Edison

big glass body with a tiny filament
inside. Yes, the light is bright. Yes,
it is, all you can say about it it is.
Even more.
The filament, unignited, unhoused, on
foot, requests my empty plate.
The tide of history spins Hiroshige's
wave, and what's empty in it
now is the shape of a coin.
Sideburns growing on glass.

At a table on the other side of the restaurant, the only woman at a table of five men stands as she nurses an infant, pacing from chair to chair, reaching over the head of each man to retrieve food and drink. They are loud and they have claimed the entire restaurant as their own for the night. They tread the aisles between diners speaking loudly on cell phones, and she nurses the baby standing next to complete strangers as they eat and have their own quiet conversations, having come in from the bitter cold for refuge, fuel, a chance. They are obviously wealthy and recognize no others, us. The mother sways at her hips, the infant's head cupped in a ringed hand surging with milk, belted in a sling, its dangled feet hanging raw wiring to be braided to the motherboard of the table itself. hunger
I will build a mountain. A mountain that keeps out God. I will point an elbow to the sky that when I last saw you You can keep all that you know You can keep all of it When I was their age I had not even a quarter what they got and was a hundred times better off I'm only in my fourth decade but in the light of this digital sun e'en as fine a pussy as mine looks unfinished Like there's something missing about it Made to look unready Like my pussy should be wearing headphones you told me something I promised I would never forget, and I've found I can't remember what it was I remember you telling me, the moment you told me, how I leaned to you, and watched the side of your jaw move as you told me, and I remember you wore stubble, and I remember seeing the white in it, down by the corner of your jaw, and I remember the feeling of growing vast and proud as you told me, because you were telling me, telling it to me. But I don't remember what it was you said. But I remember the moment. The moment seems to speak still

Wen

We'd come back from the ocean that night, the same ocean we were married at, the same ocean lying by I'd first heard the whisper. A grey whisper of a mother I never had, as I lay shivering, eyes closed the earth speeding me into the sun. I felt the feet trod my way, feeling the sand grind and dug, feeling this forewake approach blowing me deeper into a solitary chamber of listening, listening with the surface of my skin. And then there was the voice, at my left ear, the same ear the ocean was on, whispering my name.
Wen
Wen
time to get up
time to get up Wen
it's ok now
time to get up sweety
The seawind blew her voice all the way in me, way through all the way down to the bottom of the well. A dry line in me smiled. Watered. Not clear whose mother that was. It was a good visit, one I looked forward to each day that summer by the ocean, staying in your father's house, looked forward to it each time I came out of the sea, shivering and exhilarated, trembling. After that it was just the memory of it, each time I lay waiting. Each time laying waiting thinking it was now it was coming, she was coming. But she the voice never came again. My memory of it seemed to ward it off.
And it was that ocean we went back to that week, honoring our first year of being wed.
That night we came back from the ocean I heard Eve died. Eve died. I heard Eve die.
Because the ocean was in me, and you were in me while we were at the ocean, I could not sleep. Like the vertigo after swimming rough water everything moved and slid across the night as I lay in our bed and felt. One year married, our houses collided in mid air, come crashing down and into shapes that were unimaginable to us, familiar like all disaster. So, making our home as we were in this new domestic debris, it was a relief back then to get away, and hotels and motels always felt more homelike than the one we were striving to build. The home between homes. (There was something about a buried radio, about a sound, about sound being the true home of childhood. There was something about that radio being buried, seemingly lost, when the world changed from sound to the ruthless silence of Matter. From the oral to the written. Typical stuff. About childhood disappeared. About sound and History. Something about a radio, buried, then disgorged again when the houses of marriage collide. And the world of sound that was silenced coming to life again. Something about childhood homes colliding in marriage, and those houses of sound being the home made anew.)
Because you were in me while we were out at the ocean I could not sleep, as you slept. When you are in me I become alive. And stay that way, for hour and hour after.
A dark that is never put out.
I sat in it, feeling the ocean still in me and you still in me and heard something like glasses or plates tapping outside the window, under us.
I listened.
It was that dark, that same listening-with-the-skin dark and I began to hear, in the world, the hissing click of a lighter, the hissing suck of the tube. Some blurred words. Socked feet. Plastic. Glass. Click hiss and suck.
And then an insect's barbed foot of lighting struck the window, in Eve's voice. It was the prayer of a geyser vomiting, the prayer of a severed artery ejaculating, the victorious murderprayer of an unclogging drain. It was spewed running over each and every boundary, every bed, every border. It entered me in that dark that is never extinguished with the violence of a hyperdermic filled with the sun. I immediately swelled with fire and a storm of fear. And then the light fading, and just the sound of her voice, its first wet eruption stilled, now a steady small stream of molten pain.
So I listened to that, for a couple of hours. Took a shit. Finished a crossword, all by candlelight.
Sometimes the voice would crescendo and blow again, and the shapes of words started to appear in the explosions. God and help and oh. And then the subsiding, the sibilant trickle of untourniquetted pain.
I understand you already were told what I thought, then.
That I thought: Good. Go. That I thought: Die. That I deliberately watched the undelicate hands of my minds form their responsa of No Help. Yes. That's all true.
I did not hate Eve. I didn't even wish her dead. But I heard her dying, I knew it as soon as I heard it: it is a sound transmitted by bones, received in marrow. And I could feel no reason to help her live, assuming some action I could have taken could have. Some phone call. I saw stark that helping her live would not be best. That some healing results in what's called Death. And it seemed to me to be the best medicine for all involved. Her bitter suffering, the raped little girl what never got aid, what never got soothed, what never received consolation: what never became Who, and who never got to speak, just inhale, insuck, the solar violence of her first home lighting the fire of her stem again and again and again. Now, toothless and back-broke at 49, coming on to the garbage men morning in a humpbacked halter without teeth, her apartment disintegrating about her into a ooze of oily tan dust; dreaming of "colorado" and "california" and "friends out there", her medicine delivered by private sedan.
Neighbors surrounding our building screamed at her to shut up as her heart died. We'd all heard it before, they'd say. But I'd never heard this, because this was something hearing could hear only once.
Go, Eve.
Go.
It's alright.
It's time.
Go, sweet heart.
I did, I wished her gone, and done with all the pain.
How she was found, wrapped around the base of the toilet in a jaggedhemmed nightdress, face drawn in an openeyed rictus of agony, fists tight around the lighter and stem.
But I forgot about it, and laid down next to you, and, the shivering moving ocean drained by Eve's deathsong, slept.
Two days later they found her.
Like I said, I forgot all about it, til her death reminded me what I'd knew.

