The Secret Destiny

Specks of light flicker across the bay at night,
a city of rooms being left, entered.

Reassuring bluewater spread wide with boats drops back over the edge of the earth.
The top half of the sea bears more miles, and its top most of them in proportion,
until the thinnest infinitesimal black line on the horizon is a week’s sail compressed.

•

at night
perhaps the slightest horizontal motion of my head
throws many lit windows out of reach behind bushes
while releasing others from behind telephone poles and mailboxes
fifty miles across the bay
car headlights weave in and out of traffic, in and out of view

•

We will never meet
have never
but we did
we are
(for just a little while)
there’s something I want to get hold of
I saw crowded flashes of past adobe mountains
crammed into a single tear on khaki lips farther

•

and a kingdom of birds leaves cars suns flowers to never be used
but always the filter of people met etc. continuing in a line that feeds
off of portions of the kingdom to the someday when it will be shut off

•

      The statesman’s son climbs out the window of his room, scales the wall to his hidden view of the statesman, while his sister sits on her bed pulling the many strings she has rigged to all the doors of her drawers. They used to tie her to the bed and leave her. The statesman’s son puts a tree between himself and the bleeding loomlights and erects his mirror. It is the smooth breeze that lifts him up to the recurring street of nowhere.

•

      The ocean is for the middle aged to watch from afar: an endless wave to drift into from the subsided storm of faces.

•

      The dark secret in my soul is the song of love and the kissing of the dead childhood dream of the mountain of the burning flower tear of the wet stone of my licking, savage heart that bleeds outward over all trees, lakes, faces of the earth, covering the morning in sweet song of the ceremony of coffin and the torn book, seen from a soft summer balcony on the sunday of the sea, and wavering odors of the sex of cavernous screaming moan lilting wafts of seableen air of yellowbirds. From the morning gutter my soul sucks the afternoon, knows the deep hibernation of night. An angel has touched me and the sacred glow of generations is the fever that kicks.

•

my hand fades into black,
reappears as a skeleton.
book cover bubbles
black to blue
out of which rises
a viny cluttered garden.
roomful of stars
migrating battling herds
she stone sculpture
spiral charcoal winds

•

      We took a walk out into a farmland field and I saw the barns and manmade trails fade away and we were the first men on earth, in a natural field on a fresh planet, the tall grass swaying like cellophane strips staggered with the rising of the horizon, down to specks far off, where strange animals grazed.

•

Somewhere a golden window,
jackolantern houses on the hill
Somewhere an airport

Here cold ground,
a fierce running breeze,
Platinum skies

•

      At some home-just-returned-to I worked in solitude at the creation of a small machine that would broadcast any tape I chose to play. I journeyed to the local library for some parts that would complete my machine. Returning through the center of town, a policeman was involved with some petty crime that was occurring. He gave me a handful of bullets to hold and went down the street. I looked down at the bullets, which resembled horse chestnuts. On a sudden urge, not wanting to, I hurled one of the chestnuts into the air and immediately began to regret my action, sending the policeman’s impending return. I knew what was going to happen, watching the chestnut rise high into the air, as high as a flagpole. It came down into the street and exploded, leaving great holes in the pavement and flooding the street with water from the broken sewage pipes. I came to a park and hid in a bush. I heard the footsteps of my father descending into the leaves.

•

A simple flower twists
ground under oceans of glass
rise the veins of lustrous eyes
soon dead and given

•

      These are wet leave days. Wet leaves cover the wet streets; wet leaves fall through the forest’s dripping air, land with a yellow splash on your nose; wet leaves plaster over the cars with their fairytale silhouettes.

•

      In a library in the middle of the forest I discovered the works of the old french poets.

•

      It is only now that I realize the full significance of her having made herself the author of that which represented eternity to me.

