On the Way back

A blood-thin woman wielding metaphors, 

deep in her cul-de-sac of everywhere

invited me to come stay the weekend.

Sleeping down the hours, I arrived,

dazed against the air pressing in.

Afraid of her northern ice, unfreezing

Relics in her warm house, book-brimmed

sensibilities of screened-in porch

and moths, cicadas yet to come.

And so-- and so-- she said, paused

whatever is the word that brought down

worlds, whirlwind inside the thought, 

Why are we so serious? Ice cream

shouldn’t be this way, two-three

days long, one shared dream shortened

Into telling, hours sitting and you

-- she understood the bleeding, 

fed off long-lost pieces of the same, 

A wild fur hat rotting somewhere 

in Sylvie’s room, that doll that looks

forever, wooden eyes like hers and 

Yours, matching the painting and here

is my leather jacket, did you ever wear

it with wine in Paris?  Dress around 

Dollhouses, Champs Elysées, those lights

and guest-bathroom watercolor in

latent steam, someone else’s soap, 

Not my mother’s house, not my mother, 

hers long-gone always, mine never she, 

Who are we? Stage set delicate on the square, 

These characters forget roles, roll their 

buttered eyes, yes it was too easy but, 

but full-moon nightmares every night, 

Characters from another dream, screen-lives

pressed up against reality: Sweet potbelly-man

who can fix a car, glimmering eyes and all.

But where is he, I ask, tears behind the question, 

Heaving, how can they always leave? He

And I, we slept fast in knots on trains, 

I woke up to find the seat a void beside me, 

avoiding eyes of others, together, but she says

You didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t

do anything wrong.  So why, I ask her, am I 

alone again, if that is what this means, 

And elsewhere I am comforted by her past my

Future solitude and nieces and tea, a house,

Some lovers, none him, all distances, these

travels, these words at the end of it, sentenced.

Dear Dad,

   Your lessons recede into the past, but somehow remain in the same place; it's as if I am standing on the edge of a lake so vast that I mistake it for the ocean, and as the waves crash and move away my eyes lose focus and the harder I stare the more I feel like the tide must be going out, when really there is no tide at all because my bare feet are standing in a spring-fed lake that has been there for thousands of years.

First night, last morning

I broke the rules this morning,

Spreading color on my face in front of him,

Shamelessly talking behind a door that never closes,

Latched against my own anxieties.

There are two of you,

He told me, kneeling, head in my hands

And they are at war.

So what? I asked, what if that’s how it should be,

What if everyone else is wrong,

Why does everyone need to say something is wrong.

Well, think about it, no living creature wants to die

Or live in pain, you’re stripping the gears,

One day they will be bare.  I know, I told him,

But what am I supposed to do?

Shall I pour myself into his eyes,

Forgetting until… or….

Grow a thicker skin, kill one of these two,

Live far away from myself forever?

Footsteps in the kitchen, someone is listening,

And I didn’t have to ask; he already knew.

Anyway

After I had scoured the day from the palms of my hands,

(it was aseptic, anyway, and invisible)

Six burning bells rang in my ears— last

hours of the day – slumped over in the train,

my spine forgot its dignity.       

Narrowing forward folds of itself, absorbed

somewhere inside coat and scarf and

reminders of an outside elsewhere:

Such tight disdain for full spaces,

I couldn’t enter— though finally

I did ( français oublié ) every step forward

drawing me back.  Anyway,

you’re reading this over my shoulder in the subway

he’s reading over my thoughts in his bed

(either one). Some other refuge,

warm and lost like us.

Still, the ears are burning and now they’re not

alone, fire seeping into every space beneath

this skin, sweat from nightmares stinging life awake.

Such meaning we find in a stale clinging to phrases,

because why not, what else is there but our own

uncertainties? (I decided not to ask him, in the end)

And even here, even now my fictions are not

saving me.  Eyes slip off these pages, glossing over

and at last it’s just the eyes.  So many screens later,

Staring staring staring two-dimensional patterns;

disgust and grief and guilt looking away and my eyes met his, or…

Then they were all burned there, as images, effigies

(not flat, but fully-formed) in my mind, nails in his shoulder,

the afterimage of an inflamed nostalgia, relic from a past birth

haunting this unsuspecting consciousness—a trap?

Such confusion is the friction we need to survive,

the lost breath re-invigorated with whatever oxygen.

And my clean hands are staining themselves from the inside out;

No pretension of dirt.  It’s all in your head, they say,

and above all these words, do you still feel sick?

After all, it cannot be what you set out to know. 

The girl who ate sleep

Sometime after she had scrubbed the silence out from under her fingernails, she put the kettle on and sat down at the kitchen table, where she began to eat sleep.  She took small bites at first, nibbling at the edges, until the center spilled into her mouth and coated her teeth.  When it had eased down her throat, her eyes rolled back and her lashes clasped one another.  Toppling from her chair, she dreamt of satellites, the wires racing like stalactites from television sets, radios, machines of every kind-- dripping sinister sparks and emitting faraway sounds, like so many small animals crying out.  Surrounded, piled beneath shredded tires and gears and circuits, she inhaled.  Polyester air, the inescapable rubbish heap, a trash island of towers and turrets.  She wanted nothing more than to wake up in her bed, covered in soft things, feeling one warm leg against the other, the sounds of the surfaces around her settling in space.  

 
Hours later, she awoke with a terrible headache on the kitchen floor; the pots and pans hanging from the ceiling had loosened themselves and toppled down upon her.  All the water in the kettle had boiled away, and the bottom had melted onto the stove, adhering itself forever to the burner.

 But she could still feel the weight of all the sleep she had eaten continuing 
its relentless expansion inside her stomach.

This time last ____

These empty rooms. Their echoing smells, the half-light, and the sleep. It's as if they've forgotten us already, and maybe they have, but we are still there-- the fullness, the nervousness, the meals we cooked but never ate. They linger in our minds, haunting our exhales.

For days we awoke to soft-lidded dawns, telling time by the sunlight on the trees outside. The cold had put all the butterflies to sleep, the tea calmed the ones in my stomach. Repleta. Fingertips stroking arms in conversation, smoothing them over.

The clock stopped soon after, and the phones went, too-- wrapped in a world of blankets, we crossed into waking reveries, the softness of lips, sleeping in knots on trains. But this universe is not our own. Though we created it, we cannot stay here. The clouds and sky grow heavy with the oncoming storm, the weight of all our possible lives collapsing upon us, filling the air with the humid electricity of tears, and the inability to breathe after a night of hollowed-out restless dreams.

Next time, I kept telling you.

Your whispers were always inhales.

déjà vu / jamais plus /