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I.
I wanted to say all
the edges were sharp
and there was no room for her spilling over.
A bird with a broken wing, I call her.
"If I folded you up, with a point on each corner,
and threw you off the porch, could you fly?"
Her eyes narrow.
"You don't know the difference between a bird and a train,"
she tells me.
I laugh. Her body tenses.
"If I taped your
mouth shut and tied you up
and threw you off the porch," she jabs,
"could you swim?"
I say: "I'm not
sure I love you, anymore."
And spread warm and
soft around her, when she begins to cry.
II.
It's getting to where
I don't know why I bother to come home.
There's always something in the middle of the floor:
a wall, a fence, an iceberg.
It doesn't matter who
puts it there.
We take turns.
III.
I have come to resent
the intrusion
of possibility into circumstance.
Maybe it's the soldering
closed
of the recent past I'm resisting here,
the idea of just moving on.
I tell her the edges
are where one can be total.
Total.
The word has a circular
sense to me,
not like the flatness in the "center,"
where we are always pulled thinner, covering all angles,
struggling to maintain the surface, to leave no cut
through which subversion might leak.
A kind of suppression, a holding down.
She shrugs, glares:
get serious.
Gravity.
IV.
I don't know anymore. It's lead and it's lead and it's lead.
The way old silver sometimes tastes in the mouth. I wanted the
"civility" of not eating with fingers, the security
of Arabic numerals on days, calendars, bookworks. Moving out
of an unsettled desperation and timelessness, into a settled
desperation pinned with numbered flags. A tribute to my "sanity."
V.
She says how now we've
dropped
all our weapons, barriers, and strategies.
No god above us, she tells me.
I keep thinking: no
hell below?
Today, this feels like
an abandoned street, swept clean
of the names that remind us.
No hell below?
VI.
"You give so much,
then you take it all away," she begins.
She's trying to be kind
to me, but I run
away from home. She's really had it, this time.
Angry, she stands at
the door, screeching through the thin morning air. "I'm
tired of you treating me this way! If you leave now, it's over."
I bite into an apple,
stare at her from the bottom of the steps, trying to dissolve
her image, to feel what it would be like if she were not there.
"I'm telling you
because I know: you're being really schizoid."
Neighbors peeking through
their curtains. I stare back.
"If you leave.
. .," she threatens.
"Be quiet,"
I tell her, "you'll wake the whole neighborhood."
"I'LL WAKE THE
DEAD!"
I can't think of anything
to say.
If she could wake the
dead, I wouldn't have left.
VII.
Crazy.
We are both still crazy.
I keep picking her up and letting her fall, until she is dark
and pained with bruises. . .and she says, go ahead: let go. .
.because I won't cry and it's so bad. . . because I've made her
hate me, and she wants me to hurt like that, too...share her
pain. . .wasn't there every anything good? Couldn't we invent
it? So far above the abyss, and neither one of us can see, when
it is light.
The opposite of gravity
is grace.
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