It’s late. It’s early. It’s time to lie. Down. Dark pasture. The night is gone to words already spoken.
How stupid. How flush with hope. How optimistic. But no one gets better. Jung suggests something akin to a religious conversion but lies are arranged to please; be it plug-in modules, talk of sallying forth, it’s all rusty with incontinence.
I won’t say that I am the cause of your wild, mad pain. No not in this level of incarnation, no matter our quantum tangle.
One sentence. Another cut of sensible plot: look two people, call them regular: I think she’s squinting. He’s ready to lie down on the damp sand right there. A wind without a name is mixing parts of Lake Ontario, parts of landfill, parts of sand and parts of every skin husk, dust mote, and in this case, parts of his/her longing into a single force. She’s deflecting with a hungry smile.
If I were to say ’spring’ it would call up the ‘final storm‘ so I won’t. And there’s the knowing that this cold won’t give up easily 14 Celsius or not.
Unable to be clever. Hasty in the possible. Just checking items off a list. That wild surmise summed up and sold. It’s copy my boy (sound of an old man’s acid chuckle) not some holy writ.
It isn’t this insistence on form and final things like the little dot before it all falls away to silence it isn’t this flat beer nor this hash stain on my French cuff and in no way is it this unused condom, you gone, unreal as the breakfast we won’t have.
My fabled ruin in the mind, words damn sweet words, appear as if they were readymade; dare one consume them?
An unexpected recollection of Good Friday: With Marianne in the early ‘90 at the 3-hour service at St. James Cathedral. The congregation shouting: “crucify him, crucify him!” An alien custom bred in the bone. She the recent convert stood dumb. Raised one, doubts and all, I smiled at their fierce abandon.
Sæternesdæg. Satharn. Saturday. Disathairne. dydd Sadwrn. Sadorn. Shanivar. A lading list of nominal sounds all packed and ready to be loaded for the voyage.
Quiet day. Walking Yonge Street. The city can still seem deliciously alien.
A second spring. Toronto. This human density. All the green blossoms set against the grey pavement.
Prepare for the end. Having proofed, mapped, sorted, counted, scheduled, reviewed, reported, debated, and presented.
Night. Consolations unavailable. Home at last from the twists and turns of verse.
Woke up comforted by doubt. The precise punctuation of certain moments..
Later on then. It was later. Much later I think. Well, after that. No. Is that how you recall it? Odd. I was sure. But of course it might just be that it was otherwise.
The thoughts of strangers. The thoughts of friends. Precambrian fossils . . . . The newest thing held for a moment before it’s named. From here to Orion. Next door, right there. I remember stars in the lake. Swimming in a black sky.
I’d say something about sun. Maybe fabulate about the light. What was remarkable? Easy old poetry.
Helen came over uninvited, bringing flowers and brandishing ultimatums, such as: Marry me or you are my enemy & I hate you. She left in threats.
Vacuum broke. Mopped snapped. Pine needles from seven years ago. Christmas Tree. Dust architecture of fascinating plasticity was observed in some regions. Led Zeppelin, U2 and The Pretenders were added to the mix. I grow old.
Reading the broadsheet. Considering taking action. This afternoon.
There’s no reckoning how one missed the point between absolute zero and the consequence of sin, precisely how that door could have been opened, a dragon killed, and how one might have had the freedom of her countryside. The goddamn magic mountain was won and none worried that that queen had taken routes various from bed to bed.
But of course I’d never liked Love in the Time of Cholera or pretending that overcooked roast was delicious, so it’s me at the local with a narrow bourbon, some overbearing IT geek explaining liberalism, as I try to talk about her by pretending she’s recent, the news, they like news in this bar but the geek’s not listening to my parts of speech
If it were easy. If it made sense. If there was something that would work. She said. I said. Then quiet. Entangled orbits. No way in or out of the gravity path. (Right now one can hear the murmur of a lecture about free will in a distant classroom.) But I am shifting in and out of time, as I act in the day-to-day, knowing less & less. All that talk. Dead flowers.
Later than it seems, unlikely to bend to my will, forces will not be subdued, being here attending to leaf rustle under jackhammer.
All the ways that are new . . . all the ways I am sick from saying yes I’ll just go over there and get close; jump on in, “once more with feeling.”
Oh to be the seventh caller and know it was a Monteverdi riff tucked in there under a blues disguise in that song by that long-ago group of indolent pranksters masquerading as psychedelic hipsters. And to win.
Awake with a raw if muted revulsion at the thought of her wandering away, as I’m in from a patio-night roundabout of Aristotle, Plato, Newton, Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution, Jacobins, Napoleon, Gramsci, “English-speaking Justice,” and the difference between reform and revolution.
Sensible. We are all going to be sensible. Patient. Attend to cracks. Investigate subtle deviations with calm determination. Focused. Intensity restrained by phlegmatic forbearance. The fun we’ll have.
Walking home from Ottawa & Newfoundland. Poetry will do that. It was close pain to be proximate to her beauty. Glad I didn’t tell her.
Pissed off. Calm. Categorized. But also terrified. It never stops. Strange molecular agglomerations secrete counter-civilizations in the corners of storage closets. Old dirt gets all phoenix on you as you prune. Knowing it’s for the best does nothing to alleviate the textual dread: bank statements, purchase orders, 4th revisions, failed poems, and letters, when people wrote them.
Memoir scrap: “It was not long after the divorce that he noticed the change. Nights that followed the separation had been fluorescent with promise, a recurring of festival second-adolescence through till dawn. Since the papers arrived, signed and witnessed, there had been a slow falling back into some preexisting state of ennui. What had tasted new became stale. He realized it could go on like this for an indefinite period.”
There are patterns he’s sure as he gets from margin to main subject. There are patterns she knows as she goes from foreground to edge. He paints what he cannot write. She writes when colours fail.
“Later when we looked back there he was eating strawberries from her hand. Later when we looked back there she was wiping red flesh off his mouth.”
If any one of us just spoke over the humming. If any one of us had asked for whom the white noise. If any one of us had proposed we were human.