Talk to Bonnie on the Fictionville Blog
1.
I only remember the sight of her running the circumference of the soccer field in pink sweatpants.
Trees cannot speak but have their own circumference. Trees do not say “we,” do not self reflect, do not put themselves in quotation marks. They circle themselves, not in balanced sentence structure, chiasmas, the ellipsis or the parenthetical. They do not need the “pro” in Latin to exist, they simply are. The circumference of trees is amazing. For each, merely being means something. Soon, perhaps, maybe, or not, the trees will span 360 degrees, each in the singular of its own [existential] plural.
Exhale, bend
Exhale and pull
Like an extended bow
The bird was born.
The circumnavigation of smells.
The sweep of childbirth.
The revolution of disease.
These are circumference: each joining
Circumference as though
Circumference were a
Performance arranged by
Circumstance.
(I wonder if I made this part up)
To meet as circumference
This morning circumference
With it circumferenc and I am
Circumference a chorus circumference.
Exhale, bend
Exhale and pull
Ear, bow, foot, heel, ear, toes, leg
Stone, fish, fiber, dough, crack, block and breath
2.
Circumference is evolution; evolution is circumference: the making of birds from dinosaurs, the leg stretched back toward the knee (which does not speak, but which has its own circumference). Spoken and speechless. It is in the full circumference of all this being that the tree remains firm, round, fully grown, speechless. As such, the speaker is “in its place” and “according to measure.”
Our days put on such reticence
these actions seem their own defense.
In this circumference
Everything comes around
Is a still performance
Arranged by chance
To meet.
To every sphere its wholeness, to every fisherman circumference was a proverb. The men said it themselves: There was no end to their start, no start to their finish, no line that terminated.
Afterward, we all drank orangeade, so cold it was full of tiny bits of ice.