to yet another strong, earth-wrestling blade of grass.

The wind is on his back like a past love. Like a demon pattern spanned and reflected in a fugitive speck of dew. This is how the ancient amnesiacs speak, wielding more poise from the future than they have invested in it.

Time will tell. But first, say everything you can to it. As it makes its way towards you, what it forgets it sacrifices, the Grass Master says, to appease a failed fulfillment.