“You interest me like a sea…”

You interest me like a sea, like a view of the water widening out of sight. You live in the blue, in that far-reaching and unbreakable stillness. You can be there what you cannot be here: part of the future, one of those peoples, the image of those peoples, the sea-people, the island-people, horizon dwellers who never move, who remain when the post is left. You’ve become this presence, a dry wind scouring the grasses, a scent out of season, the sun-hammered rocks, a face turning up, a body washed away. If only I could touch you once, where the map-dots go, where the running from place to place ends, and the past slides away, like the make-believe ghosts of troubled children. I inherit you when I am most alone, when there is no lunch but the window itself, or the gate long since rattled into shape, ornate, and unmoving. And all these glimpses of the sea, the sea through the trees, the sea in the guidebook, in the museum wing devoted to sea-paintings, the sea earlier and the sea later than I remember it, these glimpses become you, leaning into the glass, saying words I can almost hear.

The End of the Mesozoic

I once lived in a stone house, a house whose bushes were so overgrown, so Mesozoic in their size and number, that you could not see the house from the road. Inside the house, the silences were so thick that you could not breathe except by opening a door; the birdsongs would help you breathe. The food on the tables was so full of steam that you could not approach it, had to hold it at arm’s length. When you stood by a window, the fingerprints on the glass were so numinous that you could not see the weather. When you went to the living room, the stags and the pears were so lifelife that you could not remove them. The hallways were so redolent of flowers that you could not fall asleep, and sometimes you wandered out to the driveway, and laid there with your eyes, like a toy soldier, a statue turned over in the dark.