i remember once he asked me to make a book with him about games. we would take games that we knew or made up and write them in ways that sounded the way we like to sound. there wasn’t much static in the air, we sounded loud and clear. we also inherited a load of books from a woman who’s childhood was in boxes in a basement and she was moving out. we took the books and many of the pages had her drawings on them. when she was a little girl the woman would draw in the books with a pencil and red pen. she would circle different words, like TREE and AMAZING and KITE and SNAKE. he wrote a couple of words on an empty page that we had decided would be for notes. the lady’s books from her childhood had strong odors, they smelled like wood rot and honey-fried licorice root.
memory is our most important sense. there aren’t lights at all to illuminate things in the night, and the night has been going on for a very long time. we had gazed hard during the day in order to improve our memories of how things looked. we were warned that that things would soon be losing their light, and strove to see as much as we could. i stared intently at a shovel for five minutes. i moved on to a pack of gum, the ceiling, her hand. there were new people who had just inherited many books. they showed us the books and it meant a lot to me; i would probably not see them again.
here is a story from when kissing was invented:
“stick out your tongue and tell me what it tastes like.”
“what?”
“the air.”
“it tastes like air?”
“don’t you know?”
“no. i just taste my tongue.”
“what does that taste like?”
“my mouth.”
“can i taste it?”
“sure.”
we were all small children once. i used to be and you used to be very small and very curious. we would ask “why?” about pretty much anything. it became a mania. we needed to understand the world around us. we wanted to become a part of it so badly. we didn’t realize that we were very close to the world. being short, we were nearer to the ground. we could see small things up close much more easily than we can now. we would spend entire afternoons making up the backyard. we would lie, and become so afraid of being caught that we’d plan to run away. we really had no sense of time passing. we spent much of our childhoods waiting for people to do things for us. we opened our mouths and said things that were so young that some people couldn’t hear them.
our main adult was a mother. she went before all of us.
i worked on a poem while i was outside watching the neighbors. one was in the window on the second floor and one was on the front stoop. the stoop one made swift movements with his arms and tried to tell her. the one at the window took one last look and moved out of view. the stoop one walked over to my stoop and sat next to me and asked to use the phone. i said the phone was inside but that i could get it for him. he said no, he didn’t want me to get up. i liked sitting by him, too.
one way that he and i wrote poetry was cutting bits of language out of books and concentrating on them and setting them near each other and seeing if they would talk to each other. when the bits would have a good conversation, we would add glue, and they would stay together, having the same conversation until someone else looked at them. then, they might have a different version of the same conversation, or a different one entirely. it would depend on the person who was looking at them.
the games that we put into our book were almost all unplayable. this is because their rules were prone to breaking themselves. that was the rule of the first game, and another rule of the first game was that it would set the rules for all of the other games after it. the first is always the most pushy. one that i remember writing involved waxed string and fifteen to fifty children. the string would be tied into a large circle, big enough so that each child could hold on to it with the index finger of their left hand. they would all do this and pull outward so that the circle was stretched. the string was strong and didn’t break, and they would start to walk swiftly, pulling on the string with one finger. they point of the game was to never stop doing it, and also not to give in to the temptation of running around the circle. the rules said that if running started, the string would become a powerful wind and blow them all very far from each other and their families.
we used to talk and sing and yell in the dark. on my birthday everyone tricked me and used each other’s voices so i wouldn’t know who was really there. i was totally fooled and became confused for the first time. after that i started focusing on their smells. it is harder to hide the way you smell in the dark than how you sound.
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