Something blossoms, something dies. I see Chicago tonight in the parlor where my father had seen the stars, my mother the sun, my brothers the cosmic portrait  through a trembling kaleidoscope snug within the paper fortress. I see Chicago lit up like a luminescent baton falling in the glass bowl of my morning, stumbling down the orange and yellow, mumbling within the orbit of a somber Monday. I walk outside. Children like oysters swaying in the grey parade; howling echoes spread atop the gut table. My hands are his hands are their hands are our hands- it is the same from under any waterfall. It is the same sheen of anothers eyes, pushing atop the mirror until the reflection is softened atop a throne of tangible dreams drawn with the imagination. Of the old way, I yawn. Chicago like a painted diamond whose wrinkled palm holds the rivers of my silk hopes, in the morning, rising like a drunken sun. I stumble, humbly along. Wither hath fled thy visionary gleam? It is a vision I have had, it is a vision within a vision, framed within the restless closet where the radio silently weeps. I believe in a city; I believe in a possibility- the alembic of my life suspended from above a jar of teardrops. Chicago standing beneath the marvelous kiss of industrialization, the sound of a steel eclipse, the people coming and going, walking snugly shoulder to shoulder in the bellowing cavernous streets. I see the train break the air like water upon a shore, I see the women, tall and bright, the portrait of a lady, composed of the collective sounds of words I had only imagined to be words; the outline of their silhouette like a thousand raindrops suspended in the freckled way the sun falls in-between the buildings, buildings like heavenly trees which shimmer in the shadows as you walk by, lost in the way one becomes another- are we not that similar no matter how many cities have fallen? When it snows it is beautiful the way the aspect of the world is changed as we all brush the flakes as they land upon us, the way our arms all do the same instinctual thing. I see Chicago in the form of a story, sitting within the amber fish tank wrapped within the fog of a moment held captive within my mind. I see the timeline of my life falling short of an hour, I see the history of my life before it is over, embalmed within a shadowbox, I see my voice as it rolls over a canyon, I see my eyes as they close for once as something blossoms.

The modern man tumbling through the tumbleweeds like a land fish- a man rides his bicycle late in the night in a town, somewhere, sometime. Progress. Rolling. He peddles in the cold where in of doors it is warm by a fire. The crackling logs suggest the voice of the disillusioned. A steel mill closes but what for? And the voice carries on in the timber we continue to let fall. It is ok, it is not a civilization. I read some things at night which become the shadows of the following day, lurking somewhere within the garden. A woman, beautiful like bronze- beautiful in its solidity, in its mineral form- she waits quietly with her arms at her sides. I watch, suspended from above her mountain eyes. If I approach her it is over. The actuality of the moment fascinates more than the moment actually happening. So I wait. Dumbstruck, like loves loose ghost. And for a century she stirs not, only does she turn the air into bread, the rain into wine and I am lustful, I lust for her, yet to go to her would be the death of the dream. So I wait, wanting more than the cleavage she has shown me from afar. The modern man crumbling into a word. It is the disillusionment we have quite forgotten in the cars; the highways pale in comparison to the clouds which they sit beneath. It was a red car that carried so much steam, it was a green car which killed us all. See the café, lit up as she spreads her thighs beneath the drawing of a table? It has been drawn down and out on that road which leads to Winesburg, Ohio, but he took the train, amen, god bless, and I laugh, I cough, I snicker and blow my nose as another car floats into the nameless ocean then drowns. Still she is waiting, my Madonna of the rainy night. She is ageless like a plate. Her palate consists of gold, sit with me from above and watch the way her breasts fall into her stomach. I have driven very far but I have seen what the world can do to a man; what a man can do to the world. Women, perhaps women, and another man passes but is he the same man as before? I cannot tell. Dear roses will you answer, or is it to cold to pierce the brisk evening air with you beautiful thorns…

