Chicago
for Mindy Mastruserio
Blood above the bed after a
near-week of late-August is brown
and the jellied bits of
brain too are brown
and the smell is tended with
paper plates of cat litter here and there
and a loud fan in the window
not oscillating
There are stained photos on
a shelf in the closet
and prescription bottles all
over and dirty silverware
I don't know what to do with
the sheets but pull them into a plastic bag
and turn the mattress and
gag
There is traffic and
commerce and couples meeting for drinks still
Flights still leave on the
hour for Paris, Barcelona, Reykavic
Tokyo is out there with its
bullet train
I will fall in love and
marry, but not for years yet
I will never lose this smell
I will go tracking it
through friends' apartments
To Austin, St. Louis, and
Portland
I will cross the Rockies by
jeep and the wind will not blow it away
I will drink away an
afternoon thinking only of baseball
And still there will be a
speck of it
A whole cosmos one-zillionth
the size of this one
but always there stained
brown
even in the blank sky of
summer nights at home
no flickering moment of
memory is heavier
more jagged at its edges and
more corrupted
What does Kierkegaard say
about love? Or Peter Cetera?
We are to carry it and
breathe it in, bathe in it like the waters of our births,
To know it as complex as a
premonition of death
This is the task we have
been set
by philosophy and by pop
music
This is the stuff of art
that matters
This is despair, I guess
This is love.
--Kristofer Collins
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