Reliquaries For Louise Nevelson
If there was a thing, a thing lighter than a dress, I would wrap it around my body and lay in the sun. If there was a thing, a thing higher than space, I would use my lighter thing to parasail upwards – though bribing the wind would be essential. She likes false cherries and crab apples, I know. My mother told us not to eat crab apples but we did, and got sick.
How do you explain to a man, upon meeting him upon his eyes meeting you upon his meeting of his hand on your shoulder excuse me, how do you explain to him that were there a lighter thing you would be flying now instead of explaining your family structure? There are three of us kids, I say. There are three of us kids and two of those parents. Parents picked on purpose, us kids always thought. The way they fit together like nesting bowls in contrasting colors, like two Russian doll shells. A hiding, a holding, an enveloping. It was always suspect.
If there were a thing more like a hot pit of a planet, our planet, I could be that hotter pit inside a man who could be like a plum. If there was a hotter pit then I would be it, and snuggle quietly in fruit radiating heat on the spindly branch of the last orchard tree on Old Orchard Beach where the soil is sandy and unwelcoming. In the winter, there are only ripe prostitutes and a handful of junkies swimming the cold seas at night. In summer, my beach is teeming with padded children in lifejackets.
I could explain to my junkie, about the deep green water, only explain by jumping: See the flowing out and around of my lighter thing? I am a phosphorescent octopus, octopying only a few gallons of water, occupying only a nominal amount of sea-mass, displacing not much at all no sir do you mind when I touch you though you jump when I touch you? Is this lighter thing, this thing lighter than a dress, merely a ghost rind? My junkie nods, and lies. My junkie points to his pale naked thigh. My junkie’s mouth is dry and pursed. I nod, and wipe the salt from the pikes of my eyelashes.
If there were a thing more like just a table, more merely a table than a table, could I embody it in an all-fours position? If there were a thing more like a table than a table, then I could be it, and men and junkies alike could place all manner of things across the width and length of my flat surface. Catch-light flatware, gleam-in-your-eye dinnerware. Beverages featuring crushed ice and wedges of lemon. The thing more like just a table, itself myself, could have table manners and though that is beyond sufficient, above all that is expected of that which is merely a table, something better could indeed be better in some circumstances perhaps.
Investigation: I am sometimes withholding. Interrogation: binary of ogle versus snoop. Which of these. By asking to leave a private mark you seemed to be requesting more but I believe you were in fact not. In Austen rain I am pulled to the plank floor of my home. Hold this for me. It is the things I have. The things I do. The way you are. A gesture which pulls itself apart and secrets in my pores like seeds in a primed field. What is this. What is this fine. Your pollution guards better than. My cobwebs awkward. In every picture you look a different son of the same parents: you are every recipe involving the contents of the punnet. You may say the same of me. You do. The Austen rain persists. We thought you could not meet anyone at a bar.