Daniel Abdal-Hayy MOORE

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STORY OUT OF NOWHERE

1

Of course it should be possible to start a
story right here and let it loosen out further and
further until it nearly encompasses just about
everything every love-glance every love-gulp every
gulf as wide as the Atlantic itself between our
very patched selves and perfect God
such as a story about an ant say who
meanders along his Ouspenskyan two dimensions all his
life until one day his vista opens as wide as
double doors on a Renaissance garden
he sees a third dimension by its angular intrusion into his usual two
accompanied by faint zither music and distant
trumpets he undergoes a transformation
appropriate to someone having their
bottom fall out and their sides and top extend
into undreamt-before perceptions you could say
he's left antdom by being so expanded and perhaps that's
true although perhaps just as accurately he's actually
achieved true antdom for the first time in his life not just those
dutiful plodding steps as if on stiff stilts and twitching feelers but now
full inhalation of cosmos and exhalation of illusory self
inhalation and exhalation becoming at some point one
but what do I know
what stars are above me
what wonders await me I have no
idea what my death will be or where my
life is taking me what double doors onto what
Renaissance gardens or post-Renaissance German
Expressionist labyrinth pathways with looming
angular walls and dizzying inclines yet at

heart it is the same story that could if fated
unroll from here and embrace by its
purest wit and Godly wisdom even the most
nonchalant player with hands in pockets and cigarette
dangling from raw lips eyes slits smoke curling up in
front of his or her face in which suddenly
he or she sees more than expected
the double doors to his or her life suddenly
swing open and why not
onto a long beach that extends into another
territory altogether where people greet each other from the
deepmost parts of their hearts eyes like delirious
singers whose songs have a lilting simplicity that
catches everyone in their nets and each
exchange is from the
fullest bellow and aria of the
glorious human heart in full splendor and yet
simplicity itself a

gesture so fine made with human hand the poignant
sound of a voice long-distance telling its
tale of woe and visceral recognitions
the sexual perplexities as if giant looming
silhouettes on specially built platforms like
ancient shaman ceremonies involving
trance and words to a
new revelation were to
take place with every
encounter we can
ever expect to have
and yet each one is astonishingly
the same and at the same time unique
the ant goes back to its hill and
wonders if it was dreaming or if it is
presently dreaming whether the
real is the universe turned inside out so the
silver backside of it shows and it
no longer reflects the same old
grimaces and smiles or whether it is really just
this one so hard to actually define and seemingly most
friendly to those who plunge into the fire of it
headfirst to find its silken pathways
extending from the bottoms of their feet

tended and watched over by the
long gaze of God


2

Episode without precedent or antecedent
afloat on the sea of it
bobbing happily to itself so self-contained and
self-sufficient as if
nothing but itself mattered
life flowing out both ends into tumultuous nothingness
starting abruptly and ending abruptly
someone coming into a room chattering and going
out of it again leaving dead silence behind
us fidgeting with things or rearranging papers
or simply thunderstruck and inert at the
explosiveness of the story while it was here
its perfect nouns and verbs moving it along
its adjectives giving it color both
local and cosmic
starshine on the forehead of the girl from the
mountains or dune-burn from the rough
caravan leader who knows how to speak to
camels better than to men
and so the episode lives in the air like a
spark from a night fire thrown up in the
blackness like a jinn's spangle bright gold then
gone
but while it's alive it has the dimension of
palaces with thousands of rooms and
elongated corridors and formal and informal
gardens out windows and archways in which
at all hours trysts and dramatic turns of
event take place the breaking of
horses and the submission of wills and the
freeing of spirits to fly on their own wings not like drunk
moths to the flame of the sun but like serious
water birds capable of transcontinental
travel into
continuous oceans of sky auroral wonders