Breakfast

Once past the only time a flicker on the clean-eaten dish, I think I hear you pass the fence that looked like a fishrib canoe. I remember thinking sometimes my stomach rumbles and I think it's my cellphone vibrating like I'm swallowed in the present by the very objects that cut a clear line through the past, make the past past, our past, and the present unthinkable any other way. Like I'm swallowed by them, even if I feel them quiver inside me. Because the inside me is the sign of what's outside, you remember.
Now and then reach for one another through a mucus membrane, doing the old pushpull.
Sometimes I remember it like the smart-bomb videos back in the nineties - a target imagined through a technological dream appears, approaches faster than knowing can see, becomes an inevitability shaped like a hole remembered only after a violence that swallows the screen in a sizzle of destroyed light.
How I remember our We's first moment.
And somehow that meeting is also the place I've left so many other's stranded. The boy, sitting in the Row-5 Cough Bar being instructed to finish his story by his father, standing over him as his hand refuses to write anymore ... How sometimes silence is the only remaining defiance, no matter what the age ... And Young Madder and 12, both of them converging on one another at the Four Stories, that dilapidated cedar-shingled tottering hotel by the water, twenty-four rooms, each named for an hour of the day ... And V____, him too on his way to meet the young, too-young girl being sold him by her mother, her paying him to have her, so she can hear something break that she slept through the first time, as if that would change the break and mend ... And Wen, reminiscing on his early years, his jail time, his buried radio, his first year of a first marriage, his hearing Eve die on the floor below, hacking up her pulped heart and dying with the lighter and charred tube in her hands, spooning the toilet's base: And thinking, as he listened: Good, go. And shocked by the vividness of the thought: Die. And watching his decision not to go down to help. Feeling the femoral artery of solar inevitability roar through him dark without sound. A pleasant sensation, like melting into sand.
It's at that meeting place, when the screen sizzles white and dies, where we met first, that they all await their outcomes.
Twenty-four years is nothing, you know. It takes longer for you to leave in the morning, so I can find my peace, and miss you.

Start At The End

It's to you, really, I owe my life. To you.
The debt, the position of this debt, it's become more than I know how to sustain. Each breath I take, its shape is sculpted by your need. Each thought, where it goes and doesn't go, its boundary is your desire. I've no words but those meant for you. I've no desire but what you stir in me. I've no thought but in answer to the question you ask. No answer but to your call. Through all these years, now, these twenty-four years, years spent together and apart but never separate, inside me "I" has always been the sound I've heard when thinking "you". Somehow surveillance has been transformed into a vigil of love. No one misses me, no one experiences my absence. I'm the space between your words, the darkmatter of your syntax, the fog your breath makes when we sleep outdoors. My desire only finds its space when yours has been exhausted. My desire is refuse, trash, waste, excess, ort. The dark nonhuman eyes beneath the table.
When I found you on the gravel, when I first heard your feet on the gravel, twenty-four years now gone, I carried a bag of tools, coming home from a job. A bag that was my exact body weight, filled with blades and strikes and shields. You had a bag too, I'd say now it weighed exactly the same as your head. There was a thorn bush there, by the shed, green flaking paint on the old plank door. I heard your shoes, the heelheads crushing the stones, and because it was dusk there were ripples on the air made by your feet. I know exactly the season, because I'd come back from installing a ceiling fan for a judge. Had to put the ladder on top the oak dining table, the ceilings in that vast apartment were so high. She'd been recently divorced and her teenage girl had moved back in with her, so she'd put the AC in the girl's room, and decided just a fan was enough for hers. I left greasy fingerprints on the ceiling. I remember noticing I refrained, consciously, from cleaning them up.
And you walked on the gravel as I walked away from my car remembering not cleaning up the stains of my hands and I heard you like feeling blood wash over me in a dark shower. It was like I drank you before I saw you.
But that's so long ago, so long ago for a life to owe so long.
I see now, what I took to be our history was yours, and I was transcribing. And I find myself waiting for your sleep now, your absence, your work, to feel alive. To feel myself squeeze myself out the narrow spaces that are all that are left me since I've cleared my world for you. Since I've withdrawn to become the boundary of the world itself, so that you have as much space as you need, as I can manage to give.
Funny how your complete acceptance of me, of everything about me, seems to have made me vanish.