An Exercise in Revision - Sierra Blanco

The train stops.

An Exercise in Revision

By Sierra Blanco

I’m all the way in exile, all the way out here, a different stage, somewhere near Canada,

freezing cold; solitary and vast and open and indifferent, someplace that I walk like a tightrope

and dance through as if I had infinite lives. I’m out here with the tormented and the forgotten, the

freaks and the bitter lying “truthful” tragedies. I am here in a world where the endings don’t end

and the fragments build until they tie together, until all wars are one war, until all destruction is

all one decay, until there is no complacency and every inaction is the biggest rebellion that

cannot be sustained. So big, because it was never allowed to grow when it was small, when it

could be stopped. So big, because if I started it big, it was because I wasn’t supposed to know

about the things involved unless in abstract, three steps removed, her body and his heart and their

skill and the “opposites” of my own decisions.

And to come back to these old woods, to stand here and be asked to make it so big, so

encompassing? To be so small again, to be stopped again, to recollect that - yes, once I came

from this town? To declare that once I allowed myself to be corrected on what I knew was

correct? To declare I would allow that again? To declare that I see the sterling yellow eyes of

wolves in my dreams, to declare that walls don’t heave and dances don’t freeze, that nightmares

are warrens in caves off the cliffs, that I fear the feeling connected to those ice-framed images,

slow, and steadily kindling my understanding of the whole. To declare, in so many words, what I

press from my mouth like flowers. “I don’t know, or understand, or want to understand.”