LOVE NOTE FROM KAZAKHSTAN
Does the space we dissolve into taste of us?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
On New Year’s I confessed: a year since I’ve been touched.
When the doctor brought his stethoscope to my body last month he pressed
it lightly to each clavicle, as though listening for a voice inside my bones. The cool metal
and rubber an isobar between us: two people unable to communicate,
the interpreter commanding: breathe deeply.
The escarpment of memory divides before now from now: each landscape incapable of knowing the other. Our past and present waving from across the divide.
A new language stares alien at me from the page, a language I’m told has no verb for thirst.
Lungs rattling, ragged, dry as dust and no word for thirst?
The loneliest place in the world is now.
A man drives a plow over a field. It’s not considered virgin steppe, was torn
apart and furrowed into again and again, fallow from the start.
The man drives back and forth beneath the mute white sky. People are still making plans
for the future.
I see now: the gentle aloneness of my life. This tender, shimmering thing.
SUTRO BATHS
for Alan Hankin
I’ll tell you the sky was gilt and vanilla instead of lead—
such ritual in the subversion of reality, the repetition of days.
In truth, the dull sky was miraculous. This then, our failure:
the need to seek perfection. Each human tragedy culled
from the stubborn search for utopia, the necessity to discover
unreality instinctual, deranged. A pelican cuts suddenly
downward and disappears in a havoc of splash. Across
the sandy field swimming pools and steam rooms crumble.
But it’s in the ugliness of things that there’s hope. Or,
in the world’s indifference: the perpetual rhythm of tides,
the incessant wearing away of one entity from another.
The utter omission of sentience. Only saltbrine and air
pressure, wet limestone and my hot tongue against it.
The toiling, turning motion of place, the suck and thrall,
the bitter spit and sweet hum of spray and rot—this swelling,
this unencumbering of belief, skin suddenly cool, quelled
by a force so much greater than fear, as in childhood, when
you endured the loss, the comprehension, held the curved,
empty shell to your ear and knew it was nothing, nothing,
only the wavebreak of your own blood crashing back.
Glint Literary Journal 