Testimony 9, and: Testimony 10

113 BRETT DEFRIES & Z. CODY LEE TESTIMONY 9 If I say nothing. If I shiver. If tonight. You come but you do not come when you say you will. Like an owl suddenly telling you what it needs. It looks at you. It implores you. Are you made of pity. That’s what it’s like. I find you but I don’t find anything. I believe in mystery. I believe in sleep, which is a kind of mystery. Infants are not breathing and then they are breathing. Listen. I have kept this to myself: you were not sleeping when I was not sleeping. A thousand miles, you said. A thousand miles, I said. Your eyes behaved very differently from mine. If rupture. If privacy. If I go. You will take long naps when I retrieve things. This is like emptying a spigot before the cold comes. A drum unheaded. A photograph of sex. Ordinary daylight. If ever I remember that particular rain. You said: how was your snack time, I mean sacrament. Is this how it is done—simply setting. Or is it like disappearance. 114 The danger is that moving slowly, you are more likely to see things. Talk to me about timing—about incremental abandon. The toy bird has forgotten my behavior. You were sitting. I was sitting. You could not decide. 115 BRETT DEFRIES & Z. CODY LEE TESTIMONY 10 If the light off the wine glass lingers any longer, it will feel like winter inside that light. You say place that snare over my breast. You say you back away from this adorability. Stop yourself from moving. Like water in smelted pig-iron piping recirculating. Stop yourself from breathing. If promising. If rupture. If at all imperfect, imprecise requitance. I go. The mind on some nights is a back beat, some bass line background divining delineations. I know exactly how not looking back occurs. I know just how it’s done. But I also believe in the reoccurrences of retrieval, how a thing will come back and back and back, absent of any revival. And I could be convinced that what is left unsaid when we leave here is exactly the silence that makes music occur. I am so sorry. In the end no parent wants to outlast their child. Leaving them to be consoled by the rest of world that is now outside them and irrelevant. Leaving them weeping by the coat rack. To be catalogued like the space in graveyards. 116 I believe your eyes would be photographs of azaleas in another world. But I also believe in secrecy, that it might well be an enactment of sleeping we do sometimes. What happens to those uncertainties embroidered, arabesque, and left behind. Tell me. What happens to them. When is the last time you palmed the head of a drum and didn’t think of listening. Look, if I say there is no mystery in loyalty, it’s only because love happens in the brain and nowhere else. And there is no devotion like ________. And there are no such things as replacements. No such gravity as persistence. And the stars when they flash and skull out in the dark are made of waiting. And the dark spells out again and again in its want-fed breath the letters of the word never. And never is a type of always. And maybe it’s the sound of guitars that gets us breathing again. Maybe it’s the thought that this could all be ending very soon. Maybe it’s when we look over and already there is snow. Maybe we are here for absolutely no reason other than to measure the febricity of a single moment and record that sensation. The people who saved you from that ambiguity are your real parents in life. Those ones. 117 But if you doubt the gentleness of her, when she turns to face you in the night, the expression of her grief soft and thick like the eyelids of a giraffe. Don’t leave her. Topography of daylight. Ordinary meaning. Ordinary breathing. Apocrypha of sight. If I have promised anything at this point it’s that I know what I...