gideon,

i don't know, sometimes it comes very suddenly. sometimes it doesn't come. sometimes we get lost in the space between ourselves & god. sometimes we wander to find it, prod our skin in hopes of it. coming, always: the wish for death. & the laughter.

we tire without realizing we tire, keep going. we exhaust ourselves with sleep. memorize street names. pace, tear. we think: these women are familiar, yes? we recognize their absolution. we relate to the way they disappear. we see, & pretend we do not see. in speaking of seeing, forget. repeat.

& the pause. & the perpetual, how do you say, how did we get to here. i loved you for a moment? what do you think?

love is a drastic thing. i'm sorry.

I touch my skin. I pretend that there is no motion in the universe. I am covered in darkness and silence. Light and sound have dropped and disappeared. There is no longer gravity, nor speed, no constant or variable. The walls are still, and the mice in them are still. The wallpaper is still. Then my eyes are closed, and all of the walls bend in to kiss me. I want to make love alone.

I pretend that I could hang a photograph on the wall and then just walk into it. Like that riddle about a room with no doors or windows, only a ladder and a mirror. I want to climb into the mirror, into another world like a world of lies where trusting nothing makes sense. Where I could feel safe constantly looking myself in the eye, trying to climb through to some imaginary dirt road, through that sky, through the moon bleeding into the clouds. That silver lining like the edge of a blade.

The only sounds I make stay inside of me. My mouth is silent; I am constantly hungry for what lies beyond it, but do not wish to reach for it. I am hungry for happiness but happiness eludes me, the world eludes me. This is how I will die, hungering and unsure. I cannot remember what it was that kept me full, kept me trying. Perhaps I do not want to remember. I am tired of hope, it gets me nowhere. I feel that I am constantly shattered.

we could talk about the way the bedroom will smell of your skin: champagne, cotton.

the clean sheets like something being undone; the taking of the truth, body & blood. paddling & paddling it, both of us as pawed as a heavy tray. we could talk feedback, white noise, white wash, acid wash, stone. or neither of us writing or being written. sliding against each other, like erasers being cleaned. featuring sweat as dust, et cetera.

Sebastian,

Maybe silence is a type of open air.

I am sorry that the wholeness of our bodies is a secret.

I cannot tell you that I am damned.

landon,

this is my note:

i want to tell you a story about the wounds that you left on the earth, all of the digging i did to find your bones which left gaping holes in the crust -
and gravel under my fingernails.

i can still taste the dirt like blood changing colors in my palms.

i thought you'd want to know of the way i've learned to pit myself in time to your strumming, the way the phone lines made you sound like a thought that quivers on the tongue of your city, a shaky puddle.

and when you look into it: you see me, instead of you, covered in dust but the rain is cotton hugging its body to the streets.

i was so tired of your honesty, your big pink heart in my hands.

it just bloodied me.

is there a reason for this? i have wondered of you grittily, tepidly soaking
the scars on your stomach. a warm bath, the sponge-tip of your laughter, oh i have wondered of you covering your mouth, opening&closing the sky.

as i finger the earth, deeper and more diligently, i have been determined, deterred reconciled diminished defiled objective subjective & covered in disbelief. i have searched and searched your marrow, sucked and swished it against my teeth, gargled it, touched it to my uvula, doused it in flame, scorched it, saved the ash and never scattered it, scrunched it like an accordion.

i've walked the wobbly edges of our love, holding its hand in mine.
limply.

i have sung to you of nothing: i have been a nightingale, maybe all along,
flicking against steel strings, tightening and loosening my body to accommodate your girth.

i have told you stories, lied for the war of it, fought against a pitch fork,
tugged the sleeves of your silo, stubbed my toes on memories.

i have hung myself from the gallows of April, found you in languages i never knew existed and hated you, abruptly, harshly, and truly.

loved you undaunted in full circles, walked around myself over and over the lines while you stood in the centre and held out your arm.

i divided and multiplied you in one movement, brushed you to the side
and pulled you to me: i have feigned magnetic. held you in the flesh, then in dreams like iron in a pool under my tongue, tasted and smelled you for days.

