I.
The laurels and oranges of your dreaming, a winter passed in Antwerp. The steep and ascending paradises we arrive at, the billowing descents, the rooted chill of such altitudes, the silences we seek, our footfalls consecutive. A shoulder thrown back into place and a built fire, a moonlit gnawing of depiction, an endlessly flowing existence, the cut teeth and hung carcasses pulled to a luxurious emptiness.
We move past the river, we begin to locate ourselves singly in the bowl of humming mountains. The darkness is furred and deeper, the sky stretched clean as cured hide, domed as an imagined yet pinpointed heaven. We are afraid to talk about many things, most strikingly each other. Silence moves, uninhabited. Time lies adrift as a Detroit mansion. There are rooms we don’t go into, memories that we invent for ourselves so that our histories are more easily comprehended. The architecture of sorrow is a northern one, snow blowing around corners, ice crusting around the sill, the burial poles languishing within thawing ground. Life is a character we inhabit and then erase: the shadows and the marks remain.
II.
White birds of your dreaming, the deaths and sensation. Unmemorable language, thrift and anger. We are no longer surrounded by each other, we have moved into the forbidden area. Here are the tunnels and blockages, the crimes and sweet violences. I am moved by nothing anymore. I speak an unincorporated language. The field is ploughed but flowers grow. Life builds upon the dead, and yet.
III.
Unstructured revision. The ceiling-height paintings, the tables cast from plaster. We arrive within atriums, we become chilled in vaulted foyers. There is no place like our inversion, like our drifting mission through he wild, hungry patrols of disappearance, a rallying of love and distraction, of slow regeneration.
No roads grow over in the forbidden plateau. There are no cries or repeated thrashings. Just the alginate bloom across snowfall, just the sled tracks in the silence, and again the disapperances, the ghosts blended fast into the view. Somewhere close, a beautiful skiier lies scrambled in the ICU. There are built shrines in her name, photographs pinned to boughs in the woods. Somewhere further we arrive at a closeness over mourning; the gas stations like temples along an ice highway stretched thin. It’s not a hard thing to do, this leaving. What becomes difficult is the intensified reflection, the endlessly triplicate gaze of nostalgia, desire, and sorrow. The beast’s lensed belly, the crawling threat of return, the howl of the sky crossing the ice bridge between arcctics, between sawed histories of the soul.
In the new year, we carried wood inside for a fire. We nursed ourselves like animals, our eloquence dissolved. Our rooms were opened to strangers, our departures left anonymous. Our language lacked precision: the ripped landscape swallowed it whole. What are we but gift-given upstarts, untrained young professionals displaced beyond our lighted vitrines? Where do our heroes go with their lack of discretion, with their songs and their sculptures built always with a gesture of lifting? Our dreams and intoxications, our great tilted sorrows, our unsightly revolutions typed gloriously out of bedrooms into streets. We are not great, my friends. We are merely generous. We are merely fresh intimations of compassion. Each day there is a ritual in which you ride a horse across the desert of my soul, in which you check into a motel in the desert of my soul, in which you jangle the keys in your pocket in the motel in the burnished desert of my soul. Ah, this is a strange one, the pacing at gunpoint, the ingestion of pressed pills. How many suburban boys did die this way, how many of us survived to run to the borders of that place, and then beyond? The hooded eagles, the fattened mangoes of your dreaming. The hallways packed with lard, the city blocks of chairs upon which nobody sits. The retraction of the velvet curtain and our lapse, sun-blinded, into ecstasy. Nothing in the world is ours. Nothing is shared, built, or made.
It is absurd although essential to relish our pious vicissitudes, though we walk and walk to the summit. Here is the packed flag, the vulture bone, the thin mandala. Here is our arrival within the future, more bare, more clean, more empty than any thing that came before.
