Secret Vespers

It is raining and as usual you are standing in it, waiting. I don’t know why. It is a temperate rain. A body can easily warm what water soaks through. You are dressed for it much better than I am.

I want to give you something. A mint canister has been discarded. I pick it up and scrub it with the rain and my finger. I push its dents back out. I do the best I can, but you can still see where it was dented. It opens and closes well, but it needs something inside. I pick up a curl of hopeful red plastic and drop it in. I give it to you open.

You brush a wet lock off your cheek. The drops are heavy now. I don’t mind closing my eyes for a moment.

Next time I see you, I offer you a chain of paperclips. When it is sunny I gather twigs and wrap them in twine. But usually it rains. I am sure you are standing in it today, but before I find you, I go to look for pennies on the sidewalk. The shiniest was minted in nineteen eighty five. I promise you it will reflect a disk of light onto your palm once the rain clears away.

It wakes me up again, it is a question that will not answer itself. You mark a black X on my hand and tell me it must mean something. In a better world there are longer, greater distances, there is wilderness and anarchy. I want to kiss you in a riot, slip a piece of rubble into your pocket. When we meet, I think you are dancing, but no, you are in the middle standing still. I bring you to a rooftop, we spot what stars the city lets us see. We plan an escape, complicated and unlikely, give it every chance to fail. We post secrets onto paper airplanes, wishes that must never come true.

I want to meet you without ever planning to meet, sit next to you on the subway and get off at the wrong stop. We’ll change our clothes, buy five dollar outfits and chase cats through alleys, steal the cameras of tourists to take pictures of graffiti, follow them back to their hotels to give the items back. We’ll find a protest and teach an anarchist to sing, set the unwanted dogs at the SPCA free. We’ll ride glass elevators in the financial district and give crayon drawings to vice presidents. We’ll share pies with hipsters and run up stairs until we puke, shower in cold water, in our clothes, and kiss to keep our lips warm. We’ll do the single most honest thing at work to get us fired, live by selling whispers in a gallery. We’ll not know each other’s name for at least a year, and never use words between sunset and sunrise.

In the place I want to find, the autumn never ends. The leaves don’t fall but float, and every time we kiss, a green leaf turns to orange.

In a secret field, you will run up to a scarecrow. It will lift its pumpkin head and rake us free a tunnel through the sky. The leaves will be firm enough to stand on.

When you stand in front of me and sing I can hear your voice behind me.

I want to find the end of this world, the dome that has enclosed us, but our scarecrow, with straw dropping out from between his buttons, is no help, he sleeps, slumped against his rake. I ask you, but you touch a finger to my lip. I wonder if your eyes have always looked like this.

There is nothing left to say. The autumn never ends, and perhaps I should be concerned about how many leaves remain, but there are no question marks to ask with, only songs.

I hear that one hundred thousand people pass through my metro stop every day. I stayed up last night trying to count that high. I counted for five hours and I only reached thirty-six thousand. I fell asleep as the sun was rising. I saw the dawn’s first joggers.

I used to sleep with a runner. She would count her steps jogging, walking, jumping. At ten thousand she would buy new sneakers.

There is always a higher number. Say you are on an escalator, pressed so close to strangers you have to escape, so you imagine you are elsewhere. You are in a memory. Maybe it’s the last time you kissed. You are standing so close to these strangers you could rub noses. But how do you measure the real distance, the distance between your imaginations? You are outside a bar with a friend you had never thought you would hold that way. The man ahead, in the spreadsheet of his mind, is repeating a calculation that proves he must sell his home.

How many times will your heart beat? If I slide my fingers into your hair, how many strands will land on my palm?

I want us to escape and hide from unmanageable numbers. I want the rooftops at night, the streets at five in the morning, a wide open space in a museum where the exhibit is space itself. I want to count things that matter, things like the shivers before a kiss. I want to live inside what we can count to in a night.

When I finally found my camera it was back at my table at the café, exactly where I had left it to pay. How did you know I would come back? Perhaps you returned every day, set the camera down and watched. It is such a crowded café. I suppose the owner must have been in on it, too. I can only guess.

