April 18

& no sooner do I call in relief on my self than my heart infiltrates my nightly dreams. All week, each night, some new heartbreak, some rejoinder of loneliness, ghost of her, active landscape of the peopled past of which I was once centrally a part. & I awaken burning with longing, enflamed by the desire to feel that subtle tempest of connectivity, to share in life’s vicissitudes, fall back upon or hold up. All of my contingencies vanquished. Self-exiled. How oil-slick & slipshod our brief roles in life can be. Regard an old album of photographs with an eye for the periphery in each shot. These people whose names well up from some forgotten cave, flushed & fleshed to, glimmer-eyed & smiling. Say here, my arm around a friend now dead & years buried. There, an anonymous hand border-severed upon my back, a sidelong glance. What have I been to others, to myself, & how, I wonder, do I haunt them? Some stranger’s awkward grinning in the corner. Oh, that one. I remember vaguely. & nowhere more bewildering than in love, all that open tenderness writ plain upon the countenance, all that swirling heart-tempest conjured & recalled, woven of smoke & ash, an aria sung & echoed dark off the ribcage. Wonderment in amnesic fugue, adumbrated recess. How it feels to be alone. Jackself after all.