Thursday, December 08, 2005

And then to pick up Carla Harryman's Baby and read sentences like these:
A twinned Sierian iris on a spindly stalk is what she knew. Something larger, absent in her consciousness begins to grow.

Or.
The hand is an insect perched on pee. Forgetting forgetting forests. This matter swelling in glee.

...................................

Knowledge.
Knowledge was being processed. It was in the argument machine and the driver of the machine was a god with the face of a man and the body of an inkbottle.

Knowledge.
White fuzz in the air froze on a screen. Baby danced the cancan which she'd seen imitations of on daytime television. Monarch butterflies hatched that day blanketing the scruffy shrubs with anxiety. Baby danced on the sidewalk. She choked a coke can with a jump rope. Then blew up a plane with her semi-automatic spitballs. The butterflies wanted nothing to do with her. When she trapped them with her little hands, they played dead, and when she opened her hands, they wobbled on air pockets off into the trees. These children, these children, screamed baby. What do they know?
The world is here, recognizable yet estranged. It's as stark as the difference between awake and asleep.

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