For Nora

Fertile ground incomplete. A strategic withdrawing of forces. The men leave the field, the way the tide recedes: slowly, hissing resentfully. Even years leater, one can come across small pools of angry-eyed men, lost and stranded in heavily fortified eddies. Samaritans wandering about with metal detectors, seeking violent treasure. And we wandered these heavily wooded beaches, these sandless jungles, looking for a place to start again, a landmark not washed away by the waves of the war. Was this temple where we played as youths? Do these monkeys circle the remnants of the sand castle we were raised in? Is there any chance for us to resettle? What happens when the waves begin to return?

Parenthetical to nothing, women strolling slowly arm in arm with oblivion, smiling leisurely, checking their watches. "Terribly sorry. I just can't figure out why my watch has stopped." Oblivion apparently doesn't mind, because it doesn't say anything back.

The dehydrated tongue of a business tie. The emission of sunglasses as a voiding of character, the expectation of the jungle spirit to revlaim this city, sweep up the sides of the hills and remake this chaotic world in its far more chaotic image. Because that's the truth, stripped of all the romanticism--this brutal chaotic world is not nearly as brutal and chaotic as the world before it. No wonder, then, that the women take long lunches with oblivion, seeming neither upset or afraid, hoping perhaps for a quick kiss or at least an offer to pick up the check, the check that's owed, the check that's come due.

I can watch you walk and I don't even know if you realize that you hips sway under the weight of the world. You smoke and flip the pages of your magazine searching for some respite (little wonder you would turn to your patient gentleman!) trying to will yourself into flatness.

Nora, where are you? Where are you, girl. There, there, tha's a love. That's a love.

Can't go that way anymore. No matter how longingly the pages are touched and turned, there's no excape to be had there anymore. It's all for the birds, and for the bird's shadows, moving over the landscape like a speed reader's gaze, as we try our best to come to terms with our roles, far more slight than we might have ever thought, as we begin to come to terms (become to gin to terms) with our essencelessness. Milling about, waiting for the moment. Lighting cigarettes, tapping our fingers through the sockets of abandoned sandals, feeling our way to an imagined lucidity while the bird shadows circle overhead, while the bird shadows wait to feed us.

And is that so wrong, our listlessness in the face of facelessness? How unsurpirsing that we might dye our hair blue, tattoo ourselves in banality (meaningless designs, cartoon characters, senseless epigrams, initials of long-abandoned loves), settle back and twisting in panic just as we tread the border of sleep, but otherwise trying to settle into our cradle (aware, sometimes, of the men left behind in wars and scarred with poverty, lingering still at the edges of reef and in soft embankments of shadow), but wishing for nothing more, finally, than the lifting of the weight; the chance to reshift one's weight and resettle, perhaps, permanently, listening unaware for the pounding of surf.

--July 2, 2001
1:49 p.m.