As children we are never prepared
for such unassuming days,
the way they will decimate things.
Waves roaring, one upon another,
slowly abrading us into grains


~


1.

I think I remember the first time we talked.
It was on a bus, on a night much like this -
not quite cold, smelling like smooth stones,
so that our bodies feel coated in frost,
and a natural compulsion to closeness, touch -
Anyway, it is all just a blur of things real,
half real, entirely invented (though what is
Memory but invention?): pig tails, black
as coal; a flash of moon white skin; the scent
of old leather. These are the foundations of
love, or pretend love. (the difference is like
the space between the sea and the shore, where
pools have formed and grown vile with
crustaceans and the murkiness of underwater)

So it is an evening that will soon become
a night very much like the first night we
talked. That was a third of my life ago,
and if you had told me then we would be
here, talking of heartbreak and expectation,
completely incapable of looking the other
and saying, “You know, I think sometimes
I might love you. But then sometimes I think
I don’t feel a thing for you. And right now, I
am thinking that you are nothing to me.”,
I would have scoffed in the way adolescents
scoff at the future, because surely, it cannot
ever arrive in such spare, unanswerable terms:

two people across a table, someday dead, bearing
such needless weights. I wish I could say, oh,
fuck all this pretense. Just float, be light, for it
is your calling. I’ll watch you go off on some
current, like a cloud, and it would be enough.
And isn’t that cloud phenomenal? The one all
drenched in rose, a cotton ball soaked with blood.

We are walking under your cloud, and not fifteen
minutes ago I was across from you, listening to
you expound your break ups, and looking for love,
and I don’t think I said one thing that was honest
the entire time. Not that I lied - the facts were
reported with accuracy. But everything I said
was a complete fabrication, a betrayal to the things
I would like to live within. How do conversations
get away from us so we are saying things that
do not come from our hearts? They come as if
we are watching a film about our life, narrating
in voice over. I sound like an asshole! For I believe
in love, and I would like to open myself fully,
but the truth is I am utterly terrified because right
now you look rather beautiful but all I can think
is: run. Run as far and as fast as I’ve ever run
because all of this is just like paint, and the
brush strokes. It is a replication of the impermanent,
passing itself off as permanent. You are there but not,
and I am…where? Some village in Spain wandering
with an imaginary woman I’ll miss thirty years
from now. Though she could easily be you, too.

That terror is the past now. We are into the sunset,
and sharing dreams, and sometimes our shoulders
brush while we laugh, and I think that maybe I will
never find a happiness as clear as this. Two people
inexplicably laughing. Life will never give us
anything lighter than this, or heavier. It is simple.
Why is it so hard to find ourselves here then?

We finally find a clear view of the western sky
(save for the power lines and rooftops), and
watch our lives glide a few steps closer to night.
I think I should kiss you, but I remember that
twenty minutes ago you were talking and I knew
as vividly as anything I’ve ever known that you
will always be a mystery, in every way. I
could spend a lifetime studying you and not
come away with one statement of fact, just
the suspicion that you are a deep well of very
sweet water. But maybe I have simply been
deceiving myself? But now the sun is beyond
our small cache of love, and hope, and longing.
The sky is the frail color of newborn skin,
soon to rot. Oh, but the red and pink is still
on your face, refracted in laughter. I wish I would
never have to leave this efflorescent minute or
two. But I will, and I will stop loving you, then
start again, and you might never even
have felt a thing for me at all.

Both our dreams tonight are of dying,
though sometimes mine are of you.




2.

You are in the backyard, throwing a ball
for the dogs
which is a strangely gracious act.
It means a great deal to them.

This is what I admire most in you.
You are the master of strange graciousness,
of being deft when no one else would
think to be,

the way rain sometimes calms itself
after midnight and parts in a gasp
so that for an hour or two
the sky is vast and incomprehensible.

I would like to be angry.
But you are throwing the ball, and the
dogs are so elated they actually retrieve it,
languorously trotting back to you with a gift.

Your limbs move quietly, such calmness.
I should be furious, for all you have taken.
But then you give, and give, in your ways.
And I think all I have for you is love.




3.

My old man, fully bald (I vaguely
remember when he was only
partially bald. He once had hair, now
he does not, and I do not know
when the distinction was made).

We are smoking a cigarette together
because we are befuddled men, adrift.
I cannot say to him, You will give up
your whole life, all that you have dreamt of,
all that has given you purpose, for sixty thousand
dollars a year.

You would be a mercenary, an MBA.
Do not give up, Dad. For me, your prodigal son,
the one whose failures fall from the skin
beneath your eyes as leaves from an oak.

Because my heart could not handle you the businessman,
you the suit,
you the nine to five man without
a language all your own.

He is disappointed because he
has been like a stone that grazes a lake,
full of sun, such a shimmering glint of failure
that will sink, and very quickly.
But what is failure? Simply an accumulation
of days, and memories not reborn.

“I was in a fight with your mother
not long ago, and I was trying to
understand her side of things,” he says.
“I realized then I have no idea who
she is. Twenty five years together
and she is a complete stranger to me.”

So we will die strangers, all of us.
Except death is our common knowledge.
Oh, yes. There it is, in your skin that burns
like quartz with sunlight (it will be nothing,
someday, your bones painfully white, though no
one will ever see them, not even me.) And in
my brother’s eyes, the way they seem covered
in rust. And in my father’s clean head
that once had hair, though I would not
believe such a thing because how could
my father ever be young (but he was, you see,
and he dreamt of things other than me,
and my mother, and he still does).

He told me once, after a few drinks,
that I should never make any decision
in my life because of money. He was
once like me, rich in ideals, lacking
pragmatism. And now he is a stranger:
my father, lost, smoking, in need of
advice that he never taught me to offer.


~


I am nostalgic for winter when it is summer,
and for summer when it is winter.
Now it is autumn, or just beginning to be so.
So I long for my life, which always seems
to be lingering on cold nights, in the smoke
of cigarettes, the way water eludes my fingers
when I dip them into the sea.