excerpt from Colluvium

What did you find when you went looking? What did you find when you stopped looking, but the memory of looking was still firm in you?

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I can stand on this boulder, too young to know the glaciers are history, and I will be, too. This is me, this is my body, this is the rock I have climbed, this is my house, this is my life.

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My body is an artifact. My body is a relic.

This is not my body.

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I carried you down to the water. Now, swim.

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When the words come, they come over the right shoulder. When the words come, they are gleaming.

“We are everything you have subsumed,” the words say. “Each of these stories is us.”

When the words come, they are folded like paper. When the words come, they crackle. When the words come, they are always telling me something I have forgotten, something holy, something mundane, something I buried in the backyard, something I looked for once, something I left.

“It is not true,” I tell the words, “that you know more than I do.”

This is a thing I said because I am afraid.
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“What,” asks my body, “if it takes as long as it takes, and you already know?” You already know.

It isn’t going to get better. It isn’t going to get better. It’s just going to get darker, and then we will set to work.
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When, as a baby, I was placed in a crib in a high-ceilinged room, I cried and cried.

Anyone can understand the feeling of being adrift.

Let’s say there is a task, or a series of tasks, you were made for on this Earth. Do not cross this out. Let’s say you’ve been doing this work all your life. You do not even know you’re doing it. The work is invisible to you.

Out on the road, the same black car turns the corner again and again. You know, you know, you know.

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The book is hauling itself out of me.

The book is a wad of bills, stuffed into a bank.

The book has languished too long, and now it is telling itself, backwards and angry.

The book is unlike any I have written, but it comes to me the same way as the rest did, the bolt to the lightning rod, out in the dark.

So, then, I am out in the dark.

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Let me just help you out of this coat.

I already know what you are going to say.

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The story I did not want to write. The story that got hooked on something, and unspooled, and wrote itself as I ran away from it.

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There is a rock in the woods, and you can go there. You can go there still. You think you cannot because it is there and you are here, but that is just a smallness in which you have let yourself believe.

This will necessitate a pleat through the middle of the page.

It is your page. Who cares if they see it.

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I started stitching time shut. I started putting folds in the years.

If I had been out in the world, leaking light. If I had been out in the world, spilling myself like a shaker of salt.

Then, eventually, it would be time to return, to collect myself.

I am taking it all.

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I slept all night with my hand on my throat so the ghost of him could not.

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“Ca va te faire du bien,” the doctor said. This will do you some good.

She put the prescription in my hand, and I was bruised and maybe crying, and the pills lost all the days I lived as long as I was on them.

A week, of which I remember nothing. This was the remedy.

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All the way home, someone is nailed to the back of my neck.

“Who are you?” I ask, as the bus climbs the hill. “Who are you?” as I ring the bell.

“Are you mine or someone else’s?” No reply.

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Begin with a girl, standing on a rock, and the whole world ahead of her. Begin by admitting she knows.

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Femme fatale, he calls me in the tiled station.

Femme fatale, he tells me on the street.

Femme fatale, in the vintage coat with the belt and the ruff and the bell-shaped skirt.

Femme fatale, over the dinner I cannot afford, and then he chokes me in the bed until tears pour out.

Je ne suis pas jolie, reads the ad across the platform the next morning, as I head for home.

Je ne suis pas jolie, je suis pire.

I’m not pretty. I’m worse.

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The stamens stain the runner, this fabric that somebody stitched.

I knit for myself a garment. And now, I want another.

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There is a silence above the little house.

“April,” says the baby. “I’m on time.”

Through the window, the branches begin. Through the window, the world she watches as she learns how big the work.

And an envelope of light moves across the covers. And a key of light comes through the door where the now-lost key would be.

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“It is possible,” she says, “to hold your own hand across time. It is possible to build a chain of yourself. It is possible to bring the pieces back.”

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As close as you can for as long as you can to the thing that overtakes you.

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“Child,” I tell the girl on the rock, “you and I know, but there are thousands of us in the time in between who do not. They are caught in the slump.

“Go and claim them,” she says.

I want to say that they lift at once, these women and these girls, their bodies like birds from the land.

But it is not this. It is more like a house fire, which I enter, and I cling to the walls, and I lead each one out by the hand.

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“Where do you go,” my lover asks, “when you go?”

“The same place, always the same place, and if I cannot answer when you ask me, I am gone.”

And the water on the road and the sharpness of the light means her room is filled with color as the cars pass.

Sudden red, sudden grey, sudden yellow for a long time with the school bus, though I am hardly here for it.

“Where do you go,” she says again. Can I say: back to where something is still smoldering. Back to where the burning thing is me.

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“What?” he said in the back of the bar, with his sinister smile. “What?” he said, teeth bared, blue suited, dress-shoed. “Are you kidding?”

“I am not kidding,” I said, and the fist in my eyes met the fist in his, and whoever looked off to the side first would lose.

I did not lose.

The men began to bleed together, the stories doubled back on themselves like a weft. We have passed this way before; you think you do not know me? I know you.

