The world is both smaller and larger than expected. It sits perched on the window-sill like a gorged sparrow, its beak shining, wet from pecking at the ground. Recent rain. A ruffle of wings and a cocked head. I turn my back to the window, trail the fugue of dreams I have escaped. I am waiting for the sharp sounds.
Remarkable, the elasticity of happiness. How it stretches over the fingers of time, a cat’s cradle waiting for another hand. I triangulate, pull back the nip of band that hides my bright pellet, wait for the darting flesh. The red welts on your back are the notches that mark my marooning. I have scavenged your darkest places for my sustenance, long ago stole away the jams and preserves that decorate your seep-light. Now it’s the caves for me, smooth limestone that hews your steep exhaustion, and outside, canopies that reveal the sky your ragged garment, shifting across your shoulders in unending ease. I trawled your shores for other wrecks, driftwood and shells. The tall masts of previous scars were easy to climb, an ax to split their pain. Growing bolder I took to jumping rocks, calling you names that you spit back with the wind, and then the whirlpool that sucked away my shoes. Barefoot I scaled palm-trees, drank coconut water and pretended to be drunk. I cling to your sculpted form with all the ardor of a 16th century Franciscan, mourning in sackcloth. I am bald. But I had to buy a comb for my beard.
Later, when we were bored, we took to driving. The eternity of roads to replace our charted bounds. Never the highways or the three-lane grid-cuts, but rather those tributaries quiet and shallow, the backwash of residential housing, small grocery stores with names like Mendel’s Dry Goods and The Everything Store. Speed past them all, the propped up apartments, the shanty towns, the empty lots like eye-sockets, staring us down. Stop for food, stop for piss, stop for rest, stop for love, stop for a three-legged dog and his blind master, stop for the Memorial Parade, stop for cotton-candy and an authentic German bratwurst, stop to fight, stop to fill-up, stop for the largest tree you have ever seen, branches as thick as smoke-stacks, skin so rough you are afraid it will grind you away with its age, stop to shit, stop to be silent, stop to play the song, pull off your clothes and indent the hood with our hooves, stop in a ghost town and sit on our haunches, wail the acrid wind and suck the blood from sunset, so drunk, so high, lets break into the house, pretend to live here for a day, I’ll make breakfast, you clean the dust from my hair, we don’t need so many clothes, sew up some curtains, drag in a mattress, light a fire, big one, so I can see it reflected in your eyes and know that you are strong, stop, stop, stop. We ran out of money, ran out of gas, drove the car into a ditch. You hit your nose on the dash, bled all over the upholstery. That was the last time we made love. Gearshift, speedometer, gas-pedal. I ran you to the ground.
Suppose you came to me, clothed in periwinkle and the strange scent of regret? A garland of Queen Anne’s Lace, honeysuckle, and the prickly skins of rambutans, all woven together with my grandmother’s hair. Why my grandmother, you used to ask, and all I could do was write a poem. As if an excuse for forgetting so much of the past. But, suppose you came? There would be blood in your eyes, a burst vein to mark my shortcomings. The skin of your soles cracked and peeling, the silt of burning asphalt lodged between your toes. Your feet caress my bedpost, I bury myself in the covers. I can hear the friends you have brought with you, so many when you still cared, and they are holding your veil before you, lips moving ceaselessly in their litany of loss. Loss? I want to tear that word from every being, so that I can speak it again and again as if for the first time. But, suppose you came? I can see it now, the sudden reverence, descending with the slow force of an air-raid siren. That whoop of joy and doom, one to the other. Perhaps we should have made that left turn.
