ofelsewhere

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Evening light. May 2025

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Some personal news.

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Star Child by Claire Nivola

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Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight by Galway Kinnell 1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell the sun, don't go down, I have stood by as you told the flower, don't grow old, don't die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, I would suck the rot from your fingernail, I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands, and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades, and rats walk away from the culture of the plague, and iron twists weapons toward truth north, and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress, and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men, and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her in the dark.

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry, this the nightmare you wake screaming from: being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone quietly eating, you clambered up on my lap: to all the mouthfuls rising toward all the mouths, at the top of your voice you cried your one word, caca! caca! caca! and each spoonful stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering steam.

Yes, you cling because I, like you, only sooner than you, will go down the path of vanished alphabets, the roadlessness to the other side of the darkness, your arms like the shoes left behind, like the adjectives in the halting speech of old folk, which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself, some impossible Tuesday in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out among the black stones of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,

and the raindrops hitting you on the fontanel over and over, and you standing there unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens you find yourself with someone you love in a café at one end of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day all this will only be memory,

learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come—to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face, to hear under the laughter the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss the mouth that tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon sends back, I can see in your eyes the hand that waved once in my father's eyes, a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell. Your eyes close inside your head, in sleep. Already in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

[ofelsewhere]

Listen/purchase: Remaining Angel by Of Elsewhere

I’ve been working on beats and electronic music for years but have never put anything out. My first EP is out today. 

[ofelsewhere]

The Importance of Elsewhere by Philip Larkin

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech, Insisting so on difference, made me welcome: Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable, The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling, went To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

[ofelsewhere]

Leah’s

November, 2014. 

[ofelsewhere]

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, 1966

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Putting in the work.

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An extensive classical Italianate landscape with figures by a river, a town beyond, Attributed to Jan Joost van Cossiau

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Echo Park, 2021

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The art of escapism. 

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Half-frame light play. 2018.

[ofelsewhere]

Ballad of Distances

There’s nothing smart to say about COVID-19 that hasn’t already been said. We’ve all read the think pieces. Followed the news. Dropped out from the news. Gone back to it. We’ve gone through the phases collectively, individually. 

At first things felt new, the furniture of everyday life had been re-arranged. Then boring. Then sad. Then angry. Nothing ever changes. It’s the same thing over and over. 

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Outbound and Returning

I sold my car two springs ago. I had been walking to my new job, so it mostly just sat parked on my block for weeks at a time. I could walk to get where I needed to go on a daily basis and rely on public or mass transit for farther-away destinations. 

Now in week five of COVID-19 social distancing measures, I’m really missing that car. For all its perks, South Philly leaves us wanting when it comes to natural beauty. Would love to hear some leaves rustling together, maybe the splash and static fuzz of the waves down the shore. But for now its concrete, discarded latex gloves, wind-tumbling litter.

The days, weeks, seem to pass by faster and faster. On our walk back from the pharmacy this week, Dani talked about how return trips always seem to go by faster than outbound ones. 

In scanning some of my highlights in John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, I stumbled upon a quote about time that seemed to reinforce her point. 

“The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the accumulation of experience. This is why the moment is lived as longer. The dissipation of the time-flow is checked. The lived durée is not a question of length but of depth or density. Proust understood this.”

The density of input, novelty, new things to see, dilates our experience of time passing, slows it down. Things seem to be moving quickly because we’re running out of novelty, just like the return trip seems to fly by. We’ve been there, done that. We live the same day over and over. The only real newness is the magnitude of horror and sorrow taking place in the outside world. Let’s get out of here. 

[ofelsewhere]

2018