notes from the field

the writer reports in from real time:
the kind of night where i am finding myself trying to eat more than i did the meal before this one, feeling too much like a ghost and thinking it would be heavier if i were heavier, like i might not float away.  riding through cold streets, taking my little girl to a school concert - she's in concert black and wishing she could wear boots instead of velvet shoes, and the wind blows against her legs.  she is thin as a faerie on a night like this, but just enough to keep us all on the ground, riding into the wind and hoping we don't pick up the wrong kind of speed that could take us up.  it's not a good night for flying.  these last moons building up to this next one, coincidences and second chances are in the air, but i can't count them on my fingers, they float away with the tip of my thumb from another time altogether.  and if it weren't for her, i think i would float, that i would find myself floating, if i didn't have this spiral going through my lip.  it's a staple over my mouth, and i'm not sure what else is holding me together, but it might be that, with all of its multiple meanings, hooks and mermaids and locks on secrets, closets that hold more flesh than bone, and it doesn't matter if i am trying to fall apart, because this is keeping things together, just enough to remember how to do these things, with cold hands and a heart that wants to be anything but heavy on a night like this, weighing down and waiting and making things with my cold hands, watching for signs of what designs this moon is trying to call up from the depths of the ocean. 

it's important to keep in mind

This story is a love story.  It's a love story that looks like it's about someone you don't know, but it's about you, and that's why it's always so uncomfortable to be writing this in public.  There are things that I won't say in public, so the story won't have everything, but there are enough spaces between words, and fragments that are left out, so that you would recognize those spaces and fill them with the same things I'm leaving out, so that we're still talking here, and we're talking about the same things here, because we're always talking about the very same thing. 

the last thing i will ever say about that

the first part can't matter because origins and beginnings never end because they never really start because they are always already, and the middle part was not for anyone else to know, and the ending was so much in public that it took a lot more water than we had to get our hands clean.  so i would live in the middle if i could but i'm supposed to be somewhere over here in the river of time, and i suppose i am way over here, but we don't live in one time or one place ever, unless we are very very dense, and that's never been true for us.  except in one degree.  maybe two, or a few more, but not in the usual way. 

so at the end of the day it doesn't matter what they said, and it doesn't matter what i hear, and it shouldn't matter what you hear because the only thing that was really true about any of this was what you heard from me and what i heard from your mouth, and if i could have your words over me like a blanket then maybe just maybe your meaning would keep me warm, and it's what i would do for you on the rainiest days, or the ones where there are no wolves knocking at your door and all the foxes are keeping themselves well hid.

i won't speak about it again. 

tres dos ambos mundos y te por tres or quatro o algo diferente

A deep breath at the place in the cafe where she can't see him.  They were sitting in the same booth and talking and while they were talking they were moving closer, first he comes around to sit on her side of the booth, because she wanted him to see something on her phone, and it was the perfect way to get to the side where she was, and the very good thing about it is that when he moved to her side she didn't move to his side, not away from him, and they were on the same side and she wasn't running and neither was he.  Next was that moment when she was asking him to see the picture on his phone, and it was maybe a dog, or maybe a baby, something very cute for sure, something terribly cute  like a dog or a baby, and she moved a little and he moved a little and the tops of their legs were touching and it was interesting, because there was a point when he was trying to hold his leg still and that was a mistake because of a certain nervous condition that made his leg shake whenever he tried to hold it still, and that was sort of bad, except it moved further on, the way of all flesh pulled by gravity, and that was inward here, where she was on his lap and he was wrapping himself around her by the legs and nothing was shaking but everything was moving back and forth, just like that, and it was that very certain point where the flesh starts to hum and so were they, humming in the cafe of the world before god and everybody.

It was a little too much for him so he said, "Excuse me (and note to self note to editor, first thing we will need to do is look at past and present and future tense and first second third person oh this is terribly inconsistent but it's always what you think it's about so it might be ok, no we need to fix this I will get my people on it)."  And he went to the place where she was not, and that place was on the rooftop, where she couldn't get to, because he was a little taller than her.  And even though he was much older than her he was also much more limber and he could jump, hahaha, now let's see who's really old, eh eh eh????!!! 

I worry just a little bit that I am getting older and weirder, and it's going to be going like that for a very long time.



