A Propos (A Prose Poem)

by Sophie Mayer

“The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.”

                                                           -- Gertrude Stein, ‘A Piece of Coffee,’ Tender Buttons

Dear Gertrude thank you. For the post: cards (can be) stamped, Tarot, dance-marked. Your hand? For the ball moving around in a cube of air. The floor rectangular, for: square (the) dance. Insistently quadriliteral, all angles right in our verbal/audiovisual. This era rectilinear, wherein this, the frame, is message (S, M, XL). Black-edged for that hipster look (much possess’d). Line/line/line/line. And

Space.

Light from the long windows writes ripple on you. Swim “under” water; suspended in the medium, and. Flicker, vignetted at the edge. Late afternoon is sepia, creased even in the real. What lengths may come, the counting-out an immersion: touch, kick out, and turn. In another’s wake, or swallowed; forward motion its own universal. Not straight the waiver: that it goes on. That we swim the same water twice, lapping the wavelet of yesterself. That we curve and curve across, doctoring our timelines with remember and imagine. Recording :: projection -- the screen we hang (as).