There was that last, impassioned moment, we tangled there, my hands following yours, some tender invocation finding your flesh so warm beneath my touch. That last hungry groping embrace has been the shape of most of what I am missing, watching the radiance of this winter world. My cold hands fumble as I play at fire-keeper, some ancient tribal ache hinting at my blood as I sit and smoke. I think of your bare hips and shoulders as the rain sets a glisten upon the twilight, a whisper, both intimate and alien, some gossipy prophecy just out of grasp.
Dusk was there, almost as soon as I looked for it, pressing the light from the landscape. Shift changes are seldom ever elegant, west and east inverted from the beginnings of the show. There was a dozy poetry, bitten by the cold, choked by the cigar that fumes and sputters, smoke and cinders upon my lips. That clarity gained in measuring the self against the season, holding onto that last fire at the edge of camp, watching as the world enveloped all sight. That lucidity when the reason for the feeling is revealed, set free from the confines of translation. Knowing things best when they are about to fade away.
The rain falls, distant and steady, shimmering an armor of fluidity through the street. Cars spatter their wake with shadows and plumes, separate shares drifting through the weather. I lean towards the ground, lean forwards, towards the falling rain. Smoke curls from my fingers, smoke is pressed fleetingly against my teeth and lips, smoke rises and abates. This is the land without any bothered promise, this is the year when all oaths are kept, silence the only surety allowed of this latest ancient flag. Every map full of forgotten perfume and border markers no longer acknowledged by law. Every map made obsolete the moment it unfolds, flat and inaccurate and stunningly small. The rain just another river flowing through this absence that fills every night.
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