You, Never-You,
the new vessel.
Dark/light of the sprung soul.
Flung
upward or shuddered
up-ringing, iridescent as a fountain:
eyes flickering
wide open in sleep.
And on the kitchen sideboard
your old
script pages, flipped over;
cut up into memo-pad size. If someone
jots a
note, turns it over--
there are the words, dialogue of
people
you once became or not.
Laura says she cannot command the
space
station alone any longer; can't
he see this? Brent says he knows, he
knows
what she has been going through.
I don't know what these words are for—
just as
I know you will arrive no more
to counter this argument You may
have said
these things aloud. You walked,
you lay once beside me. Albert says suddenly
from a
paper square: "Vague. Cryptic. Enigmatic.
Ambiguous." Claude says, "How do you mean?"
I want
to enter every semblance of you—
profile, ideogram, rainlight, zigzag kite,
shifting
plinth. Even this comment
from Mohammed: "I should be going—
this is
a private matter."Earlier; Frieda
has said, 'You're upsetting me, Ira."
Let me
consider this private matter in anger,
in terror; in reverence. Voiceless, let me
consider
a thumbprint, a top-sheet,
margin shout Here's Marc crying, "Bullshit
How can
a man live in any other time but
his own?" At the tombstone, the fire pit,
at the
anchor dragged brain-red over
consciousness, Yvan says, "I don't see why
I have
to put up with your tantrums." In
this private matter; I refuse the lilac, the
anemone,
all the lit banked candles.
Rachel says he's in the middle of nowhere,
without
an alibi. Bring me no alibi.
Bring me instead one sprig, pale-white,
of your
never-endlessness, one pulse-leap
inside the sick brilliant rose of your not-being.
Holden
says, "That's my girl" Fire-rose, ash,
drawn petalled, unpetalled, along my wall of
solitude.
You hover; eyelit, at falcon-height—
and Serge cries, "Read Seneca!" Laura is alone
in the
space station, weeping. I am not weeping.
I am emptying the pockets of my own monologues.
I am listening
to the semblances, what you were,
who you've been. 'You’re disastrously open-minded,"
a fragment
says (it seems) to me, though I ask for
no feedback here in my space station, here in my former
life,
where there is no gravity--or crushing gravity—
in my kitchen, my open mind. Where I
listen closely to no connections. To no you, David. No you.
-Carol
Muske-Dukes