Scene: She put her money where her mouth was: dread marks in her underwear and a belly full of rent. Still, he crackles like soda spilled on a sofa: “You can’t have too much nothing,” he says and winks, weary as the world.
She: In the spring, the ditches are ripe with cardboard and ruined cabbage: the style of desire particular to our era. I sought a prophylaxis against sorrow: an aperture, a tendon wrapped in wax paper. I point to my language when my language fails. The valley laced with ropes of hay and pasteurized lilac. Unlikely beings who seem more alive, not less, when images are made of them. Would it be a trespass, then, to say that they look tellingly radiant in the flesh?
She: “I realize there is a spaciousness inside me,” said a woman on the bus. Then, “What I ask of language is a very dusk seam. A fence, inanimate and nervy.” I conceived a violent to desire to be ill. I tried to purge myself of absence by drinking large glasses of water. Still, at the fulcrum of desire, I open into a formal feeling: sweet and particular, a logical architecture.
She: I used the language of desire as I found it. It is luscious with its legs together, luscious apart:
a wedge
of wet
tissue
in the small
of the back,
through which
the poem
asserts
its brute
geometry.
It is a laundry for abstraction, full of body and pointing past it. It is a vegetable substance gathered in the blank places and rotting. Being so complex and vascular, touched in the bower of bone, it is the give in the crotch of an old pair of jeans, the secret remnants of lilac and gum in the folds of the couch. It is the ache, or its architecture. It settles in the hollow parts of things and yanks them back: the past with its tendons in a twist.
[He is the hardness in hearing, the drag in time. He mutters to himself, “Whatever. Nevermind.” He rises from the couch and preps his wound — whatever it is — for work.]
