The Body Keeps Crossing

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Even after leaving, the mouth continued holding the taste of the salins.

Certain mornings began mineral.

Not memory exactly. More the body preparing for something that was no longer arriving.

Even after washing, shoes retained a pale whitening at the seams. The camera strap stiffened. Salt gathered invisibly along coat cuffs left too long near the marshes.

By late winter, repetition had altered the nervous system.

Wind.

Hours of it.

Reeds bending in one direction without correction. Flamingos moving through distance slowly enough to lose all symbolism. Entire afternoons reduced to brightness, salt, and the sustained pressure of open land.

Some evenings I returned unable to speak immediately.

Not from sadness.

From exposure.

After months in the Camargue, the body stopped separating itself properly from what surrounded it. Wind entered the eyes until even tears felt altered by weather. There were afternoons beside the evaporation basins when thought itself flattened under the light.

First attention altered.

Then duration.

Then whatever keeps the body from entering weather completely.

The body alone after months of exposure.

Even grief changed there.

It lost sequence first.

No single sorrow remained intact long enough to become narrative. Only a pressure carried quietly through the day.

There were afternoons when the light removed sequence from things.

Not emptiness.

Something more exact than that.

Once, after hours beside the salins, I stood at the kitchen sink unable to remember what I had intended to do there.

There were evenings the silence followed me indoors.

The flats remained entirely indifferent to meaning. The wind did not become symbolic. Even beauty appeared cautiously, almost unwilling to separate itself from erosion, labour, weather, and exposure.

What entered instead was repetition.

Distance without climax. Salt roads whitening again overnight. Water holding the same dull brightness from morning into late afternoon.

Some distances could only be registered physically.

The body had already answered by the time understanding arrived.

Even now, flat water can alter concentration for hours afterward. Wind moving through reeds still enters attention physically, as though the crossing never fully ended.

Not vividly.

The way old injuries answer weather.

Some forms of contact do not end.

They move inward.

Even after leaving, the mouth continued behaving as though salt were still arriving.

By then it became impossible to tell what remained from what entered.

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—rb

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residual note

Written in the weeks following departure from the Camargue, while the body was still adjusting to the absence of salt, wind, flat water, and prolonged exposure to open land.

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