The diving was kept secret from all the parents in the town because of the lake’s reputation for housing hidden stone formations just below the surface. Before any of the high school students had even been born, a girl had carelessly jumped too far to the dangerous side of the rock protrusion. Her death continued to keep the community wary of the lake as generations of kids continued to keep secretly visiting it.

Decades of clandestine visitation yielded foolproof planning, passed down from upperclassmen to the lowerclassmen: one “responsible” teenager with the promise of a parent’s car, bathing suits worn under shorts and t-shirts, towels rolled up into barely noticeable bulges at the bottom of a backpack, knowledge of what movies were playing at the a distant cinema (to guarantee needed travel time). Luce knew all the tricks, and he was often the driver deemed most trustworthy by his friends’ parents.

He didn’t need to lie about his destination today, however, no one would have assumed any cliff diving would occur because of the promise of a deep chill in the air. Luce gazed out at the setting sun, adding deep light to the veins of the bloody-red leaves floating delicately to the water below. Autumn sunsets held intrinsic contradictions between vision and the sense of touch; his skin prickled the cool blue bumps as his eyelids lowered against the sky to the west.

His shoulders sank around his spine while his neck loosely followed the steep slope down the rocks to the lake. He took long, deep, measured breaths—his posture and inhalation mimicking a cassock on a clothesline. He kicked a rock, sending it over the cliff’s edge, and listened for the plunk of the water taking it in. The sound disappeared as soon as it reverberated across the cliff face, so he hoofed another, larger rock, and heard a rounder sound produced by the liquid divot— farther across the lake a fish jumped—and again everything settled.

“Luce, don’t—please.” A voice crossed the twilight. Startled and wincing, Luce turned to find Gabe materializing out of the dusk, cloaked in his best trench coat.

“You found me. Good job,” Luce said, turning back to the simmering light of the lake.

“You weren’t anywhere else.”

Luce edged himself closer to the drop-off.

There it goes, rising up, and away, and somebody is telling me it’s just glass, concrete, and steel, but what they don’t know is that there are so many more currencies[ii] that go into a construction than those physical ones. One is planning; sometimes it is paper; sometimes it is the people that end up standing inside of it for a third of each planetary rotation. Each of these is flowing. Current currencies irregular as they are—you’ll understand why I felt the need to stretch beyond our arrangement.

Teller, before I sat down to write this to you, I paced the other walkers on the sidewalk, making paths to places (that were probably closer to you than either of us realized). Now my mind is attempting to pace itself. My mind feels its rootsandlimbs, its reaching-searching. It is this stretching of many arms that leads me to thoughts of an Inter-Collective, but it is no comfort, Teller. Rather, it brings about unsettling feelings, a hunched back, and eyes wide and unblinking, pierced by RGB light. Shouldn’t anything interconnected settle the shiftiest moods? It is working to bring about minimized spaces, instant information, instant contact. Instead, I am overwhelmed with semi-validated information. There is no longer a steady and satisfying crawl to certainty. I do not perceive any of these walkers having the same jagged, crooked droop in the individual hunch[iii] of their shoulders.  No one else that I see cripples under the weight of their graypink and wrinkled Bundle of Think.

Do you feel it? Like we’re walking the banks of a Brimming[iv]?

Do you feel that the only thing that would make you stop staring into the shadows (of alleyways and vaults and that crevice sliced into the back of a porcelain pig) would be to sit quietly on the edge of a bed—Thinker-style, cradling some nerves but mostly things that can only be categorized as thought-clusters, feeling-clusters, separate somehow from the scientific what-not—trying to sort the different movements in your head? These snatches of information are coming from everywhere and coming all at once; these twitches keep moving in directions.

The air around you, it is simply humming with gerunds. I wouldn’t even desire to reach out and paw the vibrating strands[v] that make the space around you—I am trying here, with this Feeling, to understand that my air here is at once the same, and possesses everything in itself that would ever could ever be possessed by your strands.

Tell me you’ve already understood this to be where our human community is moving? An ever-present-feeling, if for the only reason being that information clusters are being produced and moved[vi] all around us at all times? How much do we all know? We all know everything, for air is now comprised of charged-and-moving Knowing, moving through and up and down and about, fingertips and irises.

I’ve been trying to tell you[a] that I feel all is connected, the world wide web seems to accomplish this connection, and so does religion, but nothing accomplishes it so well as loving you

And that this unity and science fiction[7], is now all of a sudden tentaclesandroots condensed:

Article I. Snow Globes.

Section 1.01                    the fact that you always seem able to shake[8] mine.