So he was on the roof and she was inside, or maybe she was gone, he did not know because he could not see her, because he cannot see through walls, what does he look like some kind of a wizard?  And he was smoking even though it bothered her because it made her feel like he was doing it because he was frustrated with her and that meant that she was accidentally slowly killing him even though that was her wish every now and then (we're all human, and we need a break from things that don't stop moving).  But he was not smoking because it bothered her, but because it was so very cinematic, and he felt that it would be terribly ironic to be doing something cinematic in a novel, and yes, goddammit he was there on the roof smoking at the sky, and he made his confession> 

"OK, so this is all I can say, it's all I can say, 'I love you, but it's not you, it's me.'  The way you sit in my memory, I want to carry it like a child in my arms, everywhere I go, and everywhere I go people will see the weight that I carry, just so I can tell them, 'It's not that heavy, it's really not that heavy.'  Because we all carry our lovers in our arms and on our backs like a coat, like a perfect coat that doesn't fit anyone else but us, and at the end of the day, we're all in this together, we all wear the same coats, and they all have their own peculiar themes and variations, and maybe, just maybe, just maybe, there's a saturation point where the number of lovers ceases to matter, more numbers won't keep us warm, but like the elders seem to understand, it's the quality of love that makes us perfect and light and hungry for the things that wake us up.'  And if I can say that just once but say it right, then I won't have to keep saying that, and suddenly I am light I am light I am light."

And that was that.  And the world got very bright and grey all at the same time.  And no moon revealed itself, and no shooting stars fell from the morning sky.  And when he went back down, he fell on the way, and he fell on his coat of lovers, and they all began to complain that he was incredibly clumsy and needed to focus, they all told him he needed to focus, and it was a complaint that was so powerful and so echo-ey that it felt just like being married. 

At the same time, on the other hand, on the brighter side.  He didn't realize that this was an act of surrender and it was a marriage, but marrying a destiny of a sort, one where coats and permutations and subtle and radical changes in the design and the method of weaving the cloth became something like a process, like giving in to a process over which he had no control, and you would think that would unlock things and make things perfect and right.

She was still sitting in the booth, still a little bothered from what they were doing before he left, and a little flustered by the smell of the smoke on his clothes, and a little upset that he was still carrying an effigy of her in his arms, because that meant to her that she was sort of dead to him, or at least, what he carried that was her to him was not really her at all but something else, and it looked like her and it talked like her and it wanted the same things she wanted, and he loved her double more than he loved her, because it was something he could carry and she understood that she was not that at all.  And she wanted to be carried, for a little while, she wanted that very much.  We like to be carried, and no one is worse off by being remembered, because being remembered is like reproducing without having to take all that time and energy to sleep with people. 

He felt a little bit odd to be talking to her there on the other side and holding her there in his arms all at the same time, and it didn't take long before he understood that she would not be able to sit on his lap even if they both wanted it badly because her double was already there, and he was wondering if this living in metaphors might not be all it's cracked up to be.  Her metaphor was feeling heavy in his arms, but it also protected him from all kinds of unwanted solicitations.  Her metaphor was feeling as unbearably light as anything he could exhale, and he wanted to exhale more wishes.  Her metaphor was becoming very much like that hungry shaking bird that already lived in his stomach, the one that stammers and shudders and bleeds because love is impossible and necessary all at the same moment.  Her metaphor would grow, until it could wrap herself around him, and hold him still and silent for three days, or months, or years, and when she unwrapped him, he knew he would be born into something else, and he would be like a small bird that would eventually learn to move freely in the world, like a wizard, like a sorcerer, like any bird worth its weight in salt.  Her metaphor would tear him open again and again, and when he was open and bleeding he would find his way to the rooftops and register all his complaints and confessions and wishes, and he would be almost completely unaware that he was being put back together as something he never suspected, and it would be longer than a lifetime to decode those taps on the back of his neck.  Her metaphor would turn him terribly terribly bright, filling every room with wishes as elusive as any shooting star, born with one foot in the middle of a grave and one foot in the middle of another transatlantic flight.  Her metaphor would be like a hungry child in his arms, and he would learn to love her like a hungry child, even when she was asleep, and even when she couldn't hear anything else but the sound of the ocean in her ears, her head a seashell, her body a cave for the waves to come and go.

And she felt herself becoming heavy with salt, and he felt himself being torn apart from the inside, and everyone in the cafe became exhausted from trying to turn back to flesh from stone. 

"This is why lovers can't be friends," he said, even though he knew it wasn't true.

She, meanwhile, became too dry for this part of the world, and felt herself rescinding herself back to the sea.  He was whispering her name, and it was no longer so sweet, but a little spooky.  And she, meanwhile, turned herself into a particular kind of sea monster with a particular kind of tail, and she began to make her way to the sea, and when she got to the foot of the mountain that separated the desert from the ocean, like the desert were him, and the ocean were her, and they could fall in love again if that mountain moved out of the way, she felt the winds whipping her in all directions and she thought, "I didn't know it was like this, every time, to see me it is like this every time," and while she was being blown in all directions, she started to blow in all directions, and she became wind, and he became mountain, carrying versions of things in his arms, and those things turned to shapes and formations that every other lover would see when they were on their way, desert lovers on their way to be with the ocean, like two pieces of cloth that can't ever clasp, like two pieces of cloth forever trying to clasp. 

ambo's mundos (next) ((not last just next))

This is already well-established, then.  What this is, then.  This story, told from the other side of the grass, from my point of view (one of the dead ones), and told all over the heads and hearts of these few people that I have decided are important enough to me to pay attention to, and there is a complex web of relationships that might not be altogether related very much at all altogether told, but if they do all have one thing in common, it's that they have not forgotten how to talk to the dead.

