Forrest Gander - As a Friend

I’m glad you never watched the light in my eyes glint out.

The smoke blown away and then sucked back into the fire.

When breath meets the reed, the air propagates an elastic wave of energy.

Like the severed head of the egret we found by the path in the pine woods, its tangerine eye open, unclouded.

Was I kicking again?

Here it says that most people walk at least three hours every day to fetch water.

In the bucket of your mouth.

Villon: arrested a dozen times. He writes The Testament between jail stints. Then he’s sentenced to the gallows. A last minute reprieve banishes him from Paris for ten years.

That was in 1463. Villon was thirty-four. No one saw him again.

So lightly you slept.

As though afraid to close the door

on consciousness. Were you afraid

of letting go?

You slept like a bird

with one tangerine eye open.

You nudged me awake

and said my name

when my legs kicked out.

Your long fingers on my stomach.

Itys, Itys, Itys.

Was I kicking? I thought I felt a baby kicking. Beloved among women .

On Rifle Range Road the summer signs are up: Tomatoes Corn Lopes Watermelon Queens .

They are fishing again from the overpass bridge.

When I drive back to our rent house

the primroses are gone.

Dead leaves blowing against the fence.

It was ages ago. Last year.

But whenever you went away, you always came back.

Not to be refused.

I sit lightly on the bed. To run my fingers through your curls.

Rubbing my tongue against prickles in back of my throat. I know I have a cold coming on.

So many hawks in the trees along the highway. You’d love their white breasts blazing in the sunset.

But to whom do I write this

if you are not coming back?

Never heard from again.

A black kitten crossed my trail.

The name of my beloved is Irrecuperable. Liar.

Albert Ayler at the Village Vanguard. The way to listen is to stop focusing on the notes, he says. Listen to the sound inside the sound.

I brushed on nipple rouge this morning.

In the evening I scrubbed it off.

Devour me.

You said, Two men are inside me. Remember

the other one. The one who did not do this to you .

The sound inside the sound.

Eternally en route.

Like a dog is ripping my heart out.

This music I cannot listen to, it makes me dizzy.

The pendulum swinging stably in space while under it, the floor is carried around by the earth’s rotation.

Yesterday the snow came, bearing no message.

The wooden chair on which you sat at your desk.

How you wrapped your shins behind the front legs.

Empty of you. Dormant.

Who was it who ravished me? Who ravaged

me?

Your thumb stroking the nape of my neck.

The membrane separating me from oblivion has ruptured.

How could you betray yourself like that?

Like that.

When the mower hits the mint.

In a sandwich bag in the freezer, a belted kingfisher.

Flew into the windshield. I thought we could bury it together .

They are wrong who tell me otherwise. It will not be all right.

Villon, shivering and hungry and still going to his desk to write, finding the inkwell frozen solid.

A cockroach on the kitchen wall. It would be blasphemy to keep house.

That mentholated C-flat of your laugh. Its

intervallic swoop into the upper registers,

your eyes closed. Tearing.

You laughed like a rollercoaster.

Completely infectious.

Coltrane’s Meditations . The dissonance leads to a modulation.

Cat got your tongue?

A downy woodpecker eyes me at the window. Each illumination, another kind of shadow.

As if the light—

A photograph of you that I pore over

looking for clues to what would happen.

What happened?

Can you whisper it to me or have you fallen asleep?

One last breath leaving the circle of your teeth.

You are strange in my dreams.

I hollow inward. I’ve gone dark as a hedge.

What a completely outrageous mockingbird.

Purgatory this place, and I, a wraith

wandering lost.

A wraith.

And this photograph I did not take of you

with your arm crossing your chest,

your hand cupping your shoulder

as though it stoppered a wound:

of whom is it a photograph now?

The house finch wiping its beak against the empty tray of the feeder.

Still walking in my socks around the house as though I wouldn’t wake you,

not letting all my weight down.

Carrying the unbearably heavy last words I said to you.

As I am going under.

Purgatory this place.

As if the light had stopped in the air.

My sweet.

When you were.

* * *

I don’t know. Until you’re emptied out and chucked to the side of the road. To anyone you have something to give. I try not to judge someone’s need, you usually can’t anyway.

*

To be consequent to my friends.

*

So the Nixons and Unferths of the world roll out of bed, they look in the mirror and see their mug in the tain. And they think they’re some kind of radiance surrounded by fog. The genius among pissants. And they think about their desert loneliness, how isolated and heroic they are, surrounded by a lesser race of men. You’ve seen that kind of man, we all have. But I’m going down with the ones in the mead house snoring and dreaming on the benches.

*

An ordinary man. With an exigency, I guess.

*

To buy a ruined mill town, say like Old Dawt in Ozark County, and invite all my friends to move in. Jobs first come first serve. Who wants to be postmaster? Who’ll run the café? The excellent company I’ve been privileged to know — I’d love to seem them fall together in some such place.

*

For my conviction and my action to be of a piece.

*

Yeah, but the ones who think they’ve got the right to speak, the gift of tongues, the kiss-my-holier-than-thou title deed and some indisputable angle on everything that’s happening — those righteous motherfuckers when you get to know them, they’re hollow as an egret bone.

*

Oh, when you get down to the licklog, just to be a good friend. To be consequent to those around me. I guess I can’t see any virtue higher than that.

*

Almost all my so-called discoveries, like it or not, have come about through some kind of violence.

*

Sure, art doesn’t save anybody the way a sack of rice does. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. There’re plenty of ways of living in the world and among words and some of them are a fuck of a lot more predatory than others.

*

You’d like to think paying more attention to language might help keep you from being corn-holed by frauds. To die for your country, a lot of Americans heard that and they stood up and saluted. But what it means and how it means and who is saying it and who is dying it — I’d like to think there is some hope anyway to be found in paying attention to the words.

*

To be unreflective about language, you limit the frequencies of meaning and even, I’d say, of experience. The newspaper, that’s one frequency, obsessed with selling something, an Olivieri fur coat or a story about embezzlement. Sequences of so-called facts running across our eyeballs like lemmings.

*

Remember Jimmy Cliff saying, Hero no can die ‘til last scene, man . But no one scripts their own last scene. And no one’s congruent with anything more than what they came with. I know, now and then some people break through. Take on the weight of whatever it might mean that we come to call them heroes. But maybe that happens less from looking into the horizon than from being present for what’s at hand.