I Am A Rock . . .

The Dying of the Night Dispatcher’s Angels


Eleven-thirty, back in Jersey—
he's got to get to work on time.

From the under ground he has dug up more than one bitter passage: what's left of fifty years--a residual hour of fear. That is the misdiagnosed sadness everyone detects--life's lonely work.

But, soon he arrives, on time, at the government job he dislikes very much. He receives his briefing, and takes the seat where he will answer the troubled night-calls of the world.

“I am an idiot,” he thinks, staring at the dirt in the grooves of his fingers. It is late by then, and he wants to laugh, reminiscing first about a dream, then a girl, then music that ends it all triumphantly, gloriously, angels singing, like in a movie. But the stupid phone rings, like a body in a dumpster, throat cut. It gurgles like a sucking wound whenever someone calls.

--nine-one-one: what's your emergency?--
-------------------------
(post-fact-oh conversation)

“You could see his Adam’s Apple hanging out,” the cop describes the scene to him afterward. He tries not to listen but the cop keeps on. “He did it to himself," he says. "All alone. Cut his own damn throat!”

He's fifty years old
and he is sad that he feels nothing,
believes nothing.

In the morning he wipes the station with a cloth,
shoves some papers in a bin, waits for his relief,
and repeats the awful words,
“Alone. Alone."

Have I told you lately . . . ?

Night Full of Absence

Time moves as slow as stone without you near. I find myself in this strange limbo of desires—to be close and yet not to push too near too fast. I was saddened that we argued as hotly as we did, troubled, enormously. And yet a faith sets in, that our friendship is stronger than either of us suspected, strong and sure, even when we are not.

This short period that feels so heavy brings to mind how deeply you have sent your roots into my life, reveals what a deep mark would be left were you to pull them from its soils. I have been seized by obsessive need, to talk with you, to listen, taking comfort in your voice, even knowing there are no words adequate, none soft enough, none strong enough, for what I long to hear.

Our words rise and fall behind language, like the ground of all we see and feel. Ours is the language of eyes through which the heart burns, of knowing without grasping, of hands that touch wordlessly, in the surging silences of jungles and deserts and enormous skies full of clear, throbbing nights, nights whose skins stretch thin, skies so filled with playfulness that they will themselves to the air they live in, hoping for fire.

I remain incapable of expounding any of these visitations, these spectres that rise up in so many bodiless nights, hours full of rushing spaces, your eyes nowhere to beguile me. I am flung outward by words escaping to find their place in your hands and your limbs, these words heavy with life like vines.

This garden of feeling we have cultivated makes a place for the sun, for water and salt and earth. We needn’t touch them, the years, to feel them, how they have flourished within the borders of this garden's rock walls. These several years sing sonorously, steadily, cemented and meshed together like the letters of a cherished word, a secret word, a word held between us like a prolonged breath, like wet, imprecise kisses, lips groping among last things, braced in waves that en-trance the constant moon, waves ever changing the lettering of the world, the many ways that love is spelled.