I don’t want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails
at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street
in any direction is directionless. I’m beginning
to think the concreteness that I seek in theory is waking
each day, walking along a tree-lined pond. Today, approaching
a fallen aspen, my child turns to me and asks, do you want to live
forever? Beyond April, trees are wildfire. The child is a stranger
I held in a blood museum once. Our narrative,
one of proximities. I like to imagine I knew aloneness
before I was occupiable. Reterritorialization: a migration
from within desire (or do I mean language?)—reality’s jumble of tenses
& imagined borders. Something must give. I have everything I thought
I wanted, still I’m incurably lonely in the way of capitalism
or an abandoned child. In the only photo I have of my dead
father, the image refuses identity. Whom I can or cannot remember
I murder or save. To stay alive, even the dead must endure
temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean
a refrain. Its vows. Without her child, today, a young friend calls home
a chapel of wet grass. The black trees. Absence. And what
of the symbolon? That unpronounceable name
transmitted as a promise that connects touch
to a touchable silence. Sometimes, I think pain is a world
I am too tired to carry. A creek, creeklight. The bee
crawling on a rope in the basement I crushed
this morning. Lest, beestung on a Tuesday in some future
June, I arrive. Last words: the rain falling through the child. My body,
failing to imagine me. Asking to be known. What is death
if not a dream of distance? I wish I could see my child
to the end of their life and not see them die.