It is strange to think that once we were children, that we shared a bed and a roof. Have you thought lately of what I had mentioned, of the cabin, the fire burning? It has been a dream of mine so I am sure you have dreamt it as well. Are we that similar? Do we not both sleep beneath the same forgotten skies? I see you often in my dreams; in my daydreams you become something different.  It is not with reproach that I look upon you as I travel from day to day but you become something different. I imagine you sitting across from me, tucked away within the industrial way this city carries us, you, a stranger, sitting bleakly and crossed legged. Your head moves slowly, moving with the train, glancing, looking, falling upon all the faces then the legs- if I met you in an imaginary moment would it be the same as how I imagined it? Last we spoke it was sparse when I wanted it to be dense, but the noise that surrounds one sometimes and I become lost in the words I was preparing to say. Strange, yes, how sound swallows, drowns the thoughts, but I was thinking of the hutch we shared and the silly moments we had tucked away, forgotten in the pine drawers. Notes and letters, postcards unsent, a few pictures, yet it was not those which I miss, it is the times we had placed them there together. What is tangible I believe to be unimportant, it is what led us to make and to create that which we can touch, the imperfect way we sometimes have of composing the unfinished stories of our lives; one thought leads to the next which is to finish what was before, but always do we leave the seemingly perfect creation unsettled. It is never-ending the way we compose the intangible moments which connect us within the shared reflection.

If only you could have seen the masquerade, the promenade lit up like a thousand deep sea fishes, the town folk dance and curtsy to a tune which reminds me of your fair weather, the armistice resounds and I am thankful for the memory I am sure will glow no matter how dark it is from within. It is sad, she said, that we do not talk. The room grows smaller when I think of your resilient charm. Why can you not break that indescribable barrier?  You are a silly man to think that nothing will change; it is, as you have made it, the wall is yours alone- I cannot climb that which I cannot see. Things are well, things are okay, I have seen more often than not that which I will speak of within this prancing dialogue we have surrounded ourselves within. Is it that I am to blame as well? I remember standing in the kitchen, glowing and red, dancing about in the wake of a new love. She was soft this one, that one, and for the time it sufficed to say I felt something other then the anguish brought by another, but something now is growing and as I have said, I fear the day of her departure, the road down which I am more oft than not to take. I have shown her where we have walked, the trees, the stream, and she has set upon the grass the memory which she has kept of you. More often than not it is alone that she visits what she calls, ‘the death of the twin souls fallen into the abyss of a misguided apprehension of the fear of what one will think of the other.’ Men are silly, she says, and boys are no better, but there must be something in-between intuition and pride. Maybe not and maybe I am trying to get at what is alive within, unsettled, a part of me which is yet and in time to be a part shared. When we close the eyelids of our loved ones, what ever will we say? And if in passing… I hope that there will be more to our lifelong story than the times when we were absent, but on and on the parade goes…Her outfit this evening is divine. I know you once said she is quite lovely, tonight she is beyond love and beyond any words a man could muster up to describe.

April is a beautiful month, you should see the way the children dance and sing in the shadow box garden of our youth; diner in Spain, the fantastic voyage, et al, et al. Walking this afternoon in the shade of a hidden grove, a creek runs between the stones smooth fingers; the water has softened the natural way the earth fell into a grove here, winding, returning to Horseshoe Pond. As children we often came and watched, chased one another, stumbled and fallen beneath the cabbage green vines of the weeping willow. I tried, if you can imagine, swinging as we used to, yet the strength of an old tree is not enough to hold me any longer. I felt the ground, I glanced, imagined as you once ran away- your tiny life sprinkled atop the old streets which haunted us, where the lights did not shine and the old people coughed and frightened us. The park has since changed, yet I stand and it remains the pillar of my often forgotten childhood, fresh as ever, and the moments come on strong.  The days spent in mothers winter dressing barely able to walk but never cold. Has it been long since you visited the old maroon house? The siding is still the same weepy color. I thought to knock and say, but I once- but I could not. She smiles at the thought of what you had mentioned, of seeing again our smug cheeks grinning over a table and a glass of wine.

