Secret Vespers

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.

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 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.

I have found the notes you hide. The first—not of your notes but of the ones I found—was stuffed in the window of a city bus. I saw it was a page from a larger work, numbered 27 and beginning in the middle of a conversation. I liked that message. Don’t we all meet in the middle of a conversation?

I know the work is at least 391 pages long. Judging by page 391 it is much, much longer. I know it has a preface, I have page xiv. I know it is divided into chapters, I can see their titles: Thunderstorm, Tokyo at Night, Broken Chair, and others that appear to be the names of characters. I do not have any consecutive pages. One name has come up twice, but so common it could mean two people. The writing is divergent, a different voice to every page, topics that leap from paragraph to paragraph: the ink of an octopus, a brother and sister racing cars, the stairwell of a downtown mall, the conversation a young woman overhears. I do not know if the pages are meant to be read consecutively or in the order that I am finding them.

Maybe I am imagining this, in fact I must be, in fact it fails more often than it succeeds, but tell me, do you work hints into each page, are they a treasure hunt? Page 72 described a pavilion in a park. I spent an afternoon searching parks and found page 219 in the second one I searched. But then, I was so sure Sunken Ship meant the naval memorial, and though I worked my fingernails into every crack of the thing, the warden thought I was crazy and there was nothing there.

No, I must be imagining it. I can’t be the only one finding these pages. I can’t be the only one they are meant for. I wonder how many people are gathering up these broken pieces of you. I wonder if we have more in common with each other than we do with you.