Could you settle the miniature floating orbs for a minute? It would do us all a favor, really. We’d be able to complete this transaction; the line would move along; I would be back out by the curb simultaneously avoiding people, people-watching, looking for signs, and feeling referentially maniacal[9]; until the next morning, when I would join you again, Teller, waiting on line (furtively).

It’s been about a year since you started making me think about containers and the shelves we make for them. It’s been a year since you’ve made me start seeing again How I Feel anew—like perhaps back in sophomore year when I was first starting to wander under trees with whitepink flowers that were soaked and steaming in the spring evening—that evening in particular was of an inconsolable sort and complete with the adolescent’s (regrettable) stages of regret. This came shortly after learning from you that every shadow was not simply dark, but held colors like teal and cyan and saffron—if you looked closely.

Except this time, with you, and the transparent encasement of a million little events that keep my days rolling down towards a sea-level-of-sorts, and within the encasement there is the capacity to buoy and sway like leaves in autumn, and to settle like leaves in winter, to float like leaves in spring.

I’ve been sleeping beside a cigar box stuffed with bills and coins and held tight with rubber bands. My mattress bows, debossed. Replace it.

Effervescently Yours,

A Patron

[ii] Your feeling; this writing; those hands; our speech. Watch it all change hands again and again.

[iii] Any other day I would believe each hunch to be a pair of wings hidden beneath a trench coat. Today your distance is made more apparent by the width of the counter separating us; all I see are deformities.

[iv] Recall science classes in your middle grades—recall (drip) dropping each bundle (drip) of water from your pipette onto an already-gathered compilation—a bell rings from the corner of the room, and no one in a red suit is asking for change, but rather is asking you to abandon your experiment with cohesion, let them drops burst from their electromagnetic bonding (pump that fist) as you fold your trapper-keeper and scuttle into a river of students seeking level ground among the rows of desks filling the next room.

[v] Vibrate on! String us along!  I’ve got a million theories why you would, universal Teller.

[vi] Send me that e-mail! Txt message! Voicemail! I will respond! Never write a letter, lovely Teller.

[7] “Un-sci-fi”

[8] The contact administered to such kitsch is often in the form of a wide-fingered grasp, a tug off the shelf, and a stirring through their air that stirs a container of water. This water does not worry about cohesive electron movement. This water is a see-through wire connecting your/my memory and your/my vacation and perhaps the skyline associated with both, all of these depending on the shelf from which the memory was taken, accompanied by how much nostalgia either party is willing to experience at that time. These choices; that love.

[9] Look for Vladimir’s “Signs and Symbols.”

Dear Hombre,

I’ve found myself sitting in my new chair that I told you about the last time we spoke. It is funny how the right arm ended up with a small arch of barely noticeable indents where my fingers rest most of the time. Tapping seems to be a new hobby of mine. I’ll run my fingers in three independent patterns depending on mood or the previous events of the day. More often I notice I’ll start by lifting my thumb, bringing it down, then lifting my next finger, bringing it down, and repeating the pattern all the way to the pinky. Sometimes I will start by lifting my pinky and then moving along from ring to middle to pointer to thumb.

Or, on those most exciting days, I will start with my middle finger, tap tap, then my thoughts flow in wave formation toward the ring finger, tap tap, then pointer, and drift out and out, alternating sides, until I have no choice but to return to my central finger again. This usually occurs on nights that I’ve guessed the Daily Double in Jeopardy.

I’ve tried to surround myself with solid things, but I tend to become swamped by softer materials. My blankets still wrap, my pillows will cushion, my socks still slip, and my t-shirts will always wrinkle as they fall around my frame. I’ll try to take your advice though.

Thank you for sending the typewriter. I was sort of confused, in a way that happens with unexpected pleasures like really heavy boxes, but you were always pretty good in the past at knowing what I like. It wasn’t clear from the packaging where you got the typewriter, but it was missing the N,O,S, and T keys. It’s easy enough to use it without them, but I suppose I could get them replaced. I think I will get them replaced soon.

I had this idea to use the typewriter in my new chair but it was hard to concentrate and it was like the chair wouldn’t let me. When I first got the chair, I would settle into it and have a feeling happen… I don’t know the word for the feeling, but I’ll use “adoption” because I can’t come up with anything else. I tried a few times to sit in my chair to use the typewriter, but the feeling was there and it was too present to work around.

