Excerpts from “Rhapsody”
Let us exercise our vocal chords. Let us draw them out limbs. Let us say there is always a longer or a shorter dress, always congruities, blissful, bitter rhythms, sprung onions splitting, violins in harmony that is harmonic, chaos that is chaotic, in sense that is sensible, in here it inheres, out there rapid rabbits. Let us labor under these notions as under the cantus planus factory whine. Let us stumble around, humming, stumbling, humming. Then something in the shape of leaves, something in the touching of ‘red.’ Is it subversive? Let us hesitate with ‘red.’ Let’s feel it out with the feeling which we are. It is a panic in the full field. This outward loping, is it making it? Is it filling it? Is it making it explicit? Let us make it lovely again. Let us make gardens and lakes a variorum of some eternal para- nomasiac, some perfect para- dogmatic, perfect para- dise. Let us stumble around this place that’s humming, humming. Counting the stems and the howling, hollering, the refrains, o the terrible refrains. We’re in a musical, thinking.
Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017) and the translator of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action Books, 2016).
