Statements form
Statements form in my head, questions, accusations, statements bond into fragments in which settings are appointed, passed time prior to the setting provides arguments and causes, potential can be intuited, the marks of narrative punctuate the place but withhold it from annunciation, hold it still and silent from her narrow tight mouth. They just appear in me, but they are hers. I see the curves of her face in each setting. Everything inside is far away. As it approaches me, when I am looking at her mouth or eyes in the shadows I watch the bits of a situation form around her, or after her, playing through the shadows, until it envelopes her, or makes sense of her, and then she and it are beyond my reach, beyond my apprehension, hidden within me. Then she is again there in the crook of the wall, resting on the carpet, and she starts again. She describes the edges of the shadows with the profiles of faces, still splayed black fronds, long stretches of sharp fence pickets, succulent spines, swaying fabric seams, and hands reached in from the darkness poised to grab at her as she sits there. Her presence populates me. It grows crowded. None of the situations that contain her apply to me. Nothing has association and I sit illuminated, on display, waiting for her to just take it all away at last. Each fitful start forward has days fallen in between and each starts with something lost and something useless gained.
She has fallen asleep against the wall in the midst of some papers. Maybe they were hers, or had been. They were covered with names in unfamiliar handwriting. From her emanated the gentle touch of a corpse. The air fell to her but didnt drape her, reserving the vacant packets found beneath an afternoon bedsheet, when peace is found by drifting away from the stacked masonry of accusations that build awakedness. Life seals me off from peace. Where I saw her leaning is completely dark. I watch the empty space for a period of time from my chair, drawing out my dry pupils to receive the dusty shadows. My eyes are dried ink. The dont change. They are old. Nothing poured into them. If she was gone I could feel the coldness of the hole in the air that she left. If she was gone then I was done with what so long ago was born of a single body cleft into a population. If she was gone, the desert breeze that dried her skin from the rain could whisk my blood and bile into the atmosphere. I want to rain far out from the coast and sink through the brine into the rocky sheets of space that house the blind. I know spaces arent empty.
