Hypnagogic gibberish

*

A man walking through his home city
after many years away

finds his memory fails him
in mostly unexpected ways.

Wasn’t there a bench
here,
underneath this Mulberry?
Wasn’t there a girl here?

The populace speaking French

*

The aseity of matter

*

A man in the desert. The slow, oneiric shift
of dunes under wind. Patient, funereal moans.
He comes upon a Bedouin camp. An old lover
around the fire. Funny, finding you here. Eyes
alight with laughter. Together, they wander out
from camp, to a spot on the horizon so the fires
are vestigial and only darkness is ahead of them,
immense, and the wind is roaring above, free
of internment, bellowing across the scrubbed
palate. The sky is so clear the residual cream
of their galaxy is visible. And for a moment,
though neither of them believes in God, they
are cowed, rendered speechless by some ineffable
might whose origins they cannot place. They
believe, in that moment, the entire history of man
is carried inside of them, his imperfect and fruitless
loves, his horror and original sin, the frailty of
coming up against vast emptiness and being able
to move through it but not being capable of holding
a thing, simply knowing their infinitesimal scale
and then losing that knowledge and finding it at times.
The wind suddenly quiets away, and they can hear
the Bedouins singing an ancient paean, very faintly,
a koan for the impermanence of the dunes, their
formless hearts. For the sacredness of the stars,
maps of the past. They pass the melody from
one generation to the next, she tells him. An
oral history of praise. A remembrance of smallness.
What do you think we are here? Peripatetic souls.
Lyrical wanderers. No, we are an acciaccatura.

*

Within all stories: false grandeur

*

A man suffers an aneurism.
In the liminal threshold between
life and death, he found his body
buoyant, afloat in a sea,
the horizon infinite and far off.
A ship appeared, divined from
all that spatial and temporal compression
or expansion (he could not be sure which),
moving closer,
one of the old schooners he read about
as a boy that hauled fur or timber
from Sault St. Marie to Chicago, or to Cleveland.
Blue and white sails tattered
as if the vessel
had outlasted a November gale.
He tried to call out, to rouse
his voice. "How far from shore
are we?" he tried to say. "I've
noticed there are not gulls. We
must be way out in the depths."
The awful terror:
he had been rendered mute.

Two days convalescing in the hospital.
A woman visited the man.
I brought you flowers. I didn’t
know what else to bring.
She smelled, he thought, of brine.
“I love you,” he said. “I
was terrified I would die
without being able to tell you that.”
She bowed her head and took his
hand because she did not know
what else to do. How strange,
she thought, these habits of affection.
His hands smooth and dry and cool,
granite, impossibly heavy. What are
their origins, these rituals of ours?

Outside: spring, pale green.
Nascent fragrance, nascent color.

What she felt
was that love is a broad,
mostly inadequate term.

Dying flower petals like
tissues of lavender, draping
the earth in a fine chemise.

She thinks, I’ll carry his fear
and then I will die. And someone
will carry someone else’s fear.
Every life burdened and braced.

All the same fear, and it’s eternal.
The horizon smoldering.

What she desired
was precision. The crepuscular
rhythms of her life:
birdsong, windsong,
the silhouetted moon.

Verdant smell of coming rain.
Already falling in serene,
staccato little drums. Not
entirely foreign.

Yes, yes. I think I remember this song.
I was on a bench in a city whose name
seems to escape me. Kissing a slender
boy, believing love was going to save us.