Moments of Unavailability

by barbara caveng
translated by kel barksdale

“You’d better keep your plans top secret” (fortune cookie)

In the place where i am,

the food is served cupped in the palms of labiates.

In the place where i am,

creatures with wallpaper coattails flit from room to room.

In the place where i am,

the leaves of last autumn have fled into the corners of the city.

In the place where i am,

an ivy angel spreads its wings between buildings.

In the place where i am,

washing lines tie each house to the next. The internal glides out into view on its tight rope act, pennants in a festival of underthings. The unveiling of the private creates a bashful intimacy, shed skins fluttering in the breeze between the clasped thighs of their clothespins. Maybe the people

in the place where i am

don’t need any closets; maybe everything is in a permanent state of being obsessively washed, cleaned, dusted down, hung out on the line to blow in the wind, blow away, a knit dress becomes a kite dress  and a terrycloth bathrobe in front of the fourth-floor balcony that was looking suicidal a few days ago, hanging headover with its sleeves dangling helplessly in the empty air, jumped from its line last night. Who will care for him, what will happen to him—how do you bury a bathrobe who leapt from his line?—

in the place where i am,

there are plenty of places to fall. The railingless balconies, the platforms, the concrete ledges—these are the plateaus where night wanderers and edge junkies gather. Moons of red underpants slip off the line and climb towards the heavens,

in the place where i am,

where life is a balancing act on the cliff’s edge, the external surroundings, the architecture of the city, in acceptance of the unovercomeable. An avalanche where the search-and-rescue team are disguised as garbage men, salvaging the remnants of civilization out of the rubble. The faces of the living have grown stony too, they are also survivors when they fall into the pits of the city. Unslowed by their end-of-the-world clatter, escalators plunge into the depths for a 2-minute-12-second-79-millisecond eternity, carrying their riders down to the platforms of the underground. Above ground they celebrate their freedom. I was led

to the place where i am

by the expedition “Journey to the End of the World” (Ibn Battuta)—21 days into my own internal landscape.

In the place where i am,

i crawl under the sofa with my headlamp—third eye—to descend underground into the  limestone caves of letters, scraping my teeth against the deposits of thought and idea, drilling words, raising language—stuttered syllables in a golden bowl—letting each era flow into the next.

I’m trying to imagine what you see when you walk through this neighborhood, says the man behind the counter of the bistro,

in the place where i am,

i see a city falling to its knees insofar as its materials will bend—a giving way, a falling in on itself, this melting of concrete, a bare view of the fragile construction lying below its reinforced epidermis. I see the rubble and dust of buildings imploding in slow motion, drifting away on the breeze. The lace veil draping itself like a motion on an operetta stage across stumps of walls and shapeless carcasses, the remnants of luminaries remembered in plaques: “We were all poets.” This weathering away, the rotting door frames and the wounded facades pulling your gaze into the buildings, the flecks of plaster, the scar tissue, plaqued, grated, raw. All of these prosthetics, everything lashed together, bolted on, clamped in place, plated over, and duplicated in shadow. This cobbled-together life, the frozen foam that oozes out of seams and cracks, polyurethane phantasmagoria. The city

in the place where i am

has been weeping tears of grief for days—the gutters spit water, the little rivulets swirl around your ankles, your shoes begin to grow moss before you get home from the store, the arteries of the river are flowing a clay brown color, always stirred up, i’ve never seen the water blue or transparent or a floating mirror of self-awareness. It is a broth (brew) and the whole brood (blood) has moved away. Dog City—i can no longer tell whether human or hound has the upper hand. This city has gone to the dogs, wrote a famous author, tracing the phrase back to its roots in his epic about this city of iron and concrete.

In the place where i am,

my neighbor on the right has put a pair of insoles on the washing line—someone is close to a breakdown, i think.

In the place where i am,

i find stability in the idiosyncracies of my apartment. On the sandy strip along the baseboard wallpaper, the scraped-off bits, the trip hazards, the flaking laminate, the scuff marks –the wear of reality against the cover of a cozy life.

The deep window frame, whose broad sill I use as a seat for my morning reading and writing, the ancient pillow against my back with its cover crumbly and faded like withered skin, the milky skin of abandoned coffee; the pillow cannot be cleaned, it would simply disintegrate along with all the time stored up within its fibers: the deposits, skin flakes, life particles of everyone who’s leaned against it over the past century, whose tears have dried inside it, who buried their faces in it, stuck it under their arms or between their legs to sleep, perhaps even rested their feet on it or dried their sweaty hands against its fabric—all of these dried flakes and crust of bodies remain caught inside forever. It was handsewn, it is heavy, filled with thousands of tiny feathers, a swarm of foxtails—when i’ve arranged myself in the alcove, i pull the bridal veil that hangs on a frayed hemp rope and serves as a curtain, and whose upper seam bears a fist-sized wound where a jealous thought caught in the lace and tore it open. I hide the scandal in the folds of the drapery and settle myself into position in my window fort

in the place where i am.

ps.: I have, said the man, behind the counter of the bistro

in the place where i am,

visited several European countries. But I couldn’t connect. I couldn’t get a feel for you.

pss.:

In the place where i am,

my neighbor hangs a bag of apricots on the clothesline between three coat-ravens who keep a night watch over the city

in the place where i am.

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