regret inconnu au printemps or I need better glasses.
Metal music rattles against plastic and steel panels in the asphalt valley thaw below my windows. A discordant guitar solo shifts through pitches as the unseen car moves from left to right and ultimately disappears from my ears.
Fickle vision with only a vague sense of shapes. Sounds are the real signposts. They give definition to the ambiguous scene: shrubbery becomes a barking collie in stark auditory relief.
At night, when the scene is heavy and hushed under the static quilt, locomotive air horns howl across town. They are answering questions that weren’t asked. Barging into half-awake dreams, punctuating drowsy desire with innocent impractical jokes. The trains are always saying goodbye.
And you are always beginning to tell your life story on the edge of the mattress and immediately passing out. I follow down deep into dreams, on a corpuscle to find you. But I’m lost in the sinew of sub-unconcsiousness. I cannot find you in the comedy, murder, chairlift line, gym floor, test score, music awards, fence post, hymnal, shipwreck, windy nude beach nor armageddon picnic — whichever you prefer.
The trains pull us back up onto the bed. The fuzz of an early morning bedroom awakens to the horns. The cocoon comforter wound the wrong way around our legs. There is dew on the ground, there is sweat in the small of our backs.
This is really when you know that we’re alive. Sour, strange and real. Almost innocent, almost giving.
When was this and why can’t it happen again? Sometimes, when my head is awkwardly smashed on the pillow, there is only the embryonic sound of my own heartbeat. Sometimes even the smallest sounds are too much, even when they emanate from my chest, from my brain — a fight to remain both focused and unfocused in the arc of a delinquent diver.