i tell dove that i don’t remember the first time i saw my mom put on lipstick. dove doesn’t remember her mother. we understand this as the same thing. i tell her that lipstick is the gravity that flattens time and puts my mom's kid self next to me, next to my 60 year old self, next to her neutral self before we knew each other. maybe it is in this timeless place where she saw me picking a new lipstick shade last year and that made her buy her first lipstick bar when she was maybe 15, which made me first fear beauty, and she love it. or was it the other way around. we exist only as spread out magazine cut outs of the same silhouette, hidden in a damp notebook. but this is all a lie

i need to stop; but dove has set up the table. a mint oval cloth that makes the golden china stand out and shine in silence, a silent sun, rearranged. the look of friendship and terrible love, from the dirty guts, glimmery in the pink that i don’t deserve and that she accepts like a queen. she’s made jasmine tea, and she's built a palace out of brown sugar cubes, and she folded the napkins to her image. there isn't anything i'd know how to say, sadly, and the pink light threatens with forgiveness already. it’s too much. more silence dove please i ask

i want to fashion an apology out of something heavy that will weigh the box down for a while: a paperweight made of ebony. a figure of a leaping hare that has just left its sleeping spot on the grass. i will think of an apology for that heaviness, and another for that speed, tomorrow. i feel the chunk of wood and wish i could just love it. but it needs to say Sorry for all the useless words and plotless impressions. sorry for having to apply it over and over again and staining napkins, cheeks and glasses with it every day like the gesture is never enough. dove responds with laughter: the tinkling of bells in a maze of lipstick traces. not again dove you don't understand futility. what if every gesture is a puzzle. a puzzle of allowing, a puzzle of pain, a puzzle of mischief and breath, a puzzle of long darkness 

i try again; the outline, apologies that neither dove's laughter nor the pink light will dissolve. maybe amber resin, maybe chromed tin. no. again it’s pink light, pure sweetness. why? a horse with red lips, a rabbit with red ears, a dolphin with a red fin. on the table. what could be more readily available than what someone has laid on the table. more enjoyable, more free

this pink light---it’s barely audible, it ricochets, it’s a drop of invisible gold. i have tired out everyone’s ears. everyone's tried, too kindly, to catch my thick droplets of saliva. my aim is not good. midway out, every word is revealed as torn cardboard, a condom, a ditch, a receipt for something cheap--

this time it's dove that stops me . look at me she says, almost laughing again. she's letting me have my lack of plot, she is here with me not minding my chewing glass in between letters, my trail of Shouldn'ts, Have tos. she asks if i remember when she was born. i say yes, i found out the other day in a yeats poem:

one had a lovely face

and two or three had charm

but charm and face are in vain

because the mountain grass

cannot but keep the shape

of where the mountain hare has lain