Notes on Flow, and: Vantablack Timothy Donnelly (bio) Notes on Flow The unforthcomingness of basic information, such as what we've all been waiting for, whose responsibility it is, and whathappens when they fail to perform it, or when they perform it poorly, incites a desire rooted in irritation, the kind of itch that wants answers, its storm surge an echo of the mechanism of the aphrodisiac Spanish fly. Tincture ofcrushed blister beetles, its active ingredient, cantharidin, when absorbed by lipid layers in the epidermis, disrupts transmembrane proteins that bind cells together, resulting in lesions and pustules. I am answering my emails; I am feeling in touchwith the great currents that have guided human striving from the start, knowing the domed night sky, uninterrupted, is my backdrop, and my end point is an arctic pavilion, not some potluck in a common space, where everyone apologizesfor misunderstanding one another's tone over plates of murky macaroni, which is likewise where I am. Someone compliments my cupcakes, but speaks ill of me, often, to a colleague. Thanks! Must we always live crumbled over so many fronts? What, if I cried outto anyone in admin, would ever come of it? Nothing, no one, under feckless heaven, has time to make good on my beautiful complaint. [End Page 23] Vantablack Wanting my mind to be quiet as a child, I wondered if a thought could survive without words, which always came alongwith sound, with noise, even when unspoken, and so I set out to stop— surveilling the room from the raft of the bed—my eyes briefly, wordlessly, when they landed on red—stop sign corkboard, Merriam- Webster's, stripes on the flag atop Old Ironsides—and even as Isensed this wasn't actual thinking, I was certain at the time what I was making, stringing reds together, was a sentence. Night falls; night falls again, harder; night falls a third time, into the forest and the trees trap it there, batting it back and forthlike cats at play with a cockroach, confusing it in its injury till it transforms into energy, into the heat that feeds the night and keeps it restless, an endless circuit like a fountain of crude no light can escape from, falling deeper into the spread of itselfforever—but there are no words for what it does; it is the space at the mind's molten core where there are no words, there can be no sound, no noise; the aberration of language only takes place outside its borders, our babble skitters off in fear of it like goatsdown the face of Mount Etna before an eruption, or before the gasp as I sense what I made of red wasn't just a sentence: it was an invitation. [End Page 24] Timothy Donnelly timothy donnelly's fourth book of poems, Chariot, will be published this spring by Wave Books. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn. Copyright © 2023 Timothy Donnelly