I.

I want to say that it happened sometime, and that it involved a pillow, the daily rearrangement of bed sheets; but, more than it happening, it happened over again.  It would continue to happen over and over again, and there would be really, no real story, just the sorry vision of whatever it was that I wanted alongside the sorry truth of what never really happened.  And so, if it was June, and if it was the most beautifully blooming June, it was June only for a short while, and the strawberry moon was not there but for one night.  “What would you do,” you asked, “if on that island there our old friend were to appear, and he was merely, nonchalantly, bar-be-queing?”  I said that I would then believe what I suspected all along, that the very stitches, the very strings splicing you together would soon come undone.  I never did see that old friend again—not on that island nor anywhere else.  We continued rowing in a manner that showed that neither of us really knew how to row.  I didn’t know then, but I would come to know later why so many love songs were about bays, why they all ended so sadly.  And later, around the various cul-de-sacs, along the water’s edge, at the various fish and chip shops serving various ales, I would know too that there are certain smells that will—no matter how the cosmos rearranges itself, no matter the new scenery—never be smelled again.  (I understand Maude now and her smell machine!)  There were fish eyes and squid eyes, and the eyes of various blooming things, the eyes of the workmen watching me through your curtainless windows as I slept, the eyes of your housemate’s fourteen cats, the false eye-spots of the lunamoth the eyes of various piercing things.  (I want to say pink and flowering.)  Even when it was I coming to you, you wouldn’t stay.  I know, the poems still exist somewhere in their own weak way, but the heavy

and old video games is the availability of life.  In new games, the player can die as many times as he likes and still reach the end of the game.  The disjunction between knowing and unknowing is thus disturbed, creating a false sense of the implications of one chance and life and death in their more mortal terms.  This false finality is further confounded by the fact that medical advances have progressed at the same rate of video game advances: how many people do we know walk out of the hospital when, even just twenty years earlier, their ailment would have surely killed them?  (I remember once my little sister pausing from such a game to pray for another life.)  I remember being in a maze, embodying a big dot that would have to eat an infinite number of smaller dots—an organic being eating an infinite amount of smaller organic beings.  I remember that what killed us was ghosts, and we could never enter the houses of the ghosts.  I remember we would have to flee them or have the power enough in order to eat them only to have them come back to haunt us.  So too do I keep spying lunamoths, a familiar sliver of an old moon, a letter I thought I had long since discarded, the dress I will never wear, a certain photograph, the sign post that spells out what never was.

Among the many various differences, I truly believed that when you mentioned bumblebee, you really meant bumblebee.  For me, the author used hydrangeas to really mean hydrangeas; however, it was really something else that was captured and wilting and then short-lived and beautiful, however fleetingly.  When March was still cold, and you could not, try as you might, get the stove fire to light, I knew how all of this already would end.  Your sorry kindling, flaming fast only to extinguish itself, remained—as did the chopped poplar—as it was.  What didn’t burn however, was another, a something else that might have or might not have been something like love.  And so, I cannot tell you how the fog and I had another dialogue—it did and did not involve you. 
            My desk was, for once, clean that spring, only because the bills (thanks to my father) had been paid, the book was finished, and the letter had been written.  You see, there was nothing more to do but clean.  And so, I could pack as wanderers do, taking everything and nothing.  (Believe me, the author used suitcases in order to mean suitcases, but what was being carried away was really something else.)  For once, that spring, my view was pristine, only because the hills were coveted by blues and greens, the book was finished, the dogwoods were like a myriad of eyes opening up towards some heaven or other, the letter had been written, and I was about to leave this valley of narrow creeks.  (And the choking wisteria, all abuzz with fuzzy bumblebees, what a maneuvering in order to get past it and to my apartment door.)  It was best to leave before the unfurling height of spring, before the sultry air of summer.  Your stone cabin (and here the author means heart) and the various dripping flowers, the train in the distance departing, departing