To the Irrealis
1 \
mercator projections—
Three weeks ago I sat in dead-stopped Fourth of July traffic just outside the northern New Hampshire border. That point marked mile 1070 and day 3 of driving. Up ahead, the 1000 pt. type read “Live Free or Die”. The car’s A/C had long gone out; the thermostat read 91. I sat in a sea of mammoth trucks and SUVs, of blaring alt-country and diesel fumes, and thought “Fuck the Fourth of July!” I reconsidered the sign. Traffic inched forward, stopped. Live free or die? I thought. I can’t venture toward either.
*
I’ve mentally drafted several drafts of replies to you by this point. Something about putting the words down shifts the direction, order, implication, always. Reader may shuffle at random, sometimes. Something like that. Shuffle once for the past, once for the present. And so on.
*
You enter the southern Maine border over water. Muted teal beams crisscross the sky; the Piscataqua River lies 130 feet below. Now you’ve crossed the bridge, you’re on open highway again, traffic clears and speeds into the distance. You’re steering a thousand-tonne machine along a strip of earl gray rock, and very aware of it. Nothing but trees, secret-green and prehistorically quenched. I’ve felt this before, you think; I had a name for it. Something like soul, spirit.
*
Or that was Iowa City, circa last call. “Last call for hope!” the bartender shouted, and everyone came running. Live innocent or die. “I voted for Obama today,” a friend told me, “and afterward, I cried.” Yes, that was then: changing seasons to an internal singing, hope! with its attendant peaks and valleys. Red leaves, strong coffee, deep breaths. Fireflies in a clearing.
*
Fireflies (a children’s song)
The firefly
only lives for
such a short while
but they lighted up the sky
for the other flying ones
*
This time, it’s different. You live daily in the pull and rub of this predicament. It’s different, it’s different. The answer comes dreamily and rarely: it’s always been different. You’re the same. The dream turns dark. I’m not, you say, the same. I am.
*
You’re fit to burst. Can’t shut nothing down. The nested parentheticals break. I think, I’m nested, pathetic, and fit to burst. Can’t open nothing up.
*
I am learning the little formulas of a previous life. Already gone epiphanies. As in: a walk in garden sun. As in: repetition and difference. I am a repetition in empty time, time declining. To include Deleuze: repetition as difference without context. Floating, fog.
*
You’ve lost a previous film, an earlier language. I speak in mismatched letters, choke on clouds, silent in a clearing. And I forget, forget the movie song. What path lies there, where? I am perpetually lost. You perpetually find me, there.
2 \
the daily and the grand—
The week over. Diffused into the past of it: the week that could have been. Some missives, under the wire.
*
To get from Verona Island to Prospect requires crossing the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. I glimpse the beams well before reaching them, through the glacial flint and reach of US 3’s twists. I have become afraid of bridges-afraid of most anything with latent lethal potential, which leaves little else to feel safe in-and on approaching the PN I’m overcome with a sense of dread I’d only previously witnessed secondhand.
*
We are tethered by the daily. Air to ground, water to sky. Habit and ritual entwine us in tautologies of order and meaning, of purpose and worth-the efficacies of which, of course, depend enormously on shared social values and one’s own capacity to fasten the actual to the ideal…
And in the space between the ideal and the real: melancholia. Is this why we speak so infrequently? Because our speech* lives in this mourning place?
*
In The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, Stacey D’Erasmo locates several liminal spaces as grounds for connection: the subjunctive, the actual, the image, and the dark. It may go without saying which of these worlds this text seeks to inhabit. If only, if only. Light passes from east to west and back again. In the real: I-90, I-495, I-95, I-295, ME-3. In the real: reversed, the subjunctive responsibility mine.
*
Secondhand: 1992, weaving through the Lepontine Alps, my father behind the wheel of a heatless Renault, the two-lane slim-hipped highway whiplashing through glacial crests and dips. We’re moving southward at breakneck speed toward Lago Maggiore. The highway abuts a thousand-feet drop into rock and snow; there is no guardrail; my father mashes the pedal and my mother cries out. “Hand me your sweater,” she says. I hand her my sweater. She drapes the sweater over her face and lies back. “You’re going to kill us all,” she says. I wonder at it, imagine the free-fall, our car toppling over the cliff into mist, then close my eyes to the image, return to the real vista: beautiful, vast, latent.
*
If the subjunctive can breed intimacy, it can also breed fear-contagion in the possible, never mind the probable. If I could be silent then, what right have I to speak now? If the bridge had been recast. If latent danger, what about danger’s twin? Suppose that X, were it not for Y, and so on, and back again.
*
“The field is created as the hunting progresses, and the hunting in some ways deposits the field beneath it” (Bergson 319)
*
I ride streaks of confident abundance, search you in the subjunctive, find you everywhere. See above for evidence. Like trick candles-the exhalation never fulfilled; I go on, pause, leave the words while life fills in its small tasks, its routinized necessities-returning to the store for vegetables, phoning my sister and missing her pre-work window-I move through the daily, aware of the held words in limbo, and a vast sharp sadness floods in. My inlet, the subjunctive, retreats like mist. I stand by the shore, enmeshed with untouchable weather.
*
To ride the valley I mirage other vistas. Recreate and co-create the never said. As in: love, the untouchable weather. The erasure comes later. Will this section stand? And what of the actual, as in: the daily, and what of all major and minor chord meanings and promises wrapped up that life. I carry on, you carry on. It is enough. Is it enough? I ask myself and delete this response. I tell myself that enough can encompass responses like these, start over.
*
The subjunctive country burns and floods. What could have been comes over the airwaves daily, fresh reminders of, salt in the wound of progress. Here and there, fresh gratitude at the staunching.
*
Coming into Ellsworth, Maine: a town like many others. Main Street putters earnest and small. A storefront advertises martial arts. A ringing echo in the internal air sounding out silence, and a latent question: were you here. Answer in the subjunctive. But now, in the actual? Resoundingly, and daily: yes.
E.G. Cunningham’s prose and poetry have appeared in The Nation, LUMINA, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, Hobart, Poetry London, 3:AM Magazine, and other publications. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Georgia. Her full-length poetry collection, Ex Domestica, is forthcoming in September 2017 from C&R Press.