That is exactly what makes this a love story, then, not because those who don't believe in ghosts can't love, they can, but it's entirely different, and a different kind of passion, then the kind that builds with intensity, intensities based sure on friction and physics, repetitions of movements of the flesh that wake it up and make it hungry, but also here for the necromantics it's that these movements also wake up the cells of the ones who passed on, and they want to come back, and their only chance is through trances or trance dances or occasionally through another birth.  But no one is getting pregnant in this story yet, it's not another human birth that I want, that would be another story altogether.

But it is a love story, it's always a love story, the pilgrim who progresses through sloughs and things isn't interesting me these days, because he ends up pure in god's love and light, like all pilgrims do, and that's one reason among many that I can't stand pilgrims.

The reason we're still in the Mundos shop is because it's not done yet, and in truth it will never be, because everything in the world/s happens here.  And the best things that happened here are things that haven't even happened yet, so while he is trying to think about what to draw on her napkin to let her know something important, there are other things at work, things that have nothing to do with who he or she might be right now.  On certain nights of the year, lovers are stuck in time, stuck in spaces they once were and never could leave, because they left pieces of their hearts there.  Out in the back, where no one who is of a pilgrim lineage ever dares to go, there are a hundred pancakes, half-eaten, left in the dirt by the lover who chose the object of her affection over the butter, and if she were ever to come back, she would see a hundred versions of herself, looking for traces of half-finished meals, wondering if she hadn't made a bad decision.

It's not a story about bad decisions, though, because all decisions are right if they are made, and if she were to look around long enough, she would find the signs he left for her on the wall that sealed him to her for a time longer than she imagined would be something he wanted.  If he were to visit, and stay well past dark, in an abandoned house that no one ever lived in, he would see the things she drew on his chest with her nails, and he would also see the marks of the other lovers that marked him even long after he was convinced her marks were the last.

All to say, they continue, this genetic material continues to take root and form, and tries to find the right path, when sometimes the only right thing to do in the dark is to say happy birthday and wait for more light to come, when the morning seems to be refusing to turn, but it always relents, because it is being pushed by the ocean.

He is in the shop, then, drawing something on her napkin, and wishing that she would turn into a mermaid so they would never have to worry about having to pretend they were perfectly happy being mortals, with court cases and circumstances and desires that come to make spirits feel less than light, and chained to the bones that don't want to know who they are. 

(and more)

Don't forget

This is a love story.

la parte arriba de la linea entre ambos mundos

I was on the road trip that could only take place in between time and space, and this was the one where I was visiting old friends.  First I would see my tongue, and then I would see my heart, and it would make sense if both of them were living with her, but they were not.  In fact, the her with whom I assumed they would be living was not one but a number, that is, a number higher than one, and so it was becoming very necessary to try to keep track of the pieces of things.  She was pieces, and she was many, and there were more hers than I had known about, but it was suddenly important to follow the tracks to all of them.  If I could follow her fractions, then someone might be tracing mine, and this is the way we could keep track of each other and help each other put each other back together each other.  Not that I was falling apart.  Not ever.

The only reason I knew that I was still thinking about her was the fact that the sun on the road in front of me looked more like her face, like I was driving into her mouth (rather than the usual face of the sun, which for me, like most of us, is a Tzotzil Mayan elder, possibly male or possibly not, but probably yes male yes because of the phallus that is hanging by his ear ((left)) ).  This was the funniest thing about it, the most ironic thing, because I understood so very well that I would never actually reach her mouth, that it was always just out of reach, and I was starting to understand what sailors go through when the moon is making them insane, and why they turned manatees into mermaids. 