scraped the clay from your face.

walked into your valleys and never walked out fascinated with how infinite
rocks can seem. and even as the plates moved i stood in the chasm and kept looking up.

oh how you shifted from one foot to the other & told me of the grey sky, of the buildings like spears of ivory and covered in sleep the ways you have hurdled counted sheep and waited for the rain, taken me to the front of myself, learned me without question & traced the axes of my body, climbed my mountains and i...

in the dark, following the map, i had sculpted of sand dunes

hungrily

i have been devoured and devious
i have been past the core

i have been the only one left
i have been the only one
i have lived without you, lost my footing
and loved without you

found and kept and shouldered
equality like a tangent,
gone quietly

and unquietly
into Autumn
without you

i have been discovered wandering the avenues west of center, younger than i've ever been. i have subtracted you from my body, added you to paper, burnt you whole
alive
and dead
forgotten and remembered you, in songs & letters

i have been both first and last, like bookends i have kept you on the shelf, raided you and braided you like hair i have found you silver cut down to the skin.

scrupulously untied you, strung you around my neck, derailed you.

i have learned
that i am green underneath

and have grown with the sun
shrunk in the winter
unleaved myself for fall
gone bare and barred gone
naked as a pencil tip
dressed myself in graphite
harbored my dew

and now i have come to tell you the truth:

to tell you the story of the wounds that you inflicted on earth's mantle, to tell you that the molten will come and cover it all to tell you that even the soil has learned to heal, opening its self as wide as it can. it has loved blindly, justly, unjustly at times cradled its self like a feather and heated its organs and spewed them to the surface, covered the skin the way morning covers night, back and forth, rocking the evening.

knowing what is to come gently or harshly, the moon & the soft stars and below the equator, i have learned to find my way with out Polaris, have guided myself through forests and seas without anything and i have made something new.

i have forgotten and remembered at once, jutted out from somewhere within & jostled you in one blow

i have fallen and risen like a tide, i have come through the umbrella of the tree tops and made a desert beneath; i have moved quickly and fervently.

now: i love without rest, without shade like new. i love! equally and unequally down so many paths to the same place.

i have simply come naked as night, to tell you the story:

once i dug holes and wounded the earth in your name.

now i grow flowers.

once the marrow dried in your bones and you cried your tears into pillows filled with feathers. and i wanted to say. i know the song.

Gideon,

You try to find his eyes everywhere again, those terrible knobs.

You know you are nothing. You are no harrow, no terror. You are a faith without possession; you claim no god. You are familiar only with the formless tactility of your heart. You go into town & move shapelessly through the streets, unnoticeable as a reflection in a bent water. A white sand.

You know you are only the love you have. You know your love sleeps in the garden, in the glow of the house. You know it wakes & raps on your window as you dream of dying, because it leaves the shape of its hand in the glass. You remember it in ricochet, in the motion of loss, the sexing. Then you remember the truths you once kept, in the cup of its spine, & you tire. You think you are the same. You say aloud to yourself, I am the same as when he left me. You are still. Then your hands around an orange break open & release the song.

doesn't it feel desolate! all the cities in a row. with the moon in your mouths again, as the two of you become something slowly swallowed by the trees, & the clouds, & the highway laid between you, upon which you can find nothing that you want. at all.

It comes in pangs now. Sitting shotgun again in a place so vast, so heavy with the familiar, that you wish again for rushing your feet along the glass being baked into the soil, the old place, the place of what has been destroyed. It comes in pangs, the way you feel the lack as something genuine; the loss of the thing in your life. The thing of the filling of space, down to where it is raw & marks you, singing, in time my dear! in time; the thing of the Other . The way, in sleep, you reach for his hand to reach for the hand of the lover, or the mouth, which says it. Which says to you, like something I should remember so that you are brought to whatever again is real. To think, what felt so sordid was the way the moon came through in your bed, to touch his knee.

