Having Spoken
His voice at once humorous and painful, his delight in consciousness and his fear of it: the summer sun would rise, wreathed in mist, and that affectionate, doggish warmth was a kind of learned helplessness. There was a point to this ritual, which was embarrassment, theme of memory: the numbing of the brain that loves. Wetly I declared my hindsight, in the first blast of wind closed the last of my drawers. It was a day like any other (game of moods), in which I seated myself, penciled in; it was one epoch the growing teeth of which I would have passed without understanding. Having spoken myself through them, having been strange atop the weight of that ground. And through my own eyes having known the clumsiness of a life bearing out, the labored O of a mouth mouthing “born, born, born.” At that our great cries went up, our cries which even then we knew were only the dead tracing dully their feelings of open love: the looking trap, “criminal peace,” sweet terrors held big and aloft. Wherever the water faced flowed compassion, and the crust of that filling surpassed whatever in our weakness would tempt us. Intimate distance, things and words. The darkness that would cover the law after the eleventh, the thirteenth, the eight. For whom the body was “thou,” the red heart was “thee.” For whom the danger that colored space was sacred and, like blood flecked with light, understood. And that in itself was a way of knowing everything, a way of being coveted, known and apart. He speaks himself, and in speaking says “of, of, another.” That I am trembling and confused is not your opening (whatever one thinks, what the moon is like, not liking to know in his changing shape the stranger, not liking to hold that gun). It is good with two halves of a face to fall open, merely fabricated, to say to one’s widening body that the future, too, would kill to set up at that crossroads. Which is the end of everything, even if good: the natural breathing between the flesh (knowing everything) and what it really was like to wake up in that bed: tossed and reeling, a horror with money, and those half-human eyes spanning hundreds of years.