Another month slips by.

This one full of snow... drifts up over my head!

Here's something:
 
 

A Reminder

You were busy making masks

for no body in particular to wear

and the walls were staring at you,

all unblinking fixtures, while I

contemplated how to change my hair,

change it like so many clothes.

(I don’t like being a girl like this;

it happens only when I am bored.)

I was wearing a shirt of yours,

flannel and down to my knees.

The stove glowed with persistence

and for once we were warm together—

as if breaking a promise

we embraced the comfort of fire,

watched it leap and gambol

as if another living creature

we have taken on, taken in,

though really, it possesses us,

like your many faces possess you

and create you. What it means

to be what are widely called artists:

We belong to each other

only briefly and breathlessly:

The erasure of solitude surprises us.

Cheeks flushed, we tend one another

like fires, eyes drawn inexorably

toward the other’s movements,

the flickers and signals

speaking those most intimate of truths,

indecipherable to those who would look on. 

Your masks are more transparent,

their rage, delight, surprise more pure

than day-to-day shadows

cast by day-to-day flames,

more pure than my words—

forever circling all that you capture so quick. 

Who lives deeper in the heart of the real?

And why must I keep asking?

Comparisons strip away the meat,

suck out the marrow and leave us

like paper, flat, dried, and partial,

awaiting the fire—our only hope

of completion is in the ashes, the dust,

the return to the unshifting forms.

I hope to speak less, but hope

wastes the heart, makes it brittle

and bitter, a shell of itself,

with no core. Breath comes in sighs,

sings its frustration with words

that will never speak true.

You go on tracing and trimming,

you embrace approximation,

while I add layer upon layer

and line upon line, feeling some

shiver of need to brace myself,

to insulate. Watching you,

I feel my own art stifle and pale,

I feel it move farther and farther away.

If I could be more fleeting,

relearn the brief and breathless,

quit drifting into theory, into form—

My body might know, if I let it,

how to be, how to set itself warm.