•

      I am alone in the dark. The cryptic iconography of black and white engravings brings me a catalogue of all possible contortions throughout history of the human face;
      One recurring face frozen in time throughout the centuries bears a name of one syllable imprinted on my brain to ruin the infinite pure possibilities of its perceived twitching existence.
      The cover, a symbol seen frequently on TV or in mythical recurring scenes endearing to one’s sense of HISTORY fade yellow with the loss of my hold on the english language, particularly as used in the GREAT BOOK, and in the movie that I am the star of and really like a lot and NOW suddenly this and a loose leaf …

•

      I went to the library, lay among the aisles on the top floors reading, histories of ancient tribes, obscure theories of music. I tossed books off the third floor balcony so that I could read them at my leisure, not necessarily in the woods.

•

      Everything was in bloom and blossom. It was spring. The oranges were green with black and yellow smudges. Strange to watch night’s darkness fall over this euphoria with such cold indifference.

•

      When I am sick and Jessica brings me breakfast in bed there is the sensation of washing machine churning cycle of time superimposed over greek statues in stone passing through my hand or the feeling that the walls, white, are transparent and watching this moment, moaning, a saxophone played by prehistoric races on the edge of rivers far from the tribe on afternoons warm revealing a new relationship with the sun, rising, a commitment to the future and discovery, playing the running water and the rushing motion of life spontaneously improvised in the fog of a certain death.

•

      (superimposition: the cyclical whirring of a laundry machine, white marble, greek, a vision of architectural premise, within/against the singing of a bird, buried in leaves)

•

      The discovery of a pair of useable bicycles behind this tapestry facilitated relationships with the examples of spanish architecture shifting all about us, amongst which continually wafted the warm fragrance of the sweet and almondine flowers of the night blooming jasmine in abundance along so much of the town’s sidewalk.

•

      In our old age. On the stone floor of our low villa we lay in the moonlight sleeping amidst stacks of old National Geographics. The strawberries behind the outer wall came to light with the turning of the night. Beyond the spanish facade in the arched doorway of which she stood in the days of empty annals where she waited like a ripe pear for me to arrive for dinner amidst a spray of battlefield bullets, an orchard of bulletholes through which to view an empty and forlorn crew of sauce-stained porcelain infantrymen.

•

      By day. From the empty archway of a spanish facade on the pebble-pathed rose garden side of our villa, she waited for me and my dilatory mustache where a straw checkerboard orchard of bullet-holed pears hanging ripe and juicy converges in the empty annals read in the sauce-stained porcelain of our emptied plates, fly-swarmed on the bluing round-the-counter.

•

      Nights I endlessly stalked the streets of the town, staring up longingly at the lit up windows of rooms that were closed off to me, windows curtained off and silenced by glass, rooms from which emanated rumbling strains of music, voices distant adrift, creaking walls amidst which lovers lay, coloring with crayons on the floor, trading elaborate costumes, hanging paintings and drinking tea, covering each other in tears, passing the time enraveled in clandestine worlds of love that left only the patter on somebody’s dimly lit ceiling. I walked by pumpkin patches on great fields high above the rest of the sleeping or settled city, windy and cold with views of the starry lights of people at home. I breathed deep the smell of the unwatched vines, and I was in love with lumber that lay in stacks untouched at the edge of these moonluminescent pastures, naked and unviolated by midnight poachers.

•

      Now I don’t add this minor incident to my story for the purpose of sharing this fact.

      It is belief in love that suspends all reality and creates its own, and this is how lovers can become gods.

•

      In the afternoons we did nothing. We played. We painted our names on the walls. We created dances, scenarios, costumes and stages for encounters, moments of precipitation, contact, trade-off, savage revivals of obscure salvations, children’s games, mud pie scribblings, delirious inhalations, vertigos, scrambled breathings; all ambition had left me. When one has love art is fulfilled.

      Butterflies were everywhere. Everything was in bloom.

