Thick Description

Eleanor Chai

I cut lines of ink as I read through the night. 

 I imagine the margins on pages are slim wings 

 between plankton and stars. I find what I need 

 in far sources. I make them intimate, 

I make them mine with the speed of light. 

He was seventeen, just a man, still a boy and ready to die.

 A true sacrifice, a living encounter -- 

                                                      This father has paid 

 the sum of a daughter's dowry for his son to be consecrated 

 with a rod through his cheeks and tongue. The boy's face, 

 his mouth pierced and gaping, hangs on the page, helpless. 

His clove-jelly eyes float and metamorphose into my mother's 

 eyes, eyes I can't possibly remember without images like his -- 

 images forbidden, seized and smuggled into my life. 

 I can make anything mean what I need to find. 

The stolen scrap, the plosive glance saturated in 

 longing is not looking at me: I am looking at it. 

 Every description is thick with a will to revivify -- 

 reclaim, renounce, rename what is sought. 

Blind hunger drives when I read. A scream, the echo of 

 a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village ... and bit 

 by bit a village I've never seen swells into me. The ovoid 

 mouth of my mother's life, its slivering silence exists 

in that scream -- unheard, in memory. She came alive 

forever -- not loud, just alive forever redeemed from her never 

 with no speech. A noun transformed to modify 

 action revived her, returned her to me. 

The words as they lay may refuse to say what you need. 

 Drop to your knees. Crawl beneath the overhanging, 

 the dangling down. Stroke the described, 

 from underneath. It reeks of the atavistic 

to live. It survives by swallowing.