Also, the desert we escaped & which escaped us. Oh, heedless animosity. With your fingernails pried from skin, from bone, from the thing that holds us, whatever that is, of the earth coming down, of his neck-- the last of the undiscovered limb, of love. How we travel alleyways now only in our sleeplessness, only in the gratitude of our laughter.

I find myself hiding things and bringing them to light again: a perverse form of peekaboo that's appallingly dark-farm. As difficult as it is to love emphatically, it defines the vulnerable, fleshy, transparently alive us I wander toward. I want dissent from isolation and a recurring/prompting memory bank of intimacy. I'm waiting for the return of shopworn clich?s and a sensual tapestry of implicit feelings pointing back to a moment when possibility was close at hand. I no longer know when to dispense uncomfortable dialects or downtime interludes. I only want impassioned music along elliptical rails.

For its softly devastating conclusion—to obtain liberty and follow idealistic principles—I am not assuaged. Granted, given the constantly beating drum, the rose-tinted lens will bring forth some form of healing later on.

I don't mind the brooding artist or the sizeable obsessive jury; during depravity, however, I can't build another mask beneath the one I have.

I have violated and been violated and touched unclean things. Been touched by some celestial body, drowned in the Styx, cursed and freed and bound and released into open air & smoke.

julia,

your ghost dances at the edge of peripheral vision, pretending to exist in the vicinity of my immediate senses.

please don't lead me too far astray. i am a kitten for you; paw batting spots of light on the windowsill.

The journey began when light was led into the absence of its self. Macabre kisses, blood-drenched ecstasy. & now, the path winds into temporal hints of memory repressed too long.

It is a free-fall into terror.

the noises we make; spacing

it is true, even, that one may hold a vague
thing inside
of them--to be opened & closed along its ribs, to be broken,
removed, loved--without ever
owning any part of it. understand this, &

i will say, in fact--
subjective, valuable fact--that a mouth must belong not
to its self--but to an other.

& anything is capable
of mattering, really. i can say so simply because
circumstance has it that i cannot need any
thing which i truly have, truly.

i am putting these things out now, &
it is almost to say: i have very little, or
i have no thing.

but really, this is no sort of joke, & you should know; in moving
vowels beneath your lips; in eating
a warm meal; in the quiet dusting of fields with snow; in singing
an argument to the radio; in places,
you or i have come to know
more of how to want a mouth than
how to keep, simply, our own to its self.

that which i cradle in me is little of mine, really. & i can not rest
within these words--but
these are conditions: every thing, having, not having;
these are bound, endlessly, in to knots & ribbons, in to troubles,
in to woes. & having, which in cases, is only our condition of
having--i think, is often one to hold the
part of a selfish, hungry thing.
in having, i feel full of dry, white wine--my stomach heavy
where, i think, these things must dwell.
consistently,
i am sure that not having, in its fetters & freedoms, more wants to carry
itself & keep near
a thing, more to become acquainted--in its naivet?--with what this thing bears, than
to ask of it some permanence.

a loss, then, does so without asking, often
in a song against your veins--as i do, without asking, against the speakers
in an elevator. this sound, damp & slow, is
perhaps the same noise a crowd of children makes, when
left alone & close to one an
other. it is subtle, in troughs & fits, & moves the cool, soft
pang inside of us--
it is likely, i think, that it is
exactly what has been making us happy all along:
the way our mouths
& noises & bodies travel when unattended to.

with the start of your mouth i'd also started sleeping, & since have started growing very tired--
probably of longing, or
never dwelling in that place,
as sleep is really something of a mouth.

a mouth itself is also as much a song as anything can be, & i hold to it as i
held to the warm voice of vodka in my belly, or to your breathing
as we pressed together in bed.




but really, this is to say that i worry & also do not worry,
as there are all sorts of things i have never asked for, but needed &
needed more than air or food--like your mouth--

which i have, somehow, quite recently
found.

we succumb to things which are ineluctable, sebastian
therefore i have the strong urge to protect you
you build firm bridges
bridges that people are afraid to cross
in this sense your passion, and your brilliance, give life
but do not awaken life
i have been passive, negligent, and have coveted your humanity
wherever you are there is a blinding illumination
when arrangement surfaces and becomes the preamble of your love
remember that isolation is struggle and fatigue

i cannot compete with your expressiveness

if your lips modulate
indulge in the reflection

kiss your bride and love her, your worry for my being is a gordian knot, tangled mass of
secrets

Landon,

I have no words for the way I feel now. My seasonal lover has come and gone. His torrid light has every shade I've ever wanted. He doesn't even know that it is the loss that has his gutted heart. I am some white stone in the snow, or some passenger with a hiked up skirt ready to board a plane home.