I was on my way, then, on the road trip, then, and I decided to stop just then and have a snack and look at souvenirs, and I pulled off by a shop, Ambo's Mundos.  The sign outside said that they had pancakes made from dates offered 24 hours a day, and a free butter bar.  Although the idea of the dates never sounded very good to me, the butter sounded so very French that I had to stop, because I was so worldly (am so worldly), and this was between so many mundos that it just made sense.   I turned off the motorcycle and let myself just sit there (stand really because if I sit then the whole thing falls over and it can break your leg because it is so dangerous to be on a motorcycle, even when it is not moving), and I let myself just consider this moon this sun this face of hers that I was chasing and it was always just out of reach.  And that made sense because I don't know why because really but it made sense, and seemed to be perfect, a perfect way to enter into Ambo's Mundos.  In my mind I was thinking about a story where the boy misses the girl, and isn't even aware that he's playing with that idea of the feminine and the lunar, but finds himself buying things in series of 28s, and it doesn't even dawn on him how much he misses her.  Thinking about this story, even more than thinking about the moon, I felt very much whole and well put together, so much better off than the character in the story I was creating.  He was an awful mess.  Just a mess.  Slept with a girl a few times (maybe 56) and still so hung up about it (maybe it was 3) and he can't get over her and thinks he's romantic (3, there was something about 3 that was just insanely crazy and good, so so so very very good) but he's really just insane and not at all well because as long as she's there in his head, no one else will enter, until the next one, except the next one always comes along and enters, and stays, and it's not very easy for him, the character in the story in his head, not like it's easy for him, the character in this story that I''m writing right now, and so he feels so much better than he could have imagined earlier upon waking this morning, with the sun on one side and the moon on the other. 

But the real story, what''s happening right now, is so much more infinitely important, because it is in a cafe and it's really happening at this very moment.  We are crossing the line between art and life, and it's fantastic, and even exihiliariating, because it is so real and visceral.  His hands are cold and his mind is racing, racing, faster than the motorcycle, and all of his life is an attempt to catch those lost moments and still live in the present and still be aware that the road up ahead has a cow in it, and he needs to be careful, because cows are so very important here.  His mind is racing so fast, in fact, that he forgot that this part is told in first person, and once again the "I" became a "he" (resisting readers: resist the text!), but that's something I can fix right now.

I am in a cafe.  My hands are cold.  I am thinking about cows. 

Since it is that kind of cafe, she is sitting across from me, and she is wondering if we should eat the pancake and explore the butter bar, and the answer to these wonderings is always a yes, and the universe is on our side.  And as she's wondering, I'm looking at her, and thinking about the next important thing to say.

She interrupts, however, and she asks me point-blank, "Are you really trying to live through the first conversation again?"

"I'm not," I say.  But I am.  But not again so much, because it's not one that I relive very often.  I am thinking about talking about first dates and making a joke about porn, because it would definitely break the ice, because it would be inappropriate.  She would say something about how she never actually saw porn, anywhere, which is very unlikely, because of the way things are in the world right now.  It would get entirely too complicated after that, so I try to steer away from porn altogether, and try to imagine us making an amateur porn film, except without the porn, with the same natural light and hand-held cameras, and instead of doing those kinds of things to each other, I am imagining how it would look if we set the camera on a high chair and it would film us eating date pancakes with all that butter, and thinking about how filming people eating is the new porn, because porn is what shows what we really do but don't talk about.

In that film about butter, they begin at a table at the cafe, and she is looking at the pancake and she is looking at him, and they start off slow, a dab of butter to begin, and soon enough they are melting the butter and pouring it over each other, and somewhere in this Marlon Brando with white hair comes in and starts to take charge.  The men with the wide jaws are always taking charge in all the best films, and when Brando is in charge of the butter, we are in very experienced hands indeed, and it's electric and visceral and gritty and it's just like goddam life, beautiful and ugly all at the same time. 

In real time, however, she is very upset, because she gets that way whenever she is beckoned from her sleep to participate in this same scene all over again, and I woke her up before there was enough butter to warrant waking her up, and it's not as confusing as it could be.  Because I know why she's mad.

"I'm mad because you keep wanting to relive this," is what she says.

"That's not true, it's not true at all," I say, and I am a liar.

"Then why am I here again?" she says.

"Because I don't know who you are," I say.  "Because I miss you," I say.  "I don't like date pancakes, and I never will, and the idea of a butter bar isn't exciting to me.  I've always liked real butter, all on its own, and at the end of the day, that's all you were and all you'll ever be to me.  Real butter.  You don't need anything else.  But I don't know who you are, and I have no idea where you went, and I am still looking for you, and quizas quizas quizas..."  I trail off, because it drives her crazy when I don't finish my thoughts.

Only it doesn't drive her crazy, she is already not paying any more attention to me.  She is texting someone here at the table, in front of the pancake and everybody, and it's cruel and absurd, and I get terribly angry about all of this. 

I am afraid suddenly that her texting at the table will remind me of the time that woman was texting that cruel little man from the hotel room, in front of him and he pretended he didn't know but he did and that makes her a little dim but I am not bitter, and suddenly I am afraid that every time someone texts anyone from now on, I will feel threatened, and get so unreasonably angry, that I might say angry things, things like, "Please don't text while my tongue is on your heart."  And that will cause no end of trouble. 

