Don’t talk to me
about upping the emotional ante.
If love were all that mattered
we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Consider the barefaced I—construct, artifice, caprice,
a notion to be played at. Like a troubled child I should stand
before the blackboard and write it a hundred times—I, I, I . . .
until it loses all meaning and falls to the ground like empty sound.
I might even forget how to spell it, simply refer to myself as persona of naught,
pronoun to the power of zilch. It’s no accident that eye and I sound the same—
eye the vision, I the self (now there’s a homophone you just gotta love.)
(And when I say you I mean you the reader.) So, here we are back at love again
(in this case we refers to the universal we, which of course includes me.)
That’s all right, call it love, instinct, need, self–preservation,
but know it for what it is: a pretense to be named, the story of a story.
There are family photo’s I have not looked at in years.
The same ones I pondered as a child, studied for hidden clues, the missed gesture,
the half open door behind someone’s head. Here’s the one of my mother and me
at the base of the ruins in Oaxaca, her hand on my shoulder, the sun
making us both squint. Here’s the one of her yucking it up at her cousin’s
wedding. So fully herself. So much a self.
—It takes years to see your life unfold
in chapters and if now is a chapter I’ll look back on years hence and judge
like some tedious novel I nurtured too long, I’d like to think I did not hunger
for illumination too deeply or lie to myself too often or imbue too many hours
with hope. At the end of each day when nothing is touching my skin
but air, in that nightly ritual of disarmament, the physical I laid bare, I can’t help
but desire one more step, just beyond the body. What release might be had
in shedding this noisy temporal reminder, with all its speeches and tirades,
its many interruptions.
In the meantime, let’s say that years from now, we
(yes, you and me) will look back on this conversation and roar with laughter
over the empty sound of I.