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I shuffle the deck over and over, asking, but even the deck refuses.

Memories, it says, memories. And cups, and the fool, and death, and the two cold figures in rags, out in the middle of the night.

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I want to burn my body clean.

You cannot, my body says, the work must be so much more careful than that.

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As though there might be women everywhere, in heaps, huddled, washed up in piles.

As though the same current carried them to the same shores, and if I went at the right time, I could gather them up again.

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“Pompeii,” I tell my lover, my head on her chest, my leg on her hip, her leg between mine.

“Pompeii,” as we fit into place.

“What?” she asks.

“If we died right now in a pile of ash, this would be how they would find us.”

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When, in the park, a man walks by with a face that’s too close. The brows and the nose and the cut of the mouth.

How dare you, I think, walk through my day with your terror.

And he waits for his dog, and he stares at me like he knows.

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Mine, I say to my body.

Mine, I hold my shoulders with my hands.

And there is no relief, just a wave of fear. You abandoned me, my body says, you left me here.

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Until it became clear that I was remembering without remembering, and her touch was his, and her eyes were not hers, and the years had been run through the machine wrong. Sewn together.

“I love you,” she told me, and I realized I did not know who she was or why she was speaking.

“I think,” I said, “I have a lot of work to do.”

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Uphill in the dark, I bike past the azalea, hot pink and huge and throwing itself to the ground.

I fill my bag with fallen flowers, and I put them on dinner plates by my bed. All night, they sing and they sing as they scrub out my heart.

And in the morning, I wake to the bodies of the bees against the window, hitting there over and over in want.

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“A story on a high shelf,” I tell my lover. “A story in a jar that sat mostly untouched until you came along.”

“I am so sorry,” I say, “that you were the one. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

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And the light on the waves receding.

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I was running, quite fast, through the garden while the garden ran through me.

How, I ask my body, is it worse in the remembering?

It isn’t.

Now that the memories return, there are memories.

Outside, from the glass-grey sky, it rains and rains.

I cannot do this, I tell my body. There’s a vein of panic I’ve uncovered.

“But listen,” she says from far off, “you already did.”

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“I don’t want to do this,” I had said.

And he had said, “I don’t understand.”

“You like that,” he had said. You like that. It was not a question.

And besides, my mouth was full.

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“You won’t do it for yourself,” says the girl on the rock. “But do it for me.”

Set all the ugliness down on the beautiful page.

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I grab the locust blossom, and it stabs me.

“Of course,” I say, as I lick the bead of blood. I did not ask. Of course.

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If “no” was not a word that I was given.

If “no” was not a word my body knew.

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The sagging mattress. The courtyard. The worn-smooth floors.

The building itself apologizes. I was trees and sand and stone. Just trees and sand and stone.

And a trough in the center of each marble stair. A trough to which I contributed.

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She is out on the rock again. She is far enough that the house becomes foreign. The chimney and the cedar shakes. The door, its grid of nails.

As if, she says, another girl might live here. Not me. She could come to the windows and stare.

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The granite I see and the lichen upon it. Clinging to the places it dissolves.

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We lay by the lake, so low that the wind could not reach us. Lay with legs stacked and arms around, with my head next to hers. There was a tiny bird on a branch above us, and all that wild sky, and someone by the shore with a radio.

I am writing this, I thought. I am writing this all. And the current switched on, running as it sometimes does between us. That current, like syrup.

“Do you feel it?” she asked.

“I do.”

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In a dream, doing the thing I said I would never do again.

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Her eye against the pillow, blue. Her eye against the window, green. And all those leaves.

The boat of my body approaching the crest of the wave.

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The wine I had so I didn’t have to be there, and then the walk to the water. There were grasses by the road I do not remember.

I walked right into the waves and stayed there for hours, and they called to me from the beach to come out.

But why, I thought. He will not touch me here.

I was in until my toes went white and my lips went blue. And all those people with him on the sand.

And none of them knew.

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The leaving like a folding to the center, edges in and in and in until the document of me cannot be seen.

The leaving like a shadow walking off.

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In a long-ago dark, the whippoorwill comes and sits in a branch by the window. And she wakes to it, its hollow song, the click in the back of its throat.

She presses her fingers to the screen and taps on the tautness of the wire like a drum. She thinks of the words of the prayer before bed, she thinks about forever.

If forever is real,  she thinks, staring out, then what matters? Dead isn’t even dead.

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“This is the garden,” she tells me when I visit, “and the oak woods, and the stone wall.”

I run the lines back. I hand them to her.

“How old were you when you forgot?” she asks.

“A little older than you,” I say, but the truth is, she has lost some edges, too.

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All my life, I said that anger was not the horse for me to ride. All my life, I kept it in that pasture, where it rested or it ran at the edge of the field.

But after all this time, it still came to me when I called it. And the tops of the trees blew back in the wind, and the pale underneath of each leaf showed.  We have never been here before, the leaves said. This is our only season.

