What Counts

On seasonal records.

brown mountain

1.

I’d love to tell you, but the words become ghosts, choking intention. 

2.

Once, they showed their insides, breaking open. 

3.

Meaning tends to expand at the site of the cut.

4.

The next attempt reminds: what is necessary is also impossible.

5.

The space after time’s vanishing has a way of losing its contours.

6.

To compensate, you can try cross-mapping histories to create an architecture of memory.

7.

Now we are inside the stones, now we are their erosion.

8.

By exposing matter, you can revisit its secretive nature. Some colors don’t happen in paint.

9.

The synapses around a single sentence can curl a face into the face of another time.

10. 

We pierced the soft flesh of old monuments. 

11.

A child makes bricks of debris, each block a memory.

12.

If each of these haystacks is another time of day, seeing is what happens between them.

***

Inspired by Monet’s Haystacks.

Author: Stacey C. Johnson

I keep watch and listen, mostly in dark places.

2 thoughts on “What Counts”

  1. I’d love to comment, but the words become ghosts…
    I’ve read the lines numerous times Stacey… like so much of your writing they simply strike an interior chord.

    1. Chris, thank you so much. This is a feeling I know and love well as a reader so it means a great deal to me.

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