By ADAM KOSAN.
IN THE LOWEST areas of memory, at the bottom of a hill at the bottom of time, that hill begins to move with my arm. A limited storm-like movement in the land leaves no stream, no tree, no face unprovoked. Everything brightens down the valley at this fist that was a vision, a childhood hill, and now is body, an appendage. To have such sudden unnatural power is embarrassing. There’s nowhere to hide: each movement of my arm darkens the sky and gives the valley disquieting coldness, the first breeze of an imminent ice age. The land of memory is usually hostile to intentional remaking, but now the hill-hand works over its face. Nothing disappears but nothing is inviolable either. The hill-hand is like a stone shadowing every minute near thing and I see each take in darkness, the little shadows begin to crawl.
Attempts to set things right bend the trees even more—such ardent do-gooding!— and now they lie so low and mangled, they brace the mouth of the land. Everywhere pilgrims are falling and backbone-lacking stones are being struggled up and announce to passerby that wind will chasten our names from all last places. The air is like a sea, dark and loud. The phantom hill of my pale hand moves silently, sullenly, through the turmoil. There’s no swimming up out of a hollow that’s all water-resembling air. The hill-hand waves slow destruction. It strikes against a far object into outlandish fire and will burn everything nearby to the unredressed lightness of ash. Galvanic madness pushes you up, clocks are going off making insane steel noises, you can’t shut your eyes, you can’t block your ears, you can’t seal yourself in fetal helplessness, but something within defying exhaustion and despair forces you to declare yourself against every corrupting thing, and like the airport runway worker sweeping a wand through the dark you make languid signs by waving your death-white hill-hand.
Blood is eager to get out of your body, which, blood feels, betrays by constant fatigue, drawing the cowl of death slowly, ever tighter, over blood’s living dream. I feel like a king who razes a city after finally giving himself to impulse and glee, like an infant knocking over toys and everyone claps and oohs and aahs. I am on my back in a cradle, I am cradled in memory’s time from shin-splitting physical forward time, in my valley of the world I rehearse catastrophe, enthralled by an overgrown hand and belittled hill that together have established a new natural form. This new reality tells me that the future is a place of unforeseeable grotesques. But for now I am still somewhat exceptional to possess this forerunning mix of living body and land, offensive, I have to believe, to the God who originally separated us from soil.
Air breaks up then regains integrity, like a circle of flies when a swatter passes through them. The world won’t stop, a curtain somewhere is withdrawing to show new windows against wasted fields, or yet again here you are, you’ve come to in head-over-feet-over-head falling. That hill of childhood has gone out of memory into the world, a physical, temporal confusion of power and defeated will, panic and sweetness. Oh I am in terrible form and playing the joke, I don’t know when passion will exhaust itself, but as I recite whispers down to my chest I know I’m being claimed more and more by everything that’s not me, I’m turning more and more a shade of Arcadia’s green world.
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ADAM KOSAN’s writing has been published in Chicago Review, Prelude, and The Quarterly Conversation. He’s directed a live performance of Christopher Logue’s All Day Permanent Red and an opera, Productions of Time, for which he also wrote the libretto.
