She places her book, marked with
a coupon I've been meaning to use,
on the nightstand. She turns the light
out on her side. It's her side, her light.
The left side is mine.

Night.

Night.

We're past clutching love. We're
not married, but I think I know
what it means. It's two lonely
people; it's two sides of the bed.
It doesn't take her long to fall asleep.
I watch her forehead unwrinkle.
I listen as her inhales and exhales
become spaced and even. At this moment,
I do not know her. She's not a woman.
All the inviting curves collapse. She is
a girl breathing in, breathing out.

In a memory she related to me--I think
she related to me--she asks a boy to give her
a turn on a swing. It's toward the end of recess.
She has waited. He says no. This is my swing.
She says it is the school's. He says the school
isn't sitting in it. I can almost remember why
she told me this story or some story like it.

I can't sleep without my fan on. She can't
fall asleep with it. I'll give her a couple more
minutes. I wonder what violence she dreams
of, of what forbidden ecstasy she views in
her private night. I do not know her. She
looks vulnerable, her body now bent in an S shape,
facing away from me. Am I scared for her? Of her?
Still sleeping, she bunches up her comforter;
she brings it to her face. Maybe that's marriage: being
scared for and of.

I turn on the fan. She stirs.

I'm sorry. I'll turn it off.

You can leave it on.

I'll turn it off.

Leave it.

She pulls my arm under her neck.
She brings her bottom against my thighs.

Will you hold me? Just for a second.

I can hold you longer.

Just a second.

When I lived in the city, night, true night, never came.
The natural day gave way to the artificial day,
a day made possible by streetlight, by humming billboard.
With sick pinks and near-white greys, the early hours
hiccuped away. I slept or didn't. And this time in my life,
as any time in my life, is marked by a woman.

I won't say much about her. She was a performer,
and I've never been a steady fan of much of anything.
So when I kissed her the last time, I kissed her like it
was the last time, a kiss calibrated to say, "It's been."
When she kissed me the last time, she kissed me
like she didn't know it was the last time,
a kiss not so much a kiss as a mouth half-opened eternity,
where the sun didn't shine, nor was there night.

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?

A Sunday morning out there that
Makes me want to open every
Window and merge outside with
In-.
I could eat the weather; it's so nice.

She smells like fresh laundry
When she sleeps.
Slight dreamsmile on lips that say
They love me daily, and when I run my finger
Over her latest tattoo, they part in a smile even
Fuller. She stretches with a morning moan.
Never interrupt a streching girl.

God...
I hope to God that there is one
So this gratitude is recieved
By The Deserving.

I never pray; I never don't.
I've never been outside a church.

All I have is the same as the richest man
In the world.
The currency is just slightly other.

Beauty seeping from the pores of
Everything, and contrary to the claims of mr.
MC Hammer, I can -indeed-
Touch this.

There was a time when I watched it happen.
Strangers pressed to other strangers
in one bed, clothes on, air humid
with the cloying scent of fruit juice
and *****; none of us
giving into another and yet unwilling to leave the scene
of that possibility,
pretending to sleep, actually sleeping.
Then waking again to slip a hand
over a shoulder, slide a finger
inside the waistband of a skirt; so young
(we are even now still
so young) in that hotel room
turning blue then lighter blue.
We wouldn’t have tried for more:
the kiss, the button; firm, white shape
of an image slipped wholly into the mind,
acted upon, dreamed upon,
filling the thin vessels of the lungs.

Earlier, a film, its forced sounds
of *******. The tension I felt winding
into the muscles of some of the others in the room.
I remember I left for awhile.
We all left for awhile;
even the music was frightening. How
to strip ourselves like that, point
at the places that were wanted, plucked
and peeled; speaking the words, hearing them form us,
the nature of what we were
and could do to each other?
The music, the rocking, the sobbing.
The man called the woman by parts of herself.
Some laughed at this. I remember
I must have been one of them.
In the morning, the hotel room was turning white.
After the long night, hands were slipping
and unslipping, moving over the flattened pillows
as if in hopes something small could still satisfy us.
Someone turned and looked at someone else;
we all heard it. Legs
shifted, sheets slid themselves down waists
or shoulders, tightened again at the necks
of those pretending to sleep as the unblinking sun
crawled in our window.
From another room, coughing,
We all heard it.
Someone looked at someone else.
The room turned white. The air began clearing.

A shell, the ocean.
My ears, the empty silence.
She has gone away.