Once I was so beautiful that even you fell in love. I was shy and irresistible like the child's invitation to play under the Cedar trees in the garden. Happy, a girl in the lake, water streaming from my ponytail.

You call me to a place other than this, where the gardens are of dust and pumice-stone, expecting me to be indifferent to the blinding green alleys of the sea. "I am eleven days late," I said. Do you remember? Nothing I said would designate you or the wild intent with which I loaned myself, listening like a fortune at the far window. You were so huge and strange that you become Levi-Strauss. If I understand him right this means that women disrupt the man-made opposition between nature and culture. All feeling women are set-up to object you with their broken hearts, you said, littering the ley lines with sites of canonistation.

I don't know what it removed from me to be pregnant. Two worlds. Or one, perhaps. Two rival atmospheres. I had a fever. I was wearing knit white stockings, looking at a female student through the window pane. I couldn't watch the motions but I could hear her open mouth, the plate ridged where something hollow, weightless, had pressed and released.

I remember the June wind, how it stepped through my archway. It entered my arms and made my body swell. I think: this is how my sex life feels. I am not Barbara Stanwyck, so smart and sexy in those early films, conning Fonda with a double Scotch and soda, double-talk and a stacked deck. I am not the croupier at the roulette wheel with the pearl-handled revolver in her purse. My lips are burned so raw from the scalding brew you drank dusk to dawn, it hurt when we kissed. But this was my first love.

I could write a poem that no one could tell was for you, or for anyone. It would just be about doors, the old glass doorknobs in my uncle's hotel, the rickety stairs dense with pigeons all the way up to the sealed bell tower. I could write about vineyards, irregular stones in adobe, windmills, brown fountains overrun with geraniums and the smell of olives. I could leave here and return in a pale yellow robe, like Gotama, seeing myself twelve winters before, this day, during my growth. It all means so much.

I never fail to be amazed at the misery I inflict on myself when I'm supposedly at rest. Last night I had a dream that you were my umbilical cord. You undid the loops of yarn I rested my head upon and said: it is too early for new life.

gideon,

i look at the size of us, our fleece and our unction, unravelling everywhere, and try to pass the weight masterfully. i never succeed, of course.

i know what i speak of; i am full of decibels.
even if you hated the night that i cried in our alley, well, i retained some knowledge there.


My raconteur, my burdened Atlas.
I feel safe in your house. In the barrier of your arms.
Last night I was not the martyr of extreme, self-inflicted grief.
I wondered if I could have romanced you to lie in bed, as we were, for another eight hours,
exposed, naive, raw, hurling laughter as big as stones and swallowing each other whole.
I wanted to hush Thalon with his flags glittering in the harbor-- tell him that our time is not over. I would leave him a trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to your heart. I swear.

Then, sometimes, your voices are fingers. They negate the need for hands. When your words wrap like bone, when your words, squeezed forever beneath too much, too hot, too hurt, burst like diamonds from coal and cut scratches through the glass I live in, at least I was warned.

my wounds are open and laced with soil flat to the back of my knee.

