The enormity of small events colliding:
the feeling built slowly
all day
pearls sliding one by one onto a string
sending tremors back and forward
along the whole strand.
Every moment felt as if it had already been lived
already carefully examined and savored.
It felt too familiar,
like snapshots of life pinned
where the wandering eye would memorize every detail,
a school or an office, memories pinned above a desk,
the everyday bustle meaningless, and only those
celluloid squares framing life, the real story
the one happening just now, filling every corner
with the sensation of seen-this-before.
Not only,
lived-this-before.
Stepping from one image to the next, walking through walls
like the paper filling of a plot, one sheet at a time,
flipping, flipping
and no one, (or is there?) to tell the heroine,
turn the page, he's right behind you,
open that letter from your uncle,
grab an umbrella.
Creature of memory, she
had always been. But this day
made an ocean of her sunny fishbowl.
Now in the depths of it, in the reaches,
she remembered things she had not yet dreamed.
Two women with the eyes of fishes, eyes of the dead
one looking forward, the other looking behind,
sisters never seeing the eyes of each other.
Speaking truths that pass like ships
One knowing what was, one knowing what will be
one who is, coming for counsel.
A merchant or a thief (it's one and the same)
holding a green glass bauble before a boy.
He is slippery, untrustworthy, but he means no harm.
That image, there, the dish on the stove
this girlish sashay through the kitchen,
breathtaking sprinkle of stars in the heavens,
A small step for man,
the steps of a careful dance around piles
and boxes in a crowded flat.
She has lived it all, so attentively, before.
This time she is careless, bored,
overwhelmed, and paranoid by turns.
No one writes you back, she observes.
You can never write anyone back. You don't know
what it meant to such an author at the time, or what it still means
no experience is truly shared
if our lives are moving targets.
You can only write forwards, write for the moving targets of the future
those who can never, unless Einstein,
unless traveling against that flow,
those who can never write back,
only forwards for them too, trapped in the flow,
no reciprocation, equal and counterpart, action-reaction.
Yes, your cipher worked.
Well done. I am here. Aliens have landed.
it will not say, the message you can never get.
I have heard you. I am here too.
because they have shared what you
once were, a sloughed skin
your futures will be their pasts,
or is it their futures your pasts,
and you will look past each other
at the screens of each other's experience
encrypted
and they will always long for who you were
when you, in past, in passing, left tracks.
Beads, pearls, colliding on a string
separately resonant, but when you
string the last bead and fasten the clasp,
will it slip gently around your neck?
Are those pearls cool on your skin,
or warm, holding a trace of body heat?
Were they a gift to your past or future self?
Two-way mirrors set at right angles.
If the affair is remembered before it can be lived, loved,
she is always haunted by the shadows of what comes next.
