visceral pagoda 1 111 I /1 1\1 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 111••• • I I N'OTX

After my years of breathing salt water, encased in a crust of saline brine, to spend my empty, carved-up days, Ilooked up, and there youwere, my girl, wreathed in red and brown, rising from a ring of sea- green out of the depths, the mother ocean of my dreams. And even though you were there with me, in the real, with those dancing eyes and that cracked egg smile, grinning golden yolk at me, I dreamed you bigger than you could ever be. And even though you touched me, and sang to me...Wo weilest du?...and slept next to me, breathing my salty air, I remained beneath the surface where the circles of refracted light can only make you look different from what you are. And even though I am pleased that you woke me, when I would have remained just a mirage, shimmering below the water, or a blue touch of St. Elmo's fire, flickering in the dusky distance, I saw something, there in the water, a reason to be cautious, the last image before I realized that I was awake. They were white, wax feathers, melted slightly at their tips, thou- of them, floating on the currents, coming together, collecting, like a -pool, in the middle of the Sargasso sea, where nothing moves. Now streaking through the dirty window, the sun strikes my face, sneaking under my eyelids. The whiteness of the glare pries them open to find you sitting at the edge of my bed, pulling your plastic hairbrush through the tangles thatyoucan't see, even thoughyou try, from the corners of your eyes. Sea-foam green cutting channels through the thickness, straightening what was not straight, you catch me, by chance, out of the corners of your eyes. Watching me watching you, you shift your weight, putting a leg upon the mattress to mark the boundary between us. This is somehow less personal, you must think. My hand finds your knee through the knotty, wrinkled folds of the bedcover that has gone unstraightened since the day I bought it. There is no sea-foam green, plastic solution for the gnarled wool of my blankets. No plastic comb to pull through the mess of my room, my days, or myhead. My hand on the morning warm skin of your knee is more like a weight than a comfort, for me, the listless heaviness of an obligation that sits on my chest andwon'tletmebreathe, won'tletme speak. Anyword leftinmeis, bynow, so afraid of your morningweightlessness, this early rising glow, thatl could never find it to speakitin the drowsy echoes of all the promisesstillbetween us, as you sit there, still in the sun, an echo of the image I first saw in you. As youmove outyour arms tobindyourhair ina golden tailbehind you, I imagine that I know why. I imagine, now, that I understand how you ...... visceral pagoda are a creature of the sun,blazing, yellow-gold, and I ama creature of the sea, pacific, aquamarine. I dream day around day inwaves the blue visions that wash over me unceasing. You are lost to your dreams only by night, and in daylight you soar in a different world. You stand and stretch, the fire-hot skin of your thigh leaving my fingers to cool in this pale sun. On your lips, only traces of the shapes I have made to remind me of all the angles in which I have met them. Looking down on me, you seem untroubled by my seeking stare. My seeing you, as you are, imagining in the reflected light that your skin is a pale shade of green, is no more obtrusive than the gaze of a wall, or a window. I can no longer communicate with a look that which I am not able to say. An entire web of connections, sentiments, and impressions atrophies, and then col- lapses. Dust of a memory, caving in. Hatejoyloveangersorrow ... removing, resttling, readjusting, empty ricochets. I remember the day we met, spent watching the sandpipers and kingfishers on a of that stuck, hand-like, into the southward- sucking of the gulfstream. Smoothwhite and gray streaks of silence floated into and out of the twisting blue-green brine, kingfishers, breaking fish-bone backs and with a gulp, off again into a newer, rising wave. The sandpipers seemed to just stand there, watching, holiday gawkers at a boardwalk carnival. The roiling, indefinite springsky conspired to upset their afternoon's amusement, but they remained. Only I sought shelter against the growing bluster. Again, I am retreating, beneath the waves now, beneath you, beneath the storm of frustration and sadness that is growing in you, that I cannot seem to take away. The hurricane of epithets and curses that you would like to fling at me in a passion to wake me from these torpid depths, like dropping a rock in a pond, will go nowhere, leaving no ripple. Because I cannot speak, you are left without a way to respond. In me, there is no argument to redirect, no tension for you to spring from. And though your frustration grows, I am nowhere. It is clear that you must leave me. In the single moment between waking and sleeping I am tom by fluctuating currents, each pulling on me in different directions. The knowl- edge that you must go, the relief I will feel when you are gone, and the dull pang of sentiment that will drive me almost to the point of action, that will say to me that this is not the end of it... of you. I find myself holding my breath when I come home and see you sleeping. I imagine that I see the corners of your lips curling up at me when I touch you. I see an ashtray full of used up cigarettes, their ends covered in coral pink, and I pick them up. I want to put them in my mouth. I want my fingertips to feel them, to be where you have been. When you are not here, I can still see you, moving through the room. The scent of your hair stays on my pillow. But when you are here, my lungs fill with water, my mouth with sand, and the carries me farther and farther away. I cannot swim the distance between us, and you cannot wait forever on a spit of sand for visceral pagoda 1 111 • 11• ,1/' 1••·········································••11•the far-reaching oceans to heave your lover back upon the . Your songs will not draw him to the rocks were you wait. He is lost at sea.

