Laying next to you is like sliding a cotton crew cut over bare skin - and looking into your eyes is a lot less like homework - trying to add and subtract all the ifs and ands and buts - to get an answer. It's more like looking through old photo albums and seeing how far you've come... While the neighbor's dog barks and car doors slam only dozens of feet from the bed in which we lay for hours - tasting each other's tendencies - both spoken and other forms of oral. And I just want to bask in a moment with you - but moments bleed into minutes bleed into memories of clock faces and LCD screens for time checked - time lost? But I wouldn't mind being lost a time or two with you.

Hayley Fienne scattered herself a year ago today. A hammer. A trigger. I sent flowers to a funeral home in Chandler, OK. I called. Said, "I can't imagine what you are going through" and something about how time turns the past into a form of fiction. DeLillo wrote that, I think.

Her mom said, "That's not true. That's not true."

And I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't known Hayley like I knew Hayley. She used to do these oil paintings on the nights she knew she wasn't going to class in the morning. I've a layman's knowledge of visual art but even I could tell her work was real. As opposed to what? I don't know. You just felt it. It kicked you in the gut, left you spinning around the room, asking every ******* in tweed, "Can I get some water?"

There was one large canvas in particular that stuck out. She called it "Dissolution."

The work depicted a seemingly amorphous spiral of headlight blues and star whites against the murky black of space. In the dead center of the piece she painted the face of a young man, broken into quadrants. The face was nothing more than a faint veil. If you scanned the canvas, you'd miss it.

When she showed the piece at a gallery event, featuring the work of outgoing seniors, I asked her who the man was.

"It's Jesus."

"You gave him a shave."

"It's actual Jesus. It's 'I'm thinking of converting to Buddhism' Jesus. It's lonely, masturbatory Jesus. It's the Jesus who stares at a ceiling fan wondering why Peter won't text him back," she said. "And above all, it's the Jesus God asks a little too much of, the Jesus that calls in sick."

I said I was unaware such a Jesus existed.

"Exists. Dealing with impossible quotas, he has to shave."

"I think your Jesus looks like you."

"He is."



Now it's a year later. I find comfort in the painting, allowing the erratic brush strokes, both fleeing and advancing, to lull me to--what? Just lull, I grant, aimless and asking answerless questions.

I think about her at the end, at her end-- but not the violence of it all. No, I think of the release.

No intended romance. I simply wonder how she would have wanted that final let-go in life's calendar marked by letting-goes to wrap. I imagine her body separating from her mind, her mind separating from her memories, her memories separating from her name. I think of her matter fractured and dispersed, directed where the universe, in its imperialistic expanse, requires.

I call her mom. Say, "I can't believe it's been a year" and something about how outer space makes me think of Hayley.

Her mom says, "I don't understand."



After I hang up I look at the painting. I look at Hayley's Jesus. And I think in memories, memories that may or may not have happened, I think of them in my chest--not my head. I think about mercy. I think about the infinite. And is there a place where they intersect?

i curl into your back and you wear me
like armor into your dreams.

under your hands i turn to water
or iron and then you bend me again.

you say you knew it from the first when
the space between us bit its tongue.

i didn't know it though i ground my teeth
down that night under your name

and spat out all others in my sleep.
i didn't know single-mindedness

til you packed your suitcase and placed
it against mine outside the door.

i didn't know that it could be like this.
a reflection caught by the tail

of you watching me and i see more.
for you i am more. i have to be.

eyes tear at the black
pulling each thin thread of light
shadows weave below

for I need my night as much as day
and when it comes, it comes what may

no shy question, no subtlety
the tongue may tie, still it cries out from me

day holds the knife, and oh how bright
but where dreams tear free? the realm of night

so take this hand, step to the dark
when the blade’s pressed close
ever deeper beats the heart




- - - -

blade-wings carve the sky
a knife to oblivion
slicing ever on

I still think
Heaven is a small
Town with bright
Blue eyes and the
Sound of a child's
Laugher—

That it unknots
The brows of even
The most weary of
Philosophers.

I still think
Heaven is a small
Garden encrusted with
White feathers and
The west-wound winds
Coming from the Atlantic.

An old harbor—Vladivostok—
Spelled perfectly,
Abandoned by
Knaves and all the carnage they left,
Or Ceasaria:

Dry bed of luminous ruins.

I imagine You beckoning us:
"Don't be afraid, come!"—
Revealing pockets of
Nature only you would have
The courage to call

Beautiful.