She is texting and I am trying not to relive this part of things, but it's too late, I am already stuck here, stuck with the version of her that got so very tiring, the one who couldn't focus, or decide, so entirely unlike me who has a razor-sharp consciousness and never second-guesses.  Except to wonder what it would be like to pick up the threads of her and the threads of the thing that was me, and try to weave them together again, and see if the patterns had numbers that might be worth pursuing.  It would be easier if the idea of her were more stable, but the reality of her were not, because in the mind she becomes mixed into a very large and complicated one, where in the world she keeps breaking up into pieces of the whole, and the whole is the only thing that is worth pursuing and entirely impossible to hold, so much so that at the end of the day, there is only that thing that wants to want, a drumbeat that plays a very particular song, and that song was the one he heard, not for the first time, but it was a very clear time, when he heard it while there was a date pancake and a face of someone that he knew he would love for a very long time.

Fabric breaks open whenever there is a word like love trying to work its way to the front of the tongue, and fabric breaks in spectacular ways, always making room for other ways of covering and other fabrics, it is not jealous, nor greedy, nor gluttonous, broken fabric is the cream of the butter on the pancake of the world.  And in this moment I have never been so far from all the things I care about in the world, and never so close, because it's always blinking back, on the other side of a very thin cloth. 

(more cafe scene coming just you wait)

under the line (afterthought)

She, of course, was not who she thought he was.  For that matter, he was not even close to who he thought he was, and everyone is always wrong about all of these things in spectacularly misguided ways.  While he was meeting her in other forms, she was meeting him in other forms, and there were moments when he thought he had gone back in time to her, and times when he thought he had moved forward, and this is what sparked the idea that maybe we don't have to live in the fixed points of the present, but that these things happen simultaneously, and concurrently, and repeat (sometimes for the lessons, but more often than not for the force of the repetition that makes life resemble the drum, the drum of the tongue, the drum of the heart, the drum of the heart on the tongue).  And the trick was to learn how to stay in the present while traveling through time.  As if a life were an act of time-travel, based on repeated patterns and the moments of their recognition.  Like recognizing a matching scar on a lover's body.  This has happened before, and this will happen again, and the meanings of the rhythms will only become clear when the lovers go back to the beach and begin with a conversation about the cold night and the moon waiting underneath the clouds for someone to follow the clues.

the part beneath the line

And another season starts to wind itself into the ground, like it were returning to the center of the world, like the dwarves who are preparing, making careful gnawings on the walls of the world, because that time of reversals is very close, and they do tend to increase in chaotic occasional sporadic bursts on the way from here to there.  However.  It’s not for us to know why we are stuttering and the milk and the blood of another time keep running down the sides of our faces whenever we meet the new and perfect lover.  It’s not for us to know why there are more forces working toward nailing the chains into the wall by the wrists of the living, and why there are fewer and fewer with each passing generation who are willing to speak on behalf of the living.  Fucking phantoms all of them, living a life already in the grave, as if these things were already decided.  Not for me to understand why the living are acting out their version of what they think is death, perhaps capturing something to make it still, a cat playing with a mouse on the edges of the waves of history, and history is always at the center of things.  It’s not for us to know why she can’t wake up, or why she can’t go back to sleep.

This is the exact kind of morning, though, where it’s apparent that there is something about to begin, and if I were in my right mind I would do what I can to warn the living that it can’t be for the best, not in the way that anyone can conceive it, and for those who understand that the underside of things is where the diseases start to grow, and where things begin to decay, and where things are cut away down to the bone, to that point where we are all on the verge of death or birth, that’s when and where the dividing line between the best and the worst makes itself terribly clear, and the dice falls always to one side and not another, but it falls because it is pulled, that is to say, gravity has everything to do with it, and we have moved through time and space to make things fall the way they fall, not that we control gravity, but we affect it. 

Enough so that. 

The verge between this kind of birth and this kind of death is always approached at the same speed as any other verge, and I don’t know if I can speak so clearly about approaching verges, not here, not like this, not with all these people watching. 

Enough so. 

That the things we do in the morning have threads that repeat in the evening.  It’s reaping and sowing, and the lesson is not necessarily one of karma, but more like: you just fucking watch yourself all right.

On this verge between seasons, between creeping and stowing, the insides of all of our jackets are lined with needles, and the blood on our chins is not appropriate for public places.  And it’s at this verge that history herself does become visible, that gray cat made of dust that you see out of the corner of your eye whenever you are in a particular shade of grieving, history is visible, and this is that time of year.

