Starlines

Out in the night beyond the green where dark falls into greater darkness the lights of distant villages line the hills like rows of stars against the edge of the world as it has always been known. If you stare out long enough you can read them left to right and right to left until they spell out the history of time. They like to tell you it isn’t possible but you can leave and you can come back as often as you’d like. You can start at the beginning or at the end or in the middle and revisit the self you once were before you became the self you are now. Under the expression is the pure form and that will never change. You can go out over the edge in search of the starlines but you will find that even among them you are the selfsame being.

You can adjust the time on your watch, pull out the crown, twist the dial forward, backward, forward again but you can’t invent new seconds or minutes or hours or moments. If you read the time on a dead man’s watch you will see that it is the same as yours, as it ever was, as it is now, as it will always be, forever.

See your image in the water, magnified and contorted. With your mind’s eye you can fill in the elisions brought about at the hands of the tide, at the hands of time as it propels you forward down the stream. You can inject memories into the narrative and start over.

You can say to the boy, Goodbye, I have to go now and I won’t be coming back this time, but he won’t understand what that really means until he revisits this moment, if he ever does, years from now, and wonders who that stranger was who once spoon fed him yogurt with honey, apples, cinnamon. You can hold out hope that he will someday remember your voice and the way he would put your necklace in your mouth, saying om om om, his word for eat eat eat, but you have to know that this moment may never come and you may be forgotten to his unborn conception of time.

You can sleep but you will dream. You can wake within it and maybe you will fly but it’s just as likely you will be paralyzed and faced with a faceless woman staring you down as you stare back wordlessly, gun kissing the soft spot between your eyes. I thank god these days that I am dreaming nonsense again.

In the sky hangs half a moon. You can appreciate its shine, try to bottle it and pour it all over the parched skin of your sunscorched body but in its warm glory you will forget that there is a dark side, but if you can see the dark in the light and the light in the dark you can go out into the world again and do much better this time. You can lick your dry lips wet once more, clean once more, new.

At the end of your rope you can swing freely, take advantage of gravity, test it, beg the question of whether or not it really wants to hold you. I can tell you now, before you go off the edge, that it does, but if you really need to see for yourself I can’t and won’t stop you.

You can name the you, define it, but in doing so you will limit it, miss out on all of the animate or inanimate humanity that makes it what it is. You can limit yourself but why would you. You can write like someone else but why would you. This door is not that door. This heaven is not that heaven is not my heaven nor yours.

Against the draw of blackness the curtains enclose an even deeper, deadening dark. In that dark you can listen for a silence that might finally steady your heart’s irregular beating but you should know by now that true silence is not something to be heard.

I think I’ll buy some new shoes today, so I can run.

I think I’ll let the stray cats in and loose them under the bed and in the cabinets.

I think I’ll shave my legs and bleed around the ankles because I don’t take my time with the razor. I think I’ll buy bandages today, and here I go again, talking about blood.

I think I’ll sleep in today, until the hound dog barks down a brand new dawn and I am called forth

once more out of one dream and into another. In our lives we will all be millions of men and so far

I have only been three or four. I have nights to sleep through and mornings to wake to. I have to get back to work, I have work to get back to.

My heart’s feeble beat, gorgeous and alone on this side of the world. You can hear it if you put your ear to the ground and think of me.