Michael McNeilley
wishing I had something to
say to you
that something had happened I
could relate
some thing you would find interesting if
you were here
but nothing keeps happening in almost
fall still
you sit in my head waiting or
I think this
since I never know when you
will appear
but you always do eventually
unexpectedly
and I find I remember things
about you
things I do not know though it is nice
to think of them
and I go back to cutting up onions
making coffee
it occurs to me to smoke but I light
the filter
that burned taste like the one firemen
have always
with them you can remember tastes
you know
like I remember you standing naked
in my bathroom
you or your shadow at the window
the light
a halo through your hair watching
the moon and
as you can taste perfume if you get
close enough
you can taste sweat if the air
is still enough
from across the room across
years you
can know from what is spoken
what remains
unspoken you can try to put these
things away
but for me closing my eyes is
better to let
these things flow over me like standing
in warm summer
rain the cold only later when the
wind rises
It's as if the dark, which had before just been context, gave to vulnerability a permission, almost: fleshy saucers of spilled cream, so many parchment fists, unfisting; and now, in pieces, the delicate mask of an indifference offered radically up against what, each time, seems as unthinkable, as unexpected, as when, in the long dream of retraction, that sea that is finally not a sea, but what else to call it, begins again its shifting, and though to every push of the will forward there's something noble—which is to say, something lonely, also—it's too late. Carl Phillips Speak Low Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Comments
Post a Comment