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  • from Moth; or how I came to be with you again, and: from Moth; or how I came to be with you again
  • Thomas Heise (bio)
  • from Moth; or how I came to be with you again
  • Thomas Heise (bio)

There's nothing latent in my wireless imagination where everything, even the heart's muscle, is public. Give me one more love song and I'll destroy it. Orpheus looked over his shoulder because he wanted Lili Brik to disappear, the only way to save himself for the poems he thought he'd write before thirty-six arrived, a shock in its chamber. Oh mother. Oh love. Beauty enters wrapped in furs and the whole train to Moscow suddenly unsure of itself, the revolution suspended between wheels: "Down with Symbolism. Long live the living rose!" The moment the chimp recognized he was human, he began to paint over the mirror. These days, mystery floating in the recesses of the plaza, a memory of green sky high above us like glamour and the history surrounding us forgotten for a minute, then we're cold. Every woman begins as a description. A brochure. A leaflet. Love made into origami. This one's now for July. This one's now for August. This one's now in the wave pool, buoyed by the chlorine and sense of possibility, as if the water were in me and churning and could this last forever and that seagull, you don't have to think. Sometimes you have to be shot in the heart in order to stop dreaming. These days of false humour and sequins, like Jean Nouvel's windows, we look in from the outside because we're fortunate to [End Page 172] be poor and part of the city. Every city begins as an accident and soon becomes a need. The player-piano melancholy through the avenues now the night is quiet ushered in by a line of crows as if pulling a photographer's cloth. Finely granulated static after the daily life counting coins in our solitude after the dry cleaners after the loneliness of the mall at closing, the lights in the fountain turned off, after that you were, after the ornamental civic gardens after the letters tossed from a balcony after the street that ended at a power plant and a river you never drank from, you were, then the orphanage then the House of Assignation then the locked door then the brain scan, you were, the nonfunctional façade after the mattress store after the Museum of Mind Over Matter after that after all that, you were, and the great throbbing crowd once in super slow-mo formed a Rorschach blot, the visuals moving to the melody of a soundtrack, I don't have a map, she said, I just enter the territory—I love you to this point. A leaf. A few thoughts on paper. Nature doesn't grow on trees, the critic said, but we don't believe her because we don't believe in Nature, and even her dress is synthetic and her glasses have no lenses so how can she see the moon, or the flag planted there for Marilyn. These days, the intricate architecture of our past lives, the rhythm and beauty of it, the way you could walk into a stanza at midnight and surprised to find me at the desk, our home, it was an idea I [End Page 173] grew inside of, and if asked to describe these days, what I would say would fail, as does every poem at the title. I'm remembering in Berlin remembering you and I'm remembering in New York remembering you and I'm on a bus by Tupper Lake remembering you for the first time I can't, the morning in blades of light through the pine trees, a kind of triage. Every map begins as a legend and ends with a woman on the Bosphorus where the blue is so supple you wore it as a scarf and then you took a shuttle called a metaphor. In forty years, I'll be dead if I'm lucky. These days, three o'clock in...

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