Above the fold

kathleenjoy:

Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering
there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and
rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into
picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma
bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world
can’t understand them. Coal trains come through here, taking across the
mountains what we’ve taken from the mountains, I think this is like walking over
cows while eating a burger, and feel filled up on the empty feeling night is good
at bringing to me like flowers before a date. Here, night says, I brought you this
bouquet of gone, and it occurs to me these are the flowers of negation the man
who spent a night in a foxhole with a dead Viet Cong was handed over and over.
He doesn’t talk about that, there’s not a single speaker I know of the language called
“this is what it’s like to dig a hole and be alive in your death with the
example of what that looks like.” Nor am I the last speaker of the language called
“I will too often use crows to express my deepest self,” which it turns out is only
centimeters below the surface, now that we’re trying to go metric. The gravel
sounds like breakfast cereal eaten straight from the box. If night is crows
touching wings somehow in place, stars their eyes and the moon a hole in the
patient of crows to obliterate, only the air, with its high absorption rate for dead
languages, could speak of this to the past, which I’ve been trying my whole life to
get in touch with. So the last speaker of Mohave will soon be sitting on the edge
of her bed, noticing for the last time the beauty of cups, the entirety of their
existence the honor of holding and giving over, emptying fullness into the empty
mouth, and she will whisper a word the cup has heard many times over, and
when she’s dead, someone will take the cup away without putting it to their ear
to listen to the last, the entire ocean of what is left of a people. They will be gone,
the cup taken to a new life full of waiting for water to come. I understand that
sensation most of all, feeling there should be something inside me there’s not a
word for in English or Urdu or Wichita. In grunt, perhaps, in the language I’ve
called “heat this blade upon the stove and press it against your forearm,”
absolutely. If languages have to die, kill that one. Every time I walk it down these
tracks and leave it, it drags its way back and kisses the neck of my sleep with its teeth.

(via muscovite)