Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Note from somewhere to someone

The next evening when I returned home I found our vessel’s walls had blanched slightly whiter through the daylight, and while I was away you’d let your body into public pools where sun would kiss you and make you warm.

The present idea that you would look more yourself with the hair cut up around your ears, the shorn ends that much closer to your brain.

While with the stored light still coming off you in our blanched home we this time left through doors at separate ends, turning to look again at one another slowly, and smiling, and with the intent that tonight we would be apart but not forget.

And where at a spot among those noise-sunk houses, I found you in again a different form, among a group of people I had also surely known once but could not herein recall. Their faces far-off surfaces even in nearing, where along a slope of mud between the houses we gathered on cracking concrete to watch the speeding cars, come hurtling in their fury from some nearby ruptured and unrestricted interstate. The cars, they flew off the mud gorge one by one, each one behind the other not seeing the one there just before them flying off again into a cup of nowhere even you (vague in that body) or I or all our others could not see or know or name.

Each car with its windows steamed up. We watched them go and smiled.

Here, though I did not think about the man with black teeth, I know he must have been nearby. Perhaps in one of the many cars decompiling, or the mouth from which the cars or mud had come.

Perhaps inside the body of one of those I thought I’d known then, as I never took the time to check their eyes.

And when David came to stand beside us I saw he carried his guitar, a silver stringed thing with blonde body that he had learned to play by holding up upon the air. With his eyes he made the strings sing, the instrument stiff-armed out before him as a shield.

The song was something even then I knew I would not remember when we left, though in its touching of my body, through my ear coils, I could feel the water in me gunned, the cars passing David often in the mud by inches and his arms still straight out above his head.

I believe Peter was there in his long hair and his slow grin, though you have not met Peter and by then you (the you worn in me) were not part of the crowd there I recall.

You through your own door perhaps with your own me or in another mind in full.



That would be the only section of the evening I’d hold in me when again I went to leave the house.

Where in the day the days last less long every hour we are alive.

Finding my body often wanting for the feeling of the mud room, to remember the sound from the guitar⎯but from here not remembering how I’d found my way there, and wondering what had while I was gone become of you, though when I saw you next, for just a second, in another building, I did not think to ask.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Whomever that some wom is, I am sure she is pleased. This is simply beautiful. I don't think I've ever read anything like this from you before. Of course I have not read everything you've written. Maybe everything I have not read is exactly like this.

Ken Baumann said...

read this while listening to this:
http://blog.noahkalina.com/post/177272155/the-antlers-sylvia

it worked/got me reeeaaaalllly sad

this is great, blake

BLAKE BUTLER said...

thank you didi and ken