Der Verkehr

 

19 October 2022

 

Not narrative, but chronology. Not how, but as it happened. Not art, but accident.

Before effect, there is cause. It’s worth lingering. Conspiracies neglect cause for the erotic pleasures of the perfect web. They don’t entertain the pause. All noise and the blur of rain on a car window at dawn. Doppler untangled is mere siren.

Conspiracy is the gossip of events, always adding up.

The new V2 is a kamikaze drone. Disruption inside the war’s disruptions. Torture chambers buried deep inside buildings, drones knocking out the windows. A window without glass still refuses the eye’s trespass.

The history of war acquires its shape through broken forms. Precision missiles take out armored personnel carriers. Men run from them like ants without compasses. The scene in Dr. Zhivago of a man lying in a field, firing a machine gun. At 6, I’d already started weeping by then.

My son had a flat tire on 395 the day after Reggie came to mind, young, African American, killed on the New Jersey turnpike a couple years after he graduated. Should have gotten better grades, he said, heading off to law school in Michigan.

These faces rise from the throat into the mid-brain like curled hands, borne into memory. The question of meaning includes this: why do I remember this now? Or that.

The power lines between parts of the body light up like a street at the end of a power outage. I feel traffic between my heart and right knee, then the point between my eyebrows and the end of my nose. I make a map that’s already there, like a drawing that burrows inside the paper.

He says he wants to do only what he loves in his remaining time on this earth. Do people say these things over coffee?

She wonders if the story about the old woman who sits for hours at the bus stop needs more drama. We wonder if she’s had a stroke, can’t get up, feels sick. But she was just noticing things. The drama is all us. She’s the one who sees.