I would give more than these teeth and this marrow to love her again for the space of an afternoon, but here is where I have to remember something entirely important, that is, history is that kind of lover who always has a razor inside her mouth, and stands at the edges of the playground with large eyes that shine like a baby animal, and she shakes like a baby animal, the kind of cold that only the oldest bones know, and she makes you want to hold her and make her feel safe, but before you get there, there is other work to be done.  And the worst of it for her is that every time something starts to turn the insides of her locks upside down, that shining point of slipperiness where one decides to slide down into the world of the senses and surrender to the falling, that’s the very same point when the blood comes trickling down the sides of her mouth.  At that point everyone in the room understands that it is much too late to apologize.  And that this last earthquake has only just started, and the waves that are lining up for the shore are doing so in successively darker shades of red. 

So while on the one hand I understand that it is  kind of comfort and assurance to the living to say kindly things like, “The small things, they don’t really matter,” in truth, they really fucking do matter, and it’s much heavier than that, and entirely worse than anyone could imagine.  At the end of the day, when those men who lived their lives in suits and are now dying so all alone because they behaved like total bastards every day of their existences, when they look upon the one or two people who can still stand to be in the same room with them, and say, with one of their wasted and dying breaths, “I didn’t sweat the small stuff,” that is the very moment when the dead ones come laughing.

For two reasons:  one because their concerns were terribly petty and two because they even missed out on the details there.

It’s not necessarily necessary then to point out that most of the time spent living is an engagement with missed opportunities.  God is in the details, and the small stuff is worth sweating over.

That’s entirely neither there nor here nor anywhere, so beware, while I am entirely morose and loose enough to speak a little too freely this morning, there are entirely important developments, and it’s entirely essential to pay close attention to how and why things are starting to unfold in unfortunate directions. 

Because the story is always a love story, and there’s never any way out of that (hold on for just a moment, because that needs a qualifier, but not an excessive one, any story that is told from the other side of the grass is romantic at its roots)  ((keep in mind, further, that because of my unique position, I can eat the roots whenever I want, so I may not entirely respect the genre, and no one should unless they are trained to be that fucking stupid)  (((I am not unique, only as unique as you, but there will never be another one like you until the end of the world when the dwarf who is your double takes your place, so you just fucking watch yourself))).

All right.

The heart is a drum and the tongue is a drum, and this is a perfect morning for playing on her heart with his tongue, but it’s much too far from that kind of season.  He didn’t expect it nearly so keenly that he would wake up again so very unserenely, where that copper witch seemed as if she were kissing him from the other side of his eyes, from inside his head, like she had worked her way inside his head, and the very terrible thing is that he knew he invited her, and he prayed that she would come.  He always prays and she always comes but neither of them are awake enough to recognize that this is the way things are happening.  It’s often enough that when he thinks of her and she thinks of him there are riptides that make the waves flutter in ways that no one could have ever suspected, and the world turns on an entirely different kind of axis.  Nothing as bold as love, but another kind of lover altogether, this being the dividing line where anything might pop through the surface.  It’s never wrong to hold the tongue (except for when it is absolutely time to play it like a drum, and that time should be clear to anyone with a notion for the motion beneath the belt) and let the moment come and settle, and this is what he’s done, for so long now that his small apartment is entirely flooded over with still water that’s much too cold to live in.

He has been taking to sleeping on a rubber mattress, then, like all people might do when they are living after a flood, and even though he is convinced he slept through it, he can remember very specific things about every scar that came from it.  It’s one of the peculiar things about this generation, having been trained to consider their narrative authority questionable at best.  Their experience denies their perceived unreliability, and very much like the generation they are nipping heels with before and after, it seems to be a part of a very elaborate plot to cheat them out of something valuable. 

Knowing that you’re right about something is a curse to every righteous generation, and wondering if you might be wrong about everything is the curse that’s given to their counterparts, and it does go back and forth every time, in the same, studied measure.  The generations bounce back and forth like a metronome, and although there are some who might think it is modulating, moving faster and faster each time until there is no difference between right and left and life and death, that is not the case at all, it is always the same exact speed and frequency each time, because we are living according to energetic forces that are very very old, and nothing humans can do can change the velocity of the waves.

Except.  Except except except.  The way he thinks about her, and the way she thinks about him.

The truest love the world has ever known has been that one between half-mortals, who do not recognize the forces in each other, and assume only half about the other.  That’s why this story works so well, because of the tension.  Or perhaps it’s better to say that this is why this story is about to work, because we are about to see the tension at play, and it will be so goddam beautiful that your heart will have broken long before your eyes have taken in the words such is the power of the story-telling at work here.  So.  This morning.  He wakes up and she is scraping the insides of his eyes with her imaginary tongue, she, the kind of witch who works long distances (though not always accurately), and she, she is wanting to make his windows clear so that he can see her, and when he wakes up she is the only thing he can think about, it’s his tongue on her heart, his breath on her sternum, he wakes up smelling the smells of her skin and his breath, something unique and impossible to replicate.