•

      Caity lived in a little rotten old shack that her parents had given her on the muddy bank of a muddy viny leafy little river of swans and ducks. Ducks waddled up the muddy bank through the overgrown weeds and wildflowers and poked around by the old half-buried tires, barrels full of rain water, ancient cracked see-saw, stacks of filthy old chipped window panes with grimy cobwebby glass. The white paint and green and red trim on the shack were flaked off most everywhere and the bare wood was grey and cracked. Inside the shack a ladder led up to a loft where Caity slept. The main room, utterly cluttered, which was the only room besides the tiny crooked-floored kitchen at the riverbank side of the shack, had a floor of grimy grey concrete, over which were strewn a great number of worn out old stuffed snakes, dogs, bears, elephants with one button eye missing, dolls in bonnets and gingham dresses, raggedy ann, a big old tube amplified victrola for playing 78s, 78s scattered all over the place: fox trots, waltzes, world war one marches, Avalon, Caruso, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Bix Beiderbecke, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, I Wonder What’s Become of Sally, Sam the Accordion Man, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Hotsy Totsy Gang, the Chocolate Dandies, scribbled-in coloring books and crayons scattered all over the place, broken and brittle-papered, crushed to the cement in some places, a ripped, loose-snared snare drum, a pedalless bass drum, and a rusty old bent cracked cymbal set up in the corner of the room next to an ironing board, against the wall an old black and white tv set with a smashed-in screen set on a shelf next to a big old farfisa electric organ that Caity accompanied herself on when she sang the blues, a couple of big old scraped up stained-wood bookcases that were stuffed and overflowing with worn, torn old volumes: Gide’s journals, Yeats, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Stein, Sartre, Stendhal, Plato, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Colette, Nietzche, Diderot, Strindberg, Chekhov, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Stanislavsky, Lawrence, Valery, O’Casey, Synge, Pound, Eliot, Woolf, the Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel.

•

      There is a party on my hallway. They are drinking red wine and beer from a keg John has tapped in our room. I return to find Jessica and Carolyn sitting against the wall opposite my wall sharing some of the wine with lemon and cinnamon in it in one of the blue plastic cups. They are giggling. They were embarrassed to ask John for a drink. They were waiting for me. I am talking with John. Jessica and Carolyn disappear. Later when I notice, I go to Jessica’s room and knock. There is no answer. The door is locked. I go to Carolyn’s room. She is there alone. She doesn’t know what happened to Jessica. I am afraid she is with Brian. I go back to the party, have some drinks, return to Jessica’s dark door, still no answer.

•

      At this point I get up to go back to my dark door. This time Jessica comes to it, bleary eyed and wobbly in the dark. She has been sleeping. She embraces me in gushes of whispered dreamy passion. I kiss her all over the lips cheeks neck forehead hair. She has been asleep all this time. She thought I didn’t want her around. She was dreaming of me. I fall into her room as into my deepest dream, embracing the space that so quiet and dark has been waiting for me.

•

      I stopped by to see her in the morning and she was playing the song. She kissed me and I fell to the floor and she fell with me, pinned me with a flower.

•

      This was my new coat. I dipped my toes in the wet pavement and renounced everything, toasted thrice the spirit of abandon to glorious poverty, infinitely rich with freedom, a child upstart in a gathering of stuffy academicians, a king in a castle of muddy sidewalk; the sky was heavy with her grey pulse, the flower her fingers had put in my lapel. I twirled it around and around between my fingertips, bit it with my teeth, licked it, put it in my ear, pressed it to my eyelids, crushed it and stuffed it into my nostrils. Passersby must have thought I was mad, but I didn’t care in the least. It seemed I had never been given a flower before. Not like this. Not in such a singular coat.

•

      In the morning she brought me a tray of breakfast, bananas and orange juice, toast and jam, eggs and sausage, laid it next to the bed, caressed my head, watching over me with fond eyes as I lay in a bleary congested half-sleep. In a fevered delirium strange fruits blossom … Time again we fight to recall where we have felt this thing (elapse) before … I spent my afternoon in a delirium, smoking my fingers and listening to bird, sweet agony, death encapsulated in song, soaring and sweet, I stole flowers and crushed them up for paints, hiding in wet overgrown weeds, painting the afternoon from a pallet of wax paper, planning her return. You think this is not true, a metaphor or an exaggeration?

