confession/requital

memory of: the sky did seem bigger, i always thought. yes, the old masters, i understand, i understand, their clouds were true, their clouds are truer here. and i remember the night-time tightness in my legs from long days of walking all day and then sitting for three hour lectures, sometimes back to back for six hours. in the many centuried buildings where the rooms were white with big windows and mirrors and too drafty to heat up right. in the beginning, i didn't understand anything, in the middle only pictures, in the end it was all just new names for the same things as before, more sinister for being so familiar, more sinister for being another wall built up around everything, shielding everything with new names like the old names shielded them before.

and the many textured green of the countryside as the train sucked through it, me seated with my back to the destination to watch it all stay still as i was sucked away with the train. your mother lived in a sea of sunflowers, in a sea of green, and i still loved you then. we'd fuck on the train and then i would breathe hot breaths on the window watching all the green go by.

and now, it's funny, i remember so well that desperate feeling and know it better by its being gone. and all the other feelings are the same. we build up the edifices that separate us from everything. we re-name all the things, do it badly because we do it incompletely, do it worse when we believe the names and only the things we have named. in the beginning, there was the word. and the angels will only prostrate before the one who bears in him the name of things. gift from god: may it kill you forever. here is your covenant. in heaven, we don't have names. on earth, we build them high enough to block out the sun. bend yourself to your own will, then suffer the consequences.

every man you meet will lie to you at least once, more if he can. despite himself maybe. unconsciously sometimes. and then resent you for the lies you made him tell, because you are a woman and that's what women do, don't you see? what more can you do, being what you are? the hand in yours that squeezes back, you need only one woman to love you and then the fear that has been pouring in from all side like cold salt water through the rough-hewn stern, bow, etc., it doesn't matter where it's coming in from because it subsides. it trickles and pools and that warm little hand, those hot little eyes, greedy for you maybe, they burn up all that water. steamy you, with your justification for yourself, justified in the form of this quick moving body that heaves and is dying imperceptibly now, but faster later, this deep sleeping body with thick lunged breathing and nonsense talk on the pinkest lips ever, proves your point: i deserve to be here. just look at her.

so maybe it's worse when she goes, maybe you need to cinch in your grip a bit tighter, let her name you a little longer as the man who gives names to everything, but mostly to himself. let her lie under your dry hips and be named by you and forget all her other names. let her name you in shame or impunity or pity even, it doesn't matter. i am here and i deserve to be, you think. and she squints her eyes into the sun, looking away from the you now, breathing deep into her stolen chest, her appropriated ribs, her stolen everything under the sun. she can't even look at you and is not even guilty,
nothing can justify a woman.


they talk about things i don't know: love and honesty and about the things that mean the most being the ones you forget or don't even understand until years later, but i'll never forget how disappointed in me you were that day and i won't lie i didn't even know what to think then as the half rain half spit down and half didn't and i didn't even walk you all the way to the train station.