So he wakes up in love, and she is gone, and the elders in the land of the living are advising him not to be caught up in any kind of longing, but the youngsters who died before their time are advising him to just love the heart and the chest and the body and the soul of that woman already, even if she is far away, because that’s all there is, and it won’t kill you, necessarily, but it very well could do the opposite, and bring you to life, as if for the very first time in this waking shaking trembling world. 

thanks for jumping

So this is the scene.  I'm being strapped into this harness thing and there is this teenage boy doing the strapping, and he's looking a little distracted, because, because for one thing I am a little taller than the last person he strapped into this.  I am also a little heavier, but not altogether too much heavier, because children eat a lot more these days in this part of the world, but that brings up the other because, and this is because I am not a kid.  My daughter is on the other side of the room, being strapped into a harness by another teenage boy, and we are about to go flying into the air.  I tell myself that I am doing this for her, so that we could be seeing each other jumping, and although that's nice, certainly nice, I know that I would be doing this anyway, because I cannot resist.

This isn't the first time I've been strapped in to something with my daughter recently.  It was less than a month ago when we were flying across a lot of space on these harnesses that are meant to keep you from falling to the ground because that's what gravity would like to do to you.  This time we're not flying across, though, we're jumping up and down, except jumping very high, as if we were out of reach of the usual laws of physics.  But just like last time, it's something that makes me very happy, as if this were something that I were missing.  On some days, it does feel like flying, but there's not enough real flight in it.  And on some days, there is this wish that I could be escaping from things.

They're not the usual things.  It's not because I need to claw my way out of a circumstance that's unbearable because of the distance that happens between lovers, and it's not because I am growing bored with doing the same things every day.  In truth, my days are all very different, and I am rarely wishing that I could be something else than in this body.  But there are so many things that I would like to change, just a small amount.

Like, the way we can't jump twenty feet in the air when we try.  Like, we can't cross through the rules of geography and time, and visit the ones that we miss the most, and bring back a souvenir from the journey (like a hotel napkin, or a flag from their country, or their smell on the inside of a shirt collar).  Like, we are not entirely immune to this decay thing that happens to everyone, it seems, and for some it moves faster than for others. 

I don't think this is where I see my daughter yet, entering into that river of time where the body decays, but it must be true in some small way.  Very recently I realized that I stopped thinking of her as a likely subject for a sequestration, where spies from the government come to take innocent children into their custody and try to barter for abstract concepts.  She is tall, tall enough to be visible from distances, and loud, loud enough to scream someone's ear to that point where it starts to ring a little bit, and wise, wise enough to know that there are always people around to help if things get uncomfortable.  So even though she is out of that, she must be into that phase that ends in something like adulthood, and there's a decay that comes with every stage, and more decay at the end, but this is still close to the beginning of the chapters that will make up the stories that make her life. 

There's an uneasy feeling I get, though, when she is flying in the air, and I see something on her face that looks like the same relief I feel, so it must be true, then, that sometimes she gets a little bit tired of all of this, in the same way we all do, but I didn't notice it on her before, so she must be changing.  I must be changing somehow too. 

I haven't wanted to freeze anything lately, not the way I used to.  Making this moment last or linger, they're just happening, and I'm participating, and there are things that I can do and things that I cannot do, and the days are rolling into each other like wolves fighting.  I see signs of things getting worse for some people I love, and some of the things I had hopes for, and I see things getting better for other things, and other people, and I would like to say that I'm just letting things happen, but it feels more like I am participating in the world while riding a motorcycle that is taking turns a little too fast.  My teeth are tight and my stomach is stretched back against the bones in my back, and the air tastes like metal, smoke, and blood.  Despite that, watching her jumping into the air is something like a perfect beautiful moment, and something about these moments with her are entirely perfect, and something about that tells me that I can pay attention to the blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs, because there are people aware of my movements, people who depend on what I do, and how I react to things.  And this moment is more important than any other, because this is the place where the dead speak to the living, and when we speak back, it starts to sound like those particular kinds of songs that can stop time.  Tonight, it's the perfect time for the living to stay on their side of the grass and the dead to occupy theirs, and wish that no one enters into the others' realm before it's time, and I'm holding my breath, because time rolls forward, and time comes to visit like gravity or death or the kind of friend who can hold you in the middle of the air with just a thought.  For just long enough to take a few deeper breaths, and let the magic that will be necessary sooner than later start to gather force between the heart and the rib, poised on the edge between falling and weightlessness.

the operator of my pocket calculator

This is the third time this month that I've decided to start looking like an old man.  It never lasts long, as long as any teenage phase, but always as ridiculous.  For some moments, I am aware that I'm at least seven weeks shy of looking like the hermit in the cartoons, and that gives me a drive that I never felt before.  It always ends the same way, though.  I am at my parents' house visiting, and they're watching television, and we"re not sure whether we should talk or watch tv quietly, so we do both, only halfway, and as a result, we never really get to hear what they're saying on tv, and we never really make out what we might be telling each other.  Someone with an important voice says something about someone important, and one of them takes this as good news, and says, "Things are changing."

