Everything Is Far Away From Here

Text and 110 Photographs

Steve Kemple
Everything Is Far Away From Here

www.stevekemple.com
steve@stevekemple.com

©2009 Some Rights Reserved

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
I remember something:

A reticent dawn traveled through the air. Above my head

geometries converged in an oceanic singularity. Space shifted and
undulated, a mirror turned into itself, was multiplied, innumerable,
skittering into a graceful endless infinity, darkening repeated
forms, descending out of sight into a silvery luster.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
I held on to the damp railing, leaning into the morning quiet
beyond, squinting into the fog at the line of trees, craning into the
far off sound of interstate traffic, spectral, just beyond the horizon.
“Everything is far away from here,” words that came to me and I
reveled in.

I dreamed into the sound, into the ungraspable distance, and my

eight-year-old mind beheld a splendid apparition, an echoing
trajectory of innumerable vehicles, blurring into a mystifying fog,
an ocean of drifting aural mists, an austere encompassment.
I bent atmospheric, against the damp railing, gazing, marveling,
bewildered.

Further in the icy distance, a jet glided by without a sound.

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“Did you see that?”
I pointed at the sky.

She did not say anything.

Her neck was craned in the same direction as my arm.

I said nothing, too.

Our necks craned together at 2:24 pm on a Thursday.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
I am swept along, a torrent of moments, a fluttering of trajectories
upon the wall, slanting thrust into deep corners shifting onto the
intersecting surfaces.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
“I wonder,” she began.
I looked at her.
“I don’t know...”
Our necks were craned, the glimmering speck descending into the
mist.
Her words descended into mist
My ears craned to listen.
My ears craned into mist.
Something glimmered.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
Clouds shifted slowly, a receding tide of atmosphere. A jet flew
by, a twig bound to the water’s surface.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
I dreamed last night that the sky was an ocean and the ground was
covered in distant clouds and that I could not remember
something. I walked over the distant clouds and a solemn jet
passed above me, its trail bisecting the sky, turning slowly into
itself, it’s distance vanishing, a soliloquy of descending mist, and I
looked away briefly, turned back, and it was gone.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
Our mouths filled with helium, we dreamed hazily into the
distance.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
A solitary jet glanced along the surface of the sky, drifted into an
infinite departure and my gaze along with it.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here

“Everything is far away from here.”

I remember feeling this as a child, gazing between the leaves
toward the moon, pale against the drifting morning sky, its waters
stretching narrowly into distant treelines, which I imagined to be
far off mountains along every horizon, a barrier between what is
here and the universe’s edge. I remember the sidewalks in the sky,
plotted by gleaming points flickering along the canopy, paths
arcing along an icy sunlit expanse; reticent and weary ghosts who
walked along the sidewalks in the sky, and far away clouds mingled
with the fixed stars.

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 Everything Is Far Away From Here
“Did you see that?”
“No.”
“A jet just flew by and it was beautiful.”
“What was it like?”
“I don’t remember.”

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