Free An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick Page A

creates, opens what it opens. A song cannot be sung against absolute silence, a different kind of silence must be created, a silence that isn’t silence, a nothing that is instead of a nothing that is not .
    I left, Daniel—and I’m sorry for it—but I left because I need help with some difficult points in the song, places where it seems a word must be sung twice in the same instant, sung in such a way where a word means itself and its opposite at once, as light in the song also means darkness, as the word for sun also includes the light of the moon .
    So I am sailing to the island, the old island, center of the world .
    There is one singer left, Daniel—only one person alive who can sing this song. He came to me in a dream and told me he was dying. Such people can do such things. In my dream he said he has heard me singing this song. He told me he must teach me what is unwritten in the words. He called to me in a dream, and because of this dream I left you. He told me he was dying. He told me time is short. He showed me a map. A tiny island in or near the Galapagos, those islands sailors for centuries would stop at to carry a tortoise away for dinner. Those islands where, when a sailor died while carrying a tortoise, died from heat or exhaustion or sickness, he was lucky enough to be buried on land so he still has a body to be mourned .
    I also sound crazy to myself, when I am someone named Allan listening to myself—but I’m not Allan anymore. Notonly. I’m someone anonymous. A singer. A singer is no one and then being no one becomes a kind of everyone. I’m a better father anonymous than I am with a name—
    Love ,
    Father never spoke to me when I was a child as he spoke to me in his letters. When I would stand in the doorway of the study while he worked he looked at me as if I were only a child—the child that I was—and too young to be initiated into his thoughts. He would look up at me with a kind of pity. In the letters his voice was different. He knew they wouldn’t only be read by the young boy I then was, but also by the adolescent I wasn’t yet, and the young man, and the adult, and sad middle-aged me sitting in the night sheen trying not to cry.
    Grandma Clarel would read the letters, too. She knew where I kept them in my room. I didn’t hide them, nor did I mind. I wanted company inside their strangeness. She read them sitting on the edge of my bed; I would find her when I came home from school, dabbing a wadded-up tissue to her eye, sniffling loudly, and saying to herself oh no, oh my in rapid succession, and when she saw me, she would say Daniel, you’re home, you’re home, so early too! Coffee, coffee, it’s time for coffee and a snack , as if singing a song to a tune ever present in her head, and, stuffing the tissue up the end of her sleeve, would smile broadly as if to hide from me her worry, as if I hadn’t seen her crying, as if I couldn’t see her eyes, her slightly disheveled hair whose strands escaped the bun she keptit in, and seeing that I saw the letter in her hand, would look at me and say oh this, I was neatening up and it fell to the ground. Come, come with me —pausing briefly— Your father is having quite a trip, isn’t he?—
    Dear Daniel ,
    The woman in the chasm in the whale’s broken mouth—she is not alive but she is not dead. She is waiting with her child inside her. There are other stories you’ll learn. Orpheus descended into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice. He sang a song the darkness itself loved and it parted veillike in front of him. Eurydice followed him, would follow him as long as he sang, as long as his fingers struck the notes, as long as he didn’t look back to see if she was following. But he did look back and she was swallowed back into the night, the night that isn’t the opposite of day, the other night .
    I’m scared I will look back