I can tell you took all the photos on the same day. The first ones were of me, looking under the table, asking other customers who didn’t understand me. You must have been close enough I should have seen you. How do I miss the things that are most obvious?

You gave me hints: your body wrapped in a scarf, your face covered by the camera, your lips close with one finger touching, your footprints in wet sand.

A palm frond, a seagull picking at a crab shell, five customers examining a tomato, the ice cube you melted onto the ridge of your pelvis. Finally, a cliff with a hand glider diving. I had a dream like that. I have the photos now, and I only wish I knew how to see like you.

I want a return to childhood, I want to be like turritopsis nutricula, the jellyfish you showed me, tiny and nacreous. I want to live forever, grow mature then revert to innocence, neither die nor stagnate, be able to erase and rediscover my form, my sexual fantasies, my world.

You must know I still visit that tunnel under the aquarium, with its view from under the fish and its deep blue light. Most people come during feeding, they want the agitation, the water filled with bubbles, but I come to be alone, to see the animals swim in quiet circles. This is how we really live, always returning, always waiting. Waiting, like you and I the day we met, rigid, watching the smooth movement of fish, only a meter apart.

In your office you showed me fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of those species live now. Some of them are extinct, your favorite among them. Nature is like that, you told me, sometimes the most wondrous creatures are lost.

I tried to kiss you and you moved your mouth away. You opened your collar and said, “No, here.” You arced your neck, slid your whole back against the wall, pressed up from your toes.

You told me we all die, even the immortal medusae are vulnerable. You have no idea how often I think about that.

I want us to make something that will never last. I want to break onto a rooftop with a shovel and leave a picture in the snow. Only a few executives in the buildings still taller will see it; they will wonder about it, and by next snowfall it will be gone.

I want five seconds in slow motion, the camera on your laughter, steam-breathing, in so much detail I can trace the paths the snowflakes fall.

I confess I am terrified of couples who count their anniversaries in knick-knacks and photo album chapters. An instant can last forever and an eternity can flash by in an instant.

I want to write a message for you in the sand, knowing the tide will wash the beach smooth and you might never see it. Uncertainty is delicious. I want to call a perfect stranger and tell him that I love you, that I am bursting to tell you so. I will ask this stranger not to give me advice. Maybe then this need will leave me.

You know, I could never live so little, but I am jealous of the insects who fly for just one day, mate and die.

Photographers take thousands of pictures to keep just one. I want to spend a day with you, build it up to a look, a touch, a sound I will never forget, and never see you again.

I thought I had lost everything when the market crashed, but I have not nearly lost enough. I spent a year afraid of the news. Every day turned another one of my investments into dust. So here I am; I would have to live for two hundred years to earn it all back. The impossibility of it is liberating.

I found my flute and started playing, worse than when I was seventeen. I have never been more pleased. A year ago I spoke with old friends only on the phone, only while I was in a cab. Now I spend hours with them for no reason at all. I used to eat at pricey restaurants I hated. It cost just three dollars to feed myself today and I used my spare time to learn to juggle.

The world is ninety percent poor if we judge it that way, but other things are equal.

I want to know what you would love to lose if everyone else would, too. I want to stay up all night with you and throw that stuff away. And when all this mess is over, I want to dance with you. I want to dance like light on the rubble of our ruined city.

I don’t have a plan in the world. I have the wide open sky and a bag of dried mangoes. My last girlfriend called them slices of sunshine.

I have kept the phrases my closest friends gave me. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up are “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. I can barely describe how painful it was to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. These phrases are the best things I am keeping.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? I cannot see myself doing it by air—too clean, too impersonal. When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. Austin, I will move my lips. I will be in the thick of its air and its smells, its dust. Change comes up at you from the ground, it doesn’t feel right any other way. This ride is centering, a stench coming from the lavatory, a rhythm maintaining the brink of nausea, a boredom that makes all my music and all my books seem boring. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly.

I want to find who you can be now that I have washed my context clean. I want to feel a rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where such laughter leads, to kiss you and have no idea that a kiss can be so thrilling. I want you to give me a phrase I have never heard before.