"Then why are the police spraying students in the face with pepper spray?" I say.

And it doesn't matter what happens next, because I feel like a dick in a beard, like an old and angry version of Mike from All in the Family, and I have to go home and shave.

So it's inside a head like that where I find myself excavating the bottom of the ocean.  That's where I go when the mystery of the other world seems to be hiding, because usually it's hiding somewhere here, and I can at the very least hide out with the mermaids until the world above gets their magic together. 

Tonight, everyone leaves me alone.  I'm not unfriendly to the things on the bottom of the sea, but I just don't feel like talking. 

"Why don't you feel like talking," she says.

"It's been kind of a dark time," I say, before I even see it's her. If I'd known it was her, I would have tried saying it with a little more grit to my melancholy, because to me that's a little more flirty, although no one else ever sees it that way.  "I didn't think, or I expected I would run into you here,"  I say.

"Which one?" she says.

"Whichever one is more interesting," I say, because I'm not in the mood to make any of these decisions. 

"I'm just looking for a poem," she says. "I didn't mean to interrupt anything.  You look very busy.  And, by the way, you don't look as old as you're trying to look, you need at least seven more weeks."

She always knows how to read me, and that's why I like it when she's in my world somewhere.  I can't hide, and down here, it's not much time before I can decide that I don't really want to hide, but I need more time to think about all these things.

"What poem are you looking for?" I say.  Not that I'd know.

"That one you wrote for me," she says.  "The one you always talk about."

This needs a little explanation.  On the bottom of the sea, there are places where all the things that we write to each other and never send are waiting.  The poem she is talking about, however, is lost as far as I know.  I see places around us where there are many, many unspoken things, and places where there are only short notes with a few words, or maybe a drawing of something good that we wanted to happen.  I try not to spend too much time here, but on some nights, that's all there is.  Tonight, I came down here because there was a sinking sadness that pulled me here, and I didn't want to think it had anything to do with her.  I haven't seen her in a long time.  I came here because I was noticing for the first time that this life is very short, and there are important and beautiful things that happen that have a way of slipping away too soon, so I was looking for something like an anchor I could use later, when I was awake again, and the world was green and blue again, and the magicians were back to work after the holiday.

But she caught me.  Because this is also the place I go to write new poems, and they're not always about her, but she's always somewhere in them, because since I met her I can't put anything into the mouths of sirens that don't have some piece that reflects her.  I'm still not convinced that I came down here to think about her, but she appeared, so I have to take this as something that someone had planned.

"I didn't come down here to see you," she says.  "Don't get any ideas."

"I'm not here to see you, either," I say, because it sounds like it might sound good, even if it's petty, and especially even if by now it's no longer really true.

"You did something new to your tongue," I say.  Because it's only polite to make conversation with people around you.

"You noticed," she says, and when she opens her mouth, there are a thousand worlds that come spilling out.  They all have sounds from a thousand inner voyages, and I can see figures in there that I don't recognize, and a thousand signs of things that I don't understand. 

"It's a very pretty tongue," I say, and that's a little too much, especially considering how much time has passed, and so I start to look for the poem, because it's easier than doing anything else at the moment.  There's a space close by, the spot where we first met each other down here, and it has some of the colors and sounds of falling in love, but I don't want to step there, because if I step there with her, then she might see all my footprints, and she might know that I've spent more nights than I want to admit visiting that spot.  So we're looking. We're both looking, and it's almost nice, because it almost feels like something is happening, and when I turn over a stone, I find a stash of papers with my name written on some of them.

"I don't know who wrote this," I say.

"I wrote those," she says, "and I keep writing those.  I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them."

Tonight, the mermaids know something we don't, and have better ways of dealing with things than we can ever know, and I'm tired of the world up there, and just want to spend more time sleeping, so I can be here, where so many shadows come and go, where there is always a rumbling in the veins, and I don't know if it comes from something that happened a long time ago, or if it's something that's going to happen, and here it's just impossible to know, because the usual rules of time don't apply.  But for some reason, this is the night where I stopped missing the home I never had.