Separate Coasts: For Sara O'Malley

I.

There is a bird on the ornamental facade of the brownstone and in my memory it is your promise, which I put aside for another life. Kindness driven by insufficiency: still what it is. And to see this—that is the hard thing!

How can my name be absent from your mouth? I am your palate, tasted and forgotten, and the shaper of your vowels: Sara, Mark, the names resemble as our feelings never did except remotely, when they caught me off guard.

Xmas 1984: trailing our footsteps on their way to your stoop and above them, like a fresh snowfall, words of the season that you and I sing; or dark in Barcelona, as the photograph tells, talking up the boulevard with Art and Darlene. Spires of Gaudi and domes of the city abide in your comments on him; the mosaic of an affair that forms no picture—an incorrect assembly—abides in us.

If the heart, leaping and talking, touches on earth, it is your side that I touch; if the fingers reach for familiar furniture or walls, the subject blinded, it is your voice that says: “How hungry are you?” and I in recognition that we are beyond certain cafes—for food is simple—reply: “More than I was.”

The gray glazes of the ceramic things on your shelf contain my spirit, for unknown to me it sought yours where it resided, in those conical, oval clays given to form. Energy spent denying imagination leaves it alone, just as my feelings came unawares, over a trail concealed by clouds—hot air on the neck—from you.

I’m off, off-centre: two birds dipping the wrong side of the water bowl and drinking air. That’s how it was. But what heat from your back! What conjurings of sky and eucalyptus, in glass of my soul, you must have seen! We are masterpieces of water, and when the wind blows our faces shiver, to the point of confusion. Because I looked without looking and found, but the inner eye alone saw and kept you to itself. I mistook and scoffed at the friendly yard as it summoned to perform us, a fresh caricature of play.

To court travesty; to touch you in private and coax an unspoken—the body tells different, one more miscommunication—“please.” Why is it that you are not on this train? For a while we took them together, till you had already boarded each one. The view is mediocre—Inca ruins? Montmartre minarets? Nothing out this window to attract you, but I miss you as wheels go clack clack on the line, getting more rapid as my breath would, the further from NYC.

II.

Spirited song from the window fan over my telephone voice to NYC where you sit by the stove, one foot on the rung, and make coffee to get started. Heat outside, blows in; banality joins us as excitement never could and it perseveres, like the solstice gone amok, or like a dried out ficus immune to water, a gift that must be handled with care.

I hear gates shutting all over the yard below—in one city, trucks and Spanish, in the other the odd bird, the coming and going of tenants, strangely insubstantial lives from my perch. Thinness is relative, for viewed from a hilltop the city dwindles to a netting of pretty lights, just as from my seat you feel gone, as you intend, and noises shift the blues of your dresses like a wind from the hot city.

Those sheets! Blue of the sky, blue of an intimate place, a gulf too heavy with its salt. Thus my chest under your leaving. Skin blackens to a slow fertility of loam in your withdrawing gaze. The word “No,” a vowel that I plant in lengthening rings so you can go good speed to the West. I cry out for myself and not to detain you. On the contrary . . . And the question comes up like a stupefied face looking in on me: should it be this simple, to break it off?

The park trails you...