•

      One afternoon, having nothing better to do, we walked out across mysterious fields where civilization ceased to exist and the sun touched us with amenities. Putting our heads close to the ground, no more conscious than cows, in fact playing at cows, we heard the low whirring singing of the flowers. We were in a haycolored sea of them, colored paper and tinsel aflutter with descending light, an army of faint distant reedy whistles that wafted within a tiny world of motion. We rolled on the ground and with our long tongues took pollen from them, took pollen from each other, our eyeballs buzzing close like bumblebees. The air grew cool and shadowed and the sky to the east fire red. foxes, go home this is bursting,

•

      The air is so warm and fluent that on it you can smell the Spanish Main, you can smell chests of treasure heaped on the sands of the shore, you can smell the wind off the wrought iron rails of the balconies of the hotel rooms downtown, you can smell it off the cotton and raw silk blouses of the foreign beauties who lean out over them, and you can smell the oiled leather wallets of the vacationing businessmen who are paying for them downstairs in the lobbies.

•

      We are in the spring of the modern world. Multifold weightless papers descend from invisible presses, are multiplied and sent down from the empty skies. Each bears on its front page this most modern story: The height and sum of the history of all the paths of man’s developing story on earth. Never was there a more modern moment than this: as we walked by and peered into the gates where no one worked as we took sovereignty over time and declared the world ours, day by day, in and out of centuries, as it began to spin off its axis in spring, 1983.
      The novelty of the present had made newspapers obsolete.
      The landscape of our victory seemed suspiciously desolate of life, as though the territory of our consciousness, deceiving time by our coming together, had been set spinning off the axis of the chain of ordinary events, or as though we had divined and rediscovered an ancient communion with all points and tangents of time such that we had found ourselves utterly in the crux of modernity, practically in a place that didn’t exist. Never was a setting for love more suspiciously obscure.
      From all over the world vibrations of life falling in motion over a precipice never before reached were collecting and lifting this moment that much higher, an irrevocable precipitation, in the face of history. The implication of a universal doom was evident, yet only served to add pressing triumph to the dizzying freedom of our ascent. Never before had the world looked like this. We held hands and walked …

•

      Saturday or Sunday night we left the house with her brother and started walking toward a liquor store. Jessica asked David how he was getting along living at home. David said things were better since he was a senior, but he was having trouble with the Hunters, who he said were just using his mother for a place to stay and were taking over the house with their presence. We walked past the apartment where Jessica said Greg had lived. Angel Stadium glowed a few vacant lots away. We bought a huge jug of white wine and sat on the floor of David’s room drinking it and listening to the radio. We lit a candle and babbled and Charlie Parker came on in an unheard form like from another world and we went farther back in our minds and I began to feel radio signals bleating in my brain, distinct broadcasts from other, unknown worlds, places, lives, horribly entrenched in this fleeting catastrophic vividness, and Jessica and I got up and left her brother sitting expressionless with his carefully shut mouth and soft eternal brown eyes on the bed and went into the darkness of her room clunking in the buzzy-mind dark like invisible arms taking up the same space and sagged the springy bed with our weight in total drunken silence trying to get comfortable with raging heartbeats and another cigarette in bed and Jessica gets up to put on a tape in the box atop her dresser (I watch her back) and I start to feel the window breathing the message that it frames neither north nor west nor south nor east and that I am beyond any lifetime’s time span in which I have been associated with my parents and I forgot who they were beyond the flowery fence, barbed by moonlight, and I tried to look at Jessica in the dark, offering myself completely to a foreign legend, an entire life and tribe, under the purple willows, where blood rose from the unsettled earth, bathing you in the wonder of desolation and the fiery breezes from across the curves of the earth, whispering across silenced landmarks, tales from forgotten rooftops, other lives long sensed closer to me, her flights from oppression, her flights of fantasy, the humble charity of a small tribe; her profile was black in the dark, as though filled with shadows, empty and vacuumed, darkness colored in black and vanished, the desolation of unknown radio signals, and she was unknown to me; untenable night, the flesh of untrodden innocence, our powerful codestruction of the outer world and of all that tied us down or hurt us or ignored us or scorned us and tortured our minds and made us feel ashamed. Here we could be free-here we were ignited by faith and magic and the will to impossible holiness-here we could be pure and speak honestly and understand new languages with heretofore cryptic bases, the languages of smells, of primal impulses grasped mutually out of secret mechanisms of intuition, worlds of silences bringing mind to mind, life to raw life,

