A goodbye

To stand in the shadow of the scar up in the air. To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone. With all there is room for in that, even without language.

I don't mean to sound so gloomy, but this space has been getting to me. I find it increasingly fleeting, anonymous and irritating. At the moment I am trying to find reasons to stay and it's not coming easy.

Regarding myself as a mere echo, Cave-like, unintelligible, nocturnal... May 27, 1956 Hospital Moscow

Absence

i In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres ii Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars, in turn I will surrender this aerial photograph (your vulnerable sections marked in red) I have found so useful See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured iii Here there are no armies here there is no money It is cold and getting colder, We need each others’ breathing, warmth, surviving is the only war we can afford, stay walking with me, there is almost time / if we can only make it as far as the (possibly) last summer

I wish I could grow outside my skin sometimes, pack bags, spread wings.

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.