Reaching you

Woken to the sound of a bell that fills the room, head, effective.
A frazzled man thinks my apartment is his psychiatrist’s office and me, bleary in black satin pajamas, a secretary.
“This is #2,” I say.
He looks sharply at the door across the hall.
“6?”
I forget how to say "4" and so hold up that many fingers and he gets the message.

Later, I want to find you and go to sit in the warm window.
Everything feels exposed
and I eventually go back into the shadows to feel it all a little more.
A good deed’s done and a long line of sun descends so briefly removed, from.
And I see her, smoking, stranger of high collar.

Denial is just the greatest.
The flow of things of which I’ll never be a part.
You have gone again, unsurprising.
Too much, too sure, but maybe less. How?
Are you sleeping? What about now?
And I could not move the room held me so late into the afternoon.
Before I crossed the bridge without planning it as a reminder that all things will, are.
Sky to light up a face. More to make. This place, uninhabitable.

...

I’ve been wanting that other one, the one I left behind, because…
and I always seem to be behind them or the tolling hour.

Yet again on the verge of departure and why is it always me leaving?

The answer to this pretends to be ahead.
As in, do you like the city? No.
So, you’re in the country? No.
Or the truth that there will always be someone that has arrived a little bit before and so knows a little bit more.

To move gives way to a big flat base that covers a familiar unknown.
A present memory in which to swim through stories and things.

What if I was to make a big pile of place and just jump right in?
I’d be bruised brick, and tender, just waiting to recover from cars and parks and rain and trains in reflection before moving on.

I don’t have enough bags to hold what I found this morning in my hands.
It weighs me down in this way that I can’t quite capture what it once is or was.
To walk down the street is to freely weave through and away with history.
But to sit in one place is to stare the past in the face.

...

I was here just yesterday and already a few days have passed.
The fruit has dropped from the leaves. The leaves are blowing in the wind.
The wind runs down my chin, aloft, and something collapses soft underfoot.
It could be a heart or a plum.

In clusters of two or more we wait to fall.
It’s a way of avoiding the call and only playing feeling.
Or to keep going, which means, repeating.
Back to feel oh I so free in harmony, please, exaggerate me even more.
Distort me via windows that are doors, that are eyes and there are even other eyes looking.

I’ve been picking all of this up and eating it cold from the grass.
Beside, to the left, I mean, that eternal road, and to the right a well, a bird, two wells, five birds, circling.

For less than the cost of this ground or fixing thumb or hole or chin or sweet and heavy juice, intuitively, I could carry you to the other side of town. Where nothing runs.
Where there is no breeze, which is a constant topic of discussion.
The topic is always about the discussion itself. Like, how there used to be beauty in the silence and now there is just silence.

...

There is more to see and more I don’t really need, somehow, even though, it's blue, like a small round bowl spilling air, like...I’m doing that out the window.

Smoke curls up off a plate and whatever is blue is old.
I hold you in return but never know how you will be returning.

Whether life of things or form or substance, or surface, maybe even service, there I am, swerving, at a table, by the phone.
Car sheet bed street: illumination.
I’ve closed in. We're going out. Heading endlessly out.

I'll step out. I'll cave in. I'll bend.
I'll spread out to cover the entire river.

Even though elsewhere, there's a familiar place, a tiny place, but with a huge mirror, bigger than mine, through and through it's enough to imagine stepping through and reaching you.

Think of me

I have a friend who tells me tales of her life, which are full of travel and romance. Brilliant, if untenable, and so boring then.

The past is always creeping in to ask if we’ve learned our lessons yet.
She asks about me when I tell her.
Sometimes she asks and it’s if I am a commentator narrating her own life back to her with the context of distance and ease and observation.

I’ve not always been objective. I’ve been apologetic, misinformed, hopeful.

Is there a way to see all sides of a person one has never met?

She speaks about a desire to reach out, for example, and I reveal how and why I have and where I sustain, and she says, “I love that for you.”
I relate and say so.

My journey is a subtext, meaning, an accepted foundation, much like I maybe am in life, and she is the story of an unknown result or origin.

Somehow I am known. I do not change. I could go somewhere, which I am actually
kind of like we were just talking about with positioning yourself in the right place, not being passive, being decisive and open to whatever energy falls around that.

...

I’ve been resisting the thought of thinking that I am alone in thinking that every year is a mirror of another.
And so they weave
like reflections from pillars of glass sent to hold up the sky, at last.

For there and elsewhere, each occurrence has its twin somewhere in the past or right across the way.
But as of now I don’t know whether I’m in that year or then, year.

The truth has a past tense perhaps... And the curving roofs of the old houses in the scattered villages.
I could call on both of those things to better frame me now.

It’s like when two people share a birthday and have done you wrong.
I can see it, count it, trace it, but will I really get it this time?

Could it be that mirroring begets meaning? Or, more and more, am I to take it as a warning?

...

Or, twinning.

A cyclical presence
but what has happened in your absence is a wiping clean of everything.

Occupying either side of this gulf between insistence and instance and curse and dare.
Projection, which widens it, inviting me to trace a more tenuous edge of composure, in confusion, and longing, and care.
Why do I keep returning? There…

Detecting steps dragging out the inevitable.
Skirts trailing past as if to crunch like silk.
Dresses worn to a state, present and forgetful, and with no real bearing on today. As if to say

the road fell the mud a delight lay a beauty the field stares a cow shakes its bell, the bell, shakes its bell - delight

And if not, suspension.

...

Drama is discussed in the negative but it can also be the thought that someone else has thought it and the idea of this gives me great comfort.

To remember that most of this is and will be arranged.
Without even acknowledging it, we accept that a team is responsible for the whole show, which really only comes to be a problem when we end up at the wrong show, some of the time.

Apparently there’s a circle that I could walk in for years, in the same way that she is walking around her house, in heels, and me in mine in something scraped together, faded.
A dye, a dye for following through.

Exposure only aggravates the wound, the wound, that soft place, where the curve of her cheek turns.

Bread and showers and socks and flowers and two bottles of water and a broken wine opener, all wrapped up.
Could we instead just speak through touch, like ducks or hours?
On the nose. I call, you alone.

...

The air hangs lowly.
Yellow fruits and yellow cakes and red lights and a kitchen like a jar we bought years ago and never opened.

That mirror’s looped me for days to then spit me out in translation, all the more, offering:

A heart whose parts cannot be glued
It keeps inviting me
The way it dances around
Is quite unforgettable

I might as well feel bored
But the dream is now a veil
And it’s impossible to move aside
Or to the other side opposite you
Where there is no view.

It’s difficult for me to get up
I still have the dream on me
And I find the morning
Too tiring

I refuse to get up
Instead I continue sleeping
I still have the dream on me
And I find the morning too tiring

That is, one part of anything expected.

Elsewhere, the streets gush and preen.
Outside, a forgotten twist at the limits of kindness, and who persists.

An outfit as imposing as the idea of who I might be.
To see a tattered hem and think of me.