More real when asleep
06/22/2007 02:48 a.m.
I carried the unlikely flowers home in the rain and washed the rental vase out myself. The tulip’s salmon-knuckles rest outside the vase – as far as they can as though they hate getting their feet wet. Maybe they just hate the disconnected feeling of being cut off. I’m renting everything these days, down to the teaspoons and forks in my rented cutlery drawer, the copper pipes corroding just under the cement floor. I’d go so far as to say I’m even renting a body so that “I” can cruise. That might be pushing this metaphor. My rental body owns some things, is buying a house and some second-hand things. It crawls around on the window’s surface, ready to fly and never look back, yet compelled by necessity to seek a way to stay on track. Mosses deeper than dreams grow on low voices, a lake composed of sight and sounds standing on my sleeping hands and spread hair and head, staring up into who knows what, more real when asleep – we hold each other down under water, make believe we are a chain of double-sided beings walking off branches like weathered angels who come home at dawn and slip off their wings, for I trust only in these yielding things, the reed-splintered dirty water shifting to let in reflections and a docking ferry’s hull. Clear blue sky cups birds raising them to its thirsting lips. In spite of your shirt, glimpses of your heart drift behind the sun-shaped button-holes. On the harbor, ferries constantly switch sides.