Remembrance of Things Lost

 

Remembrance of Things Lost or, Benevolence Misread

            for Kass, forever

 

It’s not today’s fault—but whatever doesn’t count makes you

soft, softer,  swooping out all those years ago between voices. Between verbs. Deliberate. These self-indulgent lamp posts

and so much sugar; do I even like this? Do I have to decide? Whatever it is I feed it into your machine,

this uncertainty, this recipe for dropping, this wobble and fret. Deliver it.

 

I still want to be everything, distinct ache for center. What’s left?

It’s not that they were us but that we were them; and sometimes I just like the words I hear in passing.

In this universe it is sometimes cold. We think we know

what someone else thinks they mean.

 

So hello shortest day, longest night. Hello new special weather and this whole plot thing.

It is so obvious after the fact that I had never actually been to the country

I was supposed to be from. We debated going back in time to fix the clock; we misunderstood

we understated over and over again.

 

So another year of losing things has come to an end. We pause to grasp for meaning, we gasp

and the beat goes on. First, add sugar. When we wake again something will have happened.

“Nothing” will have changed. It’s best to begin near the end so that later, as you go,

things will become more and more familiar. Fate doesn’t need tempting. None of us planned

for it to go this way.

 

E Pluribus Rex

drastic times

call for drastic silence—cue

birdsong (if only

we could sing for our suppers)

but between has been suspended

 ... again

cue

  this crowded epithet

   these adventures in cardinality

insight     in situ

sometimes I, too,

  am just a little slower than I am

if only we could sing

for our suppers

drastic times suspended we all breathe at once

and when the world grows bigger again

you wake—

—oh this is inconvenient

I pine for simple arithmetic

drastic inability calls for elastic

 sensibility

   conversations swallowed

if only we could be in just one place

if only we could stop dying

the sign over the door reads "History" : so this is where we come in

Oh, Honey

I dreamt you were eating my food. Detail: it was the lasagna

that I took for lunch today and I extrapolate that I must have been hungry but no

the dream was just that. You were eating it. So much for realism.

I tried to recapture sleep. I pointed at the dream, for instance

the flap of its wings or its voice. Muddy dead ends, a slurred moment aside—why

was the door open? Again. Why.  

I squeezed myself in. I was driving around, looking for evidence. I was trying

to give someone an award. Already the house

feels empty without you. I wait for you to enter. Someone else

was also alone.

I must have found nothing; not that it mattered. Hush.

The play is about to begin.