•

      Somewhere out there in the night lurked the spirit of the Father, that purple spirit that looms under the summer willows of childhood nights where nothing is forgotten, and forlorn metal handlebars gleam under the moon’s virginity, scattering sand through the blind skies.
      Driving home through endless grimy streetlit desolate windows, a garbage can vision of the future of humanity, cold and deserted, forgotten and unknown, barren and warped, as though an escaped deviated strain of the species, struggling through blitz-deadened eternity, a tunnel of ZERO, we stopped to rub our paws against the cackling radio of days hysterically disintegrated, frozen in cunt-colored lipstick smiles with chains of death-stomachs turned inside out, worlds devouring and taking over each molecule-around their necks, but all the fur has been wiped dry, in a dreary echo that rapidly diminishes in fidelity to the original like a mind ravaged by insects, chemicals, disease, or malnourishment, we rub a little pizza on our white T-shirts for old time’s sake as the tattooed grimy cook grins behind the greasy counter with no teeth, his mouth ridiculously full of cigarettes, must be two packs in there, unlit, and his throat a gnarled black idiot hole into which he is rapidly stuffing comic books. Out on the street again, rocketing through the maze of pinball neon, shot across peopleless windshields and off of sterile peopleless store windows in blinding rays red yellow green (I think) across a desolate black vacuum, hollowing through the miasmagoria, the sound of metal on metal, great crushing steam suction, grinding holes in the pavement of sewer stink, a grey street full of crushed cars, the radio signals sweeping through the molten engines, oozing to a vaporous halt. I point my finger and ask when we’ll be home again. The answer is not until we have a chocolate eclair.
      The fingers of the grinning counter man grip the last stale cracked-chocolate eclair in an icy taut death-grip, his oil-caked two inch fingernails filled with the pussy custard they are dug into. His flesh is yellow and cold and poisoned with lead. Only his brain squirms with dull ravaged impulses. He won’t let go.

•

      And it was among these roadside liquor stores, fast food stops, highway movie houses, giftshops full of plastic and aluminum inanities, motels, pseudo-Polynesian restaurants, bookstores with scanty overpriced selections of only the most national bestsellers and clerks who had never heard of Dostoevsky, shops full of greeting cards, impersonal forgeries of sentiment for every dictated and obligated occasion, helpful counter girls with every card in perfect place and mistrustful of some stranger paying the full price but insisting upon only taking the envelope, every dimrag cluttering plastic orange inanity of a rootless uneducated blind and self-defeating culture all brought together for the sole purpose of catering to and without realizing it swindling an entire sea of rootless tourists who have chosen to find themselves at the mercy of this vast sea of meaninglessness out of the very meaninglessness of the name on the map that has baffled astounded and hypnotized them away from the grass that grows all around them, and to that strange lost race of people who have somehow found themselves born into or sold into this dark pit of nonexistence, this desert for human awareness; and it is in this empty stagtified carcass that Jessica had found herself, bore her fate, restless and convinced that there was something else, a secret that filled her young heart with hope and passion, and grew up, by the burning leaves, quiet and patient, dreaming of delirious escape.

•

      The walls waver; all matter seems to disappear, implode, explode.
      The room rises up by one end, elongates; I am lying in the most interminable, telescoped,

