Douglas Piccinnini
Moving, Again?

A tender love enters a world of mean love.

But is this true? And, could hope refresh hope?

Beneath the trees, shining on wet streets, the plum-colored stains of night. There you are in a room waiting to live, waiting to expire, like some desperate character in a novel.

Looking through glass. Taking a drink. Switching on a light. Interrogating a minute.

As far as after dinner, it’s now. And this morning for no reason at all, you were assailed by the kind of crippling sadness one sees so easily accompanied by music.

Not a car. Not a person walking their dog or the after-dinner-walk or walk-under- dripping- awnings walk. Not a woman in a tan coat hailing a cab or a co-ed leaning on a wall quietly smoking.

Inside and safe, it’s not raining on your just-washed hair.

You close your eyes and lay back into a hill of twisted sheets and pillows.

Remember, of course you do. And as you remember, a kind of root grows in darkness, hardens and radiates a patchwork of muted colors and almost-faces.

The warm mucus of your old life bubbles inside. The old, uninhabitable ways of the past discharged in some electrical storm of swishy meaning.

This intense breathing, as if to say, “No—we don’t do it this way anymore.” “What way would we like it?”
“I’m not sure."
“But are we tall?”

“No. We are definitely not tall.”
“Do we speak clearly— do you at least understand?” “We do but, sometimes it’s confusing.”
“Hard to keep up?
“Yes.”
“Are we angry? Are we faithful?”

Right now, to continue as if the street were the opening details of a story. A physical description of a few warm memories in summary.

And here in your bones. Here in your eyes and blood. Here in the cartilage of your nose. To say— this body, this time signature is not our own. Until, a self comes, until we delete the ghost of some extinct rhythm.

You were a kind of opening story renting ideas, repeating pleasures. A distant horn on the street sounding back, longer, incensed.

And from another side of consciousness the misspelled memories of lives before. A fading hairline, thin eyebrows, crowded teeth and dark eyes.

There is this time—the feel of time— washed denim, shrunken wool. A person, some person sitting in the chair where you belong. Where you want to be.

Surely, you were born.

And if you remember basic sentences and one-sided arguments that went nowhere. And if you remember the rain really pounding on the window. And if you begin to see the gutter spewing leaves and water or shingles tearing off the roof.

The warm mucus of your old life hardens around the old, uninhabitable ways of that past. The shallow breathing intensifies says, can we say it?
“No! We don’t do it this way anymore.”
“What way would we like it?”

Are we tall? Do we speak clearly and slowly? Do we understand ourselves or others? Which eye winks back effortlessly?

Night after night drains into a week, a month, and a year making the opening arguments for living and here, again, a dose of time: the streetlights blink on.

What complicated hymn stands in for what you couldn’t say but said anyway? The mute forms of longing expand, make a detail of something like increasing rain.