“Last year’s leaves are dirt,” I replied. “So, yes, this is all without precedent.”

And I reached my hand up. And I touched my horse’s side.

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The wind, the high wind in the beautiful trees.

And for a while, I brought my anger everywhere.

When the impulse to save yourself returns, it is not beautiful. When the impulse to save yourself returns, it is like all the blood rushing back to a place you have kept that blood from.

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Someone coming down the beach, strident. I unhinge my knife.

“I would,” I say.

“I would,” says the blade.

Go back. The avenging angel. Guard your life with your life.

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What are you doing, I ask the house plants.

Making ourselves out of light.

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I count at least four hands on me. Whose hands, I ask, whose hands are these, and I am already fading, falling through space.

“They’re mine,” my lover says, they are mine.

These? I ask, touching my shoulders, then touching my waist.

“Yes,” she says, “yes.”

How many hands do you have, I say, heaving.

“I don’t know,” she tells me, “I don’t know.”

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The horse in the field in the dark like a ghost.

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At seven, the room turned into a camera, with the sun through the trees. The walls and the floor and her body were printed with leaves.

Look, I said, again and again, but I knew she could not see as I could see.

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I want to go back through each part of the map and remove him.

Though, now, no one chokes me but the story.

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“What is it you want,” she asks as we drive in the dark.

To be able to see what is actually here. To hold the truth and know it. To stop the hands I’ve survived from dragging me backwards again.

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Olive green rabbit fur, fallen to the floor.

A camisole. Ivory.

I had thought I looked beautiful. I had thought he would see.

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I run through the first forest into the next, but the carapace will not crack. I run downhill and crying, this weight on my chest, you return, you return, you return. At the pond, I hold the gold knot, I give it everything I hate, and then, I throw it in.

Undo yourself, I say as it sinks, undo yourself without end. And it catches the sun the whole way down, it shines and it flashes the whole way down. And its ripples reach each shore, and then they travel back again.

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Open your eyes underwater. It is green, it is blue, it is amber with light, they are calling for you, it is a game they are playing, you come up for breath, but the raft is right there. For a moment, you think you will die.

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I hold the child I was to my chest, dripping wet. “I thought I would drown,” she tells me, every hair on her body on end.

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My sweater in its gesture on the floor. A gesture my body cannot make.

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This is only an inheritance until it is not.

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“It will cost,” says the man at the camera shop, “much more than it’s worth to repair.”

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All of it hurts, the going back and forth in time, the remembering. And I tell her, this one who I am ferrying, “it hurts, so much, more than I can bear, more than it’s supposed to.”

And she looks at me with brilliant, knowing eyes and says, “Of course it does. Each stitch has to pass straight through.”

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Some days, I sink beneath the surface and cannot fight it. Some days, I think about his hands and cannot breathe.

“Take me,” I tell the waters, “I’m ready to leave.”

But they come then, the women and the girls, and they pull me up, and they swim with me to shore.

“We’re doing this for us, too,” they say, the so-many of them. The one of me.

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The baby on her back through the bars of the crib.

“I know everything that will happen to you,” I tell her, “everything that will happen.”

And I think for a moment, I will leave her out. I will not stitch her in with the rest. Just this one, she can stay here for always.

But she looks at me and she begins to cry.

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The ones I was now pile up, like dust and hair, behind the bed.

“Where are you coming from,” I ask them.

And they look up: “We’re dead.”

“You’re paper-thin,” I tell them, “but if you were dead, then I would be, too.”

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At the height of it, the worst thing that has happened to me happens to me every several minutes. It runs through me, hot and frantic, and I am desperate to prove to myself: you are in another body now, you are in another year.

“Look,” I command myself, “the yellow kitchen table, your lover’s hand, her hand on the stem of the glass. Look at the glass, the star that is etched on it, how the light casts that star on the table.”

And I imprint on that star for a minute, but I flood again from the center.

“Stay,” says the star, the six-pointed star, as it sinks out of sight.

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The night lasted a long time. The night lasted for days, and the memories circled me like a train on a closed loop of track, a train whose beginning came again, directly after its end.

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And finally, someone came, someone did come, and there was a battle in me between the things that were mine and the things that were not.

“I can take this out,” she said, “all this dark, metastasized.” And the dark in me flickered, and the light of me did, too.

“This will work better if you sing,” she said.

And the song was older than me, and the song held open all the doors and ran the clocks backwards, and stretched the fibers of time until the darkness that was lodged there just fell out.

And the song kept going, and it filled me back with what was only mine.

And the baby I was was there, and she was older than me, much older than me.

“You are this big,” she said. “A lot of people have been lying. You have been this big this whole time.”

ξ

Meredith Clark is a poet and writer whose work has received Black Warrior Review's nonfiction prize and the Sonora Review nonfiction prize. Her first book, Lyrebird, was published in 2020 by Platypus Press; she is currently at work on a long lyric essay about time, ritual, and queer embodiment, from which this piece is excerpted.