If One of Us Should Fall

Woman, I Am Falling

65 wOman, I am fallInG water; a house designed by genius, the genius ignoring the slide rules and proportions of his colleagues, who in turn ignore their pincurled wives, wives with missing silk hose and seam lines penciled up their slender calves— it was depression, is after all, woman, there was a certain attachment to gravity that required disruption, I promise, we needed something impossible to believe in, an equal and opposite Cerberus hound, in this moment of empires with slit bellies beached amongst the shambled mewlings of other fallen empires—woman, we needed the whole of it, jettisoned— had to—baby and bathwater both, what a terrible thing to be accustomed to: that casserole of lukewarm equations — which is to say I was dire with circumstance, and, since hunger nicely puts all that aside, the agency of certain particulars, for example— I bedeviled my calculations. Got them soused and barefoot on the Avenue of Americas. I collected the best scrap, lipstick smiles abandoned on champagne flutes, the sweat of bodies drunk with the proximal stillness every city folds into, the smallest possible hours, I promise, with every organic impulse twinkling in the rinds of better conversation, Woman, I am Fallingwater. I am 66 summoned into angle and the clean lines so worth saying, it is always worth saying, in every crucial time, in all signatures through microphones and lacquered bells, dear: lasting is not everything. Look at the pieces I break myself into. How otherwise to articulate this feeling? I am trying to show you: Onward. With great velocity. We beasts carrying our beast hearts within us to the edges of the world—I am saying how we want with everything to go. ...