It reminded me of the time in chemistry when we used those papers to spread out lines of black ink. We waited a whole day for the experiment to finish. We waited while the strips of paper sat with their inked ends in the water which allowed the ink to crawl up, leaving itself behind as capillary action fought gravity for the darker parts of the color black. When the class observed the final product we found the strips had become spectrums of muddy yellow to midnight. How yellow got into the black ink is anybody’s guess. That part of the lesson didn’t stick with me. What did stick was how water could pull a shade into a spectrum. All of that came back when I was in the chair in front of the typewriter. Nothing else though. Maybe we had a bad chemistry teacher. I can’t even remember her (his?) name.

Once I figured out a new place to put the typewriter it came a lot easier—the technique of typing, I mean. It was really interesting. When I moved in here there was a tall-ish kind of desk that I had no idea what to do with. Instead of throwing it away I just put it in the closet in my spare bedroom. It has a good surface for the typewriter, and I found a great stool to use that is just the right height. I didn’t have to move the desk out of the spare bedroom, just the closet, and now the room is actually being used. Something about the room I don’t want to change is the lighting. There is this bare forty-watt bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling, but it’s the right light for the typewriter, and it dangles behind my head in a way that keeps my pages lit well. Also, sometimes, it seems like I can see the shadows of the letters on the paper, so so faint, squinting up at me from the page.

I’m never typing anything coherent or particularly important even, but it has been easier for the letters to float out to the page following the movements of my fingers. Since the new setup I have been sort of just seeing how it feels to move my fingers around. One thing I’m still getting used to is how to hit the missing keys correctly. The end of the metals stems are difficult to hit just right.

I bet it’s hard to imagine how those discordant strikes needed to create the letters on the page could be described as floating—but they were. I should tell you that I am writing everything out before I type it. When I do get to typing the letters continue to take their place on the paper gently, more gently even than using a pen or pencil, I think, because the typewriter seems to roll them across the white, rather than being pulled across with pen or graphite. The first time I had a pre-scribbled page to type out, I remember wanting to tell you that I felt as if I was One-With-the-Courier-Serifs. I thought you’d find that funny.

I wanted to see if you remember that night you came to my house and we rode our bikes. It was late, well past eleven. Still, I walked my bicycle down to the street and pedaled after you. We took that one curvy road in the middle of our town’s modest grid. The curves were what drew us in because everything else about it was the same as the other roads. It was lined with mailboxes, and next to the sidewalks lanes of grass were evenly divided by driveways. This time it was the night before garbage pickup, so next to each driveway were cans and bins and boxes waiting for the truck which was coming in the morning. I watched you wheel over to one of the houses, which seemed alike to every other house we passed, except that the hiss of a sprinkler was coming from the backyard. At the end of the driveway was the trash, sitting on its patch of grass a couple bike-lengths from the bumper of a small station wagon. Everything was wet with sprinkler-dew.

When you looked through the boxes I looked around at the street. There were streetlights, I’m sure, but all I remember is the moon. Houses I had seen so many times during the day were dark massive shapes casting dark massive shapes, row after row after row of boxes where people were sleeping and here and there a few house-less lots on corners, all of this cut through with standardized black asphalt with the rare but occasional sprawling. You stood up and turned around holding the calligraphy set, and your face did that thing where it projects some feeling between curious and excited.

The next day was Saturday, and like most weekends I found myself going to your house to pass the time. You called me and told me you spent the morning cleaning the pen nibs, and that if I was bored I could come over. So I came over.

We used the set for hours. That weekend your Dad wasn’t using his home office because he was called away on one of the seasonal business trips he took. There were two drafting tables up against the dark wood walls and the windows, always closed, we opened that day. Everything in the room had to be used as a paperweight so your Dad’s work didn’t get scattered. We ran out of rocks and books, and after a moment of considering (your hand under your chin) you took off a shoe to use on the second to last pile. I used a shoe too, for the last one. The breeze moved throughout the day and when it got darker I stood to go home and noticed the wind was coming in from different windows than it started at.

The sound of those pens comes back to me when I’m sitting in my chair. It’s so easy to recall the pen tips’ syncopated flow on the paper as each sentence condensed in front of us. Sometimes I worried about what would happen if one of the pens broke, because we found only two in the set. I didn’t think we’d ever find another. Everything would have been different if we had shared one pen for both of us. Do you still have the two pens?

It was the whole day that we were in there with the set, wasn’t it? The way it feels in my memory…I hold it there like it was some symphony, you know? The steady scratching of the tips…it was subdued but simultaneously made to crescendo by the thick black ink. The quiet chimes of the pens in the well. All this followed by percussive rustles of crumpled paper—toss, roll, settle. These were sounds of muted potential. All of these moments were timed by something other than the two of us in that room—a metronome being acted out by two scribes.

