The Atlas of Unnamed Petals
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The sign above the bin said “_____,” a word I’d known all my life until the moment I needed it. I touched a fruit the color of late afternoon and felt the name slide off it like meltwater. I touched another, and another. They had no words. Or I had none for them.
If I had them, they would have been unripe words, so bitter that they’d make my mouth recoil. If I could have said them, the words would have sounded like the language of a faraway country that I never learned.
So I kept my mouth closed.
I put the fruit in a bag and took it to the register. The woman there had a smile the shape of _________, a word that escaped me. She took my bag and made a decision. Then she said another word, one that I knew if I ever knew, _________, whose six letters my mind quickly rearranged.
She said this word with no question mark. So it wasn’t a question and she expected no answer. But I gave one anyway, since I had no answer for anything.
“Feels like a dream,” I said. “But I think I’m still awake. I never woke.” I hurried off; the sentence stood unmade.
How is it that the morning hasn’t come yet? The moon was the color of words that slipped the mind, the stars their punctuation.
It makes no difference that clocks ran backward, which is the only way an ________ clerk will get to be an astronaut. Besides, imitation words and word substitutes work almost as well as the real thing. The word “brillig” famously runs ’round the gyre, white and predatory, and unwritten tales remain as blank sheets, a little yellowed and as crumpled as oolong leaves. Soporific, no?
_________ [ means grate or grill in Russian].
I needed to visit you there alone.
I have known a numbness which is different from the numbness I knew. How is it that the numbness I know isn’t the numbness that I really want to know, need to know, need desperately to know?
How is it that you are numb, and I’m numb, and the little bumblebees are numb, and each child dropped into a garden like a black stone is numb and wonderous and empty of an alphabet?
How is it that the list of synonyms for numbness has grown to three pages, single-spaced, and there’s still space at the end for a few more?
Take lots and lots of _______ along for the ride.
Cold is a synonym for heat, for entropy, for counting and measuring. Cold is a word used in nine hundred twenty-two different permutations. Cold tastes like metal alloys ready for the forge. Or, after remelting, like pins left on the kitchen floor, pins necessary for a crime scene, pins whose blood has yet to congeal.
Or you have it smiled at the clerk and wordlessly mouthed your appreciation, which is comfortless, the thing with a dull jagged edge.
One item at the shop costs nothing, but people never choose it.
Here is another word for grief: corn. One may throw a kernelful of corn to feed the chickens, with their hard little lizard eyes. Grief goes up in fields, tall and tasseled. Grief is shucked. Shucked! Such a curious word! Do not grieve for grief’s sake, since the corn will come around again on the far side of harvest, but remember to grieve anyway.
How is it that you’ll never need this word again?
You don’t need clocks for pinning points in space to the walls of your forehead. But Time is not the same as Space, nor space the same as time; we wrestle with them to know this. Or we collapse in their sly arms.
To move faster than light, you must first become light. But if the thrushes fail to arrow out from the heartwood of the moon, and if the moon refuses to burn like anything recited by Rumi, no one will remember who you were. Forgetful and forgotten, you’ll become a light inverted into darkness, which is to say, a name; then even your name will wither. And you were so good at naming once! Now names are just something to kill time.
How is it that a sailor’s time is always a nautical second?
Forgetting contains with-it-ness. It opens pastures, consumes boundaries. It is contagious. It is a symptom of sticky stars. It is the disease that causes the sickness of a tiny silver sled. Forgetfulness: the farmer who harvests nothing and feasts all winter long. Always it brims with plenty—buckets and barrels and bushels—until a warbler tells you otherwise, until a little band of innocents leaves icicle prints all over your pages and forgets to sum you up in a copyeditor’s red colophons.
The heart, too, is a word for memory. Stone thing. Hard syllable. You carried each one, you buried each one in the fragrant earth; now they all outlast you. The shehnai records their steps on the face of the river, for the steps look like one funny letter, a seventh of the alphabet, just for punctuation, and you haven’t seen them before, and you still don’t need them. Only you do.
How is it that you knew no Lorica?
You thought language would last forever. Not so the Word, that hulk house of oblivion, that body now dissolute. The remains are untranslatable, yet they are the only thing needed. Nothing is more widely read. The mouth clicks open and leaves only blankness to frame a yet darker blankness. Reading them, you forget the key. And when you look up, the leopards have already come and gone.
How is it that you’re now undergoing a metanarrative morpheme?
The three pinecones that fate dropped on the road winter when. Surely that meant something, a meal set out for you at the feast of winter when, which arrives with a question mark, more of an early punctuation for sentences that never quite became, that never quite fulfilled all their verbs and nouns (even though they tried! oh, the sacrament of effort!)—so you will look for that feast all spring like an ephemeral word, while the world keeps springing and springing from one yellow leaf to another, and each one’s somehow precious but also unfinished.
How is it that only the museum was lost?
Your uncle wrote a letter once. It had seven postscripts. Not three or five or eleven. (In every prime number is the wile of memory. In seven there is the scrape of words, sawbones and fractured. The yearning for blue.) In one postscript, your uncle said that foxes had a secret name for conifers that people couldn’t pronounce. It begins with a roaring.
The dictionary you left on the stone bench dissolved in the rain.
How is it that you have no memory of placing it there?
Memory has shape, geometry, such odd angles for the stonemason, which is what you are yourself, forever cooing about all that broken masonry. Memory is sometimes fried in oil. So is everything we don’t remember. Memory is the sound left in a sudden soundlessness, that waiting for a branch to snap, that taste of earth, that leaf tip of light, the intake of breath before your feet curl back over the ledge and you fall between one star and another, trying to generate a few new verbs, even though you know that you don’t need them, any more than bullets need telescopes, or telescopes feathers.
Needed: a word for the snow of emptiness then, for what was never seen, what never was, what never will be. A word for the empty shelf above which everything is lost, every bullet hole we call a word and fill with fossil light.
How are we dissolving backwards before the stemship of our loss?
When I wanted to say, You have come into my field like an alphabet with no beginning, what I said was, without a word, Rose. The word of roses. The rose of words. Without a r, the field of roses, the causeway of roses, the garden of roses.
Without an o, the gorgeous thorns, the long slow adoration.
Without an s, the thrones of elegy.
Without an e, every one lost, every one lost, every one lost.
Cold enjambed, but empty. Cold emanations, endowments, and encomiums.
Cold enneads, embargoes. Cold embayments.
Cold Elysium bones. Empty elytra. Empty elsewheres.
Broken cogs for the broken one who brought them. Songs without a grudge.
You may forget a word or geography which has never existed.
All that is needed is rose the color of the rose.
yet forget everything but the word for roses.
rose the name of the rose.
How are we leaving, absolute involving?
How are we, this done not knowing?
so we return, white widening white wanting wideness.
We forget the name of forgetting, and even the name of remembering, so beautifully.
We forget the beauty we know, just as we yearn to unknow the great beauty we have not forgotten.
And here, my beloved, is the word that trembles for remembering, and fails. But here is also the word for forgetting, which succeeds, drop by drop. Let us lie down together in wordlessness, our passion the color of unnamed petals. The clockwrong roses.
The clockwork never needs◆ About the ending
❧ About the title