I see someone and the ripple flows into the form of another. Old friend I see you and your luster is fading. I write only now of the sea which drowned us all. It would be a mistake to say I know not of what I am doing, that I have not planned at all, yet within the growth of a thousand memories, I have swollen to such proportions that it must be written before I burst into a beautiful vision of an ochre sunset, for when I end, the world ends as well, and on into the darkness of the sinking unknown depths of the soul  I shall follow those who in life I had loved- old lion lead the way with your flowering plume of life’s unwanted feathers.

It is when one voice becomes the voice of many that art will erupt. When we look upon something with the shared eyes of the human heart, when we touch and feel the lives of our beautiful neighbors, when we taste the tongues of others in a glorious display of sweat and grime. The past becomes the present and the future is the present unwritten. If I gave you all the tucked away letters I have used to compose the marble statue, the veritable edifice of hope and love, would you look upon me with dismay or would you stand in awe at the way the pale sky becomes the breast, the sun the hips, the earth below. We are above nothing, you and I, only do we think that the sunsets and rises from the window we watch from. It is beautiful to think it, it is more beautiful to have written it, and what better gift then the gift to begin. I cherish the mess, I adore the idea of change, the love of play, the intoxication of creation…

I remember you driving and all the things I wanted to say, how they came rushing upon me and I chose to say nothing. Can you understand that I did not wish to be silent but I knew not how to express the sorrow, the death of the dream, of a life imagined unlived, never to fully reach the fruition I had so fully realized it to be? And then the road, the broken pummeling lines. It is complicated when one stares at that which he does not understand, lost forever in the movement. The automobile, the home, are they really that different? You light a cigarette and I cannot bring myself to smoke. She hated the smell, the taste. I would kiss her and she complained. Please understand it was something then but it is nothing now, and if again I am silent, it is because I lack the confidence to bridge the distance I have created, when I want to get closer I grow farther until I have lost my way. Steps abound, the woods become more dense and the fire goes out. If only the mountains were smaller, the roads closer, if only the pillow were not so soft and comfortable, the bed like a galaxy of tangible pomp, the pattern of all I have left unsaid is the meteor painted atop my duvet…

She stares at the wall as of late and see that which I am unable to recreate. Her eyes are so small. If I could recreate the spinning ball in a tuft of entropy; the firmament portrait of our black and white childhood which hangs upon the wall. Often I sit and stare at your photo. I say, dear, king, world, how are you where the dust collects, radiating in the freckled spots of the sun?  But the dishes in the kitchen sing a delicate song and break my concentration and if today is different than what will tomorrow be?

I see her standing on the corner where you had lived. He black slip falls upon her skin like night upon the sun. The living room is furnished with the antiquity of her grace, the eloquent way of her words, when for the first time I knew what it was to feel within the presence of another borne out of love; the shared movement of the echo, the symposium of the sounds bodies are capable of. The curves of a woman are a prelude to the romance of construction.

And yes I remember that we lived just up the road. You had cleaned that day and I cooked. The friar? No, it was Briar, and the joke always ends the same way. Can you see the now that the snow has fallen? I know your not one for traveling in the cold, but please reconsider, the fire awaits as always and I will tell you the tales of old, of the swordfish father had speared, of the picture where the two men stand, one old and one older, it is a lovely moment in the history of our photographic lives. There is nothing quite like a brandy Alexander in the cold winter weather, the cold mixed with the slow burn of a rich dark amber harmony, in the way it chills then warms. My spirit is softened at the thought of your arrival, sitting, warming your toes. Come and lets us visit the inn, let us tell of what we have seen, where we have been, as always, like the sun, I am waiting for the fresh morning dew, to drink it!

