Escape Plans

After the storm, after the marriage. After poetry and after women. After all this time. Letters arrive from a forgotten town in the interior indicating we are not yet finished learning what is true and what is not. Refuse then even mercy? Scratching escape plans on the walls of a prison in which you are the only jailer. Reading Freud (Anna not Sigmund) over coffee, taking notes for later. The psalms in Latin, John's Gospel in Latin. How you look at me when I am trying to decide what trail to follow next. Crows on dead trees out past the river, their cries cold and sharp, like being guillotined in Paris in the eighteenth century. Forgetting as spiritual practice, i.e., remembering as an error forgetting is given to amend. After writing but not yet after speech. Dissolution begins with bodily death, not meditation or insight, remember this. After the map and after the territory. After sextants and travel. After a music one cannot find anywhere save alone in darkness on their knees. Bring what is sacred with you, I always do, so you say, you who never found a relationship you couldn't desecrate with charming rhymes and semen. A cry in the heart growing louder and more insistent. From what can you not be separate? A space in which we translate everything from body to spirit, spirit to essence, and from there into beginning. A silence after unto which no syllable is worthy, unto which even the idea of worthiness is an error. I mean wordiness? Well, us anyway. Always us.