More to the point she said to me whatever made you think that you could come down here and open this?
I didn’t open it I said.
This was the night when I was meant to stay the night. The night when I had asked her at the start of it which room was his.
Which one I asked again.
It was a question that she neither answered nor acknowledged asking me instead why didn’t I take a seat why didn’t I have a piece of maple praline cake.
But now
But this
They had me driven home by taxicab. Next evening I looked down the line. The sky already growing dark. The platform even darker. Cutting through the coming night a row of lighted windows of a train. When I arrived at this hotel I stepped into the patio. I told myself
He’s here.
Then under that next layer was
I’ll try again.
When I arrived on that first night I took the elevator down to 3 then took the stairs to 4 the elevator up to 7 where the hallway lights were out. But I was wrong about that night.
That night I saw a man.
Perhaps it was the time of night perhaps my own fatigue that colored my impression of this man who walked
He moved as if
The glimpse of walking I had witnessed told me that
with arms held stiffly to his sides as though were they to be released his hands would have begun to scrabble frantically along the walls. Back down to 6
I was approaching 605 when I
There’s something going on in there I told myself.
When he was passing by I
All but certain of his turning looking back at me I did not turn look back at him. I hurried back into
just paint.
The walkway she said
double doors
your feelings even
thoughts.
She said But I can’t enter into where you live. Sometime you’ll have to tell me what it’s like.
It’s green.
It’s green?
Uh huh.
But it’s a green of varying gradations like a forest full of trees.
I took the elevator up to 8.
(Night Six) She closed the BASEMENT off.
When I am out of it I get back into it by walking. But before I walk I have to work. When work is done I blow the little candles on the tables out. I get my tote bag from behind the curtain. Out the door. I walk. Between my legs I feel a sadness. Loneliness. I think: When I am home again engulfed I’ll drop down to my knees upon the floor where I will pray to bed to floors to windows even to my walls to be delivered from all this. But I can’t get to there. Not yet. I have to walk. Before I walk I have to work.
I light the little candles on the tables work all corners of the room until the time has come to blow the candles out. I get my tote bag from behind the curtain. Out the door. I do not take a taxicab. I walk. I hear that voice: Instead of looking wanton try to give the sense that you are dressed in a diaphanous material.
You wear a wreath of flowers on your hair.
It’s true your body seems to have been made for pushing to the earth.
For doing ugly business to.
But try.
Impart instead the information that if hands approach you will collapse into an aura that will take the form of mist.
I get up off the floor. I wash my face. I pull myself together. Get into my bed reflecting on the night.
I tell myself: Tonight you worked all corners of that room. You blew those candles out. You went behind that curtain peed then got your things together. Out the door. You walked right by those taxicabs. The bus stop. Felt the crying slipping out of you. It dribbled down your legs. You walked it off. You looked. Fuck you. Fuck all of you. You shook it off. You let them look. You tried conveying the impression that you
softly
two angelic sleeves
each fastened at the cuff
with pearls
three tiny brooches
at the shoulder
nosegay at the waist
a pair of silver sandals
iridescent
ribbons
tied around your ankles
Wrists as well?
You see.
I work.
I walk.
I look the bodies up down. Mainly look at men. Among the men if I looked only at the ones that seemed most plastic I would not find any man. Therefore I look at every man. If he looks back at me too rigidly I look beyond him. I accelerate. I get away. When I am fixed on one who seems as plastic as I like a man to seem I speak to him. I say as I have heard it said so many times before: Come home with me feel wrapped in all my sympathy. For sympathy defines my being. It is everything in me.
I see a man. The man sees me. The man looks adequately plastic so I don’t accelerate. Don’t try to get away. He walks with me. He talks. This man. I talk to him. I say: There are not many people who are capable of accepting the idea of multiple existences on earth. Do you know what I’m saying to you sir?
He answers Such discussions will not get us anywhere as we approach the walkway leading to the double doors of my apartment building.
He says For too many of us life can only be a simple episode
We take the elevator to my floor.
a fragment not a whole in which all feelings of belonging must be lost forever.
Up on 8 the little door up to the roof was still propped open.
This
I tell the man
is where I live.
Black rubber roofing underfoot the view of iron fire escapes on buildings building tops high walls of windows most of which were dark was backdropped by a starry sky. I saw some movement in a window just across from
It was there
when looking out from there where I began to
For perhaps as people say the first time in my life I felt as if
There comes a time when one has to become completely conscious of all joys as well as every kind of suffering on this earth.
That window. A suggestion of a form behind it.
All of my determination rooted in sincerest confidence that I could find him here that I could bring him back to her
To us he said.
were leveled.
There is someone in there looking back at me I told myself.
It was not only the suggestion of a form in shadows in that other building’s window but it also was a face that in its image lay the image of itself depicted as if from all possible points of view.
This sighting of a man or woman hard to tell was followed by the onset of deep longing.
Man.
A comprehensive loneliness.
Demolished.
Right away I told him she’s the one she said.
That’s what she said to me he said. She told me that you were the only one.
I didn’t open it I said. I didn’t even try to open it I said.
But when I said it to her I could only hear could only see
recall
as if this image had been overlaid on top of everything
the tiny body of a bird inside that lacquered box
Man.
bird
To touch its tiny body was to rub an opening in the body that revealed it was a body full of tiny ants
all black
all dead
packed in.
But how could flowers
carved ones
ones in pots
be sinister? I asked.
My dear she said how could they not.