It is August now and the panoply of fall has yet to start. The signs so familiar still resting in the nest of summer, warmed by her three siblings, June, July and August. I here them from time to time in the hallway, I see them as they walk atop the water, in the streets they were a Spanish orange. The bells ring from a distance and shake in the mural as you walk by. I walk past and always is it different. The way the family becomes the vision of the artist. They are not lifelike but they are life-size, and maybe it enough that they were painted. The children are little and move on a carousel of a spinning fancy atop an unimaginable spread of acorns- the cornucopia of a civilization realized in the hope of a new day. It is the same what we have painted, only theirs is much brighter. The eyes glow like large comets on a land where the sun presses with a firm finger year round. How I would love to visit the visions I have seen.

The sounds linger from the lake to where to where I have been staying.  I have a view as of late just before a wall, the vines now flow into the luminous street- I envy the sounds which only my ears can touch. It is cold the way she comes and goes, stays and then leaves when the moment becomes too much, too heavy for her teardrop shoulders. She is sad at the thought that I am quite close and cannot reach her. She has begun to draw the story of our lives. Instead of talking it is pictures she shows me. She points, holds before me the girl which lives within the sinking ship. I sit some nights in the vigil of a charcoal drawing. I read- ‘Ours is a tragic age…’ The black beneath my eyes pursues my cheek and the pallor which comes without rest is upon me, throbbing. I am tired but cannot sleep knowing of the fever within her. It will not be long before she leaves for good on that ship of indifference which besets two that have loved within its deep unreachable waters. It is midnight and the moons pocked face reminds me of the cosmic holes we have dug for one another, and I long to bury that which stretches further the filament which we have become. But I fear I cannot. She is Nadja, she is Rima, she is the unattainable woman who houses the girl and silences her; the constant reminder that she is undeserving of that which in life she dreams of. The stars are nothing in comparison to the beauty of a rising sun which she dismisses when she draws the curtains. Cruel morning, she whispers, and dies upon the pillow. If it is love, then we must make it loving.

Something blossums, something dies. I await every day for the memory of tomorrow, but I cannot wait for yesterday, though I have been down that winding golden archway, it was not enough to set right the infatuation of the object. She hands me a note written in a mysterious tongue, and utterance from Greece when she was there in August. It is the narrative of a depressed period of our relationship which has not been acknowledged. She says the water has kept us from the sleeping voices within. But I am tired like the sun must be, like the moon from having to make an appearance from behind the sheen of an invisible candle. I say, smile just once so I may remember the way you had become the charm of so many sunken nights, so many misguided ways and roads, misadventures which stand like a titan when we sought only to climb the staircase to the home. Rather we chose the fleeting lure of attraction, the decline of the ideal swept away in what the night may offer. It offers nothing but the hourglass of another approaching morning. But I am indifferent, like the cold hands of indecision, a boy from under the brass balloon of hope. I hope for one thing and choose the other. I have chosen now to bathe within the song, to see the dream become alive or to die within the dream. Mother I am sorry beneath a life of setting suns, I only wanted to understand why the heavens appeared for you at a length from which your arms could not reach…

She has left. The world has fallen into the shade which has become my eyes; cannot you not see the sadness cause gravity to shutter? I miss your way of looking at things, of taking the shelter I have crawled under and lifting it with your all encompassing arms, saying, there are so many fish which never will we have the time for but she over there sitting in the corner looks like a beautiful morning, so go and have a hello before she gets cold. As a man sometimes needs the admiration of a woman, a beautiful hairline which sets the boundaries of her subtle cheeks, it was the admiration of her which garnished not a single beat of my heart. It is love defined, or it is pure confusion; chaos embodied in the vanity we stand before each night, or it is the desire to turn the stone into a flower, still I do not know. When the world ceases to spin, confusion reigns from beneath the covers I use to shelter myself from another hour. I know you have known of the ghost, that you have swam in the apparition of a bowl of rose petals, that you have drank from the puddles of her remaining footprints, yet how does one remove the shared blanket of a vision destroyed?