•

      Arriving in L.A. by bus with Jessica I witnessed utter lifelessness, a zombie timelessness, bums cooking hotdogs in trashcan fires on street corners in front of closed down radiation-zone gutted-out deserted factories.
      On the way in we passed old time-capsule houses of old men and women who never came out but lived in hallucinatory religious seclusion for timeless outskirt Los Angeles decades with sickly orange tree lawns cluttered with painted wooden Jesuses, Marys, Buffalo Bills, rotting orange wooden cacti, cradles for rubber baby dolls in antique lace dresses rain-dessicated, full sails hoisted ragged from dying palms, window sills of agates and quartz from Arizona and New Mexico desert; the great western migration of thirty, fourty years ago: Los Angeles, the promised land! Ford V-8s! Hudsons! Duesenbergs! Pontiacs! Kodacolor 8mm home movies! Coca Cola and National Geographic! Orange groves swimming pools and plastic sunshades! Variety Billboard and Lucky Strike! Paramount! Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer! But wait! There’s more:
      The night before excited like a little kid imagining the wonderful miraculous adventurous trek into a new city in the guaranteed cotton-new morning after a night’s pinprick vigil sleep I pictured cool newspaper grey suit streets of business-like footstep and cloudy floodlights of rainy movie days and street-pigeons of Paris.

•

      Sunday morning Dave and I took a ride in John’s mother’s sportscar to buy John’s brother film. We were all waiting for Tina and Nancy to arrive, and then we were going for a drive, which after some lingering-I played basketball in the driveway with Tina-finally happened.
      We arrived in our cars (I didn’t know where we were going) and piled out, while John told us the history of this park, leading us over a rude hill, children playing in the open where the sun spread out its salute. From the grass oozed pools of oily mud in clumps. Tar! A city built on oil.
      Low down-(the winding road) we were all walking, talking, laughing. Lynn with her beads and visions of the future, (fulfilling her own prophecy) pulling at John’s shirt sleeves. An age of discovery. Everyone was discovering something, our age-old age. John had the dope. We were quiet, and talkative. We were drinking from a bottle of gin. We may have even been talking in strange languages, singing like bebop. We were on low ground now, on a winding path through trees. Everything was becoming elongated as John and I stooped to burn and drain the last embers over a park bench, our particular affinity. My buddy. The rest had disappeared down the winding path, their chattering trailing away, Lynn calling after us. Saw stars in the trees, while waiting to catch up.-those stars were the form of a body I wanted to embrace. We caught up with the crowd and saw the magician, doing his little dance-crazy pants like mine. I felt I was falling, falling through the paving of the day, through which a new world was erupting, being born-a trained bear. All was love, and my travels throughout the world. I was drunk, and we were going to have to stumble home, when everything would grey. A circus through which were tumbling great painted balls. (and just a few days ago, I had been in this city with my love.) No one wanted to stay.

•

      There is something peculiarly magical about this town. The stars seem to guide people into fated contact with each other to strange ends. By the sea there is a sense of eternity, that nothing ever changes, that it is always summer, still and motionless, swaying only faintly beneath the sun’s breeze, an afternoon lasting a hundred years. The streets are empty. The odor is rich for the trees and bushes and vines and flowers and fruits and weeds are ripe and full. The sky is wide tall blue; an airplane arcs along the path of the sun, set to the far side of the afternoon, ominous, deadly. Here I laid with my love for a hundred years in innocence, youth. In a garden wildly overgrown, nestled in the hot bee swarm of a summer afternoon, a thick sea of youthful pollen, faeries singing from within the bells of tiny flowers, shiny green leafs crowding the vines with their heart’s shapes, by an old rain-worn fence, her ankles moist and sun-warm. I lifted the tapestry of her lovely dress and kissed her curls. A small child peeped through a hole in the fence.
      The overgrown vines guard a rusted old bicycle, amidst green tomatoes the last remnant of our great love, a ghost in empty streets, a study under a microscope, an armchair in sunlight glass-filtered and forgotten, the window dusty with disuse.

