Historicism

I heave myself through time’s maw. I hail myself a master of the present. I breathe. 

We are looking at a roadside photograph. Laughing at the other man’s discomfort, he looks at the photo and then at the floor, then says, “Well, every step you’ve ever taken, something has been lost there.” 

We are running out of new ground. 

I try to turn and look with my left eye, but history presses on me like a witch trial. I stare at the side of the refrigerator and everything collapses. The boys and men you once were crowd into my pantry, sharing the same blue eyes and the same strange name, but yelling different words and mulling different silences and I am falling apart. Who am I to herd these crowds? Someone else comes home, and another hoard arrives.

My backyard is filled with the bodies of the women that I used to be. I have forgotten my past with a shovel and a bath. But yours, yours I carry with me like a child. I have lost the way of hearing just your voice. Only your mouth on my ear, your hand on my hair. That was then, this is now. 

If love is the history of love, then where is the palimpsest where we can write our names? 

I beg your pardon; I forget myself. Dress yourself in different clothes, paint your eyes and change your songs. Kiss me like a stranger, and the past is gone. But each word from your lips speaks with a voice that is older than these new-found tunes, and I am afraid. 

The hand that feeds my heart has struck the hour, and time is cruel to each and all. So let me, let me learn how to forget.

“the big guy with the owl tattoos and shit-eating grin”

This balmy December had me fooled; the winter distant, grief a memory. This morning’s snow, the pines in the streets, my friends all taking flight—

His bright blue eyes are on the sidewalk, filling up with tears. We keep walking, we keep walking and I am almost falling to the ground with every step. But why, but why, but why, but why—

You and I are kicking cans out of the car. We are sitting on the sidewalk, hitting our hi-tops at the ankles. We drink a handle of Jim Beam, you fall asleep and I puke blood. I am too afraid to touch your hand when jumping off the railing. 

Strange to think, I am older now than you were then. 

I took off my gloves. I wrote your name in the snow. Someone stomped it out. They were right, but so was I.

The night of my hesitation proved the end of all my chances. Your name in my unsent missives, a hot coal. I packed my grief and fled the country, but found you in the eyes of Russian saints. The rain of Paris streets spelled out the movement of your arms. There is no escaping loss. Grief is a bloodied hound. I am a fool, a fool.

The critic at my shoulder sinks her teeth into my neck. Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? A whore cut short by mourning. A child, a child who misses someone who could have been her friend. 

Every letter that I type shrinks smaller. A black and white photo, you are three times my size and never changing. So stupid, so stupid, so stupid, how could we—

I send messages to your inactive address. Four years… has it really been so long? The start of a long winter. But I am still here. And I remember you, and I remember you, the tiny pieces that I hold.

A dead man’s clock is hanging on my wall, and there is a shape of an owl in my heart. 

A curtain opens into darkness. We sit. The hum of a bedroom fan, the sound of distant car doors opening and closing, like the gills of the night. Slowly, slowly, the light comes up, just enough, just enough, to see the shape of a body in a window frame. The hand to the mouth, the arm across the stomach. Slowly, slowly. The shape a body makes in waiting. A bus goes by, the fan hitches. Our body moves across the window. Slowly, slowly. We can begin to see the bed. It is not large, but oh, it is an ocean. 

The faintest light of early morning is pressing its hands against the curtains. It wants to touch. It wants to peel back the horrors of the night. Tears are streaming down our body’s face, not like sorrow but like sweat, a process like breathing, like crossing a room for a glass of water, face calm. A sweater is removed, a sweater is put on. The hair pinned up and taken down. A fight, a fight. Our body continues to wait, for it cannot rest or sail this ship alone.

The curtain never shuts—the lights rise up, the lights grow dim, the body departs, the body arrives—there will be no shutting until all is shut. But moments, moments, there is no waiting, for someone is here.

Troop (je marche)

In a pit of plastic frogs in paris

I fell, hobbled,

on allée andré breton 

the poets rushed forward, mais

non, I winced, je marche 

I gnash my teeth,

Roberto,

your thin legs

at which I spent so many hours 

—in what language does there lie a yellow bow

to pull my cramping limbs together? 

there were grey crossbeams, rain

there was soft, wet, red 

I’m tired, she said

un peu fatiguée 

the modern, a mantis

has staked me 

I examine the flag, standing

my black fingernail flukes across the scape. 
 

                  - Paris, February 2008