Ages ago, from Chantilly Lace:
I will offer you this bouquet of words. You will - you cannot help it - cut their stems, on an angle, arrange them to your liking. We will pass each other in the halls, on the streets (one night we will share a dream but forget it upon waking) and sometimes we will greet each other, other times feign distraction, concentration, and pass. Each time these words will line the insides of our coats, tangle in our hair, be mistaken for dust or exhaust choking the tunnels of us.
You are deciding now to whom I am speaking, if it is you or not. And if it is you, whether or not you hear me. You will not decide how well I know you, though you might try. You may decide how well you know me. When I offer you this.
The fat lady on the subway, who knows she is fat, who knows that we know she is fat, and the girls in front of her. The girls each take up one seat. The fat lady takes up two, and she eats a McDonalds Quarter Pounder, french fries, knowing she is fat, listening to the girls talk about how they pigged out on that salad for lunch, how they need to go dance it off tonight.
I might tell you how I saw this, how it felt to see it, over coffee and you might nod, make a sound, have nothing to say. And we will
sit in silence, sipping, until one of us remembers something funny. Or I might write about it in a poem.
Later, one of the girls, aching and breathless, will think that she doesn't want to be here, under him, but thinks that she loves him, wants to make him happy. But she wants to be out from under him, this tide of pressure, wants to be by the window, wants to be in the night sky. Doesn't want him to feel the tears mingling with the sweat on his shoulder.
Here you will have your own words, with their own scent, be it of sweat, rain on grass, the dinner you cooked the night you first said to each other 'I love you'. We could take the words and lay them like this... and like this, one here, another there... then add balconies and archways and a view. You could offer me your hand and we would weave your fingers in about the letters, and we would be singing our landscape. |
