LITMIR.BIZ

       Alakanak Break-Up

      1

      To find out the temperature, she tosses a cup of water into the air,

      because it will evaporate before it hits the ground.

      She goes outside and tosses a cup of alcohol into the air,

      and then she keeps looking into the air.

      When her attention is discontinuous, this no longer means that

      she is inattentive. In the same way, they can measure the plain, now,

      although plain and temperature are vacuums her heat sweeps

      across, even before she has turned.

      When she turns, the ice she had been standing on is changing into

      foam and is about to drift away. It rumbles as it is changing.

      She watches it recede, until it is a slit of light entering the brain,

      because the brain is protecting itself against the light.

      Here is the event horizon. You can focus on a cone-shaped rock

      in the bay. You can make it larger and closer than the ice

      surrounding it, because you have the power to coax the target.

      This breaks up your settlement in a stretch of infinity.

      Then you tie some string to a stick and toss it in front of you,

      as you are watching the rock. Then you keep drawing it back.

      Sometimes the stick disappears in front of you, until you draw

      it back. At these times the rock has become yourself,

      wearing soft bedclothes and with burned eyes.

      You balance three horizons. In the same way you press down

      on her shoulders and gently push the person into the ground,

      which is constantly changing in the current and on the tide.

      This is where they have concentrated you. All that time

      you had been noting the direction of snowdrifts and stalks bent

      in the south wind. Nevertheless, a storm can distract your attention.

      Your attention becomes the rasping noise of a stick drawn across

      the edge of a bowl at a party. It draws attention tenuously

      from your fingers, the way your body starts to hurry in the wind.

      This is where they have concentrated you, in order to be afraid

      or in order to re-create the line between your mind and your mind

      on the other side of a blue crack in the ice, so you can sit

      facing each other, like ice floes folded up and cut up

      and piled up against each other, and so you know enough to stop

      as soon as you lose your direction.

      Then, if you are on the ocean, with poor visibility, with no wind,

      and you cannot be seen, please go around the outside of an ice

      floe, because the ocean has dust particles, which will sparkle

      and indicate the direction of the sun, she says.

      When you look up, you see a heavy frost has formed on the window,

      which had been damp for a while each morning, and then would dry

      up and crackle. You pass the window. Ice begins to melt and drops

      of water travel down the window diagonally, because of your speed.

      You take the window and place it in your mouth, and meanwhile

      fish line attached to a red bandanna jiggles in the dark,

      because you are losing consciousness. It swarms around the rag

      when you look up at it against the sky.

      The dashes you had applied so carefully, in order to record rotation

      in the sky have been washed away, leaving milky traces of themselves

      and of their trails, so your poor map is now a circuit of spirals you

      can only decode into chrysanthemums on a sleeve moving past cirrus clouds.

      You are a blur of speed concentrating on heading in one direction.

      It is the bank above you standing still, because you are being

      held back. Sometimes in your path you see darkness that looks

      like smoke. When you come to the edge of it, you realize you are

      already veering away from it. You have to concentrate on the

      dotted line of your lane, which is foretold in threes by the light

      and ticks like a meter from your looking at them.

      Sitting up, you think someone has been splashing water on your clothes.

      Picking up a dash, which becomes a warm beam in your hand,

      you arrange them on a board, oblivious to the sky, because

      you conceive of yourself now, moving on the board or behind the board.

      A square of the board lights up and becomes the single headlight

      of a car, indicating another person.

      If the gravity of this moment outweighs your knowledge of where

      you are, that is pathetic. That is what makes the space above the

      ocean so attractive, but you still know enough to travel in a

       straight line through a patch of fog, and continue to walk when

      you emerge, with some fog clinging to you, up to your waist.

      Each time you forge an off-shoot of the river, you are hoping it

      is the river. It is a little mild time. You see a row

      of gulls lined up on the ice, their chests puffed toward the sun

      which is the color of apricots on snow.

      You pass a man lying on the snow, moving his head up and down

      and singing. At first the monotony of his movement makes it hard

      to

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