You dont see
You dont see an outlet. Things go in order, the wind, the water between you shoulderblades, your acquiescence, you eyes and the light across a dry lawn and a black gate in a stucco wall, then a high wall that plods unbroken for days in either direction, the pale rind of hilltops glancing the sky and housing an end to the rhythm of days in an authoritative dusk. Lie down on your back, inert, emptied, nothing else, and know what has happened, then the sky. You look to the east. A sheer curtain flutters out of an open window with a narcotic nod. Afternoon is slow. It stops. The clouds break revealing more white sky and no sun. You look at the window, closed, with yellow light hemmed by a flat curtain, a floral print in tiny moments of silhouette radiates a warmth that swims through the heat, a tender warmth that emanates from you, from behind your neck at the sight of it, not from it. It loosens your lungs for a moment. Take a curt gasp and your right eye strays away and returns as you shiver back into suffocation, stillness. In afternoon, when the plaster sky opens slimly through the dry trees, you are alone in its light. Everything has space to spare, distant from the morning and distant from the dusk, yawning in scaled shadows that dont reach the next body, but prostrate, gaze out across the landscape with its deformities and casualties and obstacles, see nothing beyond the thick light that afternoon spins about you. You feel your skin and where it ends and it ends. Your teeth liquefy. Your legs fall through the water. You are alone. Things go wrong without cause. Things end without hope, without things.
My curtain parts. The glass is morning blue in the dusk, condensed breath and air conditioning. You are slumped against the gate. Things have to happen. If you wont be the cause I wont be the cause. The apartment door is ajar. That is all you have. That is the parted cloud. That is the sunset. That is the mirror. At the top of the stairs you see across the flat roofs reflecting the sky in standing water. White mirrors endlessly diminishing until the last, steaming in the distance, reflects the hills, then the hills again, and the sky again, and my door, and me.
