July 7

Stef's birthday, & me here dumb to it, a malamute under bright clip of moon, wrought with some disfigured baying that produces no sound. & maybe fitting, to so contort the body in its craven expression & to hear only hollow silence in return. Where I have put myself. Where I have hung my catenary of days, strung flaccid from hope to reconstructed hope. & so I am deflated today, & my heart is playing a music my mouth can’t shape, & I am thinking how odd, like standing on a bridge watching a flaming barge pass under with no shirt to tug, no one to confide in witness. & fires are burning around me here, sky occluded in thick smoke-haze, that sudden gun-metal cold of dusk evicted, this muggy lingering heat seeping in the cabin, smoldering around Roy’s artifacts, his cigar stubs flaking in brown ash, his crumpled paper towels cast aside after pawing sweat from his neck, the suffocating smoke from his fry-baby, rings of coffee stain where he hoists his mug in the morning, cups half-shared by country time lemonade & beer, bottlecaps scattered around the trash can on the soggy plywood floor. & his stench everywhere, the massive slug-wake he leaves in passing, the slime & detritus of a beaching sea-lion rolling fat in some drying stagnant tide-pool. On my towel when I dry after showering. In my clothes. In my fucking hair. I am in no position to tolerate this. & today, compassed for my letting-in of the day’s thinking, he rears in that kitchen seat with that same magazine he has been reading for a month & a half & that same brow like a knot in a child’s shoelace suddenly untied. Such vitriol he makes me spew. & here all I want is to breath a quiet thought, untwine me that words will fall from it, that I recognize all the beauty & heartbreak & strangeness & celebration in the day. Or the being in it, the years falling around us, the stark remnant architectures of our living, vestigal & plain. & the sudden illuminations in the interstices, lub-dub of the heart, its ache, its thirst, its singing through the blanched ribs, the taut sinews, skin & skein, until some faint little note falls into the bolt-blue sky, & is carried, & is heard like a thrush is heard, all wrong but gracefully so, backgrounded but insidious, a whistle issued unwitting at some later date. It is rupture makes me tremble, & I’ve little bearings to sound. & so I shake instead. & see what falls from me.