Geometry (3)

As if each one of us is meant for each & every other 

Only across distance can any object be seen.  Have you ever pressed a rose

to your eye?  Not even its color will be apparent to you.

Only over time can a story be told.  Between once & ever after lies the tale. 

A portal to our dreams, it sounds as one falling note (as a clapper in a bell).

It is meaningless to talk about things without respect to what.  That is why

a rose in a desert is so different from a rose in your neighbor’s garden.

The symbol m denotes slope.  “To climb” in French is monter but who’s to

say that’s why (in Sweden and Austria, k = slope, in the Netherlands it is

variously a, p, or m),  s yet another possibility.

Climbing up, he did not think beyond each toe hold, avoiding the trap of

counting in numbers, the kind of behavior that leads to a slip or fall,

translating numbers into words like “clay,” “pipe,” “snow.”  In this way,

things could not add up to victory or defeat.

Falling down, her wardrobe flashed before her eyes.  It had been a while

since she had worn a circle skirt with thick white socks, cuffed at the ankle.

At rest, they both wore the same thing, a seamless garment with no

pockets.

When he had lost everything, his wife, kids, house (and later his job

because nothing was working out) (and then his health and good looks), he

was on an outbound flight to a colony of divorced men who live on nothing

but beer, nuts, television.

It was only on the return flight that he could reflect on his losses.  

After all she had been through, she could love just about anybody, young,

old, man, woman, and of course any warm-blooded animal, speaking

volumes in heavy, limbic consciousness, licking her hand, sniffing.  

The question is whither the gaze?  We already know whence it comes,

from a heart that persists, thumping along, as she absent-mindedly strokes

her dog’s head.

At the moment, her gaze falls on a man in a white shirt, sitting over there. 

He is talking to someone, making an apology.  She wishes he were

apologizing to her.

Years from now we won’t even remember what we were arguing about. 

But even as she is saying this, something bubbles up from the deep, his

complaint of not enough, hers of too much.

There it is, a love song—a rose, the letter m, the word “snow,” a boy

climbing, a girl falling, television, dog, food, drink, complaint, apology—

“a simple tune with many verses.”