Epilogue-ing
I am always waiting for things to be over. I am always waiting for things to begin.
We were far beyond the turnpike and this rebirthed thing like textured stone
didn’t blink twice at street carnations emptied out my fragile predispositions
didn’t prefer marble to gore gutter garbage only a freshly feathered body made of
mauvish prisms infinity windows Believe me on the seven-hour drive before we arrived
I dreamed I was dying like this dying into this creature dying into a condition called new
It was two November 29ths ago that I apparently was carried over the threshold of the Hudson river by the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. The Holland Tunnel had been closed, I’d been mapped to loop through Staten Island to avoid the crush of traffic. I was a bride but twice as feisty, seized with an unplaceable repulsion, an unplaceable want. All along the seven hours I drove, something like asphalt, coma, fog, thirst— and then so many steel ribs with shadows battering over my windows as I crossed— and this startling sensation of having done something strange and irreversible.
The two years since now coil into one another, occupied as they are in their new plurality, absorption. When people ask, I can hardly remember why. I can’t point to any one dream. Nor job, nor sum of money. Not a single person there waiting for me.
Why—? Whose fantasy anyway. Just one failed poem and some drained-out jottings in a notebook.
Here’s another seasonal marker, a festival, a commemorative gesture. Postscript for the turn of the year.
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