Prologue

 

And if it were possible to pursue the bleeding-heart dove to her nest, what then?  It doesn’t make sense for me to say, Forgive—I’m naturally inclined to a day-dreamy disposition, and leave it all at that.  There was more to it, to that story, that I kept leaving out: the car so close it almost.  But some things were true: when I cry, it is as I said, always in first person.  At least now I understand the poem involving traffic lights.  Symbols will always present accidents of themselves.  When the bleeding-heart dove flies into the cathedral’s windows and falls out of favor with the skies, this is no accident; what it is is the manner in which symbols will make themselves known to us.

            To begin and then end—it makes me fall out of favor with myself.  The sky full of false surmises, the desert empty: I only exist elsewhere.  Tell me what it is that you know about me, because you seem to think that I can save myself.  Is it wrong to attribute to you all of my happiness?  What was it that made the bishop believe in my sexuality? I keep falling out of use-value.  In the rain, the street lamps empty their pockets of change.  If only it were possible to love without consequences, because sometimes, I forget just where it is that I am; this, however, has no bearing on where it is I may be going.  If I begin to call the shots, it is because so many things have already been shattered.  It was wrong of me to believe that you had invented your stories; even the alluded-to rocks were based on real rocks and so the girl whom you met in the rain, who slipped suddenly into your car to say that she had always loved you, she was true; and therefore, from then on, up through London Towers, over London Bridges, through London Mazes, you try but fail to find her.  I am thinking of a number from one to ten, and you are rowing a boat further and further from shore.  If there were false surmises, it was I who embedded them into the locks, the open windows, the space of ajar.  When you said we would read this book together, I assumed you meant it was the one that held

 

 

 

 whatever it was, she could continue clinging in this manner, her date book now just a sorry excuse to linger.  Besides, the dowager had warned her against it.  The baby booties, the baby blanket, the baby bib, the baby bonnet, had all been knit; the quilt would be done by spring.  (The quilt would contain the interior of things.)  It would be done in the manner of broken dishes, because dishes always seemed to be breaking.  (In the cupboards, in the drawers, there was never, ever two of anything.)  In the end, she would know exactly just what it was that she had lost.  And when the water stopped running and when the floorboards started rotting and when the skylight began leaking and when the radiators stopped working, she would take herself seriously; she would refuse to let in the maintenance men.

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Mechanism for a Dream

 

 

            The decoder ring spelled out forbearance.  If I wanted this, then I wanted this last week.  Doctors have a way of making you believe that everything will be okay; thus, doctors have a way of making you love them.  In the dream, the doctor held the instrument that listens to life against my heart.  I sent a telegraph to a cloud and out came a thousand souls.  The telegraph said: forbear.  You may not know this, because you probably have never had to know, but I know it because whatever it is that I am doing, I am always interested in something else.  (When you dream of a telegraph, it means that you are not about to receive, but will deliver an important message soon.)  When a star “dies,” it still exists; it is only said to “die” because it no longer gives light.  So too do I wonder about our living selves: do we begin then, sometime, much later, to give off light?  The star still exists; some stars, such as quasars and pulsars, will continue to give off signals, such colossal amplitudes of last life, a life-line showing up on no screen, continuously beeping for a celestial doctor who does not come.  Some “dead” stars, like black holes, we know exist simply because of the behavior of other bodies around them; their gravitational forces continue to attract whatever happens to live near enough to be propelled closer to them.  (So too do I behave in such a way that suggests that someone I loved once still exists?)  What the unsuspecting body does not know: once there is a pull of attraction, there is no departing, no leaving, and thus one gets crushed into a cesspool so astoundingly dark and heavy that not even light can escape.  The star chart spelled out forbearance.  In the dream, there was an astrolabe that continued to point the way.  (Strange that in dreams there exist some machines that cannot be, or would not be, used while we are our wakeful selves.)  I used a strange mechanism,

 

Coda

 

a flutter from this life to that life?  That great space of in between, that unknowing of what then of what next, these were the reasons the ferry man gave for not departing, for not embarking, for not listening to his passengers say when.  But really, what it was was a love story, and that is why the door stays forever opening, why the lily was filmed as it was, forever closing. What matters is that at one time, you came to me or I came to you and then.  What it was was the space of—a love affair that was little more than.  An infinite singularity, a space for heaving. 

 

 

 

© Jenny Boully