Bestrewn th' Scruffy Laminated Likenesses

    "Getting kinda old to appreciate new things with openess."  
    "It's just one night, for old time's sake! At the college bars? How 'bout it?"
    "I stopped going there about a quarter decade ago."
    "Why?"
    "That's when the girls started to be the same age as my friends' kids."

Why did I say 'a quarter decade ago?' What pretension.  The quest for the cool word, quiver, like a bow, or my heart catching its breath. What quagmire of digressions, quietly forgotten in the current of constant change. Truths are prisons. Change is truth.

Truth is I'll never be from here, and yet it's the subject of all these recent photographs.  Subjects elude and backgrounds elapse and what worth the hurrying man, and what value, at what cost? Further back here's one of us in Oregon, so far away and so long ago and so hard to believe that I actually don't believe it.

    "I don't remember that."
    "We went for that conference."
    "Conference? Are you sure?"
    "Are you calling me a liar?"
    "No, I'm calling the reliability of my memory into question."

Here's a snap of a pole tiny boy (who was me) and a girl (who was waiting.)  It proved intolerable. The waiting, the ill-defined parameters.  Ode to th' love I've laid astrain, the breaking apart like sticks of chalk.  Just thought I'd walk there and whistle. 

In thinking about Massachusetts and the other skins I've shed; My pale body delighted in dark thresholds, my voice softer than before as it sang expectantly. The varieties of enchantment are best hinted at through song (the birds' secret).  

    "Not enough breasts."
    "What?"
    "No, I mean, they're a great draw if you put bust 'em out up front and center."    
    "What charms we set aside."
    "No, it — It builds mood. Sets the stakes."
    "Neither music nor imaginal duplication, but division. Division, I tell you."

Here's one of fried trout and, turn the page, trembling shadows.  Under the streetlights, under the moonlight. The night represents the safe haven for secret dreams, of course. 

I say of course because you knew that. You're so smart. Of course you recognize the shorthand for broken hearts and longings.  I squint outside at the whole country as she slumbers. Have you used your darkness well? Well? Have you?

    "Fig 11."
    "Windwhipped and recalcintrant. Cloistered in his defeated boat called Victory."
    "The ships have names?"
    "No trace of her left. She became the winds she sailed..."
    "...and today some say, in that restless wind you can still hear her song. That's beautiful"

A closed book. An unclicked link.  An unscrolled feed. The truth may lay there in one of the innumerable horizontal planes of uncertainty, of longing, of...

... how strange and disjointed it is to be conscious in the world as compared to the concrete misery of, say, fear, or the unwritable impulse.  I may not be from here, but here I am, and you can't see it but I'm smiling, in italics.

 "but Nabokov laughed as he spat"
    -Bonnie Auslander