Suicide Dream
I woke today having killed myself, having walked through an incline of boulders and desert plants and sand. In the same way that time within dreams grows instead of progresses, in the same way that the dream-choices manifest suddenly but smoothly (a parting of tall grasses revealing a ballroom) — I found myself committing suicide, having just taken pain killers. It was the right thing to do.
But the drugs weren’t working so I pleaded with my friend to help me, to stab me in the side because I was too afraid of the physical pain. He refused at first, but I fought him, and maddened, he stabbed me and disappeared.
I knew then that I had to leave, and wanted to. The earth was suddenly near and deep, and it became necessary to die watching the sky. So fatigued and dizzy, I stumbled out beneath bright trees, then into a mountainous boulder field, trying to find a high place to watch the twilight. There were large rocks I couldn’t climb or mantle. An anteater followed me, and though I tried to shoo him away, he was persistent and unafraid. A kind of monkey appeared and its small babies popped up from the sand. I was too weak to move any further and fell into the sand. The sun went behind translucent clouds and became an opalescent inscription, it careened to its setting.
Regarding dreams of death, I have only been murdered before — woke startled and afraid, expecting to be shot by someone standing over me. Today though, I woke confused but calm, with a feeling that I had done some right thing.
After writing all this, I opened a book I had never read:
Perpetual Motion
1
You go to the mountains
stretch in the light aquariums
and wait —
stillness turns in its well
2
I touch your face
of rosewood and sap
the last vanished yellow
of sunset on the mountain
the first cellular light of a flank
3
Walking up the mountain
before an avalanche
you’ll find the sandstone
of the peak tattooed with waves
The summit moves with the tide.
— Mei-Mei Berssenbrudge
from Summers Move with the Tide (1974)
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Waking In The Sleeping Orchard
When they pivot together he pulls her near, and their weight glides and shifts;
and though moments of awareness expand to cradle how the other dancers evolve the map of the floor,
it also contracts to cradle his hand lightly touching her back, and the way they thread, and the way, earlier, she said of course.
This is a woman he once loved, soon to marry a cabinet maker near San Diego:
a man twenty-five years older, whose wife died when he drifted off the road and crashed into a sleeping orchard.
What is it to wake within a car’s crushing? To the distorted and terrible silence that followed, cut by the crying of their newborn in the backseat?
A hand leads a certain familiar motion through fresh music and describes a circle. Her fingers on the back of his hand mark a partition of time.
She is the age now of his wife when she died, and you cannot deny the question: is there a world outside the griever’s grief?
Her shoulder blade leads an arc across their path into the sudden world.
He imagines a point on the edge of the lacquer cylinder briefly touching the table as it rolls from one side to the other, illustrating conchoids;
feels that loss and love deepen the same place.
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Wing-Man
Being Leif’s wing-man last night meant entertaining and laying the friend of the girl he was working on. Other nights it meant simply ducking out as his potential sex illuminated, as the night became warm and bright. But as it happened, as it always happens when I’m out with him, the girls were essentially magnetically opposed to me, and I probably did more harm than good for his chances of getting a piece of tail. When I walked up to the three of them, one of the girls exhaled from her nose a quick measure of disdain, though it also could have been the quick deflating of her brain. The girls were obliterated and not very interesting to boot, and certainly not interested in me, which is just as well (by this point in my life I am observing that I say it’s just as well with some concerning regularity). Anyway, these two other crunks sidled up to the girls and were laying it on think. One of them, perhaps the most absurd poser ever was brandishing an unlit cigar while taking pulls of budweiser. They were obviously better candidates for the girls, willing to carry the pointless conversation the girls insisted on perpetuating. And it became clear to me and Leif that to hang on these girls meant equating ourselves with the two meat-heads. We were all out on the patio behind the building, and it was really nice outside, so I slid away and saw Tiddle leaning against the wooden fence with four periwinkle mop heads draped and drying over the top, and thought, yea, this scene is more my caliber. Leif stayed with the girls, and for a while it looked like he was going to swoop the redhead he was working on from their small circle and from the bar — she kept touching his elbow in a let’s-get-out-of-here kind of way. I mostly wanted to watch Leif show up the other guys, which he did with aplomb and nice smiles. But when the girls went to get their next round of beveys, the cronies went with, and Leif stayed and looked at me and Tiddle, chilling by the mops — kind of him not to say anything about our juxtaposition. So what’s the deal, I said, looks like you have it in the bag? Ah, forget em, he said, they’re going to go home with whoever. I looked inside and saw the redhead with her hand on the back of the taller but equally idiotic of the two guys. To proceed would have meant being nothing more than a willing erection — which is not to imply a role somehow beneath him. Just tonight it is. Leif had already spent the greater portion of the day with his Carlisle girlfriend.
