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.