So see she ceases to exist, in sense and stuff and spine and wrist, what seeps its strength cannot subsist, what's set in stone in soul persists. Scene. See me see them see me in the gap in the blinds. In the great rectangle, in the middle, on the sofa, behind the blinds, under piping, on green carpet, where everything glows green. Scene.
An unmade bed. These are the makings of lazy Sundays - when the sun is too hot in February and it beats through the window without consent, when it fills the room in waves like a gas hissing as it unfolds, when you see it spreading cautious but with contempt in slow motion, when there is no air conditioner and the windows won't give. This is 3:50 on a Sunday. The dust of some ancient breath is propagating through space, following sun beams like magnets like magnetized so when you swat it goes nowhere. Now and then I think of changing, how everything changes every second, how I don't even notice all the change, how I can't remember the half of it; and if I think about this hard enough, the weight of what I forget per second, I get really scared in that moment and understand what it is to be paralyzed. My dad - the way he chewed; the old furniture. The worst is faces. It's when you think you know a song but then you sing it and don't know words at all, just sounds. When I look at pictures I use it for memory, to fill in the details of his face. When I hear his voice on video and it surprises me. Those moments, which come so often, when I don't know what to do, and can't for the life of me think what he'd do if he were me.
Often when I draw, I draw blanks. Often I make precincts for bad ideas. Sometimes I write well, but less often. Sometimes I freeze up, only sometimes.
We left her reading artichoke palms in the kitchen. We never thought she'd make such a slow recovery; we never thought she'd read that in the artichokes! Those were bad, they went bad, that's what we told her. That house is much too white for one person and she'll go blind if she stays there. But too late - the house is in her and she is the house. No, we never thought she'd read that at all.
The last two days have been waking up too early, in that chasm of consciousness where nothing is certain, where rooms are dimly lit and it's all blurry looking backward, like it might not have happened or we didn't see it after all. It's waking up that early that makes days dance together.
Sometimes I cough to hear the sound of my own voice.
They wear grief and they wear it well. They cry freely, too, and they look at me askew. I recite to them Castellanos. "Pero el llanto/ es en mí un mecanismo descompuesto/ y no lloro en la cámara mortuoria/ ni en la ocasión sublime ni frente a la catástrofe./ Lloro cuando se quema el arroz o cuando pierdo/ el último recibo del impuesto predial." ("But crying for me is a broken mechanism, and I don't cry in front of the casket, on the sublime occasion, or in the face of catastrophe. I cry when I burn the rice, or when I lose the last receipt for the property tax.") I don't actually recite this but I think it often.
We dance the tarantella on orange peels until we choke from all the acid.
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