Let's Talk About Near Death Experiences

[comes home on Sunday, May 17]

the surround-sound sound barrier

is between us

Let me drink up my cigarette

though I can tell you very little about yourself

Ask me anyway to name the Cole train experience

by the name which is good enough for itself,

Haagen Dazs cares about honey bees

Say: Let me not think

but instead let me feel

your love

bumps. Let me but feel

the bumps between your disposition

and your faith.

The bees are dying

but nobody knows why

I know that is inacurate, they merely fly

out, just as they always have, and forget how to get back

or they get back, but they forget the dance, forget the why of bee-ing.

The lilies

star-shaped curved and thin as skin with
huge stamen thrusting out, tips caked thick with rust-orange
pollen. Just as we get them into the vase the pollen crumbles
down onto the clean white arc of petal, and sits in clumps
there for days, like food between teeth:
so unbearable but so deliciously definite.

()()()

antarctic time

this site is now set to the South Pole: about 10 hours further into the future.
(see time published, 2:21 in the afternoon, below
and date, above.)
lick it at risk of your tongue getting stuck.

Window Pane

The Package

(translated from the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics)

Put on lipstick like this and eyeliner all the way around both eyes. A girl could stand to use three shades. One for above the lid, one for the crease, and one for the lid itself.

Looking at her cat eyes in the mirror she thought of him. Suddenly she felt as though she could just fly away, like her arms could be wings, and the two of them could intertwine like sardines in a tin. And sleep together. Her head felt like a hot air balloon or a flower on a stem or like it had previously been on the stem but had since been bitten off by a deer. Phew. Her eyes and brows shapely her thoughts turned to flower arrangement. Six twined up just the way her stomach felt, she could hand these to him in a package with a little note. Whooo or what kind of bird was she, batting her lashes after a hunk of meat like him? If her mother could have known. She imagined herself weaving the wedding knot... flying... twinning... the package... and straightened up her figure.

***

It was Boxing Day in Canada. The television had just gone all fuzzy. Half dreaming and half awake, still unable to find her head which had been bitten off by a deer, drowsy and frowsy, she turned off the t.v. with the clicker and went to get her shoes. She had 90 minutes like that news program. Or was it...? Never mind. She hoped that the boy she loved would like chick flicks. Her head was still in the clouds and she wondered what it would be like if slugs had legs, and she thought she felt the knot tighten... what was it that made men men? Her mother had made her close her eyes and handed her a little pink book that told how to be a walking fallopian tube... no that was not it... it told how to be a woman. She looked down at her naked feet. She didn’t know much about manhood. Her brain flitted off...

On to another subject. The package. How she would hand it to him. Who she was to do that sort of thing and how he would see her face, and open it and see the flowers, all six and he would suddenly know how her stomach felt and take her hand and walk with her, and take off her shoes... she thought of this as she put away the chick flicks and found a cute pair of shoes and she recoated her eye shadow with an evening shade. She did the things she felt would make her a better woman. She puffed up her hair and pulled on her shoes, first one and then the other. She put on some hand moisturizer and batted her lashes and opened the door to the closet where she had been keeping the package. She felt her own wholeness growing inside of her with her evening-shade eye shadow and her sardine tin vision, while her insides felt thorny.

She called up her girlfriend who was going with her to the party still thinking of her mother and the book and how her own head felt like a slug with legs... and then... she saw him. She went over to the punch bowl and felt small but still she turned to him and her heart lifted twice and she got out the package and handed it to him across the punch bowl. Whoever she thought she was up until that moment she felt had changed, like she had just put a paper clip around that part of her life and here she was, with him, and he sort of reared up and took her by the hand, maybe thought she was a pretty good chick, and she felt some warm feeling of some hint of his masculinity, who she was and a slug without eyes with legs floated through her mind which was static-y as the knot tightened.

He walked them out to the parking lot and she felt that at least one of her eyes was a woman’s eye now as she looked down at the handicapped-parking symbol from the side. Now he undid the string on the package. She felt like he had a remote control connected to her temporal lobe as she waited for his response, the two of them there standing but in her mind flying. Maybe it was the punch or maybe the clicker but she felt one eye close over the image of her mother as he unwrapped the gift, and she partly still pictured the package as though it were unopened, like it was a taxidermied animal, but anyway she took his hand, heat rising to her cheeks, and she imagined and she lifted.