3

For no sooner does a story start its journey
out of the dark step by ant-step across the
blank page of space it also begins to
reverberate outward and inward in geometric
dimensions and someone pulls out her
mother-of-pearl combs and yellow hair
tumbles to her shoulders and distant horses
whinny maybe Mongols maybe not in which case
ten hours later there's no city at all no
hair tumbling framed by no window there for
centuries until ten hours ago
the story unwinds across faces and their anguishes
it's hinged in the oddest places and suddenly whole
unexpected panels open out in which for example
the uncle from St. Petersburg who was supposed to
inherit the farm and its two thousand acres has a
fit with eyes rolling up into head clutching tablecloth with
all the silver and china crashing to the floor and he's
under the table dead and the farm takes
wing and sails over the mountains to a distant
province giving sustenance to the yellow-haired
woman from before who happened to
escape the chopping blows by feigning death under a
haystack etcetera etcetera it's
booming along with rattles and bells of its
own completely out of the
storyteller's control in that the storyteller wanted to tell a
tale of a family of saintly dwarves living inside a tree
and suddenly we're in Russia where Chekhov for example
told stories that glittered with a life all their
own incomparably sober and self-contained


4

A tree grew from the air
and turned into a bird
a stone rose from a stream
and stepped onto shore
water drops fell to earth
and each one flew off as a fly
the sun lifted its bulk
and its writhing tentacles caught fire
the oceans abruptly sat up
and creatures fell out of their deeps
yet now when you look at the sky the
tree the stone the stream rushing noisily between the
hard toes of the rocks
everything's back to normal

or is it?


5

The narrative flow as they say
out of the mouth of the first to speak
at the dawn of the ages
but there was not one who was first
but many all talking at once from
time immemorial
talking as normally as you or me
saying gravelly things to further the
narrative flow saying "Don't go too near that
waterfall!" or "We saw a mastodon stuck in a
bog this morning—Oh boy God be praised
we'll eat for a week!"
or far more complicated things like
She entered the place as the sun was setting in a
purple blaze like a meteor entering the sea
and the air seemed to notice her"
the narrative flow till the end of time on the
lips of everyone
the end


6

The story of the man with no toes who composed
his odes on the run
the story of the twenty schoolgirls who circled
a hill until it disappeared
the story of the cat who dived into a cardboard
box to investigate the void and came out
a Buddhist
the three-cornered hat that refused to revolt
in the general throng that would later
become the status quo worth
revolting against and so
sat on a head in obstinate refusal until it
sprouted feathers and ended as the
master of haute couture
the story of the three magpies looking down at the
dead knight sprawled at the base of their tree
the story of the first people envisioning the
last people and laughing at the
joke as their campfire flickers in the dark
the story of the woman who brought food to
orphans and came home to find her
home had been transformed into a
celestial piano playing tunes to
transport her to Paradise
the story of tragic lovers each in their respective waterfalls
signaling to each other through the downrushing
cascades in a glittering blur of longing
the story of the end of stories and giant
cracks appear in our walls and our feet become
flat and our windows black over
the story of the beginning of stories as a newborn
baby looks around and seems to be perfectly
at ease and the enlightened
master of her domain

each thought-bubble an epic with horseback
armies and attendant angels
each phrase we speak conscious or not
a haiku that encapsulates both the
season and the moment of epiphany as
surely as the settling down through the air of a gnat on a
newly fallen plum on gray pavement
each entrance into night or exit into day
the delicious unfolding of a parchment of
stories whose starlight proceeds from
actual stars and whose
main characters are aspects of our
own hearts going past each other and
recognizing each face from childhood on
each story accompanied by distant
chimes and a gong the size of Manhattan
each denouement only the ashes a
strange new Phoenix rises out of
trailing the vocabulary words of the entire
story in a heartbeat that
we are about to embark on having
started before the creation of the universe
just as we're about to
open our lips in
praise of the simplest notion
and in anticipation of the
most distant galactic recognition
coming as close to us as our breaths are
or even closer

coming as close to us as our deaths are
only a pause in the story
that resumes again
like an illuminated manuscript caught fire in a
shaft of light
in which we too exist
transformed into
the purest story of God's unfolding blessing on all of us
amen


(from The Book of Infinite Beauty— 6/28/2000)







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