The vines I have mentioned pale with insignificance beneath the stream of a forgotten memory. I call from below where my toes have been resting, withdrawn from the warmth of a shared duvet. The wish to have lived within a generous hand, giving always, twofold, the love I lived within, the statue of a stunted perplexity of should I? I should always. But the weight of a dark evening perspires. She returns for a few of her things. I think to ask her to stay, to say I am too heavy tonight to rest, to heavy to let the lids fall, to heavy to pardon the sadness of a sinking, drowning, to heavy to sleep and it is lovely the way she comes in and out through the clouds of a dark heaven, so very nice the sound of her sleeping, breathing, the sound of a girl who dances atop the moon, to a moment which was not ours and then to me, to when it is early and she lay like an orchard composed of an orange October, to when it is late and she falls like the leaves, to when I kiss her and she rolls like a snug note folded over in the corner of my shoulder as I unfurl the night of her passing thoughts, nestled in the brazen way she arrives at my neck, to my cheek, to the freckles I have imagined would come with age and the strange way how we think that under a Saturday sun we will become the disintegrated shape of our youthful visage, of what as a child we misplaced in the bursting valley of cosmological stardust and we begin again beginning to begin…

The Clastic castle, memory number four, room the first where my mother has passed; my mother, the stained glass window within her garden, framed within the wooden fence, the vines are a continuous moment emanating from her sun bathed ways, the old women as she walks upon the plucking violin as father tends to the lawn. The flowers she has given, their never ending inflorescence, the weather which has yet to fall upon us like an endless parading mask- she parades above in the morning from below where I have been living, where the furnace heavily breaths, where father approaches then leaves. We laid there often grinning at the ceiling watching as the mango skins dried. Do you remember as I the ceiling white and crumbling? We are running out of rooms to store all the frozen moments- when it snows we will have more. The town is small and tiny and the alleys come to a short end where the stairs meet the floor and the stairs again begin-  if I could only see the steps on Christmas morning the way I once saw the evergreens. She leaves now, leans in a passive way like a rudderless ship, somnolently upon the death of soil. In the second room there was a closet which many a night I spent mourning the approach of the unforeseeable way she came in the morning, the distance, the ember valleys from afar where her voice is calling. Outside the men are talking of the fallen timber. I am sure of the forgotten art, the galleries of the faithless, the history of a small fortune raised, spent but what is marvelous any longer? I thought it was her and her broken piano voice so I tickle the ivory atop the plastic floor, my wooden leg and I. In the valley he has a cabin and a Dictaphone, he smokes three packs a day, visits the farm often in his withered blue rolls Royce. Albania, it is you I am thinking of  like the crumbled paper below the heel of an Italian wedding, the invitation of your sister tan and pulling the clouds upon her, the mora that she speaks in, the grisette! but no she is not French, bubbles, no it is just the kid, the jar is not large enough for his tiny thoughts. It is venerable the way the roof sits above the children, they talk of such wonderful things. From above the sanatorium, the man, the concocted honey, the burrowing way he lives within the universe of tiny holes he has created out of the need to tell his story, do you see the way he has become his story? Silly to think the water would settle us, the wind, the woman in black, the man, the king, turn the page over and sweep her beneath the rug.  The playground, the park, the fence, what are they if not the semblance of a ceaseless desire to be young again? In the closet where the champagne calls, I have died a hundred tiny deaths in the eyes of another. If one life were enough, one life, I would stand tall each morning on the burnt out fire of the night before, rather, let us light the coals and begin the dance of joyful sorrow, to relive again the undying night when the ship arrived in the harbor and the war had begun, and I in my steel jaguar rolling somewhere in the green mansions of the Carolina’s. August, like an eloquent womb, in her belly I hear September breathing. She is course, foul, her breath is the crooning organ of time, stuck and bled, the annals of history have been living in the open meadow of her giving ways, of a child without god. In a world without the encompassing, enveloping hand, I wonder if things would have been better, produced more honey. The birch trees have fallen, the redwood softly peels, at a time when we are losing more of what we cherish. The cherry’s, the plums, the American dream unraveling within the drought of our dispirited hearts. The moth calls from within the chrysalis. We are alive at the very beginning and the beginning has just begun.

