preludeandfugue:

i think you have been thinking of death for a
very long time.

i saw your windows last night: the light was bleeding out
of them until very late, and when i came up the stairs
to your door i could hear your voice terribly soft in
the interstices of the floorboards and door.

no one in this house has spoken since the funeral, or
at least not face to face, not in the ways that say
yes we are human and yes there is air in our
lungs and a heart beating somewhere under all this cracked
skin. we are all very cold. it is summer so we left the
windows open at night and when the storm came with
its lightning litanies it split us open as it did the old
oak tree. on the bathroom mirror someone has written
nonsense words and i think we are all
practicing our smiles.

once upon a time, goes a fairytale. once upon
a time we all had time to say our goodbyes. once
upon a time i was the one who died and didn’t
have to search for words or stumble over the
lord’s prayer, half forgotten, half lost.

i’m sorry, i want to say, for looking away and for
standing like this behind your door and listening,
in silence, in hopes the words you are unraveling in
the dark are the ones i’ve been searching for.

i’m scared of everything, i say, and you
ask why, then, aren’t you running?, you do not
understand that it’s just
not done, that the wolf is always faster, no
matter which path you take, no matter
how carefully you do not stray. all that
lies between your heart and his
teeth are the questions you ask, which could go on
forever, darling, let me keep talking to you, let
me do all these meaningless things, let me shuffle
around with my hands like strange broken birds
that long to land but never can, let me cry over boys
in books and girls in songs and people i have never
seen except through a screen, let me tell the wolf a
story that is really a question and also a confession, that
says i do not think i can be forgiven and do not eat me
alive and please let me keep breathing, please walk
toward the sound of my voice, i am here, i am,
please tell me i really am.

you know i’ve yet to break a single bone
in my body, but i could spend an hour
just tracing the scar that cuts
the symmetry of your knees.

i say a lot of things, but i only mean
half of them. you should probably
know that, too.

i wake up, i go work, i sleep, i wake up.
i saw a boy standing opposite me on the
other side of the tram tracks, who wore
blue and so reminded me of you. he
was handsome in a lost
kind of way, looked
like he wanted to bleed but didn’t know why.
i went to work and forgot the shape of his
face. i thought i’d made him up, unless
maybe that was you.

there’s a lot of things i don’t write down, that
perhaps i should: how
one night the shadows of trees was so
stark on the ground, like fingers pointing me
home, for example. or
how you should have been
sleeping but instead stood at the window
long past moonrise, waiting for someone
who wouldn’t come, i think
that’s important too.

you know i talk to a lot of people, but
more than half of them are (probably)
imaginary.

i said the sunlight through the dirty bathroom
windows gave you bruises in yellow and blue and
you were short-haired and smiling, you were
almost beautiful, saying
it does, your hands trailing down your flanks,
saying do you think i
should get real ones and i said
fuck, i don’t know, do you?

you know i wish sometimes your smile
wasn’t the same shape as mine.

I was born in the war, she says, and
everybody laughs at her.

Last year it was adoption; she’d lower her
voice and whisper My parents are not my
parents, and look over her shoulder like she
expected someone to come after her for saying it.
She had her father’s chin and her mother’s feet
but I never told her that, because

you see, there was something about her hands that
was more bird than girl, and her skin sometimes
shone transparent, blue veins skittering like the
fragile lines along stained glass windows and
dragonfly wings.

The year before that she said I’m deaf.
I’ve been reading your lips all along.
There was something of willows,
in how she bent her neck; the others were
laughing at that, too, and she didn’t flinch, just
walked off, her eyes closed and her heart tucked
away, like someone I could almost trust, like a truth I
could maybe learn to believe in.

I can see ghosts, she says, every other week-end,
and flicks the flashlight off. In the darkness her hands
move along the rhythm of her words. This is
no longer Jane’s room; the branches tapping at the windows
are dry bones and the floorboards suddenly hold
secrets. We reach for one another, and the other girls whisper
She lies so well, giggle a bit desperately as the stairs
whine under someone’s foot and the door creaks open.

I love this weather, she says, sitting under my window
soaked and half-drowned in rainwater. I pull it up and let her in, and
she shakes herself like somehow the sadness could fall away.
How’s the war going, I ask, and she smiles at me through the
the shrapnel glinting inside her eyes. Same old, she says.
Lots of collateral.

