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The problem with taking everything as a learning experience is that you miss teachable moments. Two cats came into some stubborn mould. There was no cure but to split it. The only monkey in this story was taking turns on their backs. The mouldy cats did not constitute a closed system, but they did not know this. They weighed the mould and one of them spooned off half correct to the hundredth decimal place. The question of the next decimal place inevitably arose. A finer machine was produced. Sensitivity skyrocketed. The mould clung chronic. The cats stopped hunting for cake, overcompensating for the original folktale. Here’s a teachable moment: There are two cats in your body, equally susceptible. Your job is not to kill the cake with the mould.1
A man was stung by a honeybee. Let me say at the outset that this was a good man. The bee died and the man lost an eye. The good man who was stung by a bee kept an eye out for other one-eyed men stung by bees—preferably honeybees. He fell out with the two-eyed folk who had never met a bee in their blooming lives. He scorned their bespectacled advice and mourned their unwillingness to see through his one eye. Like a honeybee separated from its hive he sought anchorage until a man appeared whose bee-stung father was turning blind. At once the sea and the homecoming whale, he educated the son on the ways of lonely honeybees and the peregrinations of monoculi. The son thanked him for his time but shot down the travel metaphor saying his father was missing a leg, having long ago been kicked by a horse. To which the one-eyed bee-stung good man, by way of reassurance, said no matter, wheelchairs go faster, and by the way, did he know most horses were kind?
In plain view, a window next to a window beside a window. A wall around three empty spaces sterile white. A moving-box on a blue floor has not moved in years. Upon years a fugue. Until somewhere a butterfly stirs. A window, a window, a window. Prepositions fasten thing to thing. Thought to thing. Then only thought laid over thought. The electric mind elides boundaries. Correlation is causation. A thing is a window on another. Is another. The box is blue, the wall the window, space sky. Sky teetering on the precipice of concordant images. Details cling like stray burrs and adjectives swallow whole. The box is blue. Blue is the colour of the devil. Colour is the devil. Peace comes to those who keep the window shut. Touch the glass. Home is a stillness allowed to be taken for granted.
A month is just some time. Sometimes September. Not the month you had dental surgery and read Emma in bed while a cyclone swirled some kilometres offshore. Jane Austen is a distant novelist. Not god’s salve for your phantom wisdom teeth on a rainy day. A wish is a wish; not a prayer for a tooth to heal, the rain to clear in time for the cricket (they did). A cricket match, especially a test, can be life itself. What it’s not, is your father’s key to your company when you came home for dental surgery last September. Your father—this is tricky, a father can be pared to a person but we cannot begin there—is a person, not an emblem of security especially when the dentist sawed smokily into your skull and the sky in the window bulged with oceanic borrowings. A window is part glass, part negative space; not a square of air, not the news of rain. Rain is communal water, not the dark in your head. Not a portal to other monsoons of isolation and you don’t have to hide from it in firelit nineteenth-century English households. Warmth and dark are not mutually exclusive; they are, in fact, awaiting association. Darkness comes when nothing is itself, but so does light. And of course, things are things and not thoughts. What do you think of when you think of September?
Chang, Victoria. “Bird and Stone.” In The Trees Witness Everything. Copper Canyon Press, 2022.↩︎
