We all have our methods of asking for the resolution of what is beyond our control.

Prayer.

Something that becomes a problem of sorting photographs.

Headlines.

Patterns of deviation and return.

She would mimic me, in that prismatic place where we met, between our two lives, between our two fates.

It is beginning to seem that two is the relevant number, that our attempted fusion was not what it seemed, oneness a steeper incline than suspected, that prayer was the language of our embrace, and desire was the pretense that led us to share so much time.

A confusion of desire with arrival.

A mingling of other stories with our own, an intersection of dialogues not approachable by any other means.

The truth?

It was a piece of ceramic...

It had form and function...

It was that one summer; it was kisses and turbulence, stillness and aspirations... it was that most unique summer, and our repeated embrace, an infinity of repetitions, the years intervening, the gestures, a life lived, a love.

Something that cannot be proven...

But I lived it, am living it. I am living the history of a ceramic vase...

Bound to shatter...

Against something hard.

Thirst.

I loved you then, in that way.

Beyond hope?

Shattering.

And now?

I am broken, and you call me... nothing, not at all...

You are narrating me.

Maybe.

Playing my song.

Thirsting.

In reverse.

Clean and tainted, coarse yet pliable.

One shouldn't play at temptation while in mourning.

I want to undo the breakage.

I want to understand it.

Thirsting.

Which is more prodigious: the thirst or the project of addressing it?

Sometimes I'll coil into myself, and recoil and recoil, and find myself shedding memories of your touch, like tears, imagine I am flooding the night, and try to remedy the thirst by drinking myself, my salty sickly self.

And so it begins again.

Come toward me.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

DEVIATION & RETURN
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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