the collective to now:

9

“There was something tragic in fighting the borders, the heroism of shortcomings, the panic of passion.”

-Bruno Schulz/Jonathan Safran Foer-

Remembering first site: where met, what seen, who did, said and how.

We can go there, recreationally, anew.

Tangly garden, the smell of food, moisty air and a she and a him wandering through florid trellises on barely trails.  Something begins.

An arrival, a vision, a breath.

 

They eat and speak, jostling giggles, tangling knees.  They are happy with anticipation to realize.

Eye-movements and alcohol, presenting.  Blending to flavor their mouths for the meeting.  And further still, past introduction – names and facts and telephones – for months of hours.

Even sleeping through nights, receivers awake in their slumber.  But face-to-face invented an optimal – expression exceeding – verbal/aural toward visually kinetic.

Hand to dancing leg, uplifted and exposed, a slight flirtation interlocking and embrace.  The sky was leaking bliss and they without umbrellas, faces opened and upraised to be forward.

 

The rented room, hesitant jumble.  Limbs like ganglia on music, flailing and pulsing and alternating rhythms.  On such a scale.  Spiraling themes, and everything improvised.

 

Which became the uncanny and announcements to friends.  “That’s a lot of baggage,” they replied to excitement, calculating spouses, careers, digiting the children and distant thousands of miles.  Let alone all the dangling remainders.

 

And yet they persist.  Airfare and phonelines, sitters and several states.  Unable to locate square roots, figuring unresolvable answers to nonlinear equations.

 

Seemingly insoluble.  They worked at the problems, nearly convinced of their theories.  Hypotheses and tangents matched excuses unrestrained.  A mountain hollow downpoured with rain.  Something fell, an infidelity to measures.  And again, wrapped in a mail bomb of message.  Risk was reported.  Purporting fear.

 

The letters flew over the lines, bodies mired in their pasts.  Something was bound up to break.  And fracturing, she did.