Wednesday, June 30, 2010

take the cake

She is a mystery, but it isn't the puzzle that you ache to unwrap. She is a glory, but her halo is not the radiance you wish to embrace. All the tricks of language, all the perceptions of intelligence, all the storied actions of art and creation-- they are the icing, not the cake. Flesh and breath and the lingering touch. She is a storm you can not wait to weather. She is the cataclysm upon which you would wager this life.

Every place has its lamentations, every bone is grown upon riddles. The tangled tales, the haunted hopes, she arrives amid a tide of ghosts and tears. She paces the worried hallways, she feathers her fingers along the lonesome walls. You trace her steps, and savor her stride. You prize her presence, you attend to her limits. Her arrival is your only destination. Still you go nowhere.

There is the night, and there is this garden. There are these dry tides of a constant wind seeping through the screen. Beasts sleep and dreams idle, her wanderings a fixed point in this beguiling blank. The moon in the leaves, the possum on the porch. She is not a problem ever likely to be solved. An unkind end, professed annihilation. A mouth full of cordite and spent brass. That kiss you would kill for, bound to be the last.

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