You make plans - forbidden plans - and time passes. This project began with a reference to white sails confused with whitecaps, the two of us eating at that restaurant on the canal, talking about speech defects. You end up sitting on a curb, hands folded as if in prayer, as calm as anyone who knows he is dead and is going to die. And so on and so on.
I am always falling in love, always looking back in surprise, as if to say "you too?" The dog yawns by the door, turns in a circle. The he I am not quite yet keeps returning in memory to the dead whale, that moment alone before dawn, forcing himself to look into its withered eye, and later writing poetry amid scrub pine (the ones Del published) and trying not to cry. And rain sounds, train sounds, and sad sounds, love sounds.
It evolves and makes demands which is how you know it's real, or could be if you wanted. A bowl of salad in the saddle and she's off. Personally, I'm fond of any three-syllable word with an L sound in there but hey. Nine foster homes in two years, that explains a lot.
She writes and you read and reading makes you happy. I want you in that motel outside Albany, the flowery bed spread, the unrushed gentleness, all that opening at once. Chopin in the front yard begging to be allowed back in. He never writes from Paris and yet my heart chugs along like a duck towards the shore.
What I remember of those long afternoons was kneeling at the delta, that shock of red, and how it turned a softer rust underneath. Working farms no longer abound. He writes how he cannot bear the madness infidelity breeds and all his dead drunk uncles laugh and his dead sad aunts just nod and turn yet another page of the family bible. Yours too.
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