the habit of being

Was it a cavern or a cave packed with ice from which this knife this dagger was thrust? It is colder than the sweat on my lip, colder than the wound now is hot. This freezing is beyond water, beyond ice. Is it liquid nitrogen or swamp fog from Antarctica? Where do things come from in such degrees and such losses? Against the skin of my thighs it traces circles, ellipses spiraling spiraling nearer to inside. Everything becomes numb almost almost hard as the tip draws in deeper. Without explosion, I know I’m being cut in two halves, exposing my lack of symmetry and it is like a seam being ripped out. I see the tiny pink laces in my mind as I look up up up to the white expanse of ceiling with those beads of hot oil and icicles forming. Was the axis always drawn? Was the line through the chest? (Could I see it in those x-rays I develop in the black black black. I forgot to turn the red light on and it’s pitch today, but I’m going through the motions. Why do I need my eyes?) A knife or a stream of ice water, it’s cutting me in two. I can feel it like a lightening bolt all the way to my scalp. I can visualize colors but this is none of them. Even white is too dark and clear is not real. When this is over, will I sprout new appendages like a worm and live forever on as two? (I am like a worm in some ways.) Will my guts and my air and my vertebrae just clink down on the tiles? Or will I be sewn back together in thick black thread, to leave me forever in a pattern of crosshatch x’s? Which part of my mind goes right and which left I cannot tell. I’m too cold and every hair is brittle and my nipples stand erect. Soon no longer a pair. My breathing is shallow and quick. I can think myself to a castle in a black velvet dress. It’s slowing, my heart. Ready for the blade. Oh don’t let my secrets out with the locusts and spiders. They would be minute and alone thrown for a loop all over this sweaty sticky room.

(I write this of ice of ice and cold and death and horrid things stupid horrid horrid things. It’s me alone in the bathroom with some phantom breaking breaking breaking. It’s terror and loneliness and cracks down the lines… brittle me brittle bones that creak and no heat, not like the warmth I feel with you. And I open this gift you’ve sent me - a recollection, a poem, a fairy tale (real!). Yet even there in all that heat lives the same ice. It’s all the more touching that I know that you know. You really really know. I am already naked. Did you know what I was thinking just then as you wrote those words (more beautiful than the ocean I saw for the first time with you)? I was afraid of my coldness and you remind me here that it went away those days. I’m sick for words I never said. I thought I would -show- you what I’m thinking and I tried, I tried. You gave me everything and I only run faster now. Have mercy, for you are blue and I am yellow. I know now. I hated complementary colors until I understood them. I could cry out for want of you. Before, I never even knew what it was like to be beauty, and now what can I say? What can I say that could tell it? How can I tell you that I owe you the world, when all the world melts away in light of involvement?)

. . .

Smallness of today:

My hair poofed, my eyes done, I let them tangle me into starched awkward poses. I gave the tense unsmile and went about my way. Was it worth the trouble? I got new makeup and black bras (small. yes, I am disappearing, I wasn’t kidding.) All the usual suspects were there. (Matt with a cell phone telling me I’d be fined $65 if I didn’t return my proofs. Classic.) Then to work, where I wrinkled my skirt. (L. said I should straighten my hair everyday. I like my funny curls.) I “nuked a scone.” Home for supper and another Scrabble win. I finally packed for Sewanee (lots of scarves, the Bible and the Bhagavad-gita, clothes, bathing suit, sarong, feather boa, Jennifer picture, beauty-items, Mozart’s Requiem and other vital CDs, sheets and towels, later Eliot). I haven’t read the books I’m supposed to read though. I’m terrible. These people expect me to be all responsible and I haven’t even done the one thing that asked me to do before I came. (I’m such a badass! Hehe.)

M. called and we decided to go on a walk tomorrow night. I have high hopes of making our friendship “real” so to speak. Having an Actual Conversation and all that jazz. I’ll probably be too nervous to say a thing. I’m inhumanly ridiculous.

And worlds collided. Still I grow.

. . .

New plan: to write poetry with imagery related to backs arched in ecstasy or something less pure. Oh, I can see that shape and it gives me chills. I want to be that shape. I want to break into a million pieces out of some deep electric intensity, not a stark white numbness. I want to crack open those icebergs for you.