•

      A staircase with a ceiling of flowers winds up to the top of a hill overlooking the sea. The old houses are well-shuttered. The town seems to be empty of people. The sun is strong and swans play in the bushes. We cover our coats with cranberries and walnuts and dig our fingernails into the mud, stick leaves on our teeth, pepper on her knee, grinning, quietly, voices absorbed by the sun-drenched air, still and eternal, regenerating life continuously with its vibrant light, conjuring a thousand leafy deaths. As the sun begins to make its get-away, kids help each other down hills on flat wobbly carts, long shadows skitting beside their giggling figures. Skies hawk the long telephone wires, craning my neck, in shadows looming weeping willows from the sky, wet and blue, drenching my mind with anguish …

•

      The red and blue mailbox laughed silently, its stomach full of letters, its life sustained in suspension among the cool laughter of the trees.
      Who hid in the shadows? In the breeze-blown viny arms of trees hidden in cluttered back yard darkness, searched out by the moon? A cat? A killer? A poet? A lover? A low unknown patch of mud in thick darkness? Scattered leaf-light playing on gravestone? A wheelbarrow mired in 1923? A photograph frozen in time: the curly locks of a rat-infested maiden.

•

      The blackness over which waves the boughs of the sweet trees you have only just met, now swallowed up in blackness, and kisses you lightly on the forehead, inescapably black, for the last time.

      It is difficult to turn out the light, and recall that once we were skating on a simple pond. The echoes of a life of love are the greatest reminder of the blackness to which their unanswered voices are abolished.

•

      Still in the town by the sea where our lives were one, her life has taken on the quality of a myth, as elusive as Joan D’Arc or the hand that left spirit in stone.

      Who could remember the squares of concrete sidewalk that I lined up so neatly for her? Certain things are put away in ancient treasure chests, more loved than life, and forgotten forever, closed to eternity.

•

      What was it like, to see the sunlight on the leaves and to know that everything was dying.
      What was it like, to be out in the middle of nowhere, and hear the wind howling … the ocean crashing …
      We rode our bikes all night, and there was nothing, nothing but darkness and cliffs and ocean and us. The whole town was deserted and we were left to ourselves. No wonder we began to feel like we were tearing each other apart, eating each other alive.

•

      It was cold biking home at night. Biking past the library. Biking past the post office. Biking past the empty churchyard. Biking past the naked flagpoles. Biking along the winding roads that led to the sea. Sometimes I felt as though I were biking into horrible desolate streets of a desolate city in a desolate time so utterly barren that I didn’t know why it came out of my mind.
      When we got home we would take off our clothes and get under the covers without waiting a word. If I heard a rooster outside crowing all night long it was because my own heart was crowing lying next to her sleeping back wide awake in our cold little bed somewhere in the farthest darkest most silent and incontestable corner of the whole wide world.
      If all night a cool breeze comes to us, then something we do not know of is wavering our chance of eternal recovery. No doubt, sensing this breeze, I am summoned to the greatest state of awakeness I could ever bear, unsettled with the unsettled night. Does this breeze bathe over the entrance ways to most sanctimonious refuges of our eternal spirit?

•

      November days were cold. We would go to the grocery store between our houses and buy tuna, spaghetti, sauce, bread, milk, yogurt, juice, mushrooms, onion, garlic, apples, bananas, potatoes, vitamins, Jessica in her black skirt. We would take it all back to one of our houses, usually hers, where we would lie about in a pile of rumpled socks, sweatshirts and leotards, and listen to jazz on the radio and look at the art books Jessica had taken out of the library, and look at the yellow leaves on the chilled trees outside the window.

•

      This is the night that I am refusing and scorning sleep, that I may see the morning bright and undetained, rising like the birth of a nation, seeking out its unknown and immanently black corners, absolute, inevitable, undeterrable, inescapable, the curse of my vow, the realization of my whim, my chance, my risk, the sentence of my determination, the black wall of my commitment, the unbending fury of the dark, witless and leering, sparse and coy, dewy and webbed, dripping and trickling, tinkling and tangled, whispering and echoing, taunting and jeering, tippling and sopping, buzzing and burning, inhuman and dark, dark …
      I can barely read the inscription in the stone … buried under webs of shadows, dew gently wafting in the sway of shadows, branches lilting the sky’s holy spiders, blue and starry like streams of milky desire … I read this name, the name I have read before, the name that is effaced from my memory, the handwriting that bends my mind back past those branches … cupid’s arrow suspended in stone … Mary Magdalene smiles down, immoveable, cracked with time, a leafy superimposition, but immoveable all the same …