[4] You are invited to a party. And you have no desire to exercise your tongue and voice box. You talk anyway all the time, if only to the audience of one: yourself. Why talk here too? Let them have the stage. Mask your eyes, appear amused, shake your head vigorously as if you perfectly understand, and find the narrative, as required, perfectly amusing or patently absurd. Laugh from the back of mouth. Show off your teeth. Swivel your trunk from one “You know, that’s just like me, I…” to the other, even if what they are talking about are not, by any stretch of imagination, similar. Think of what you have read last week by Kundera, “All man’s life among men is nothing more than a battle of the ears of others”. Say amen.

Repetition enables us to construct the fiction that things really don’t pass away into obscurity or that we all end up dead. The days are all good when they are old, while the current government of time can be anything from tyranny to anarchy. Someone fell in love with someone else, someone is visiting someone else, someone had a baby or is going to have one, someone is leaving town, someone once went somewhere and saw something, someone when to a ballgame, someone’s dad said something to someone in someone’s childhood, some days are quite like this day, the wind keeps clicking in our mouths, building skyscrapers of pure light, which instantly collapse.

[3] How quick is forgetting! He sits with a cup of coffee trying to remember faces, some from a few days ago, some from a few years back. The recall that results is imperfect. The specifics are forgotten; the brain dredges up analogies, which can quite well be false. One analogy: the bones in her face were translucent, drawn tight under her skin; the way moonlight hides under the winter haze or as one sees the headlight of a steam locomotive churning down the track in falling snow. Poetry perhaps, but is this truth? Unverifiable till he can see her and, as Rilke wrote, repeatedly allow the image of her drop through his eyes, into his body, like a meteor.

What is memory however? An analogy remembered? Her eyes dark as onyx, I would perhaps reply, with snapshots of my face trapped in them like two identical spiders, if someone demanded I remember her now. But then the color of her eyes, in reality, might have been green, and this onyx business is just wishful thinking; something that the brain does, as it knits up stuff it deigns to notice, into big fluffy balls and then hidden in closets.

You want to remember him. He was leaning out of a train waving you goodbye. He had a hat on his head tilted at a rakish angle, his lips smelled of your lips. You had just kissed again, much to be the amusement, bewilderment and surely no little envy of the traveling public. You had laughter wetting your mouth and dangling from your ears. His hands were square. The Book of Lines said, such is a craftsman hand, a glass blower’s. He kneaded you all night, dough of time, grapes of desire, there was rain drumming on the eaves, and a money plant entwining the windowsill. Yet his face is a featureless mask, as you run after the train pulling out from memory’s Grand Central, waving goodbye and asking him to wait, all at the same time.

It comes running down the street as they step out of the bus. It is dusk and a bluish light shines over the square. They don’t own it and it perhaps doesn’t want to be owned. They have been away for many months, traveling, seeing sights, and making love under different constellations, same moon. This was after their marriage. She had taken to it, especially in his absences. “Someone to eat dinner with”, she said to herself, “and I have to do nothing extra anyway, just set out some food on the front step”. It had fought off others like it, and now feels proprietary about that front step. An observant passerby would have noticed it curled up on that step even when the door was padlocked these past few months.

What is its’ memory of her? Smell of her cooking, and saliva in its mouth rising? The way her voice rose when she yelled for it down the street? Scent of jasmine flowers she wore in her hair on some nights? Texture of her hands when they cupped its face, and allowed them to be licked? Does it ever say, “Good morning, do you still remember me?” Or does it simply know them as it knows itself, as it woofs and runs around them in circles?

[2] I walk out into the freezing cold to pump blood into the brain inert like a bear thoughts words memories the whole whirligig of stars that explode in the sea inside before I hold them in my palm or moves the paintbrush held in my mouth over the canvas tracks one goes over like a blind man feeling his way with a cane tapping listening for sound say wood say metal say water say bone say blood frozen moon behind a thin lampshade of cold chasing my shadow who is my lost friend with whom I learnt the secret of night walking for the dark holds the light inside it stop at the creek burst of sound laughter one suspects at what at being alive yes at being alive at not being that body inert beside an overturned truck on the winter grass beside the highway death stalks me I stalk words words sometimes are death we write we put the papers away we forget but then how the dazzling twists inside the flesh a piece of shell in the spine after the explosion the sea covers us with sand with salt you cover me with song I am suddenly given sight I don’t have to tap words on the walls to talk to you who are in the next cell you sing you shout into my ear I am all ear we are sound that Beethoven heard with his deaf ear and things come to an end the blind writhe if given sight seeing is hard to learn I go back to blindness I fall into bed with bodies logs of oak logs of pine go up in smoke up the chimney good byes of time I licked at them the tongue revealed their shapes mouth eyes breast pubis tights toes this simulacrum of friction is what passed for love fake coins counterfeit notes the heart is so simple minded that it rejoiced every time where the cold mind was picking pockets for lies what we refuse to admit raises the blind find it hard to forget that flash of light even if they are terrified by it they hold it as certain stones seem to hold it within their hearts night sleep end

the mem ory of

her inside me wanting to beathe out....

amazing loved it.