FOUR PLANES OF EXPERIENCE

GIBSON FAY-LE BLANC

1. Reception & Contemplation

Whenever I walk the dog at dusk,
a certain silence of breath. Hitch-knot
over an ear. My split condition:

always cleaving, taking leave.
The branches’ synaptic map, a wind
within the wind. Two sawhorses

say Fire & Rescue—how about
no fire, no retinue needed?
The maple that drops its green

rather than submit to a long
fall: preventative. At a certain age,
certain slow-growth cancers occur

in all patients. To consider this
stand of pines is to will a screech
owl who wakes at dusk to hunt

its limits, the word pine a home
calling in the shadow of its beak.
Who hasn’t wished for greater returns

from Benefits Services agents?
Of course the hours proceed like this,
fingers along suspicious moles,

the splitting veins. Someone I know
calls her hours of insomnia
solving the problems of the world.

When I say world, I mean distance:
me on one bank, you on the other,
a rushing between that could be fire.

When I say fire, I mean I need
a slash and burn, ash circling
in the black willows, a singing.

2. As It Happened Narration

The dog (impatient, loafing) drops his ball
and drops his ball and, sick of my staring, eats
the millipedes that crawl out of the closet,
where they are fucking and fucking nightly.

I decide to take the dog for a walk
and, as we enter the park, think,
I bet this buffel grass was planted above
a trove of fossils and graves, which is right

about when I see the five screech owls unfurl
and stretch. Long-lost cousins of the hawk,
dusk hunters, they sweep through the willows, scan
a field of asters and the gristle weeds.

3.1. Recall: Nostalgia

The sun had been the perfect past
of sun, before the earth was peopled and unpeopled and light coursed through its valley of hours and fell with matches
and withering.

From the blockhouse lookout,
the ice rink sank its love songs into the hills around, and the elms, locusts, and hornbeams
were listening, each grove
switching, each tousled branch sifting north wind up along the paths running their tracks,
cement and sand—all
these songs converging on
the old house of stone.
Like any spring, the molting
everywhere made eyewells pulse. Often nothing stayed still so I would stand until I could
separate clicking squirrels
from seed pods falling on slate.

I recall you weren’t there
and the dog was, but when I saw the owls and heard their machine whirs, I remembered we were
both early adults, two
children who could talk to adults because they know the bodies (hamster, human) will stiffen—
eight shushed in a year.
I knew we’re meant together.

3.2. Recall: A Note on False Memories

Atoms are not things, they are tendencies. Particles can be in multiple places at once—easier for
a mind to fix them, say, at the park, having an epiphany. It is true at the subnuclear level we can
be understood to be one: owls, pines, you, I. It is also true that addictions, say, to solitary revel-
ings, are possible because we have dreamt of nothing better.

3.4. Recall: Gaps in the Record

Around that time I was reading things like:
The knights in the wood knew the moon never
would cure their super-sensual loneliness,
and writing things like: Once in a while I let
go of the break, the late-night conductor

said easily. Or was that a previous spring?

4.On Recording

No logical system is free
from inconsistency. If one
has reeked of box wine, one
knows this, or if you’ve had
the woods stuck in your eye.
Add to that that nothing existent
is measurable except
by slight collisions and flitterings
imperceptible to senses,
Henry Adams said, more or less.

This is not to speak of facts
(gilt-trimmed talons, for instance)
left out. The issue with the you:
she’s not the she exactly—more
a sum of missing gears.

In Minimalism Simplified
Einstein says now depends on where
you stand. Thus for the you
who has a bulse of flints always
on her person, the one

here and not here, who listens
to her old patients rattle
on for hours and listens
to her old man rattle on

on owls and all the missing letters:
I is such a narrow one,
so singular, so flimsy,
but we still means enough.