Michael McNeilley
my eyelids bang open and I wake sudden as summer
fire spreads down dry arroyos -
her lovely nameless face floats above me in the heat -
a dissipating cloud of dream
that rims a thought that will not clear.
but the lost green eyes and hair not red but
not blonde her smile the old smile back in place
draw down icons of memory -
through the freckles that spread wild
to the line across her breasts where freckles end
and I can see in the dark - the whiteness of the curve
below untouched by sun -
the suprising pubic manicure
shaved small in the shape of a heart.
she speaks my name
I cannot speak hers.
and I roll in my sheets chilled but sweating
out the sudden details gusting through -
the alcoholic memory of that first evening rush
from bar to bed pulling desperate relevance
from every article and consonance from every vowel -
a trident siren sea of memories welling up
from nowhere incomplete.
and I try again but nothing still -
no trick will bring her name to mind
not even her first name a name that could have been
a man's or woman's name I know that much but
not Chris not Terry.
though the endgame memory returns of course -
whistles up unwanted again
of lying hopeless on frozen
apartment balcony concrete drunk
against Valentine's bitter cold - someone
saying come in come in you'll freeze -
watching through the glass
her leave the party with some unknown
unnamed one - I never saw her after that
until years later
back in town on business -
by bluff chance in a bar downtown
we had lunch together at the rail
and I ate and slowly nodded through
the story of her latest man -
the one who could have made her
happy at last arrested the night before
at the airport
their little package gone all lost.
what happened to us -
you and me she asked and we both
knew what but not why -
no sense attempting the why of it
or the inevitability - not before not then or now -
more of the secrets we hold away from ourselves.
all lost and I left two drinks for her and flew
away secure in my own developed relevance
uplifted if brought low.
ten years later those redlined eyes
still endlessly familiar -
I turn and fight my way back down to sleep
knowing her name is there somewhere in secret
locked deep in some internal file.
dreading now the dawn too soon to come -
the vast undertakings of a Tuesday or Wednesday -
slamming eyes shut in the hope of no dream
back down the corridor into sacred darkness
before the sun burns its inevitable hole
in the blanket of night
and flames the whole damned sky
with morning.
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
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