4:56 a.m. train. The days have been filled with
yesterdays, tomorrows, days after and before. I look in
my empty suitcase. I wait hunted by memories of me.
“Forget yourself,”
he said, pushing record on a tape player. He filmsdeliberate, unrehearsed, unpracticed, unconditionedwrong dream. (And to think that you could recreate itad-infinitum!)
Listen to the structure fall apart….
d
r
o
p
roll
in
s-p-a-c-e-s
we occupy: kitchen, bed, hallway. Hands shaking, I pretend it makes no difference to me if I look away.He captures me looking away.
It’s like the chair you use to sit on in the kitchen, what if it is just amemory of a chair? Symbolic of nothing, or everything that will fade. This is how we pass, like we weren’t even here.
“Did we buy it together? It is now mine, it was always mine, and youbroke it. On misunderstanding, you-”
“Through red-rock landscapes one carries chair. Yet, already, you fight.Look into the camera. Start from: ‘you keep saying this wood is him.However this common word between us tells you that language can’t substitute for life, but it can substitute for something
You filming me sing: “take away the dessert, the rocks, but not the snow from me. Take away the sky,” I yelled against the wind. He said nothing back, except I don’t quite belong. once again, nothing changed. I wish I could just tell him that none of us belong, instead the silence. The moment remains frozen. I wept. I wanted.
But his hands still found my breasts.
Yet, already. 10 years together.
This is not just another way to define, to explain how I came with, why I endure wave after wave. I cannot look away from us. To outline why I still gaze, still sail, still drift. He’s unpredictable. When I was brave ‘don’t fence me in’ was my song. Now I live on one thought, one human being. Milk and honey. The thought is on another side too sour.
Where’s our connection?” I ask. Is it just a word?
Which word? Place me on your tongue. Realize a human being is me, a me, the me, in relation to you.
My fingers trying always trying, beating.
A lifetime spent
to touch you,
define you.
To touch me,
create me,
to leave a mark.
Which is nothing, but the murmur of cottonwood trees.
“Wake to reality.”
“Reality?”
“The thin moment between tenses of mind.”
“Eat me up or grow up and blow away.”
