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

Purblind Grotesquery

There was a sweet suite advertised.
                I think it said honeymoon
but it might have said holiday
                I said
                                Hey let us leave soon.
                “Lettuce?” she asked. 
“Let us,” I say “pray
                I am ready”  to go there. My back pack packed.
 
And so we go, blind
                into the night. 
                                I roll-down
                                                the
                                                steam-y
                                                                win-dow
                                and say Joan! I say,
                (not her name)
“the darkness sur-
                                rounds us, go faster!” I say
 
going a little faster,
                                the little white car in the big black night. 
                                                                                We were that car and it was us. 
                                                It's true.  You will become what you are meant to become
                                and we all become who we are.
 
                                                Purblind Grotesquery is the title of this poem
                                                about being
                                in that car,
(where not-seat-belted's an adjective) that night,
                too late but better late than
never “aw hell we won't be late for supper the way you're
                driving
we'll be late for Christmas!” I say, and take over.
                “Let's watch a movie,” she
                                                says.  Bobby.  Was that her name? She names one.
                “I hear it's a good one,” she says.  “You'd like it.”
I am Nietzsche's birds, I think.  I thought we were going to a hotel, I tell her.
                I like it when geese are in season
                                and at twilight, desperately trying to find a place near
                                                the water to land for the night.
                                I like the complimentary soap they give you (fine-less) in hotel bathrooms
                “Okay for
                christ's sake look lettuce watch a movie,” I say.
 
 
 look
                out where yr going! she hollers and
 
I don't even know when tomorrow is
though
                What wrong stellefaction?
                What wrong two more beer?
                What wrong with flowershapes in montage photography?
                What wrong a distant planet settled for the manufacture of egg mcmuffins?
                What wrong a child,
                                told for the first time at 18 that his mother loves him
                                                Who'd listen?!
                                That what wrong.
                What wrong the hump and rupture
                                boys
                                spitting syllable seeds all over the sad August dugout.
 
These things I remember as the car turns,
                                in the air
                                                spinning
                                                                spin
                                                it doesn't matter that
                                I am turning
                the wheel or that
she is screaming in slow motion
                upside
                                down
 
                We are
                                this car,
                                                bound to each other like
                                                                life and death inextricable.
                                                                                And what does it matter
                                                                where we was headed?
                                                What wrong not knowing?
                                We was headed there together, I believe
                I believe we was headed there
together.