“I Don’t Hope that the River’s Reflection
Speaks to You Only of Me”
(or I Know I Am Not Your Only)
“You are always free to slam the portals of your eyelids for other departures.” I am not the wing clipper. I do not tweeze other longings from the stubbly growth of your reach. I, too, walk to the techno oontz oontz oontz thunder beat of all the faces I’ve read like Braille with my lips and remember like tomorrow will hiccup on. I know what it is to recognize love in not one not two not three but through more eyes than I can even blink shut anymore. Each time I do, I recollect another image of God(onmyfutonspooningme) who left her socks on my radiator after we waded into time’s bays and watched circles advance around our shins. Every hall through which we found the way out only brought us into another paintpeelingceilinged bedroom. And I saw the initials you left on the wall with your redasdeathlipstick. The new wallpaper slicked down, pressed over where the closet used to be, boasts clawmarks from skeletons not content to dangle from hangers next to our winter coats never used because an airtightfullbodyclutch was so much warmer. “All doors are open like my legs at your approach.” I have no fear anymore. Like the lifeboat is no use, hope can scuff its floorboards on barnacles of change and a sliver of a leak is all you need to go down. But I’ve made my hope into submarines so I am content to swim the tragedy with anemones caressing my thighs as I leave bubbles popping to the surface behind. Balloons of once-upon-a-time gone gray and pale all hung upon the trees with Marti Gras beads of every color. Like your eyes were confetti strewn along my naked body, a Valentine cork popping Chablis every night; two forms making love reflected in the puddle of spilled redwine on the worn-in hardwood floors with that trick creak our slippered feet memorized after years spent walking the path between the peck out the door and Frenchecstasy in bed goodnight. Yet I know I am not your only. I do not presume to be your Only. Yet I long to take you home and eat our dinner from the pot still left over from last night’s leek soup we never got to. But I have more pots on the stove too. Each a different ladle for a different hunger and a different throat. But you can drink out of my container. And it’s your dog I want make our dog and take out for a pee at night. Every night. I have different drawers in my incongruous head to store the impossible, the improbable, the likely and the definite. Yet I don’t have locks by the handles because I’ve resigned to the futility of segregating desires. I can love you and you and you and you and you and – all at the same time. And ALL with fervor and parity of need. Do you believe this? Yes. You do. We discussed it over hyper-sweet lattes while sharing that big DinosaurJuniorpurple plush armchair at that bohemian coffee bar with birch wilderness painted on the walls and connect four on the rack with our favorite book which we both reached for simultaneously when we spotted it there. How ironic you stammered. How fucking ironic as my lips grew green feathers of a parrot. You remember, it was one of those “which-way” books, where we, the reader! decide the destiny of the black and white symbols personified. That beatnik Vermont coffee bar had about six doors, remember? (How strange you thought. How strange I thought.) You said you’d meet me out front, I said good idea. We each had some scabs of regret to pick. And what a trip, coming from opposite directions on the faded-with-use plum crewcut rug, with fishing poles dunked into the rivers of blood streaming from our eyes, we reached for the SAME fucking knob on the SAME fucking door number six. And there we were, out front together. Hurt and ready to start another which way book. All our miscast characters, dinning their fickle fates within us, that dissonant roar of all the others we swore we’d love always, quieting down awnings, dripping away the remnants of lastLIFE’s storm into the gutter down at the end of the block and we, pointing the other way, we trust our new Vans and Dock Martins. I take mine off for a game of mini chess on the checkerboards. And we stop midgame because the idea of checkmate repulses us both. So we color the white boxes black and the black boxes blue because we are aware of mystery and wear bruises and metaphors on our body. You say, “I want the fire it is always possible to spark forth from between the stones of time; but the fire is no one’s…” And I finish, “…the fire devours the relations of cause to effect, (it) will always find itself in the gazes of what we don’t know yet.”
We promise to never deny each other of fresh air and ‘to never wound each other with the flamethrower of an initiate refusing to breathe.’
Down by the sea a gull braids our vision across a pretzel sky. And we taste saltskin in the door frame hours later because at the stroke of 12 it’s pumpkin good night.
***
(((Intense thank you to Annie Le Brun’s Twelfth Ring, to which all quotations are attributed.)))