welcome back the lilacs opening
like thumbs opening the night to reveal
the soft plum meat below the skin,
welcome back to the city, my love
sweet of sleep & summer
, blue skirting the edges of
the wounds opening into winter ponds:
it is a mosquito bite, it is
a puddle, small: as a single hand
opening a mango

small but then

it breathes & is great

when you ask it
what is it doing, it replies
breathing

and there -- behind the
breathing i can see the color
of your eyes i've never
seen & maybe never will. tough.
you roughened
(scratched open & still
as the flowers
petal, the stamens
ripen, let the
pollen down into
the warm hearts and
the fingers pulling red
on white soft plum center
core

and i count) the rings
of the trees as if they were
veins in your arms
or bodies in the ground or
leaves finally touching the soil
after such a long--

as i probe the cavity

of the length, the angle of
the space between your knees the--

from your ankles to your hipbones
i welcome you to the

warm crevice i open the mango
the orange the lilac the butterfly
bones of your pelvis i open

my legs, your legs, my mouth, your
mouth, the cool blue water
of the pond i stretch my legs and walk
and i am walking the perimeter

of your wounds

my footsteps would be tiny kisses
if your skin was pavement but
i plop my feet down and hit your skin
like coal i mark
you
in pink and grey i stretch
my arms and touch the arch
itecture of your spine


i am steady but you are
in motion: together
we create the illusion of desire
& then we transcend it.


(before i was hoping
the heat would not wear
but now it seems like chalk:
it seems like soil

the more we uncover our bones
the more alike we realize
they are. it is the bones that sing truth,
and the flesh that lies.

i am all about hunger but

i am not -- cannot be -- after your heart)

Gideon,

I cannot seem to grasp what it is that you are. You are not borrowed, you are not owned. You are no demi-god, no Pan with his melodic mischief. You are not Allecto, you are not the solemn guard for the Styx.

You are neither shadow nor moonbeam, and yet. When you condescend to find gifts for a girl whose hands never seem warm, when you reach for her with tenderness and find yourself dizzy with the shame of your kindness, when you reel backwards as if stricken, you are like the bulb of a tulip.

One must dig holes to grow flowers, Gideon. I cannot become Persephone, stoically weaving curses for mortals at your side. I cannot rule the ghosts, tend to their cries. The en is not in my language.

And so I press my fingers to my skin and I wonder. What are you? Phantom father, guiding? Master of the unfurling darkness that you've planted in my flesh? Muted lover, mouthing confessions only when you forget yourself? Wayward brother, slipping hands? You cannot be defined, divided, and I just want to call you by your name.

The necklace sits at my throat, & when I bend, the cool metal strokes my breasts. It feels like your whispers.

gideon,

your vagueness haunts the space reserved for fondness, your intentional reticence smears muddy shards against my cheeks.
each day i cannot speak ? confirmation your presence mutes my voice.
i have liquidated my affections; they float aimlessly around my room, anxious to clutch some adhesive plane.
but that's not you, is it?
your polarity rejects me in discouraging waves, you wash over me with opium-laced burrs.
skin cracks within your radiance, your negligence supplants aloe with alcohol.
i swallow the word for your sake... not long ago, moderation to prevent its exhaustion. now, moderation to prevent your retraction.
too late, too late.
oh, but dont let your guilt cameo. i can tumble with grace down the hillside.


your thoughts stroll among the stars, find me miniscule then raise me by virtue of their beauty.
i cannot touch you. would taint the transcendental existence of your body, the divine extension of your mind. eye contact erodes my ability to think without intoxication.
not fond of labels, yet i could tattoo a million stanzas of my adoration if you might notice. the expanse of ink could trace several paths between our seclusions.

better if you don't, better if you don't.

We greet the body at the end of night.

We know thirst as holy, there. What thirst. To travel

with this-- the body as our art, our work,
the way we practice being; the dream of execution,
the dream again of god.

though, we say yes, of course vein as corridor, of
course as transcendence into grace

we do not hesitate at skin, we know these
motions as our motions-- the tender escape,
the pacing from organ to organ. We memorize
its path, as if it were without variant, as if
without contradiction

the way we say, how do you say,
in the motion of absolute, we neglect to determine
what has happened

or, we are not without order.

& our body is a body of chaos; our death
a death that comes always into a room
as a white light, destroying everything
but the sickness-- that will
once more, swell of
heat, of love.

You cannot find the final frames of your fading pleasures. You seem to dislike your sexed-up, leaky plumbing. I can't recall academic discourse when I am near you two, your electric stormcloud — only milestones of a disfigured relationship which now are threaded and wholly self-demolishing.

