Bright Boles in a Fading Light

I was bundled up, truncated -
syntax out of whack,
trying on personae like pairs of jeans.
I was profligate.

I wriggled on the vine in ever newer colds.
I was parasitic to my self.
My chrysalis was my boredom.
Which is not to say that I've come out better.
Love doesn't redeem per se.


Everyone stands naked at some point during the day.
Takes stock of themselves.
Chooses to live.  Or doesn't.
This is an absurd but necessary point.

Every love story doesn't end.
Every love story is ultimately inexplicable.
Every love story includes some, or many, distances physical and emotional.
Every love story is a mountain range somehow always shrouded in mist.

Every love story is a hyacinth in July.
And a lilac in November.
Every love story is a trace of every other.
Every love story is every ripple of every river that ever went to the sea, every magenta and ochre air put on by the hale hardwoods of the west, every glance of an eye across the world, every touch and sound and scrape of skin.
Every love story is a fascination with ephemera.  Thumbs.  A particular smell.  A single, private memory.
Every love story doesn't end.

Can you 'explain to me how we're so immediately alive'?

Can you begin to account for this?

What has been will be and what is remains indelibly.
I can trace your face a thousand times and never limn it.

What is slaked by you is not lust.

Where the night-time monsters live we have made a home.
And where the day-time monsters roam we dance.

Mountain passes will take you to others' arms.
Forgotten ponds rimmed with aspen will drown me.
Skies will plume with all manner of cloud and days.
Moons will appear like the passes of a sickle in a wheat field.
But we, body and spirit, are inseparable despite what lays between here and there.

I'll see you in my dreams.



Inspiration provided by "I'm Only Now Beginning to Answer Your Letter" by Olena Kalytiak Davis.

The night's come again, my dear boy, and this time it's for good.
Don't worry, your legs going out from under you is supposed to happen.
Come here, sweetheart.  Come close.  I know.  This is weird.

Now your weight is pressed against me,
now your enlarged heart is echoing life in your chest,
now you can only stare straight ahead while we wait for
the rest.  Minutes pass.  
Lock eyes for the last time.  There are whole skies
in them.  Always have been.  Stars wheeling around, rearranging, wind through the wail
of our days together, loud laughter and wet mornings with soaking dews.
I hit you once.  I hope you didn't hold that against me.
Just lean into me.  He'll be back soon and this will be over.
Thank you for saving my life back there.  We had our time and I'll 
always cherish it.  It's not your fault I couldn't keep you afterwards.

The light is flickering annoyingly at irregular intervals.
Doctor back.
Can you still see that?
Second injection.

Your soft pink tongue leaks out of a numb mouth.  Can't stop crying.
 
No moment, just all and then none.  He's gone before half the liquid's in.
We are with each other here and forever.  This 
lasts, I tell myself.  This lasts.  And, never again.  But there will be again.

We'll let have you have as much time as you need.  Just leave him here when you're done.  We'll take care of the rest.

Okay.  Thank you.
 
You're the most innocent being I've ever known and I'm sorry 
for this.  I know you don't understand.  I don't really either.  This or anything.
At least it was in my arms.  Most don't
get that.  At times lately that has seemed the most selfish thought
I've ever had.

I lay him on his right side.  Facing north.  Close his eyes.  Close the door.





I miss you, jaxypants.

Attempts at a new fiction

I have never been able to sit still for very long.  After a while I begin to suffer shortness of breath and my body tingles and feels as though somehow it might be also existing simultaneously in some other indeterminate place.  Even my brief encounters with joy are coterminous with a certain wanderlust.  I have always, ever since childhood, felt acutely lost (though I know perfectly well that I am not) and lonely, which I've never really been either, in the literal sense of the word.  For example, in the midst of intense conversation, or even sometimes in the act of making love, I have the gnawing awareness that I am separate, that from somewhere outside me I am being limned by an invisible, yet everpresent, hand.  It is impossible for me to not think of myself in this way, constantly being redrawn, reworked, the shading done so that I am always partially, at least, steeped in darkness, the shadows, as it were, creeping always a little over me.  And yet, I wouldn't call myself an unhappy person.  On the contrary, I've experienced an abundance, I would say, and that being touched with melancholy only intensifies the good.

But even now, writing these lines, I feel an overwhelming sense that I must move about, that the act of writing itself is somehow to be avoided, and that the issuance of this behavior is contained even in the enzymes of my body.  And this is the beginning of my madness.

Presenting a tidy appearance to the world, much less writing, is daily an heroic activity.  Both have small windows of opportunity before the elan of alcohol and crippling self-doubt move in like barbarian hordes.  I am, in fact, a connoisseur of this space between clarity and conscious (and moral) manumission. I have the lurking sense that I'll never be able to write another word, smile again at my beloved, taste a wine I have desired.  This is both what drives me forward and cripples me.  I am wrecked against my own will.  And then there comes release, and wildness, and then the process starts all over again the next day.

A poem written by a moth that I read often.

She came around the corner 

to see body-sized mounds of rags and debris.

They could have been the warm torsos and arms

of the dead, wrapped in plastic and cloth, 

that she wasn't supposed to see

at the age of eleven or twelve.

Or twenty-five.

But they weren't.

No, they were not.

They were everything and nothing.

Like the brown paper bag

that caresses the curb under unseen stars.

Or the weeping un-heartbeat

of the car's turning signal.

Its melodic sobs asynchronous

with any other's.

Signal, it is. 

To listen.

The drive home is silent but for the city.

A moth's wing and a wet nose greet her at the door.

Coxcombs and Breadcrumbs

"...And I wanted that heat so bad
I could taste the fire on your breath
and I wanted in your storm so bad
I could taste the lightning on your breath
I watched you hold the sun in your arms while he bled to death
he grew so pale next to you
the world is so pale next to you
your hair is coxcomb red your eyes are viper black

you said every road is a good road
between the next road and your last road
every love is your best love and every love is your last love
and every kiss is a goodbye..."

excerpts from Coxcomb Red by Jason Molina

Some notes on the hum of the mind

Endlessly these eddies curl and compact and stretch out.  Dissipate.  Arise.  Morph.

The mind, if this is where such things take place, is really a kind of fluid atmosphere, driven as much by chaos as by anything else.  Sanity in this way could be seen as a kind of order, however brief.  An island of negentropy.  Insanity the opposite.  And myriad kinds of intermediate stages existing not long enough to even be recognized.

It is as possible to observe this as it is possible a body of water doing the same thing.

Is the observation of one's own mind itself a kind of eddy?  A brief gathering of substrate (which is an absurd, but convenient, way of speaking because thoughts and mental projections are not measurable) in the flow?

What is it that allows for this to happen?  Who is it that can conjure?

Does the flow in which I exist flow into you?

It must.

trestles

light       river      skin

swallows move incessantly between the swaying cottonwoods

what could i have said? 


------

sweat becomes a manner of speaking.
speaking is a palpitating creation always just formed, forming.


------

"notes for future use"

- mouth as ampullae of Lorenzini
- mouth as Da Vinci's reputed circle
- body as palmate  (over your palmate body chivalry goes out the window)
- body as an espalier


------

it has been argued (Scarry, E.) that we want to replicate what we find beautiful.  that this, in fact, makes us better, more capable of spontaneously being just, loving, kind creatures.

take my hand.  let's go to bed right now.

------

light      river     skin

a nameless place.
laughter.  curled desire and an ease that didn't come easy.  until it did.

what could i have said?