Gargoyle, grieving

I heard him come up the stairs, and the key touch the lock. I was finishing the hem. I stopped, setting a space for greeting. And then I heard the keys drop, and then there was nothing for a long time. He was standing out there, silent, the keys on the ground, in front of our door. It was long enough to almost forget he was out there. But I continued to listen, hearing him stand there motionless on the other side of our door. Then I heard his knuckles crack, the way he does in the morning before getting out of bed; and the keys scrape the floor as he pulled them up, and then the lock entered and turned and the door open. He passed the doorway, dropping a plastic bag on the floor without turning to see me, and he said "I'm starting over" and closed the bathroom door behind him. It was very quiet in there, too, a quiet unusual and active. And then I heard him vomiting. He vomits quiet too, kind of like a cat, he bulldozes air and then a little cry and then the sound of heavy water hitting light. It's the third time I've heard him vomit in the decades we've been married.

I put the groceries away as he puked, broccoli, dandelion, a chicken, some sweets, a plastic bucket of salad and a pound of oats.

He came out of the can, smelling of sulphur and cinnamon. His eyes were back lit and his face was pale. The shoulder of his left sleeve was torn. He looked at me, and that's where a kiss normally was. He went and lay face up on the mattress, which was bare since we'd not yet taken the wash out of the bag.
"I'll start dinner," I said.

Then the way to ride the train changed. Not looking became the way. Not peering, gazing, trying to see. Eyes closed. And then, the ride turned into something else – not the event of confrontation or rape, performance or spectation, but a vivid dark space filled with the visible movement of thinking. Became the ride, thinking. Extending a single line of thought for the duration of the daily ride became the game. Not making his face into a penis, or hiding the penis that was his face: just sitting, eyes closed, and enjoying the sharp contours of his own thinking, and at the same time finding comfort in the blind man’s world of the unseen human crowd, passing from right speaker to left speaker (as he thought of his ears), the sweet pan of sound that psychedelic musicians had loved so well and that had fallen so sadly out of fashion as the corporations made monophonia the recrudescent standard. The face of money has no back. The face’s skull is actually the front façade of a building, not a head. The face of money. Because this was a time when to look out at the human world was to be made paralytically sad. The grand chapel ceiling of the sky, constipated with images now – all of them evoking a spitfree airborne world, the usual wealth and sharp violence of light and speed and domination – images crowded like chattel in pens up against one another, and all evoking the ease of space and riches while being smothered by another image promising the same – to look out while under this chapel ceiling at the umbilical sorrow and misery upon the faces and frames of the people across the aisle, or seated before him, or standing before him, or simply moving by – all while under this heaven’s façade of lies – while the guns of sick murder and ambush and the ironhearted greed of the planet’s most powerful ricocheted thudding and multiple – and while the emptiness of his own wealth – an unfilled uterus, a negative balance, an image stuffed fantasy of a time to come – the ride, that ride, suddenly now was the refuge from the image of but the connection to others. Those others. Them. The ones beneath the image-psoriatic sky. Them beneath their own image. And him beneath his as well. A brook, not too cold, running its sweet water into his mouth. That was the daily ride now. Their sounds and the strict seeing of his thinking, following its course, and the heaviest lifting of all: remembering them. Still, after all these years, still developing that muscle. Because the forgetting will happen, for much much longer than the remembering lasts.

When he's hard I like to dip a finger into the diamond that beads on his tip, and taste it. It's bland and weightless, and sticky-good. It's very different he says than my flood water, which is transparent and sweet and thirst-making. I like hearing me fill his throat with the gargling stream of a wineskin pressed hard into a plastic cup.

From the kitchen I watched him lay face up on the bare unmade mattress, maybe looking at his distorted reflection in the brass nipple of the ceilinglight.

One aspect of the agreement is to make space for the person's utter unknowable inwardness, and with desire waving the arms of a conjuror-maestro call this, their separateness, forth, feed it and grow it and encourage its foray out of its dark, into the wilderness of the home.
It sits crouched on the crest of a small hill with the sunset light behind it, breathing.