Perpetuum's Sonata

Abstract

Perpetuum's Sonata Matthew Burnside (Fifty-one things you've always known…) ________ The night S arrives, nothing hurts. As if every string of every violin ever plucked could be, in an instant, undone. Tenderly unteased—an entire history of haunting. Almost, as if, a harp; a lark of a lesson. As in, and all of it so nearly for naught, learning for the first time that we could deserve love. ________ Freakzilla, whose real name you could not for the life of you remember, for years pummeled a punching bag with your name tattooed vertically across its synthetic skin. He punched and punched and punched, every morning, until the name smeared into obscurity and his fists calcified like diamonds, at which point he let your name finally die. ________ The heat of your body, which provided your first love with warmth and gentleness at a time when the world couldn't have been colder to her that one afternoon in a field of ryegrass, wild zinnia, and narcissi, is still retained in the fingerprints of her right hand, caught in the whorling-grooved galaxies of her thumb, index finger, and pinkie. The skin remembers, even if memory cannot. ________ You would also be the first face your grandmother would see in the world after this one, who would lead her by the hand into the garden of her ancestors, whose fresh hands were already shuffling a brand new, bright-red deck under the stars. There she is! They would greet her, hooting and hollering. Sit down and cut 'em already, sister. And, while it is true she let you win every hand, she often had to cheat just to give you the satisfaction. [End Page 50] ________ 5.6 million dollars is roughly the same weight as a kangaroo, a beer keg, a toilet, and your standard-size octopus. When you were young you used to dream of wrestling an octopus in your bathtub. These days, you dream of wrestling the ocean, twilight, sand you cannot even see but reach out sometimes in your sleep to grab a fistful of. ________ The man who used to mow your lawn lives way out in the country now. Deconstructing any machine he can get his hands on, he rips out the engines, converts the rotors into breathtaking Dadaist configurations that he erects in the woods. Sometimes at night he walks through his impossible creations barefoot. In just the right light, with night slicing through the tree's gap tooth branches, shivering silvery the wings of warped blades with moonglow, he imagines himself a doomsday angel there to avenge all silence. ________ There your professor's novel sits, in a box with all the other novels in his campus office. He has never been to New York. He always hated the term 'slush pile'—that throwaway term for roadside sludge that inherits all the mud, soot, juices of a fresh winter's thaw. He doesn't mind what melts unseen under the sun's magnanimous strobe, but he does take issue with all that's buried thinking it deserves to be there. Tonight, he reads your short story aloud to himself, pacing up and down the staircase gesticulating wildly at the parts that move him so as to sweep his elbows and trace great, phantom lemniscates through the air like a conductor choregraphing ghosts singing the Star-Spangled Banner. You WILL be a writer, he scribbles in chicken scratch in the corner. Indeed, you already are one! After grading thirty papers he stares at the grass growing imperceptibly under his disintegrating tennis shoes. He believes in the inner lives of rocks, that every matter matters. How the birds move with such stirring force, phlegmatic repose even as they glide against the wind, going nowhere and everywhere. Coughing along campus, two minutes before class he X's out the lecture on prosody that he spent an hour transcribing and tells the students instead, "Making art is all good and well but please don't ever forget that you, too, are art" before cancelling class and encouraging them all to go whisk an insect out of danger and then go listen to a field...