Actually I had a dream about that the other night. In my mind, I saw us practicing calligraphy at the office’s tables with a conductor sort of hovering over us. He was probably standing on a podium though. He rapped his baton twice on the stand in front of him and then began forming letters in the air with it. This didn’t really help keeping time at all, at least I know I couldn’t figure out what the meter was. Then with a flourish (which reminded me of nakedness dreams set in high school) he put a single finger to his lips to emphasize the drama of the measure you and I had arrived at. The motions of our pens on the pages were already restricted by nib and line, why would he tell us to hush the size of the letters?

Sometimes it’s hard to move toward the typewriter, even with all of its appeal. Don’t think I’m saying it’s a bad gift, ok? It’s probably the best gift for me right now, where I am. It’s just that I get tired so the evenings and weekends are for scuttling back to my usual starting point and the chair holds the back of my head pretty well because I’ve already managed to put furrows in it.

You know there are hardly any elm trees around here, and no branches tap my window when I’m trying to sleep. No pebbles are thrown, either. I find it hardest to fall asleep when there is no expectation of being awakened for an adventure. I do wish there was someone to tell me how to move away from Hombre.

—I Am Yours Always

December 10^th, 2008[1]

Dear Young Angry Poet[2],

First, let me thank you for contributing your time to the acquisition of works for this literary magazine. It is no small amount of time that is spent on collecting material for these pages, and it is no small amount of time compiling them once the selection has been made. Second, let me thank you for dealing with a literary magazine that has very few submissions at all, outside of those from the members of the club. Let us not forget the value of an audience, and how they are able to provide a sounding board for things that have only echoed within the walls of our heads.

Do you remember the scene? I cannot recall the faces that sat around us at the table. Of course there was harsh fluorescent light—is it ever lacking at moments like this? We had all read a poem together and were debating its place among the other accepted works for the next issue. None of us would remember what the poem said, or what it was trying to say, or if it was one you had perhaps submitted anonymously, looking for criticism without a face for the assessors to look at. When the issue of the poem needing editing arose, I recall your reaction being one of disgust. You recoiled at the very idea, Young Poet, much in the way of discovering some hidden societal practice rotting under a log, the surface of the suggestion writhing with earthy things even you would not touch. Listening to your argument against editing, I remember feeling affronted. I was not on your side. I felt affronted for reasons I could not define at that point in my life as an English Major (with both letters capitalized for the life-long venture this study promises).

Why were you so adamant against the alteration of a poem that would have been perfect with the author’s change of a few awkward placements of phrases? It would have been so easy, Young Angry Poet. There remains a lifetime of difference between what you revolt against now, as a spry young thing honing a talent (that may or may not be imagined) and the revolting[3] that will actually benefit you or that group you revolt for.

Your energy was focused at the philosophical target of changing the author’s work. You cried out against any alteration, saying the editing would take away from the originality, the effort that had been poured into those words since their inception to the page. The editing would change the original!; how could anyone have the Right to Do So?

These were the questions launched out from your position in a plastic chair around a faux-bois table, staring at a circle of young editors[4]. What were you afraid we would do to your work? Have you since learned what it is an editor provides you, whether young, old, or ageless? Do you continue your ideals in graffiti, or other art, where no one comes along with a glaring alternate colored ink and changes your writings? Y.A.P., even graffiti artists are edited.

* * *

There is always someone assigned a “thankless” portion of any task that is displayed to a public eye. The statues you pass on your way to work were trucked there. The pictures in doctors’ offices have been framed and hung. Editors are perched precariously in the shadow, feeling simultaneously the need for change and the fear that the changes proposed will rob the artist of original inspiration and representation[5]. There are outright errors from time to time—things that no one could successfully argue against. More often is the manipulation of language that hangs in a tri-structured balance: something-close-to-wrong, something-has- more-than-one-meaning, and something-that-could-be-right.

