Three Ways of Not Saying Something
André Narbonne
1. You're
missing quite the river. It's working out its cricks -- stretching in the sun.
I walked by
on my way home from downtown.
I thought
something large was passing, but it was just the expansiveness of it all,
popping.
Anyway,
that's what you're missing. I thought you should know that.
2. Here's
what you're missing today:
The river is
changed. I walked by it, laden with problems, on my way from the LCBO, and it
was voiceless. Today is warmer but the sunlight is a vague patchwork that
doesn't heat. It's not the same verb.
Yesterday
when I pulled myself up from other things I expected to see a freighter and was
surprised to find, instead, three white swans staring back at me. Imagine:
three swans – the magic number of the trinity and other narrative functions. I
felt cheated by the mythological implications. I felt like I wasn't viewing
anything in particular, like discovering that the meal I was eating had been
eaten before by so many other people it could no longer be said to have a
flavour. That's what I thought, but, happily when I looked further I found two
other swans. So five. I thought, that's good and irregular. When I looked for
more I realized that the narrow bits of open water (imagine cracks in a window
with some of the knife-like pieces missing) were overpopulated with birds, but
they were darker than the swans and had to be understood differently, had to be
made visible through some sleight of realization.
Today I
didn't see a single bird. I didn't hear a gasp or a pop. No voice, no life. If
you look near the shore you'll see the ice is piled up in flat sheets the
scattered way discarded paper sometimes lies beside a printer when something
difficult is due. It frames the centre of the river, which is mostly open.
Yesterday's voice seems to have smashed a channel of broken knife blades.
But you'll
see all that when you come back. Maybe you'll have birds. How strange they
should be there on a day when the river was so loud.
3. The first
time I saw the river
it was
summer and a man was
selling
French fries from a
truck and
that was comedy and
the other
trucks on the bridge
were
gravitas and
the river
was the sort of idiot
you can
never master and
the clouds
were steel
traps
clamping a church
in their uninspired
significance.
The day felt
like a carnival of nothing.
How could it
change?
It didn’t
change.
The first
time I saw the river I didn’t
know what I
was looking at.
