You balance on the outer edges of your own feet, not knowing if you can avoid the fall, the plunge into your own skin.
Most probably you are boiling in your habitual leather jacket, and most probably you have warmth enough for three.
I don’t want to hurt anyone, you say.
And I thought I’d already heard words like that before. But you said them first. I understand you, I say, meaning: I will never understand you.
There is no one thing about me that is out of proportion, but my entire body and the rest of the world. You thought maybe my falls were too great, and that nothing within me was of any stable rhythm. And it’s true; that, too is true, and all I can say is that the whole world is unstable, the whole world has a pulse, a heart that contracts as the seaweed bladders burst when you walk on the beach at low tide, or as the black seed-pods of the broom rupture in the sun, a hail amid reeds and feather. So much for stable rhythm. So much for proportions.
There is a feeling these days of nature having consumed its stores, the buds are nipped, and we await a flowering all through the summer.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, you whisper, enough breath for only one word at a time.
And no, I think to myself, you’re right, I don’t suppose it does. But the fact of you telling me this now, as you lie here on top of me, with foraging hands, means simply that you don’t love me enough.
The love, I write to you on a scrap of paper, the love that does what is right, is the same love that destroys people. There is no easy way, all the good is taken, and we have only remains by which to divert ourselves.
ALL OF A sudden I imagine more seasons. Or one more, at least.
There is a time: for apples that will come when they are but beginnings, the size of little olives, growing on the garden’s oldest trees, wild in the woods. There is a time: for apples, growing into sweet fists, red, and sweeter still. There is a time: for apples, letting go, dropping, gathered up, arranged in boxes with newspaper wrapped around. There is a time: for apples, rotting in the snow in the ground in boxes. But where is the season of no apples. The momentary escape from these red eyes. Perhaps they are always here. And then there is no use for seasons, perhaps they do not even exist but in the language. There is so much falling to the ground: rain roofs riders children blood apples ceilings pictures. The summer, melting away before the warmth has come, before summer — what did we have before the summer, something no one cares to gather up or care about. Something you want to swap for something else; something you want to wear out to get to something pure inside; something that looks like bone, that kind of illumination, an island of bone; something like reality, presumably, something that remembers. It might have been snow, or you, you might whisper. But then it’s me, whispering, me, calling.
TO BE A complete human; only then to be a repeat of another. To remind him of another woman. To be reduced to a symbol. When emaciated dogs are not allowed to be emaciated dogs; when moonless nights are something other than moonless nights. When the past and all one’s worries bed down and remain for winter. What kind of autumn then. What kind of winter, what kind of contract, the lakes at evening. When encounters can no longer be chance. I wander and search the streets for you. I travel to Berlin to let you find me.
I don’t think a person can decide to do anything in this world.
And yet that is what you do. You decide that we cannot see each other anymore. Now I am a symbol of something else. You tell me that. I repeat the words. But what if I am a symbol of everything that is meaningful here in life. I missed you from the very first day, and it has become worse with each day that has passed. Speculation, phone calls, journeys, journeys, seasons, the wish to be a complete human somewhere, a complete season; winter, it could be, winter winter winter.
THE LANDSCAPE
THE LIGHT IS milk inside the room. I sit up, as well as I can beneath the sloping wall. My nightgown is a rigid tent and belongs to my mother. My legs are stiff, my arms, too. It’s the cold. I haven’t turned the radiator on. A creak from within my bones, a person can be this cold on a day such as this. It has become winter, and the calender tells me it is no crime, though perhaps it is anyway.
Regardless.
My joints grate like something being extracted from a freezer, my legs shiver as I climb out of the bed. The silence is excessive. It must be late or early, I decide.
The light is alien.
It has been snowing, and what is seen is the brightness of snow, not the light of the sun. I reach to open a window, and imagine my hand going through the pane. The cold is a sharp slap in the face, and my eyes howl.
The silence outside is excessive, and nothing is late or early. That’s how nature is, its only utterance: I am here. Reconcile yourself with that.
I lean out of the window and the trees rise up, cold fingers in gloves of white. They stretch away from the ground, but toward what. A sky that is already draped about their ears, heavy with snow.
THE ENTRY CODE is the same, though the lock is new; the smell is the same, and the same sounds on the stairs, the same light. She lets herself in with a code she thought she’d forgotten. It’s the afternoon. You’re supposed to be here, should we wait until you’re here, she texts on her phone, and sends the message to her dead man. She steps inside the storage room in the basement, one light still working. There is a band of narrow windows facing the street. Many of the packing boxes have sunk at one, two, or three corners. There are no vertical lines at all in the room. Everything is crooked, the windows weep in the heat. The air is moist. Passing ankles, and afternoon in the summer outside. Barbeques, a gradual drawing back into the shade. Windows that stick in their frames, blinds pulled down askew. No, he texts back; take what you want. Most of it’s yours anyway.
She drops the phone into a pocket of her empty basket bag. A former neighbour crouches down on the flagstones outside, tips her head to speak through the window. The sun slants inside the dimness. Just to think that someone stayed, that someone has lived here ever since. Two years, three almost. The voice of the dead neighbor cuts into her side:
Are you coming back to live, she asks.
No, I don’t think so.
She had forgotten about all these things, so much they had accumulated. Plus everything out at the allotment. There are so many remnants of them.
These boxes, packed as if for some weekend trip. And all the things she’d forgotten about, and all those she would like to forget in a hurry. And him, texting from Italy. A grief slicing Europe apart. He calls her up, and they’re unable to find a way of talking. He lies and says he wishes he could lend a hand, but they both know he is grateful not to be there with her in that crooked room. His relief breaks a hole in the icecap of her loss, is a piece of wood floating in the rainwater receptacle at the side of the house back home. She would expect him not to want to hear about it, that he would prefer to forget; that’s the way these things work. But the reality of the matter is he wants to know. About these things of theirs, that are here still. Their having packed away sugar and pasta and tinned tomatoes, spices and wicker chairs, magazines — all with the idea of coming back. The fact that the packing boxes have become damp, that they are disintegrating, that the pipes that run along the ceiling have been dripping, that one drop after another has collected and formed, then to fall; we have awoken in other beds, in other rooms, the fact that she wiped away a bead of perspiration from her brow in a Copenhagen café where her novel is displayed, sadly resplendent in its stand of amber or bone, and the fact that that droplet of moisture penetrated the wall into the basement storage room, there to be sucked up by the thirsty house of cardboard that is sinking around its contents of old photo albums and worn-out shoes, drinking glasses, and vases dulled and fatigued by the biding of time.