She’s dripping all over my floor, so I get her a
towel. Will your parents mind, she asks, and I shake my
head, no, and do not ask Will yours?
Say my name, she asks, and I do, and she
says, Again, and Again, and Again, and I’m trying
to keep my voice steady while she cries, and I kiss
her, very gently, when she asks if
maybe I could please hit her.

they said a storm was coming in, but when
we got back home the sky was still so
bright our eyes teared up. this is a strange
season, where we are held between wind
and weather, and the sun too fickle for
us all. yet this our country; another.

my dusk used to be my mother’s
dawn, but now—
i like to say timezones conspire
against us, and it is only half jest.
i wonder what time i should call—
will it be night here, and morning already
there? in the night i think—calculating time as
expressed in distances—i now live in my parents’
past. in a distant room a clock is ticking.
whose time is it, that it counts down?

do you know? i had forgotten
there was such a thing as autumn,
and the first leaves falling are expatriates, adrift
and alone.

i should have remembered; red
has always been one of my colors. it is
difficult. i am thinking of
monsoons. my mind lingers on
the soft scent of jasmine flowers.

it was still summer when i cut my hair.

my brother has bonethin wrists, and in this at least we
are alike.

past a certain point separation is to be calculated not
in distance but in time; we stretched it like dewdrops on
spiderwebs at dawn, and all of its facets shone,

and

there is something to be said
about a sun setting on us both at the same time,
though dusk falls late here where the hills wait for
night like hands cupped to the sky during a drought.
yesternight a waltz came to me in the dark, creaking and
whirling and grinning like a pair of skulls on a puppeteer’s
strings, weaving in under the door between echoes from
the living room TV.

my brother has bonethin wrists and fingers like a pianist’s,
and for a minute under the kitchen lights he looked
like he had so many of them, fives and ten and even more,
as his hands rose and dipped like incense smoke over the
worn ivory keys of his new accordion, and the waltzes he’d
learned all by himself while so very far away swung outwards
from that red instrument on his chest, toothed and grinning, to
rip apart the spidersilk of my sleep.

my brother has bonethin wrists, and in this at least we
are alike.

past a certain point separation is to be calculated not
in distance but in time; we stretched it like dewdrops on
spiderwebs at dawn, and all of its facets shone.

there is something to be said
about a sun setting on us both at the same time,
though dusk falls late here, where the hills wait for
night like hands cupped to the sky during a drought.

yesterday a waltz came to me in the night, creaking and
whirling and grinning like a pair of skulls on a puppeteer’s
strings, weaving in under the door between echoes from
the living room TV;

my brother has bonethin wrists and fingers like a pianist’s,
and for a minute under the kitchen lights he looked
like he had more than five as his hands rose and dipped
like migratory birds over the worn keys of his new accordion.

you have always been a handsome boy, laughing glad and
golden under the afternoon sun or stumbling sheepish and smiling
by the stairs to the kitchen, joy dancing out of your skin and
water dripping down like molten silver from your hands;

last summer we lost your name to the placid breeze, so we
called you robin-red and teased the hawks out of their nests;
your hair caught the light and trembled like fireflies at night,
and we ran after you to hear you shout at the sky:

your voice rose up like a waterfall thundering backwards,
and it was a victory over time and space. later we walked
home and blew bubbles of soap into the crisp evening air,
waved them goodbye and watched them drift away.

there were rainbows from the water we’d put in the sky,
and smaller ones swirling at your fingertips, soap-slick
and wet and, like you, beautiful. it was summer and the
colors danced over your arms and the sun never set.

oh you with eyes like spring rain and a mouth like autumn
leaves, oh you quicksilver and swallowflight suspended in
a drop of morning dew; with a name like the trickling of streams
on washed stones under the sun, oh, you. how i miss you.

He only ever really looks at your wrists: says
there is something terribly delicate about the
angles they make, thinks perhaps he could
immortalize them through a shimmering collage of
stained glass, and sighs when you move without
asking; follows them with his eyes, as though they
were some exotic birds heading for the exits.
You must remember: he is a collector. He longs
for a mirage that would accept to stand still. He
wants the new sheen of bright things to dull over;
he has his books, he says, and will never be
alone. It will take more time still for him to realize
that someone else lives within these gilded halls;
that there is a heart humming not so far away from
the statuesque lines of those fingers and wrists: that
you are not simply an almost perfect assemblage of bones.

To those people who refuse to envision the possibility of
perpetual motion, I only dream of showing you.
                        I cut you open, do you know? When I
close my eyes you are lying under the knife and smile, as I
            reach between the lips of some clean scalpel incision and
start tracing circles against the wet nests of your lungs;
your ribs and pleura and capillaries thrum, and
                                                                       somehow you
                        are bleeding, and somehow I
smile back at you, while blue and red runs roughshod over
the traffic lights of your ventricles and the stop signs of muscles
and epidermis to crash, drunken and mad, against my hands.
            And then yours rise, and grasp them; you are
                                   smiling, your teeth like red windows and
your mouth like a doorway, and you stand; and with my
            hand still in yours you walk off the operating table, trailing
heat and blood and light like this was only a necessary pause, like
there were more beautiful places still to walk away from.