Eric Pankey
An Errant Errand
One by one memories evaporate, change form, lift away, are shed somehow, lost. One departs from the screen into a lost field. The silence is complicated by all that keeps it from being silence: a caesura marked by empty space. Wind-blown embers carry a precarious future. One dwells, abides in a book, a book yet finished: drafty, a bright red tarpaulin for a roof. Enchanted, enamored, one prays for the slyness of jackals, the shyness of fawns. Within the confines of a plot, one toggles back and forth between the suspended moments. A comet foretells tumult: opulent magic stifled, a salamander as an embodied flame, lithium tarnishing in evaporation ponds. Before the soul is shaped, it dwells in a gray realm unknown to the spectrum. One wakes within the chamber of a camera obscura, with only one's shadow as bedclothes, to the outside projected inside, upside down, as if one had slept on the ceiling. As if incised by a scrimshander, enough stars to suggest the not-yet- counted, the infinite. One closes one's eyes and hears the seep of starlight into stone.