Only Inattention

In a way, all the writing was just a futile attempt to be a camera, to do what the camera could not, and what did one get for it but words. She still mentions you from time to time, as if knowing at some level how you matter. People do talk. For a little while once, the landscape mattered less than her shoulder, but those were not the days, and also, one can't say with any confidence they aren't making a comeback. We sprawl in the back yard and study the sky, its diamantine constellations, the threads of pale cloud lit up by the moon, all of it coming and going. Your finger touches mine under the table, soft and unwitnessed by anyone we're with, and it's like we're in love, whatever that means. "You had your hand in my hair/now you act a little colder/like you don't seem to care." A dream in which I am warned against a more aggressive, a more commercial approach to writing. She'll be happy to be hear about that, let me tell you. The interior optimist is mule-like in more ways than one. What we bring to the table, what is left to the by-and-by. Any anyway, how will we know? Christ is one possibility but there are others and only inattention knows them, only inattention can even pretend to gather them in. It's not futile so much as funereal. The highway is its own luminosity, blessing all travelers, making traveling itself the altar. Pray on me sister, pray! Here where I am rooted is ipso facto here when I am stuck without a blossom, without a green leaf. Oh what am I but a potato, mute in the dark ground, blind in the cool soil, only getting to the light in the hands of those who plan to consume me? My existence is predicated on the relationship between your hunger and your patience and don't pretend otherwise, missy. Lifted by hawks circling the meadow. What if it really is about just taking what you want? Well, I hope it was good for you, these many sentences.