lacuna one

we are gamblers, you & i, & accustomed to winning. but the house will
have its cut in time: thus we find ourselves, handsclasped, in the home

we helped imagine, uttering the banal. losing by degrees all we had
worked so diligently to steal. a code, a call sign, an appointed hour.

easy sidle. recognizing time we could not afford to lose, & so threw
away, gestures of survival. we are not defiant people—takers of small

gains, thieves of trifles, of what the other had always to spare.
winnings from a game played against long odds. you were my loaded dice.

i your stacked deck & the teeth whereby we carved an hour from the day's
dying flank, a bloodwarm evening to kill at playing strangers. how

difficult it is to hand back the chips, to restore that which was only
borrowed. to forgive inevitability, to remember & relinquish at once.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 44K993B09

thus we learn: sediment has its own blooded history; sand in the valves
will clog as surely as it won't explode. i follow in your tracks, so closely

it is as if only you yourself had passed / to find your spin away not
a video running back but a choreography with which i was not entrusted.

and so. within the moment at which i appear to be in orbit lies the bad
luck of the photographer who blinks too soon: it is escape velocity.

i had been fooled as well. on another timeline (you backward down a path
with enough satellites to keep you in eclipses) i wake. such is the danger

of travel: that among the frozen wastes of memory one might plunge again
into the present's luminous minutiae. the way that detail wounds the heart.

rejected applications to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung: DOC. NO. 39D500E72

in the long light of your fear i cast a shadow. shape goes; your blindness
a scotch-scented thing that throws you back. we have other resources, you

& i--an edged appraisal, a line of sight, your slouch, loud laughter
bellying the night. what is there to say? i am your cipher, the knife-

edge of my outline your refuge. i do not know the substance of your need.
i phenomenal, a trick of light diffracting your desire. but the evening

stretches. adrift we stop each other's gaps. my city grown strange & i
vagrant: a minor storm in your turbulence that might otherwise lay waste

to a system. we shall not meet again, but in an hour of lucidity we honed
our teeth. as mean as that. you would sell me at the next port of call.

report 000029: after the turning

one wakes to difference, the cold light of practice. money where your mouth is. pull the trigger. having finally & at last caught up with oneself in time: it bewilders. push the button. no rewiring at the core but auxiliary protocols now strange, commands to be relearned, different pitfalls. no manual

accompanied this update. how one observes the world. new traps of looking, of the meeting of eyes. vagaries of reference. one lives in validation, yes, glorious& strange, but how

to slate oneself in context, now, with the proof of one's own changing sealed & stamped, hung at eye-level, unavoidable and sure? i have not yet learned how to live in halving. to be calm in its face.

one must, & shall. a time when the shape of one's own life no longer startles. i am free, now, you see, to hear you everywhere, to recognize your echo & cadence in the pattern of my days. to understand that we, growing

older, are twinned stars indeed; that we have, in some very material way, progressed from hypothesis to fact. these are strange territories. having lived for so long in one land of uncertainty i had become accustomed

to particular darknesses, textures of obscure. to balance the self around a certain kind of vacuum; to accept a set of lacks. it had been years. but there was a crossing. a shift dramatic as the nightline sweeps the globe.

no more a land of fear. something, instead, of patience, perhaps, though the terrain sweeps unsteady away from my looking, & i unsure of my outfitting. i keep the map that led me to this place beneath the packet of your letters which i find some mornings waking. the shake&thrill of new country. i hear you singing back.

songs for keeping the watch: night 12

the watch begins again: the measured pace, the night's long vantage,
resolute & hum. our love a reckon, sharp & sweet & rung. the autumn

waxes. day waives into day. along the planet's curve i sing you back
the hours we have spent, our synchronize. the sense still lingers;

honey on the tongue. long days of coffee, laughter, sudden sun: each
a ready in the rope of years. the nets we cast for blankets, huddled

here; across the night outstretched we trace the time. the pattern we
have made in passing through, the lope & launch of orbit, twinned & strung.

though at removes, in distance & in lack, our fugue resolves--smooth
merging of our maths--jointly now, articulate & stride. in this brisk

air i bate. we weather to our liking, you & i: improbable, perfected,
now in wait. formidable in season. i mind the days as one who knows

that watches always end, who knows the face that, waiting, welcomes in.