we who are human

darkbloom

"we who are human"

11/11/2009

the future is neat but it's also too near

Rosemary. The gentles call to you from Hibiscus. The bare settles in. The cardinal falls through the ice--his mitre a maypole for more graceful children, who having filled their cheer with scrawn, live artfully among the mundane.

Stricken with night, the dog breaks its own leg and vomits the stars before us.

I can’t remember the songs. Only the women who sang them. And the ground they stood on. The bluster of hair as clouds moved behind them. Praying to the old logic. We who are human never wanted the necessity. The looking up in shock. The inevitable coming to this of life. When she died I followed her to the door and held her face in my wound. They say there will be more for those who are beautiful.

In our pain, we can split with old times, always breathe so logical new times. We can look there though it’s different--in the universe where the dust in which gods sleep, soak up the blood of good men, in our pain there, though it’s different--we can split with new times, always breathe so comical (near) times.

And in a jar in a place more real than the world, we saved her last breath and imagined the molecules of her lungs building a world of their own. We remember how her mouth twisted and how she fell to her knees and tried to sit in a way that only she knew, one last time to be reassured that this strangest of feelings would not be her last.

The compassion of Seneca and the kindness of noble men are spit. A dying body flails and settles on itself. The old widows know this.

I once kissed Rosemary on her earlobe, that plain of skin too small for love. But I destroyed it with love. I sat on the chair beside her. I heard footsteps on the grass outside. I placed my lips on her ear. The wind blew sheets of music onto the floor—ballade, saisir, sonata a due. She leaned down to pick them up and whispered something into her own mouth.

Darkness never came for anyone as light as she. The guardians of the soul of hell. The tight bandage of hell where wisdom sustained only itself while we descended into the lurch of dog and pig and the excess of discharge.

Rosemary only played for me in my leaving. Each moment I turned to watch, she placed her hands on her lap. I heard the music behind me as I closed the door. We thought we were too old to be trapped inside of ourselves. That too many dull blades had left their mark and revealed what was at bottom. But at bottom, we still had enough strength to hide. To move away. To think better of saying it--the one thing that would have made everything different between us.

The promises of the weak are easily kept. A picking up. A departing. A killing. Rosemary didn’t harvest the turmoil of her sex. Her spores never wandered but wilted where she died. And when she exhaled for the last time I heard the word she whispered into her own mouth: life. All of it. Every piece. Even the waste and the vile and the hate that infected both sides of her skin. But when she was young, she was beautiful. Her body glistened with the full power of what it was to be human and we wanted to forever have her in that moment before we did. That moment before we ruined her.

Entire Contents

and forever

darkbloom.net

and author.

hinge (at) darkbloom.net