as far as the world I walk
with my codified grief
and dead conjectures
i met my first love
at the vending machine
in the mental hospital
i remember the bramble blackberries
we escaped through
the low branches of rotting apricot
the field lined with machinery
into what they called freedom
the cabbage smell of the town
greeted us
the codependent nation
*
my first love left me at
my near
death
falling by the side of a
suspicious ditch
he left me
what flashed before me was
the life of someone else
the otherness with its surfaces
the flat continuousness
*
i held back in my freedom
let my teeth gnash together
when I spoke
i was freed to be
a spoke in the wheel but where
was the wheel twirling me
i had to press myself
deep
into the bright
colors of freedom
had to press myself into them
not to be captured by
vertiginous fields
had to let the humid
responses of
otherness
lead me to languor
*
started living a life
with backdrops of
deodorant commercials
to avoid the rotting
flesh
had to pick solutions indecipherable from
degrees or workshop credits
had to live
a life of
imagined horizons and road signs
symbolic with people
face the enemy cried the dark inside me
i never listened
*
i was an indentured servant to history and mishaps
to photographs hanging on the wall outside the closet
*
the water was the question I failed to ask
i was having dinner with a man
and forgot to ask that question
there was news of wells being poisoned then
by
the enemy
and i searched for him
saw him everywhere i went
the waiter who served us met me after
i powdered my nose ditched my date
it was late but I was ready for another
story to change me
tall
shaved head
lugubrious expression he took me
to his apartment
his servile hands served me well
lead me to ask my most original
question
what am I doing here
but this waiter became a marriage
counselor later
became my husband though
he divorced me left me without
children or marriage
looking back I recall the exact
moment he decided
to hate me
it was a twitch in the shoulder of his
blade
growing stronger
he no longer let me
touch him no longer let
his coat keep him
warm
but let it rest heavy on his shoulders
like our marriage
creating a firm boundary for the skin
he was within himself i watched
his disintegrating gestures turned
to mannerisms then to habits
then to twitches
for a while we saw a friend
of his
a marriage counselor who also lived in
suburbs near us
he was thinner than
my husband and i leaned towards him leaned
with a sense of therapeutic need and sobriety
though as i said he was thin
his solutions
were indistinguishable from my husband’s
though he spoke of things
like love
his stature could not hide the face
of his miserable wife who was
a lot like me
deciphering the face of the wife
i saw myself in another
though by then I could not use
the word friend in a language
other than my own
*
there were no sell-by dates
no written chapters to revise
his disappearance just happened
imaginary vapors of
his once-lover appearance
though sentries in such cases are always
waiting
such isolation
freezes the body
the hunger is enormous
*
there is a terrible lack
of mail for me now
no invitations
no greeting cards
greeting me
just a generation of withering
yellow flowers in my garden
and who would take my body now
that is the other original question
I might ask that and
what am I doing here
originally published in "Sawbuck"
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