THE IMPOSSIBLE by JANE MILLER

I had to give a great speech to a filled hall, beginning
with a flute sonata, and to recite from several books
only two of which I recognized,

which I accomplished, though it took everything out of me
as I tried to hold my posture erect and, failing that,
at least look good on the balls of my feet -- this being
nearly impossible, I tried to give the illusion

of weightlessness, or at the very least a sense of rapprochement
with gravity, whereby my head remained light while my heart
suffered and my soul burned,

so that when asked to run, run for all I was worth,
which I tell you was not much by then, because of the pressure
to demur to those around me, cajoling and demanding,
I fled with a kind of verve even I did not foresee
since I was preoccupied with having abandoned a project
it's true only a genius or a madman might have finished
and which I had, frankly, more or less accomplished
by accident, intuition, and a sudden burst of confidence
which shocked even my dearest,

and succeeded in reaching the famous Crystal Springs
heretofore thought to be imaginary, a thing of wonder
but without substance, without substantiation, such blueness
and liquidity, it was unbelievable, but true,
that I stopped on a dime, resisting a personal moment
that surely would have overwhelmed anyone so haunted and
so driven by so many, and experienced what can only be described
as a disappointment, plain and simple, not because the waters
were any less majestic, any less transparent than rumored,

in fact, blue beyond the cerulean of sky over a south
high in the mountains of deepest earth, purpled, nearly black,
that is, if one thought of the sun ever going down
into such waters,

sad because I had never been more in love, more given over
to any one person, place, or thing, and all of existence
seemed paltry next to such feeling, if one did not count
the few stones that uncannily caught my eye, pebbles I
almost smashed out of a euphoria that overcame and nearly
destroyed me -- a taste of heavenly winds swept my narrow body,
tickling my ribs with a fancy singing of spirit, tempting,
perfumed -- but for the damned six or seven loosely strewn

aforementioned ugly little rocks that buckled my knees
with their gray snaky surface, pimpled, rough, impossibly
connotative, i.e., I saw a thousand lakes in the landscape
of a bird-shat mossy clump glommed to a crag, and bat faces
and bear paws and exoskeletal histories from beyond time,
and so on,

which held me face down, less recalcitrant than I had ever
been, trust me on that, and evermore eager to obey, the longer
I picked out lunar hills and valleys and the more hushed I got
between one ancient, practically moribund, megalith and another,
beamed, so to speak, from oblivion, the body of universe opened
into a gaping mouth

whose lips mercifully shined with the handiwork of creation, or
at least seemed that way to me, by now flattened to the cold
damp floor, reddened with the liveliness of movement, and of
sweat, crimson then, and moving, mouthing something, speaking
in tongues but almost immediately my language, words

I once dared to call, I grant you in a dream, the language
of love, which in this case hastened to particularize itself
in the being of a face, and then the hair and eyes and costume
of beatific figures transsexualized

by ritual and political charioteering such that I no longer
knew myself but rather a consortium of likenesses whose cocksureness
is colloquialized as immediately as the words for it are spoken --
a roaring of motorcycles and then hundreds of faceless, because
one face, hermaphroditic moderns blazed by, upstaging the monochromatic
past with theatric mauves and chartreuses, white-faced
and mascaraed images, eyebrowless, and I found myself in full
color, reproduced electronically, as it were, so eroticized
as to be unreal,

a diorama o'erpowering everything else in common limelight --
dykes on bikes, fag hags, drag queens, steroidal buffs, midnight
blue black semi-nudes, boytoys, unzipped sado-masochistic
six-foot tricks, the semi-erect, the innocent, in gym shorts
and in slips, tuxedos, T-shirts and cut-offs, jeans impaled
at the crotch -- godly, larger-than-life meaning assigned
to them by messages spelled out on their chests, "Silence
Equals Death," etc., until, so engorged, their numbers blur
into a mass of energy that finally disperses into the missions
and the tenderloins from whence they came, into the planetary
city named irreverently and made familiar by necessity,
"sex,"

and I passed out onto those innocuous stones, trifles
I might have missed another day, waking to stumble
between two destinations, home or on, knowing I
had forgotten -- o alcatrazed face, betrayed,
abandoned! -- more than any metaphor provided

because it too is ultimately betrayed and abandoned,
forgotten life because of this paper face, this alphabet
and these blanks I trusted, naturally, like a form
of breathing, life I have to return to which I made

more difficult than walking off the globe
by imagining I had to say a few tired words
into an ear, near-empty auditorium...beginning
with a couple of scratched notes, only some of which
I'd actually written...

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