Shoes

I was speechless. That never happens. I should have taken off my shoes but was so conscious of the time and of my leaving. With intention I memorized the pattern of flecks in each iris. With intention I wondered what would happen now and which outcome to even prefer. In some future I may sell Viagra while she assembles collage. I may be somewhere wanting while she is somewhere wanting. I may be just an anecdote while she is just an anecdote. The flecks are in gold and hazel like the chiseled lids of canopic jars and if I could reorient myself within her I would see the secrets they still keep. I should have taken a picture. I should have taken a thousand pictures and reassembled the room like David Hockney the better to pick furiously at these same knots and get nowhere.

...

Fuck that, that's not the truth. That's not the whole of it. That's caution and artifice and sensible boundaries.

Truth is when you look at me I spill lillies from my throat.

I started Early

Emily Dickinson never saw the sea.

I made a joke at her expense yesterday and I feel badly about it. I feel badly about certain other things, as well.




Young love is such a fragile thing,
It is itself uncertain how best to thrive -
When the thrust of mandate finds the time is fit
That you depart and in your place these words survive.

“April is the cruelest month,” he said,
Eliot and I at the okay party room.
Expectations sliced as hoods and served in bowls,
I know better now than to eat of it.

Well before I stood and watched,
Put your drinks up, Sumo, I never would have guessed it.
I guess the change in my pocket wasn’t enough and I’m like
I can’t even write this.

Well before we lay together on a couch,
Lacing fingers gently pressing lips against your hairline.
It’s darker than I would have expected and I kiss again -
I am still on that couch and where are you the rest is nothing.

“I started Early – Took my Dog –“
I did, too, and it was so much harder than I wanted.
Now is not the time for this she’s not the one
How did you get in here you’re hogging the blankets.

Spring Break

It's like that.

Magic Spells

“Don’t worry, dear Pamela. I’ll do my scientific best to command your fleet.”

Let’s talk.

What we have here is, perhaps, a complex spatial relations issue. Consider the position of each. Consider the duration of each position of each. Consider the relative distance between any two points as a function of that duration. Let us narrow our focus to those sets that include two or more points sustaining a relatable distance from one another for a period of, say, a year. Five years. Ten years.

My question is: what is it that determines the continuity of these relationships?

I’ve never been able to figure this out. There were people with whom I had a deep and legitimate intimacy. This is not code for sex; I’m trying to be truthful. There were people with whom I exchanged revealing detail and sang and screamed and grew. Made things and went places and shared formative experiences. Mostly, we parted ways.

Sure, sometimes there are simple reasons. Someone moves away. Someone else becomes a dick. I become a dick. Other times, though, it’s hard to remember what precisely caused those two points to separate. There is always a story you could relate if called upon to do so, but that’s just the nature of narrative. If you examine such explanations carefully and honestly you’ll find that they usually wither. Like any story you relate in order to make sense of yourself and your past it is reductive, perspectival, and, in some sense, comforting.

For a long time I pinned this all on Quality. That there was some system of evaluation at work, sorting people into piles. This is not true. At other times, I would imagine that there was some emotional threshold beyond which a real connection was established. Again, not true. There are just too many counterexamples – people who had real worth and with whom I formed real bonds and these people are gone.

It is also not the case that this is a matter of insufficient attention. There were relationships I hated to lose, struggled to resuscitate, that failed all the same. There were relationships I just no longer cared about where the other participant tried and tried to no avail. At this point, the easy answer is that people develop and change and sometimes grow apart. I don’t believe that. I’ve walked away from others after experiencing no particular change. I’ve been walked away from similarly. There is something much more subtle happening, some kind of incongruity between a thing and our internal model of that thing. Fantasy, I guess.

A lie, basically.

All this said, the issue has only been deferred. There is some mysterious factor, be it an attribute or a relationship between attributes, that allows the normally fluid system of social interaction to change state. I’m talking in circles and have no particular insight to offer.

I choose to classify this as Navigation.

With my charts, sextant, and astrolabe, I must relocate this vessel from berth to berth. The process is then begun again. The Great Sea is filled with traces of our passage. Each voyage has been carefully recorded, and viewed together describe a pattern so intricate and so beautiful that you will recognize it truly. It will touch you in a way that you have never been touched and likely never will be again.

Keep on the Borderlands

In this series we will assemble a vast and terrible mythology. It will take a very long time.



I.

The foundation, to begin, was uncertain. Timber and hastily quarried granite formed intercessional vaultings of repeated post and lintel design. Depressions were shorn up with shim and mud plaster in generous amalgam. The various basement recesses held still incidents of original flaws in both workmanship and enthusiasm. These competed with newer, buttressed descendents and galvanized cinctures in necessary metal. The soil was dark. As testament to the great pockets of water, gone now, that once riddled this underworld, moisture crept into joist and connective tissue. A solemn permanence held board to board and stone to stone.

The cadence of support was revisited through root systems. Greedy fingers blindly tunneling for superior position; proof that the surface was near. In the center, though, in the geometric center of these puzzled halls there were no such intrusions. Here was a different type of earth, alluvial deposit descended from some forgotten waterway. The roots that cracked these walls were different. Above this place was something wholly other.

The something had ascended through these subterranea. There was no clear delineation between built and hewn, grown and ground. There was no method by which to index one thing from another thing or to separate accident from purpose. It was simply clearer somehow, here in the center, that there was something up there, vast and portentous. A weight. A very great weight.

Strangers on a Train

Is that okay with you?

We were standing on the platform so long

We were on the train

We were

We

I’m skipping ahead

She said

Emerging onto a platform at last

Emerging somewhere sunken

I like walking arm in arm, you’ll find that out about me

Finding that out

Then the part with the people

Weird that Derick just assumed that we were husband and wife

Husband how do you feel about that

He asked

So I want to ask you a very direct question is that okay

Just think of all the things I’ll have to tell you

For being amazing tonight

Mostly cause you were there

From the Egg

Along a sandy shoulder,
a field trip gathering stones.
We dozen children, collared shirts.
I found one unlike the others, felt its real heft.
Battleship gray with crevices worn smooth,
some unimaginable thing might be birthed and slither forth.
Hurried forward, drew it from my bag
“It’s slag,” he said, “it’s a piece of slag.”

Africa, to start with,
are you still the dark continent?
Riotous living, too much living
The cradle, as they say,
featuring sound and color I will never know.
A man from this company went upriver and stayed there.
Chart your boundaries and unspool wire
Vile and virus and gunfire.

No room will ever
compare to the first room.
Membranous curtain, united pulses
Before the tipping point, before abstraction ruins everything.
First exploration as a spasm,
beak or feather against the porcelain barrier.
Nourishing some inner seed
The urgency of real need.

Waiting in the hallway,
squinting into photographs
Skull expansion, subsequent migrations
Muddled thinking, struggling to remember the sequence.
It’s best to record each detail,
the tips of your fingers along a pantleg.
All of this is familiar to you
It is written on your body.