She wanted unstoppable, steel exuberance. Wanted emphasis on a circumscribed interior space infused with a subgenre of bullet proof glass and stylistic armchairs. He needed to raise his awareness of inspiration and je t'aime.

You each had something personal and precious to be given freely but chose instead to check your viewfinders for places suggestive of scenery. You bought into traditional human interest boxes and have led this lousy-to-nonexistent bond with limited coverage ever since.

You wanted "master narrative".

And I am left speechless in your presence.

I think of these past weeks, how they sped along my body, rubbed my skin pink and insensitive, how I laid down in wait. And have not stopped waiting. The photographs: pieces of the body illuminated and other parts, small gestures, the hand touching the face, deep in darkness. How tenderness is hidden, how we are blown open, afraid of the shadows we create, those locked doors: intimacy, intimation.

The saddest part is how my brain and heart stand together in the quiet room and say nothing, have nothing to say. I feel this stillness like the large din of loss. The sound is impenetrable. There seems so little light, even outside of this grief -- certainly no light I can reach, certainly no light I desire.

To call this life peaceful would be misleading because it ignores too many unresolved conflicts, too much self-deceit, much foolishness. It is more like a drowsiness, a careful slowness to this way of living, a slow half-conscious shifting of partially-intended changes, all leading toward a vague and ever-changing point, one which can not be articulated but can only be prepared for. Trees blowing in the night, almost-sounds in the darkness, things moving. Things move slowly and carefully at night. That is what it is like. This is not important.

I am not even sure how to write about it anymore. There's a sadness here, like insincerity, not being able to look the people I love in the eyes, lingering and stale. I miss England. I miss long walks at night and the feeling that the milky way is breaking open above me. I miss knowing where home is.

saturday night i went to the docks
& sat overlooking the ocean & talked to myself for a while
when a boy came along, smoking a cigarette & smiling down at me.

he said: you've the best seat in the whole place,
can i join you?

the wood was like sponge under me/ i wanted so badly
to be alone, i said yes: yes, of course. everything felt like salt
i thought of a poem i wrote there. or thought there & never
wrote, about the moon.

i said yes & so he climbed down to me. he had an accent
a thick one & it took me a long time to get used to it
but that was okay, he was okay with my quiet & he talked to me
about india & greece & israel, where he was born & raised,
& he talked to me about love, about freedom, about acceptance.

i told him about gideon, about how cool my hands felt, about
poems & pictures & italy & the boats on the horizon & beacon lights
& silence & he looked at me & i looked at the sky, or
past him to the concrete that stretched to where the west end gleamed
up out of itself, built a helmet around its head to keep it safe.

his name was hebrew for almond & he said, when he was in india
he met a woman who called him, how ever you say it:
the silent almond. he talked to me about making cakes, whipped cream,
the different textures of flour.

we talked about him changing his name, we talked about king henry the eighth,
henry miller, anais nin. i thought: june,

june slips through his fingers.

we talked for a long time & when it was felt we'd exhausted the words,
he said, would it be okay if we hugged?

& i said yes, & so we did. we held each other there
on the dock. i wanted to cry, i kept thinking
of the beach rocks, of the sand, the stench of the ocean.
how he smelled of incense. sandalwood.(worm
wood i wanted to say/ oh/ i cannot do this/ please
get away (but he kept kissing my neck)
i felt cool, unveiled.) yes. & i told him about italy
& the mountains & the grinding together of earth
& space.

what we did not mention is war.
what we did not mention is blood, or struggle, or heat.

what we did not mention is water/ the feeling of endless drifting, or
the way, when we learn to accept everything, we forget how to change:
we cannot change, we cannot devolve to our former selves
because we cannot bear how tight our skin would become around
our bodies, how hard the flesh would be when we went
to touch ourselves. what we did not
mention was starvation.

i let him live and fed on sinners.

i came home and thought, everett, you are a silent almond.

i came home and wept as gideon's arm closed around me in slumber.