February 10, 2004
Orbit of I
I was thinking about Europe again, inevitably, the future, always, him. What does it mean to fashion these things for myself, to make a space, three dimensional, for him alongside me? I can't explain the two of us in a thousand sentences, can't explain a half of a second of myself in this, my two-dimensional reflection. I show you what I want you to see. Who is to say there are not seven hundred angles to me?
I wish I had a place to pull away, mid-week, some cotton corner of surreality. I'm a doll in a chair with legs spread, dumb face... I've got Joyce's portrait tucked underneath of my arm and caught in the web of my gray matter, black widow desolation looming. I repent... foolishness? I don't know what sin is.
How long can I go in numb satisfaction? I know the thrill of deviation, of wounding poetry, star-sundering sex, limbs aching from metaphors spent, lip bleeding from kisses stolen, rending. I swallowed a trail of spit and semen but all I tasted was ink, squat black lines on a page, my pen, my nails, my eyelashes raining down like minute feathers. How can I fly with little but beams and bones to support me? So much flesh, here, water-fat and thick as jam. Useless.
Isn't it strange that we have a cage to keep our heart in? Or is it to keep the world out?
I'm letting the silk spin out of me, warm and wet, lines of eggs unused, my ovaries emptying. Sorrow, scarlet, fertility, womanhood, curse and clots and screaming and I see Sylvia propped in a chair, indecent, bawling. She warned me.
The sky blinks, night, a wedding veil, a bell jar, an opaque glass eye. I sleep under western stars.
astera at 10:37 p.m.