Shea showed up with three friends and immediately began to harass us for being such idiots. He said to Leif, seeing that he had given up on the redhead, I knew you would crash and burn — get back in there, tiger — that guy’s got nothing on you, laughing his loud head off. Shea turned to me and said, with an almost endearing Brooklyn accent, how you doin’. Shea and I hugged. It was nice to see him. Hey, does your shirt say ‘HEAD’? he asked. I looked down and saw that my jacket was covering the T and half the R of what should have read, in big white block letters across the chest of my blue shirt, ‘HEART’. I opened the jacket and read aloud and slowly, accentuating the T. You should have kept it covered up, Phil, I was about ready to buy you a drink! Shea bought me a drink anyway, halfway expecting, most likely, that some head might be in his future, or that he might convince me or enlighten me to the reality that I’m gay, and that I’d brave that homosexual world with his seasoned prick in my hand. One of Shea’s friends showed up with a grab bag of gifts that he won which included sparklers, lip-shaped band-aides, weird kinds of chewing gum, and two wooden cooking spoons — all presented in an empty pink four-pack that once carried readymade cosmopolitans. I didn’t ask what he did to win this cornucopia of delight, but immediately grabbed a sparkler, and someone smoking flicked his lighter and got me going. Soon enough a ring of eight drunkards, including several people I hadn’t met yet, were writing and drawing with their sparklers, or just holding them in the same hand that held their drink. And it was bright between us all for a few moments, and we could see each other’s faces becoming orange and warm and inviting.
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t⇒∞
Yesterday your voice came over the unwired space between us
and met (after bouncing from rectangles in towers
as fast as tiny light between leaves) my simple ears
and there sitting before the Hirshhorn’s panorama
of gray buildings and the graying sky and white steam rising:
the arc of your attention met me: an uncertain voice at first
becoming more familiar: it is a voice
I’m learning: a voice being carried as I am gone
and not carried as I am gone
My memory of you thus generates as something that is and is not
How much more are you with me
as we are apart: as traveling far is returning:
as one distance closes other same distances appear as endless fractals
frozen but evolving
I hear so easily but briefly the music of your hair which is the smooth song
of dark water: the rivulets given and received by the aplomb composing wind: it is
the loyal night absorbing the heat of a day:
a note held and released
becoming diffuse and inaudible
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We thought most of the day about the color
thinking a green could make the ceiling
float up through the attic past
the birds making nests in the walls
past the things that were broken
but carefully boxed up and taped.
In indecision you bought masking tape
and tarps for the floor decided the color
would come easily but later: a breaking
of ice cubes from the tray. The ceiling
at some point would seem different than the walls
in an important way: the past
forming an edge with what could be or the past
being indelible like a scar like the tape
of his voice on the machine. The walls
for sure would not take any color
so we dressed the room for the ceiling
put records and plants in the study broke
down the futon and moved his volkswagen windshield from breakage.
Carrying the last of it all I moved past
you standing in the doorway looking to the ceiling
saying we need to do the edge with tape
sure I said but what about the color?
And I must have said something wrong because your eyes began to well
your fingers reached to touch the wall
and in your face anxiety was breaking
into hues of impossible colors
like the faded chipping of the house’s past.
I was so naïve in putting down the tape
and saying we don’t have to paint the ceiling
as if that were the real issue all along: the ceiling
which seemed more near now than the walls.
You said no we should put up the tape
and work from there sometimes I feel like breaking
in this place that is not enough mine in the midst of his past
and the pasts that I have lived the color
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