#37

The end of things was a nursing home with thick blue walls and carpets, hid in an unmarked building on a dangerous street in the city. I had travelled many lives to reach it, and these lives walked purposely through its corridors. Each had a message to relay. My grandmother in partnered calisthenics. My mother and brother at the restaurant table. Or at the bookstore, where Ed reached for a journal, Daedalus. "The kind of thing you do at school," he said.

But it was Caroline who spoke in subtle boldface, as she washed her hands beneath the bathroom mirror. My father dead, and she remembering. Two pills in a plastic container, each printed with a tiny zed. And she smiled as she retrieved one, the light flooding gently through the parted curtains. I heard her when she spoke, but it was for him she meant the words, softly and with joy: "I have carried these all my life. I might as well take one now."

The riddle was written in prose. Her words, dismembering parentheses. And my time so seen, reflected in my parents' verse, revised. I ever the child to their childhood, lagging behind in reasoned indignation. My father the winder of clocks whose hands I trace and tally in determined sums. How can my loss be much as theirs and cherished? For I still climb with hasty grasp the summit of my will, where no teller of tales will commit my story to writing. And you tell me, when you tell me, to stray.

And here, in the present tense, I take heed of such endings. And sit down, as if to translate: the time spent in time offered to another. I walk zigzag patterns through the day, assemble arduous compromises in my record book. I sit in a chair and read, and look up from my story to see you. A reflection on the sofa across, dogeared paperback open. As if to say, when your eyes meet mine and settle: I am emptyhanded here without you.

#36

The salutation was unfinished. Even the dateline was puzzled. Mnemosyne's children scattered, disappeared through beautiful views of doors. The ideal exception. I had sent them on a quest. My own time was counted in pages, the laborer's diet of love. Four long hours, as Bryan would say. For hours and hours and hours. And if I wanted, as I seldom do, with that fallacy to penetrate, always lurid interruption...

Ah, but that muse too has departed. No interest nor rhythm there. For once, I am wholly my own, my genius shut up in a crystal cage and entrusted to a friend. Hide it, I told Lucas, in an imaginary land. And leave no marker for history to swallow. All so many fantasies dispersing, uplifting anchor from the real. I drink my tea, lift books from shelves and study. My life is a tunnel of brackets, my epoch an epoche.

And you whom I speak to on phones, whom I shop with or dine with or laugh with, whom I update in letters sent digitally, whom I flee from with parting lips and tongue, whom I look for and remember: you become in their absence hazy, and your meaning even less than the shades caught sight of in darkness, yearning. Ever longing to drink from what enlivens the living for living.

#35

The last gray brow rescinded, and Sophie sat down to wait. Green grass from its slivers of concrete, brown. While the flys buzzed round dingy receptacles. "All the literati keep . . ." And then discard. My lover's favorite: a condom like a lurid slough, and sloughed again. None of that for Sophie. Let every cause an effect; every telegraph a slow response. She had ribbons of lavender in her hair. And liked it, when she liked it, to frown.

The afternoon was her domain, but often trespassed upon. There was cinescope and lithographs and maundering crowds of men. Each line was a line left stranded. Outside the lending place, so much reserve in standing. And total views. Kinship cisterns. Micah's dick like a battering ram. Oh, Sophie's door would open - but she was never, God knows!, at home. She sat like a grimacing Romeo and tightened her rollerskate laces, and spat at all who passed her - "In vielen Worten wenige Klarheit" - and waited, from the curb, for things to move.

#34

The seat of prophecy was a poet's stone, lost in a clearing ringed by trees. No scepter, no hunting ground. Just the birds in their lambda patterns above. The insects burrowing long latitudes. There bore no narratives further, no oracular cant, linear, deployed. There was a stone, no more no real, waiting to be stood upon. A shadow that never fell behind. And, yes, a time machine that did not travel time.

#33

You were walking without care toward the amphitheater. There was nothing to distract you. You had in your hands a notebook of transcriptions, all the movement of your former nay-saying. Birds functioned like singing-machines as you passed. In anticipation? No one could say. The streets were no longer approximate stairwells. And the sun had consumed its chariot.

Travis sent a kiss for a bruise, Micah a one-way orgasm. There were parties throughout the city, every full stop on vacation. Bryan was there, and others. Les, who fed your cat with rectitude. That couple from the park, ready to fuck you as one fucks a child.

People's hearts grew humid over chatlines. They had no trauma, like an anchor to the real. Scott said, "Love is empathy." Kerry: "It does not fail." Your head swelled in response. You were you then; and I? I cannot say. For I lay sleeping on a cot in the hospital, an envelope of x-rays clutched in my hands. Like a bill, or a book, or a script of lines I once recited flawlessly.

#32

Out of focus, the leaves shine their green. Humble. Each bird for bread. And the streets through different routes to the written places. We were limping towards the old arrangements. Paused in parks devoid of nature. No more answers to those questions, please. No more will, roaring like a forest-fire. Time passes, so we let it. Each race deserves its prize. And each memory a smear of blood on canvas.

Everyone remain seated. These are not your thoughts in hiding. Ariadne's thread for stitches, lip to lip. Dollar for dollar. The wedding room filled with cripples, quiet as a game of chess. And the days spent in hallways denuded by circumstance. Fasten your doors. See that child orphaned to a concrete tomb? He is separated from his genius. It's been shaking hands with thieves.