journal 17/11/10 (vancouver)
The gold line over the final city; the smokestack obelisk; the lone mosque on the highway. The refusal of sorrow, the cross-eyed ecstatic deluge, sugar-slow slip into delerium, confoundment. Since when was this an exercise in resistance, the ink & the charcoal, the meditative stroke into sculptural fullness? The rain misted on the track, the milk fog thru the mountains, the myriad crows in computable pattern, the unusual threat of a woodland that goes on & on. Here is the pool of cypress, here are the poplars burning in the wind, here is the ash-taste of death borne upon your own sweat & body-mist. Why can’t I let it alone, mirror-girl with her wrists leaking blood all alone in the bathtub — the cartoon whirligig of stars in orbit, & then suddenly not. I mouth the carbon bone of forgiveness, two-step the whiskey/pain away. Isn’t this a time for newness, the solitude of the coast, the cocky strut & heartbeat bump into giddy submission, into the mania of loss.
Following the rains, the pavement becomes a sea of glass. This planed living without, the trophic ocean of memories I could swim into: coughing up your semen in a Whistler shower, coke gathered in the turning groove of door-key. There’s a window that opens up to the Nichinan coast, a tetrahedron of wood opening into your heart, a facelessness that accompanies the atrophy of silence. There’s the laughing myth, hurt & sting, the thin paint of dawn, the vaulted bridge, all of me & the wash of you — the overlay, the underpainting. Here is the corner of the image in which I said I couldn’t do enough, in which your pliable face lapsed into permanent obscurity. Deep in this woodland exists the terror & acceptance of my eternal solitude — removed from the crafted likeness, the cheeky lilt of conversation. Here are the books of bone, your teeth in an envelope, the black pools of death & the jewel lakes of sadness, how the heart goes on & on.
