These days, I spend a lot of time watching you. I'm not entirely certain if it has something to do with the years I didn't get to spend with you, like they are something I have to make up for. Maybe it does. Maybe they are.

Now, I watch you pace the length between here and there and wonder how far you've gone from where you are.

Is it true, what you say, that the number of times you stir your coffee makes a difference? Does it take more of the bitterness away, the more circles you make? I wonder.

You are looking at the road and I am looking at you. To your left, a darkly tinted window; to its left, an unrecognizable twilight. I realize that I don't mind if it is so, at all. I trace your profile with my eyes.

I couldn't bring myself to stop at four segments; and so I write you down again.

Variation on a theme: Daphne and Apollo

You have betrayed me, Eros.

You have sent me

my true love.

- Louise Gluck, "The Reproach"

Waning, trembling, loss of breath: the first signs of the permanence that will become the end of this story.

Picture woodland, Dear Reader, imagine trees with whorled roots, and leaning branches; picture sunlight and comforting shade; picture the occasional brook, silver rivulets crossing brown earth and clusters of green grass; the sky must be a blinding blue, for it cannot be otherwise, the mind will always insist on blueness; let the breeze be a delicious balm--in the beginning, at least. Isn't this how most stories start, after all?

Or imagine the city, if you will, the city with its absent stillness. I prefer the woods, but do what you must.

STICK TO THE STORY. A reprimand. There should always be a reprimand.

The mind is where the chase leads; the mind is where the chase is, and I begin:

The shadows lengthen as the day loses ground. Two shadows, they were, and one of them was faceless.

MIND YOUR TENSES.

At the body's swiftest, the limbs persevere, and the mind endures.  Soon, twilight, herald of night. Soon, the wind; soon, the truth. YOU ARE GETTING AHEAD OF YOURSELF. But it is a race, is it not?

IT IS A CHASE.

I erase a word and replace it with the same word and think that I am discovering newness. It is a form of madness. I look out the window and see a small, round moon. I think it is more yellow than white, but then I change my mind.

One shadow fleeing from the faceless one, from the impermanent one, he whose being is always a makeshift one. I come up with a list of adjectives: transient, shifting, short-lived, they. They is not an adjective. Impermanent, then.

And that was why I ran. An epiphany.

WHO IS THE SPEAKER HERE? A reprimand.

The other shadow, breaking, then, turning into someone else, breaks again.

Daphne, dazzled by a slice of brilliance, finds herself turning--

That was not in the outline. That sentence pushed its way from below, from somewhere unseen. That sentence was an insistence I did not foresee. It begs to be italicized, but I would rather look the other way. It was I, after all, who was dazzled, it was I who turned; it was I who mistook that slice of brilliance for light. There is no outline.

WHO IS THE SPEAKER HERE? There should always be a reprimand.

It never ends. I cannot have you follow me this way.

WHO IS THE You HERE? But must there always be a reprimand?

I have (finally, finally) taken the great myth and torn it apart.

You are the tree that I want to become.

The Walk Home

what surprises you most in what you feel,

earth's radiance or your own delight?

- Louis Gluck

The lamps were lit, the street was pale yellow, and my steps were unhurried as I walked.

I was thinking, it is no longer the night that's catching up with me; it is I who's catching up with the night. I was remembering a particular moment--daybreak, it was--when you made me realize twilight no longer made me sad, the way it used to, for a very long time.

A small, unforeseen smile, a quickening in my chest, the deep, languorous texture of evening--an aqueous joy was rushing through my veins, and I felt light, like a murmur, or a ripple. A faint memory of, of--something brushed my left cheek, and was gone before I could give it a name. The word/s seemed far away, too blurry for me to make out. Or was it a breeze?

I laughed, out loud, and the sound echoed upward, toward the sky (like I knew what sky meant), like my laughter always does when I am laughing, and happy. I felt my heart swell with anticipation. Just a few more steps and I would turn the corner that led to you.

Thoughts of hot tea, of music and books, of hope and love, wafted in my mind like promises about to be fulfilled. I brushed back some wisps of hair that fell over my eyes and quickened my pace. Awake and pensive, by the light of the furtive moon, I knew you were waiting.

Story

Sacred and unutterable Mind

flashing thorough the universe one thought,

- John Berryman

Let me tell you how it happened:


My foregoing thoughts of you: did we have to be all those? I cannot let go of this loveliness, all blurry and countless, unlike

the wondering I had done: oh, let me, let me ask, where? Where

are/ you/ are you

(in) the things I had seen you in: streets and highways, titles in bookshops, random twilights, a handful of rainy days, this solitary tree,

the accidental skein of prayers: let me ask you one final question, or be, or here, my love, here--

converged into one dazzling, lushly flickering light.


And you, beloved, were, one enunciated night, licked by the sudden warmth of a far-reaching flame. From the immeasurable--because, with time, turned into something unseen--distance, you crossed the rift between before and after. And by crossing, you sealed the hollow, drawn as you were by the brilliance: a known strangeness, yes? Beckoned, you came.

Summoned, you arrived.

And here is the afterglow: you and I, 

here.

Interlude

Mo chuisle, you have come back.

Rest now, dear heart. Rain has laced the evening with crystal drops; look at how they shimmer in the moonlight. The night has shed away its mournfulness, and is once more fragrant with promise.

Do not keep this brightening at bay; let yourself be consumed by its radiance.

Tomorrow's sunlight waits. Love hovers at your fingertips.

Your Franz Ferdinand Shirt

And indeed, there will be time...

There will be time, there will be time.

- from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

A girl and a boy once roamed the city under sun and starlight. Their portion of the years, once swallowed by the city, are now resurfacing into a single moment. Once upon a time, the girl and the boy drifted into parallels and disappeared into the years. But some sleight of hand, hosts of cogent thoughts, some vagrant wish, a strange, mute sadness--they will never know which, or that even all of these--have driven the years away and pulled, tilted them into a single point.

The girl and the boy are now talking about a shirt. The girl is telling the boy about her dream, because the shirt--and the boy--were in it. They are laughing, and in their laughter, their thoughts are careening backward into another time. The boy is remembering a Thursday, the girl, a Saturday. They were both in those days. As they talk, they are thinking of each other, and they are bending back into each other. Now, they are starting to grope around for the lost years, inching their way into them, picking up the luminous fragments and handling them in a circumspect way, avoiding the cracks on the floor, kicking the shards away. 

In this moment, they are not aware that the wounds have healed, or that they were ever there. They are not thinking about healed wounds; they are not thinking about wounds, at all. They are asking each other about the last movie they saw, about the books they have read. The boy is telling the girl about the book he finished two days ago; about how, upon shutting it, he had found himself wishing he were also shutting her memory forever, because the years have failed to do that. "But here I am," the girl says, and the boy replies, "no you're not here. You're there, I'm here. And I want to be there." The girl hesitates, then laughs, and the boy does, too. They are walking around the gaps.

They start talking about something else.