Mar 5, 2009

Buried Outside in Piles of Love



Lost in her mystic hair I railed against forgetting and the realization that I’d been caught in the vacuum of her eyes for at least three centuries. I slept that long, abandoned to the ticking of the nothing-clock beside our bed: numbers flickering one form into another without settling on numeric symbols. This small room and my deprivation, moved into a poverty of senses to find happiness, and moved from happiness to experience truth. Finding neither, I stood up and removed the blankets covering me up to my neck overheating my body to a burning point.

- I’m going out, K tells me.
- Where?
- Need to go to library.
- Silence just kills love, stay and talk.
- Too slow. I need to be up. You can stay here.

Stubborn needless insanity. Clock too early for living. Sirens thinking about someone dying. Guilty infection of inflection.

- I’m going out.

I roll over and face the pink wall of her bedroom. My shield is the impossible distance between morning dream haze and her look that I didn’t return. Not enough this morning to break on through. Here I stay, composing the integrity of the moment. I get up and have cereal with milk and Joyce. No one else in the house. Snow piles up outside.

Three hours and she was still absent. The snow fell harder past the windows covering every car on the street; nullification of all these centuries of progress. The ground has returned to blankness. Void again. Risen up and covered. I’m sorry, there is nothing to see here. Later excavations will recover. Separating the plastic blinds from each other I stare into the street covered in white, sky white, roof-white heights and blankness of my anxiety creeping up from a below that destroys all virtue with a single claw. Tooth and nail. A magnificent claw, wielded by many, perhaps many more than wield tired virtue which is far too unfashionable to be common usage. The broken hearted few. Everyone embarrassed in their virtue except for me, who stumbles around with it daily tied to his shoes chasing it down streets as one would a top hat caught by the wind. Hope for this action of futility to bring me to you, or to someone better. The core of my actions, the hope that these desperate acts of chance in longing will bring me to at least a crumb of love.

The crumbs are difficult in themselves. Hope for more and you will get it. Too much. This truth may be much more uncomfortable than crumbs, those so easily left behind. More and the way out will disappear. No place left to turn, or burn. We stumble upon an answer here, the root of fear in this voice. Capable of imagining all possibility, but only alone. Not up for the task of bringing impossibility into love, though that was the birth of the same love.

Deep and hours into reverie. The perfect sonnet of longing on my tongue for so long I’d manifested a chorus of angels to sing it with me. Three graces and four virtues. Forget your perfect offering. I left my offering in K’s lap years ago in the Spanish sun and didn’t look back. I remember it. Mistaken and nothing left to take. Everything but temperance. Hope in her tattered red evening gown sipping on the whisk. Getting ready for descent, the last end, the snow falling gently to cover us.

K returned and asked me to come back to the world, which I did with gracious relief. We acted the rest of the day only on the restoration of her warmth, her small body next to me in the film-light under blankets again in her parents house. Warming the heart of it, warming the neighborhood and the world. Radiating out in waves of song and fragrance. Trapped in the heart of it, dying for the heart of it and to be a part of sliding down the raw face of love. We circle back on each other.

One bus failed to come.
The library shut it’s doors.
Making circles around each other though she wandered far in body and I far in spirit.
Until we see, taste and touch.
Until my body is warm next to hers.
Until the light comes shining

- From the west on to the east, I had to whisper.
- Hmm...? Sleepy.
- Should we get up?
- Mmm. No. Stay here.
- It’s snowing. It’s all covered in snow. I’ve never seen it like this.

Our hands holding each other tightly in the afternoon dark.

Never mind. I tried to leave you. No one has let go. Fingers reaching out in a gracious touch. We find each other again endlessly. New again every day. Our lives dead and covered under the drifting snow each night and entangling around spring roots in the morning. K new again when neither of us could remember the future. Let me in again, she’ll let me in again and I’ll stumble back through the doorway of her eyes.

5 comments:

Ted said...

WoW! Beauty! Love tangled with snow... I have the pace of it the weight of it the two clashes of universe that reunite. The inside the inner self the world as you see and feel and live it. I'm inside your head I see the world with you.

Poetry piled at the same time as the snow. That's brilliant because all that's written is filled with truth with honesty with consciousness.

It's beautiful.

Anonymous said...

You should mention Montreal in this poem, to bring unity and place to all the Leonard (and less, Bob) allusions!
It's an excised passage of Beautiful Losers, excised because the writer was too happy that day, and it didn't fit the tone of the novel!

MAX! said...

The tone of the close reads like you are breaking into song, which is a phenomenal subtextual metaphor for the love bloom. You should try to make it more dramatic by organizing your last paragraph lyrically.

Vanessa said...

I'd love Montreal here, too. I'd also love to hear more of the "reverie."

This is a vision that is elevating some very tender, difficult, quiet pieces of love. I like that project because it helps us see how the days apart and moments of reconnection are monuments in the sculpture garden of the marriage.

Cristofani, linz said...

thank you for the glimpse into a day in the life of high love. she leaves in an awkward moment, but only leaves for the library. he stays, perhaps to sulk, but conjures up joyce and the angels instead. a lesson in how married people separate and come back together with grace.