You have found your socks, now, and your jeans, drawing each leg up slowly over your smooth skin until it finds the spot where every crinkle is right, where every fold fits you perfectly. I wanted to know every inch of your skin, the way your jeans seem to know. I wanted to fold into you so comfortably that you would not recognize your own ending, and my beginning,.,...... sun and BlJT WHEN fOlJ ME HalE, s a n d y stretches of Ml' WHGS WITH WATal, arms, encir- Ml' \WOlJTH WITH SANb cling my ris- ing and fall- ing waves.

While you busy yourself with pulling on your shoes, a voice, the voice of a forgotten friend and teacher echoes in the deep, sunken treasure of my remembrances. Memory begins to unfold like an anemone. I see myself walking among the stranded sea creatures, the sunbloated bodies of jelly- fish. I am telling him about a girl. He is always laughing, always awake. "You walk as if you're trying not to cast your own shadow," he said to me that day, "like you don'twantthe sun to see you moving around down here." .., "The sky and the water are jealous of each other," I said . "That's why we live in the middle," he grinned, "so neither knows us too well, or too little. You're going to drown in yourself someday. Every relationship in the universe needs interaction to work, tension. You're going to have to fight for her, you know. You're going to have to fight with her." A tiny hermit crab, crawling across the burning sand, trying to get to the water. I wanted to go withhim, to help himcarry his home to the deep. "It's simple," he continued, "like Newton's third law, action and reaction. Everything in pairs of opposites, tension. The way the moon and the Earthpull oneach other produces the . To hold on to anotherperson is like that. It's a formula of opposites," he smiled and stretched his arms out, "like yin and yang, day and night, love and fear." He turned his head up, toward the sun, still smiling. "It's mythological, it's electrical, it's math- ematical, it's everywhere: Apollo and Dionysus, positive and negative, seen and unseen, X, and not x, everything in opposites." All of this, I remember as I watch you, making gestures now, intending to communicate something. I cannot help but begin to smile quietly to myself. But a noise escapes me, a laugh I could not choke down, becoming a murmur, travels the miles underwater to reach you. I see a shift in your eyes, a change of heart, as you look at me to see ifI will speak, to see visceral pagoda I I I•• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • \11111 if I still can. Love is like gravity. You can do no more by yourself than the ocean without the tides, the Earth without the moon, each tugging on each other, an enduring, celestial dance. "Gravitymustbe the mostmysterious force inthe universe," he said to me once. Again, I cannot suppress the smallest smirk. Not even close, my friend. The most mysterious force in the universe is the one that denies me any claim to gravity, that sends me spinning towards some unknown galaxy where no one I know or care about has ever been. Wanting to reach for you, as you move for the door, wanting to put my hands on your hips, move myself into your way, I see the unknown galaxy. It is a world beneath the waves, at the bottom, where the water is still, and dark, not drawing me up with the rest of the ocean, as it bulges, reaching to touch the moon, pulling itself upward, stretching to the sky, toward the smooth skin of the sun. When you are gone, I will sink back into sleep like a leaky barge, listing gracelessly as it takes on water. I will dissappear from the surface without one last wateryword, and descend, submerged, to the bottomof the oceanwhere I will live among the spangles oflight, the glittering of a million .... lost doubloons.

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