I. What a curious thing, these November feelings. I notice them as I notice the mangled branches of trees, cradling baskets of red leaves between their limbs, carefully, as though each leaf were a newborn baby; the infant redness, like cardinals, and like scraped knees. I notice the moist rotted tree trunks: deathly black, life-giving wombs, festering with strange new things that slink and skulk in the fetid dark. I notice the way the sunrise sunlight illuminates the highway in the morning, until even black tar is bathed in angelic light. II. I remember days when sharpness buried vagueness in the cold wet earth and prickly details swarmed around me in brisk whirlwinds. I remember a day when I waltzed in the rain, and when wet concrete, rough on my numb white fingertips, reminded me of warm couches crowded with friends. I remember a day when legs were strewn over legs over legs. When we thought we had domesticated something as wild as love; when we let our selves be irreparably lost in the small space that some might someday call family. I remember the way the couch felt, and the way your arm felt when it fell over my shoulder: such a delicious dead weight. The fine light hairs that fell across your forearm: the width and breadth and depth and weight, in exact measurements, calculated and absolute. I become a mathematician when I think of you. Some day I’ll tell you so, and then you’ll laugh your airy laugh, because I know that only you would know what any of this truly means. III. Again, I imagine myself as Zeus; enraged as mortals do what they were born to do, again and again, they leave, slipping from reed baskets and into wide inane open space, giggling as they go. Again, I imagine that the thunder rumbles in direct response to my own heaving sobs.
