To read and the note read my body is still groggy
wanting to be locked and lucid in a dream.
My neck and shoulders
are stiff and I’ve yet to speak.
My hands are curled and
slow and eyelids falling heavy.
Too soon to be staring or computer
is too much rush push or light pollution and also buzzing.
And the body aches to fall back in space where stars are held
in teacups and hands reach from tree trunks spread like swallow
wings but across shoulder blades her traditional bird tattoo.
To
love and miss like that traffic passing midnight missing.
The
white and black swirls around curves they had not noticed.
Petite
black heels show toes then slung back around the heels or edges.
To ache with it.
To read and the note read you are kept warm
in something knitted in four chambers pressing or expand and
contract with exhale
and inhale or four chambers with a space in the center for
your safe keeping.
It would not keep her call her safe.
They knew this.
It would not keep her call her safe regardless
of the city or the country.
And curled into the spaces kept inside cages made and meant
for ribs and made and meant for keeping chambers or safe keeping.
Inside
like dream and language and now thinking are inside too.
Exterior
like language and roadmaps and bridges and things meant for
connecting but sometimes also kept for keeping in.
She said psychotherapy
is inside with the unconscious inside with the symbols more
than symbolic inside but he did not
believe in the unconscious.
You me we needed to hear it.
To remember the invented although
she never finished the research by the front stoop and then
not speaking but
hers and also
spinning aching swirling.
To stretch hands like wings across stars like sky but to touch
tree root and freeways and parks with ponds like hands but curved
like fingers so we call them lakes or feathers.
Crown nares mandible
mantle breast wing flank coverts feathers tarsus and so on.
Or
bark twigs cone fruit leaf flower blade stalk stipule node
petal pistil stigma stamen anther filament style ovary and
sepal.
To touch you.
While touching it.
To trust is the first one.
To know is the second.
Maybe to risk is the third.
Half of us married half of us unmarried and then more than half
of us or unwed.
Or did not surrender or did not support that sort
of surrendering or cowering to.
Or unloving or unlovable depending
on the moment and the human.
In Brooklyn and in Oakland this
was still problematic full of juxtaposition and conflict with
convention and contemplation
that was a cultural privilege for certain.
To read and the email read the weirdness is passing and time.
But
disregard or to be disregarding.
To be unknown and unknowing
the hands stretch but feathers caught where fingers might snag
or catch or have had song and
flight
and wind to carry travel without necessary oil.
She said lack of agency.
He said I think I’m starting to
understand it.
He said I will keep the smooth rock in my pocket
forever and I mean that I mean ultimately until a forever but
what he meant
was until another one.
Six years later and she is not waiting
or waited.
Six years later no rocks pass in pockets like stars
or swallow wings or freeways connecting like bridges and subway
tracks
between them.
And to think of you me we so young and fearless
and maybe foolish or to think that we were foolish yes certainly
foolish in contemplating
who was featherweight and free.
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