Everything begins with Elsa, sitting in the shape of days. Elsa was August, the reoccurring memory held captive within a summer month.

Sitting in her kitchen I watch as her form glistens in the freckled way the sun passes through the curtains; the crimson curve of her vibrant lips, her hips which fall into her thighs. Naked, she leans against a wall. Like drops of rain her breasts fall from her shoulders. Her charm is in the disinterested words she has not yet spoken; she speaks in a broken verse- between the distance of each syllable there exists the shade of her love. Elsa, I say, and she stops me, falls into the chair across the table, lays her toes atop mine as the smoke lifts gracefully from the ashtray, dissipates above her amber waves of hair.

In a moment we will have danced into the bedroom, to the mattress in the cove of her apartment; the waterfall of dreams- the subtle sound of the distant water makes its way through the window. I kiss her neck; the unfinished oil portrait of the recently deceased, vanishing into the oval history of her eyes.

She remains a mystery to me but it is her portrait I wish to paint, that others may come and see her lying upon the divan, marveling at her imagination. 

We met beneath a violet night, Chicago, circa 1936, Barabbas and I. Sitting within a parlor he approaches, hands me his handsome face, hand someone your face, he says, and the end is written in the smile. I glance about and he pulls me back with his heavy tongue. His eyes incessantly drop into his drink then to the women, walking, passing by. His words are the words I wish I had the words to say. Let us walk he says, it is too beautiful of a night

The luster of his face spreads to his thick oily hair as he brushes it with trembling hands- suspenders and jacket, his pants neatly rolled I ask him too many questions. I should be sure, he says, of the man which rests somewhere within. His confidence stands tall like the buildings we pass on this pivotal night.

I imagine the room he as taken, he says I have taken a room up north. He shows me the rooms he has seen, the paintings he has left on the wall, the flowers which fall from time to time in the rooms he has forgotten- he painted them so it would happen that way, a yellow center which curves to an oily black, at the bottom of the lake where the verdigris will finish what he has begun.

In a night a friendship begins, in a decade it strengths, to then live at the bottom of Jupiter’s well, where the water tastes of an endless cosmic night.

He holds his life curled within his hand. It is over he says, if he were to open his palm. He walks like rolling clouds of thick black smoke. He talks and I walk beside him Barabbas, the ghost, the spirit of the old way.  If there is to be salvation he says, it is with women, the machine song softened by the threading vein of their shared loom song, the furnace and the factory will vanish in the wake of their distant voices. It is madness we are approaching and we must live no matter how many skies have fallen. 

It was in Paris that he met her, Paris in the daylight, he says, an antiquated candle from the heavens, she stands tall and bright on a giant steel thigh. He sits and orders softly, sipping, the rumors echo from a dark alley of a war approaching. Mysterious, he tells me, the sound of freedom. He sips again; the oil, the bread dripping- with him a rucksack, a book and a pen.

He outlines the way she bends, the way her foot pulls the air, the way she displaces gravity. From within he is weightless. He draws the way her arms rest like a lady, he points to her elbow; he is bemused at the bend. Her skin, he says, is a rich soft white. She blushes as he lifts his chin and smiles.

He cleans his pipe, stuffs it heavy with leaves, incessantly puffing; Barabbas the train, rolling, the steam floats past, stretches, tumbling atop the ocean. It is as I remember; I remember it is Sunday. I spoon from eyes sleeps leftover kisses, tumbling, dusting my chin.

When the sun falls into the water, he reads of what he has written and a world erupts.

‘We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years.’

‘We dream much of paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourself lost too.’

‘But won’t you, indolent traveler, rest your head and dream your dreams upon my shoulder?’

-M.Proust