Remains till morning (in advance of the poem)
There is the moon, then the moon out there is, as with Oppen, one or a different one. As with the cars, silent, husked at the curb outside, a text grinding in the night, cold air, cold wall. Edges on the insides of your eyelids– red and yellow beams explode boxes. Shoulders from blue covers, a leg out over: these are my reasons for not sleeping right. Shift the V, for the nuance inherited with these walls, this room of mine, not yours, not where you are now, where I am now. And where is that? I is right here? White with dark lines arching, a colonnade, a simple clause in the aqueducts, two strangers meet to be alone. And my arms are heavy tonight, my legs are restless. Your head off the pillow and then: "what are you looking for?" As with sleep, some disturbance keeps climbing around.
The facts remain: you are asleep, it is cold. There are cities outside. Makes presence hard to explicate. Mars in ascendence. The sun moves into your –expletive– house; the one you lived in during those years on Commercial when it was so cold the mercury damn near froze in the thermometer. Your language, you're language, anguish. Y, o, u, r, letters. And I could hear you stomping around when I said come back to bed.
Some burning sandalwood. Again a weathering of the word assiduous. Breaking the spines. Went cumulative around the arrival of that guy, you know, the one with the magic tricks. Loose change in his sleeves. And there isn't sleeping so much as a thinning of the blood. Avoids the nose, headaches all on the way. New books piled beside my desk. New desk beside my bed. New bed to sleep in this new place, new room, the whole apartment 850 sq. feet. Basement with bay windows. View can see mountains on clear days mostly.
We cycle here through these episodes:
• re: you and i asleep or not, the room and its walls
• conjunction vs possessive
• it is a cold night to be awake
• some tea before sleep
• blue sheets
• a grinding noise
in which you become a character and as much for that reason so do I. You make me. Make me. "Make me." "I dare you." Remake me. Member, i.e. what you thought the answer wasn't. Dad said he wrestled conifers. Concurves and– hey that's not a word. That is a word. No, not that, that. Oh. Wake up, you said: "when I was at lunch." And seven bells chime in seven hells where you might be your own jerome. To be cite specific:
"&my hands felt nothing, no wind
all night & my hands touched the silence
But I lived on, thinking the morning
would come"
& then once their cars start round 5:00 am or so, I turn on the coffee pot, turn on some news and wait for you to wake, unmodified.
2.
As an example: sam sung whenever i think of you my heart smiles, while "we were dead and were able to breathe." The speakers are not named though they make noise. Lavender from the silver lamp. In this manner I am constructed the room. Given time, armed, to be with. And we trace out lines all day long, look for ways into the I, the con, the text. What a vehicle, that loud muffler, which is sometimes a scarf. When the words go one way and the directions the other: I am left. Handed me the wrong pan, the right side went numb with shock it was so hot. Turning the fork. Tune in tomorrow. Chop the parsley, fry the deck. The timbre of her voice has the quality of wood, wood pulped then bleached, flat and covered in black ink. A white moon above, no, silver, not green, not black. Seeping. And the L slipped away. Off into the night on the sound of her advice. My memory has become overcast. Snow happens that way. Accumulation just does. Blankets. Late night sweats. Check the mail for your letters. Two are missing. Femurs known widely as the worst bone to break. Largest in the body. Shards and sharp as a knife edge when fractured. Nothing quite like bone grinding against bone. Proper cpr breaks the mastoid process. At the museum, after dark all the skeletons put their skins over their glowing bones, and the mastodon grow wiry brown hair. They move through the silent halls, haunting the ghosts of the daytime consumers. So much history underweight. Sometimes the old prop- planes snap the wires holding them to the ceilings and suddenly flight is a miracle again. What we take for granted. Learning how to pick up that stick. Incentive to start fires. Set camp by the lake. I'd like to have the water, soft against the shore.
3.
