William Fuller

Chagrin

I went down to the place where I was and I wasn’t there. I had formed a new perspective between the water and the trees. The wind had folded me up, though I’d forgotten it or had assigned the memory to someone else, someone whose name is missing from my account, who sleeps under the earth and wakes inside the sky, on the day and hour of Mercury, the moon decreasing out of time.

As ever, we were then.

Bees

What exactly do you want in terms of contriving satisfactions if not an account of how they could exist within the revolutionary horizons you imagine at given times of the day, or on certain days throughout the year, even as you admit no one can really express what they are, nor does their failure to appear matter much when compared to the piecemeal and sporadic episodes waiting for you on the pavement: a breathy voice, an odd pattern of notes, words out of order. Yesterday there was not enough information to comfort you, only the vague sense that things might be resolved without your input. Experiments continued to be proposed and carried out, for instance someone stared at the artificial light to analyze how it sent attention lengthwise down the coffin-shaped table. Do not desist from such labors. Their results can be arranged as follows: mid-September morning, early and cool, my shadow moving on stilts. Or: bonfire of evening peaches, abyssal sea salt bites the spirit clear. Or: somewhere a plastic weasel pops from inherent instability. These three cases offer hope that what we seek is not beyond our grasp, but lies just up ahead, at the next turn, much closer than previously thought, though by no means immediately at hand. I summon up the pharaohs of memory and imagination. I watch their fingers rise like bees.

Future Interests

The molecules turned tenderly toward me while a fist gathered speed. The dark sky’s core glowed—its radiance was less than a boundless or immeasurable radiance, but more than a practical, literary, or mechanical radiance. The unshaped stars exceeded all refinement, passing from peak to peak inside a tractable sphere. Trees chanted elegant lightning through the wet leaves of outer space. The glorious morning lay dead asleep and the thought of waking it likewise slept. Our then living descendants had not yet been born.