Composed in Unfamiliar Settings

If I am the leaves falling, torn from the tree by wind or a passing truck, then that hurts. This is the world into which I awoke, and you are over there, and when the wind moves across the lake the lake fills with a liquid script, and when the trains are finished running they rust in yards that nobody visits. Perhaps our grandmothers loved the same bible passage, repeated it quietly in difficult moments, the funerals of children, reports of war between radio static as the night came on through the hills. How slowly I go, as if my body were already turning to stone, as if getting anywhere were no longer an objective, as if leaving was the one thing left to fear. The garden after heavy rain, the meadow laying on its side, and the foxes whose den is near the old cemetery, who cross the road before it is light. One's head fills with sorrow, with lepers composing an essential poetry of loss, with fragments of songs. Perhaps we are forgiven. Perhaps we are simply radiant dust briefly functioning in a patterned way, where "patterned" is a form of longing, a belief that order somehow includes "us" in a longed-for way. Digressions as a form of repetition, lust as a call to go home. Where "one" is a way of speaking, a conceptual shortcut that distracts us from the real problem of shoeless feet perennially disinclined to travel. Barns come and go, the swallows come and go, and childhood comes and goes but you, you do not come and go. Thus our bed grows smaller, and the ghosts of many dogs float across it like bell-shaped clouds, like sentences composed in unfamiliar settings. I meant to say that sentences composed in unfamiliar settings enlarge themselves, as if to lay claim to the spatial encumbrance (which is merely psychological) or perhaps as a fixed response to some interior arousal dictated by causes that one intuits only because results appear - because this appears. This this. Upon what is the subject/object divide contingent? Why say anything at all? When you love the killer as you love me, then you will know what love is. In the interim, one constructs a fantasy of October, situates the body according to what appear to be mutually-agreed upon laws, and writes what is there to be written. If there is anything else, do tell. Piano notes recall one another, as envelopes recall the letter, and the letter recalls the one who wrote it, what seems like years ago, even now.