When and where the water returns, English beach. I just want to get to your apartment. Got to get at the present. Reframe. What if there were fountains that spouted concrete? Concrete that grew pronouns? And as if we were all in British Columbia that weekend. My brother on Granville. Coffee at Davie. A history.
Someone accused her of histrionics. My mom didn't know what that meant. Pregnant with my brother and shopping, a shelf fell on her. 3 years later she worked there.
Then it is night again. There was snow when we all got out of bed today. Weather warmed in the afternoon. Unpredictable for tomorrow. Sleep discovers so many possibilities. Solacement, I'll be where the flowers start. There between the gates and the stones. Waiting for you there. Alone so far away. Twice removed. Mimetic substance, substantial, under the darkening clouds, little movie scenes, forgotten, when we tilted a bottle of chiraz to the red sun, the sun we thought was red. After such a night, a night of drink and dance, the green in your eyes, after such a night, to be so alone when the moon sparks full, then sets, and the sky glows soft red, this is the meaning of memory. You become a source.
"Because I'm writing about the snow not the sentence."
When it has not been anticlimactic. Then the strange words: alexandrine, somnambulant, maybe these are not averse terms, apothecary. My angel, my love. And to whom does the arrow describe. The action of direction is a sexual epistemology. There you are, my love. There I am. You said your labia was a library. And I said, humbly, I knew that. You said no. What we meant. The concrete and the spruce. The pronouns dance away. They shift and embody one another. Then there is an I in you. And a U in the eye. We change occurances. Language has no obverse. It is an original dark. Nonsense. A real active center, my relative censors. Dance like you haven't any legs. My love. My love. We could eat pomegranate seeds by the dozen. My love. The action is always away from and then back towards. That is the direction of memory, of reference. And this seems too easy. There you are, feeding the geese in Marie Curtis park, and it is summer. Warm air, the smell of fresh cut grass. Water, water slipping into the shore amongst my memories of walking by the rocks. And you were beautiful, blonde hair, green eyes with a yellow ring in each, there you are. Blue sky, always a blue sky in such a narrative. My love. There you are.
If I bought you a red,
red
rose, would you leave it outside my bedroom door? There was the moon last night, round and bright, then there was this moon there last night just like it wasn't. There was a bright hole in the sky. And the night opened through it. The night opened through it. There were the northern lights splashed on the sky. Moving colours similar to behind eyelids. Time was emptied like sleep and then the colours usually inside turned out, broadcast there they are greens, whites, moving, some blue. An object travelling away from you appears blue, towards you, red. In space and at great distance. Red shift. Bring in the wheelbarrow or else it might rust. You're on your way. Language, language, language, aurora borealis, beautiful, in my arms, willing to sleep this night. Everywhere in costume. Fabricated, gathering around wet cuffs dragging in the snow. Where the snow.
4.
Five a.m. nights, rattle around in this shape, the order of things: a coffee, the snow, phone call, music from a strange band, flowers to keep at home with, and this incredible missing sensation all over my skin.
On such a day, making a book, reading a made book, booking a flight, when you telephoned, my head hurt. Wait, there will arrive a table and chairs. Soon the kitchen. In advance of the poem. Then television next week, rediscovered. Inventions fulfilling original intentions. The toaster with breakfast. Typing this. Maybe to sleep after. Some to build. Arrangement in this. Wherever you see flowers, substitute the letter X. Trees reach underground to one another. Hinting the way to water, some salvation. If water was money we would be thirsty. And tired. Tired. Where the poem continues.
Not here. Not there. When you walk away. Why the seasons cycle. When you walk away. When you walk away. The clouds remain clouds and the mountains in the distance. Today with couches and a chair for under fifty dollars. To build the kitchen and drink. It is still cold and it is still night. If only strange communication from long ago people returned, then does.
5.
Afraid then of shapes in the darkness, movement in the wind, the storm, the sizzle in the air, wind, and the thunder when we tried to sleep, held each other instead, and kept saying: "are you asleep yet?" Until the rain settled over the thunder and lightning, when the wind moved it all away. Think it through– turn out the light, lock the door, slide the chain across, then go brush your teeth, good. Where does this become yours and not mine?
