27 May 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 1

Toy Story

by RYO YAMAGUCHI

Listen, friend, there is a proper way to hold the warehouse when its walls have been blown out like this, and it sits there, dumb in the field. Like so: imaginary sphere, bundle of noise. We are sitting; I'm wishing for a table to mark our spot in the hilly grass, and that's when we get the sudden feeling that we are to stand, that we are to do something, really do something, like torch our possessions and gather all the humanoid figures in the wood grain of the cabinets in Nancy's kitchen into a single line of sight, singing softly, little dirge as the day ends. But then what? No, friend, we'll find ourselves right back here, one life less, and this is what I mean about leaving truth to other things, like, the dolphins, whom for years we've known to be advanced, who think in complicated time-signatures, who rubber through the vast oceans in their swift, wet beats of reflected sun. Our bodhisattvas are handheld and, at the heart of it, simply receptacles for information. So we go over to have a look, the up-down of our stride holding the trees, and the grass and the sky and the little stream where the cows are chewing, into a single, framed, motion-sick image, something we almost remember, as though our heads are in our bags tripping-out over the past, while our bodies push onward in a forceful yet measured rush for the antidote. And we get there and it's nothing but a crossroad of knees. And we fall down. And we were so close. And the day goes on being bright.