There is always an aesthetic at work in an editor’s mind. What medium could be harder to master than someone else’s voice? The job of an editor is the sacrifice of their own voice, with every word read, and is the task of pulling on the layers that reflect the author they are working with. There is an artistry[6] to editing that is not acknowledged in the journey from mind to shelf, an acknowledgement that if given is left inside the walls of an office and is unheard by the appreciators of the work at the far end of the line of production. The back of a book, or any kind of literature, will never state the truth:

If the composition was artistic, if it held not only water but wine, then it was invulnerable in one sense and horribly fragile in another. Fragile, because when a timid editor made the artist change “slender” to “plump,” or “brown” to “blond” he disfigured both the image and the niche where it stood and the entire chapel around it; and invulnerable, because no matter how drastically you changed the image, its prototype would remain recognizable by the shape of the hole left in the texture of the tale. (Nabokov 109)

The author will construct a house of words around the area which the initial idea or emotion of their work resides. The home of the words is untouched, but the beams and shutters and windows and walls that the author has made around the outside may not have been constructed by the best carpenter-identity of the author. Maybe the author decided to put in a gothic archway when the editor recognizes that the saloon-style doorway would actually serve as a better entrance into that room of the house. What is within will not change—cannot change. What speaks for the internal home is what will be shaped, and shaped to Speak[7]. An editor is someone who sees the value in being told where the lapse in a pattern is, who sees the magnitude held in removing weaknesses, in the power of mortar between bricks that could otherwise stand on their own, but knows the value of keeping the chill and critical wind out.

Look here:

Books have traditionally been the one medium in which two people, an author and an editor, could agree that something needed to be said, and… share it with the public. (Schiffrin 171)

If two artists were working on the same project, as a collaborative piece, would you belittle either of them for suggesting to the other an alteration that would make the piece of art better as a whole? If there were two sculptors, two painters, two collage-makers, working together for a greater whole, would a Y.A.P. stand up and belittle their efforts? I am not suggesting that the editor is on the same level as the author. I am suggesting that while not the same level, a good editor is looking at the vision of the artist from a vantage point that provides the same sight, but with the benefit of removal that allows collaborative shaping.

This is what the editor does. The editor shapes. The editor refines. All of this is done without changing the original work, if the editor is a Good Editor. To change the original intention of the artist’s writing is no longer editing. That is a task that anyone appreciative of writing or art at all will never volunteer for. The editor looks beyond the rough ball of clay—clay that will come in all qualities and all stages, before the editor caps his pen for the last time—to the finished work of art. What the editor must achieve is Everything Possible from that malleable formation, that original collection of matter and concept.

The work of art never belonged to the editor, regardless of how closely the editor gets to the central idea of the writing. The limit of their closeness may

Figure 1

approach infinity but it will never merge. The editor, bearing the ache of having so close a relationship with a work of art but being forbidden to alter any one part of the core, is not given a fully acknowledged relationship with that work of art. The editorial world is not a world of clear definitions. No matter how much editing is done to a work, no editor will be given credit for that book, that poem. Editors bow to the works presented them. They provide an immortal service of deference and absolute servitude for the sake of that fleeting mistress, Perfect Art.

My Y.A.P., do you know what we have defined here, together? Do you see? What we have here is not someone who shies from editing their own work, not a hand-holder, not a dam-builder. We have here a hand-shaker[8], a mill-turner[9].

Y.A.P., a book is not a book when the author envisions it, it is not a book when you write it down, and it is not a book when it is sold. It becomes a book when an editor has done all to it that she possibly could.

* * *

So many years ago, my friend who has taught me so much, I was affronted by the anger you held in your heart for those that would change your writing. And I was affronted then, because I did not know what I would become in the future. I am becoming an editor, and even before I could give a name to this life of sacrifice and precision, I knew that I would be changing nothing, but that I would be giving voice to everything within another’s mind.

With the Most Affection,

Y.E.[10]

P.S.

Let us always prevent this:

Frame by Drew

Dearest My Love,

My love, my love, my love for whom I have gratitude that borders on reverence, spiritual reverence, what do you do when someone has given you their soul? What responsibility! It is greater even than the Creator’s Responsibility to the creation, which was made self-sufficient. It is greater than this because it is a singular representation of the whole–it is the pigment of the clearest sky; it is the white light before the star blinks away and back again; it is the moving molten core that writhes this planet to life; it is also the spaces between the rings of a dial tone; it is also the space between the star’s twinkle; it is also an empty socket in the center of an off-white wall; it is also the crack-snap of the filament in a light bulb; it is also the knobs of the microscope and the telescope alike.

What can anyone do but hold that closely and deeply, swaddled in robes of rose-scented midnight, honeysuckle dawn, and lavender dusk, making sure to tie it off with ribbons of dust and mud, strips of glass and diamond, and clasps of thunder, bird-calls, and the creak of a door closing into the opening of a home.

It is because of these things that no one is surprised that the entire universe never disappears into the myriad black holes.

Bring me the space between our molecules, and I will show you how souls are made. Bring me the observer of those spaces and I can show you love, personified and glowing.

Eternally,

Eternity