6.
a: Night (for Christopher Deraiche) Wind blows down the street, when it is a dark, a long way up to tenth street hill at fifth ave walk. Jamieson a way: obligatory pavement to travel on for transit. though necessary unnatural. Trees haunt down the temperature. Breath out in crystals. Glasses blurred from wet snow. Animals in the yards, big dogs, black and brown and loud there and then. A permanence suggested as the leaves rustle. Somewhere a wood stove operates smoke, the smell climbs down through the air. A memory of birds across the sky. In your head, across the memory of sky. Sparrows near Lake Ontario. Summer. Water against the shore. Looking for the night. A movement down. Ten minute walk. Went the w away. Follow the vowels across the floor. Scoop the sense into a syrupy mess. Scenes cut and cross to mark this our outside voices.
b: (for Mara Hallman) Your hands are beautiful, the skin soft. There is light in your eyes. This reminiscent sunshine, like that time we were on a picnic in Algonquin Park and you had your hair short, blonde. This light like that sunshine, like we were together and warm eating egg salad sandwiches. And maybe this isn't correct. Maybe just corrective. Something that should have happened but never did, like breathing sometimes is. When it should happen and it doesn't so much. Language is that it can't be. Together and apart are only words that we use to describe the space of two provinces. As though this wasn't a conversation.
c: Be talking, then for the leaves to fall and the snow to settle. This causes it to happen. It is a long road, ten minute walk, the night and day. When thought is agency. Baseboards show the structure. Into necessary corners. That suggest room. Lights in the corner. Paper lanterns. Rice paper. The feeling under fingers of roughness. Roughness an idea of sound in the static. The letters remain stationary and as such written down nicely on that patterned paper. Assemble this: t the h write it down
i
t,
the letters stand get at the heart of this
hi
so into the past for as I have said it before a is to letters as ellipses are to... Morning if it is not a fiction, this may as well be true the sun, that sun may as well be real.
d: Think an agency high against a complacent subject, for example the word: aerated. If thought was enough I would be home with you. And there would be pockets for everyone with things to exchange for answers that were more like the form of questions. Maybe more mazes too. I mean we've misunderstood the Minotaur for so long. More mistakes. On a disparut... What is this? A fire waving from a window downtown?
e: Quiet, quiet, there are so many remembers in our lives. And when we meet again it will be the same. You with your ideas. Another weather system to avoid. Deciduous trees wrenching in the wind. And the wind is your mind as you read this, breaking those branches, arguing into the night. This is Calgary. Where are you? The news of you precludes any sort of negative understanding. To know you are well. And if you are reading this you are. Walk around, shake out those limbs and the lakes overflow in the rainy season. Ten inches in the evening. I would like that very much. There was something in the way of your movement. We could get samosas, finger foods, roasted garlic, and filo pastries with wild mushrooms and more roasted garlic, shiitake mushrooms, very earthy, and deep. Sensual and subtle. Really feel the mouth around the full sensation. Conversations over electronic
mediums. Then into a more lucid trip to the city, an organic taxi into the rapid night away, away from this integral juncture. So away. The departure intimated in the inferno, away. Away. The a w into an a. Then again this notation, this call to converse, a need fulfilled without some physical contact. As though this made it easier to consider a future of glorious pictures. A filmography of certain conglomerations. And such to be black and white. This hand sliding upwards, underneath the skirt. What show? The zippers, her boots, a teasing. To be advanced. Underwater, thought you might not notice. Naturally moving into the current love. The avoidance of music, and how long has this been for you? Things cry. A tearful movement towards some blinking moon. Format, a slave to beauty as it moves, as movement dictates the ride must be here and we must be gone. There are waiting people to speak, to be, to be known, what was your take on that moon? November 2nd, 2001? Never mind, well things are fine. All this in advance of the poem. And so on, and so on toward the poem, toward some thing.
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