mondays without rest

Now you�re looking at me with a dark sort of tenderness. I am trying to decipher your glances and split them into portions not unlike lunar phases, to line them out and begin to understand the currency of smooth stares that build beneath the sheath of your eyelids. You�re tracing the wood lines in the table before us with the tips of your fingers in a way that reminds me of being young, but I can�t seem to place the how of it, the methods by which your steady, fluid motions unfold lost youthful days and the mystery of the ways in which you turn your head my way. It is so hard to tell what you are thinking. You are more difficult to understand than dead languages. I�m watching you so carefully, because I know no other way and sometimes, when your head slants toward me, up from your skin carvings into the wood of the coffee table, I catch your eyes while they simmer, a kind of simple questioning in them. I have told you I adore you. Your face turns downward and a smile spreads from the moist beginnings of your lips, in the careful, god-like center of your face, and moves outward to find the ovals of your ears. I pretend you are thinking about me, how much you adore me, but I know that pretending is only so simple a notion as any free-thinker will allow. You are capturing me more every instant, and binding me with long noodle chains which I love to be sedated with. Downstairs the music floats into the street, resting beneath the streetlights, lining itself up with the gentle curves of the road and I watch as you move to follow it. I am finishing the last of a drink and you are not feeling well. I am smiling at you as you move away from me. I can feel the adoration of you in the softest urges of my stomach, in the star-strung corners of my lungs, where all precious airs come in and give me rest from breathlessness. My friend, the strange dark beauty to whom my own blood has taken such a lush liking is looking at me with questions in her eyes: she is wondering if I feel alone tonight. I am trying to answer it for myself, within myself and the answer is fleeting, however the cards turn. I sometimes seem to lose my step when walking through the gardens that line the inner portion of my mind: lost in orchards where only the roundest of citrus grows and the trees stretch to give shade to anyone beneath them. This is the way of great trees, great motions, sincerity.

Someone is turning on the lights, but I am back in the shadowed area on the sofa chairs, feet on the coffee table, still trying to finish the last of this drink. My friend is going home with the closest to me of them all, and I am trying to arrange things for him to have a few minutes of straightening time before we retire and I leave her feet padding on his doorstep. He has left a few minutes ago. I am wondering where you�ve gone and what I can do at any instant to ease your suffering. You are so often a mountain of sufferings, but so beautiful, graceful in your applications of words to the wind. I can only presume you are outside.

I look at my friend to see her thinking through, like rail-trains the events to come yet for her as the night fades to morning. There are so many. She has them scaled out, lined out, listed in her mind, a careful order of things to happen, a prophecy by sheer weight of desire: molded out of years of yearning, barely: tonight are the thrustings to replace the ancient aches.

I am imagining your wanderings: down sidewalks, gathering air into your lungs, hearing the sway of music in your ears, thoughts spinning from leaning arm to leaning arm in your memory. I see, behind my eyelids, you are sitting on the steps beneath us, my mind is wrapping cellophane arms around you�you are the greatest of my adorations. Your footsteps are stark, and your breaths even out into the air before you. You are following your breaths down side streets, across parking lots, through airways. You are remembering other times you�ve been here and who you were with, what you were thinking. You are sick to your stomach. I imagine you placing a hand on your stomach and one to your head, leaning slightly forward: you are always in either more pain or less pain than I am keen enough to catch onto. Hopefully, soon, in the world beyond my imaginings you will be on your way up the stairs, toward the sofa where I sit, awaiting you. Hopefully soon, I can take you in my arms and make all your bad dreams evaporate. Hopefully soon, I can walk with you down bright lit city streets in cities far more alive than this one, far more blood-thirsty, whole.

Now you�re coming up around the corner from the stairs and I can see you through the window-way cut free from the wall: the same I watched darla through just a few minutes ago, the same we watched darla through while your hand was in mine, fingers trading places, when they found odd arrangements: these are the most precious of moments. I�m watching you come over to me, sitting down and your hips brush against me and I am more in love with you than ever. I am drinking the last sip from this glass that long ago replaced the fullness of the flavor with melted ice, and taking your hand as we stand to leave. My head is spinning but I can drive okay. I always can.

While we�re driving home I catch you looking at me from the corner of your eye, I am watching the hair fall into your face: you are amazing.

2004-03-29 | 4:38 p.m.
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