Epilogue

20:43

"...impossibly at home. It's hard to write about. Even harder to speak about. After the hugs is the inevitable 'how was England?!' and me, again and more frequently now it seems, without an answer. 'Good' is not the answer you're looking for. You want the balls of it. The adventure and drama. I know, I know, it's just hard to... It's hard to write about and, yeah, even harder to think about myself, you know? Andy called it something like a 'did it happen or did it not happen kinda thing.' I like that. Did I forget to pinch myself for six weeks, did I not once check my reflection? He's pretty sure it happened but he says 'so you're on your own from there,' which is poignant, all things considered.

But I guess I'm pretty sure it happened, the evidence is there. I'm a ghost in the photographs otherwise! But seriously, seriously... there's more than that to say I feel-- than where we went and what we did there and how I learned so much so differently. It's something illiterate. Like... I could deconstruct. I can take the 'we' I just put out and rearrange based on the character of the whole thing, the molecules and how we bounced off each other and why and what it created, if only momentarily, in I guess the Universe, whatever. Or you could consider a fractal and we could talk about it that way, the shape of the figures in the big figure and so on and so on and so on but that doesn't really tell you anything. There are stories, sure, and they can be fun to tell. I get into them sometimes and others I don't do them right and its this same problem: the manifestation of the memory as language or or or the... creation? of experience as art... and how ridiculous it is to attempt it. I don't want to be ingenuine, you know, so I can only move in the space that I 'know'... the Knowing Space, 'kay? So all right let's start there.

America has some beautiful sky. I didn't always think so. But I came back with this lens, like a bubble I'm in, and its a delicate, careful bubble. I try very hard not to say 'I think' when I mean 'I've read' and I try very hard to say 'I feel' when I'm doing just that. I try not to project myself too deeply into your head because I don't fit there and I get stuck. When I'm gonna get hung up I try to fall onto a hook I can jam with. There's a girl here I'm crazy about and I like getting hung up there just fine, doing loops in the happy cosmos rather than trudging something unpleasant, linear going nowhere. It's tough not thinking of things as beginning and ending but phasing in and out, or rather perhaps beginning and ending again. I'm really happy this summer and I can't help but feel I've been here before, in childhood or maybe in a dream. And as inescapable as wondering how things come together is, I'm getting better at letting them. I feel not like a new person but a tree that grew out of the shade. Ah! Sun!

But you want to know about Cambridge. It was good. I learned a lot about literature and about people and I got to look around inside myself a bit, in the quiet moments, in the blear of subwoofers and Guiness. And I met some beautiful souls. I tossed discs to hands I'd want hugging me on my wedding, hands I'd hold if they needed me to. Seeing things differently... Changes... Sharif's was perhaps the greatest birthday gift, though he wrapped it in teeth and it hurt to be given. I thank him, now, and though I'd like to one day see him to say it, I don't feel it necessary. I like to believe he knows. And Ulysses... I look forward to growing with it, higher towards that sun.

I don't know if this is what you wanted. I don't know if this would or will be recieved as a sufficient or appropriate capstone. I didn't really tie anything together so much as drop the pieces in your hands. But I do it smiling. I really do."

21:34

rhinoceros

sometimes the poems spill
others i reach for

cutting an arm on teeth

claw-machine fingers snatching
at baubles in bellyacid
feeling for half-digested ships

found you there
pink paper rhinoceros
pulled you out of my mouth

quiet in my hand-- happy
with a secret you trembled with fear

from a margin

[Edinburgh notes]

Home,
It's been a while, hasn't it? I wonder how you are often, me in Scotland an American far and in some ways more alone, and sometimes now consider this sickness longing. How have you slept? Side by side in time at least, on days I'm early enough for breakfast coffee I could reach and kiss you goodnight; and would. It's a new planet here. Windy wetstone city, night with snatchclaws, body-eaters. Tight against phantasmorphic water, soft from above-- I watched the sun spill from a cliffspeak, dancing janglylight, flush blush skysmiles. Wrapped in a hotel-stolen blanket pressed against a plated rock "distance above sea level x" I turn to touch you, this life electric, feel the sun keys: ectoplasm, harmony. Did you feel it?