Forrest Gander

*

Wiper blades splashing me as

the gas station attendant hands me my change.

When our friend’s divorce was finalized and

I helped her move to an apartment, she turned

and asked me where I thought

she should place the placenta jar.

Out of friendship. Out of whatever

my services make of friendship.

What is it you’re thinking, your forehead knotted up like that?

I was thinking of you.

What were you thinking?

From the rain-blurred window of the notions shop

where you liked to go, a kneeling Elamite bull-god,

carved from alabaster, holds out a ritual vessel

to the torrential oncoming, a world forever in motion.

He must have watched you too pass by.

I’m staring at a photo of myself as a child.

Who IS that person now? Some infant

with receding gums, a widow’s

peak, and hair swirling inside his ears.

Proof of an unendurable afterwards.

I just want it to be real, you said.

But no matter how I tried,

I couldn’t shake the unreal out of me.

A single coyote howling from Eden Isle.

*

But doesn’t thinking happen

everywhere? Not only inside

the human mind. What stays

autonomous from our concern?

You tell me a heartache is not an object of perception.

I wonder. But what do I know of your heart?

Experience is first a matter of feeling.

Even the feeling of not having a feeling.

The tokens of love we exchange

don’t express love’s meaning so much

as its ineffability.

So my experience of you is infinite. Never

contained within your dimensions.

2 B True

How you sit on the kitchen counter talking excitedly—

leaning forward, your elbows turned out, palms

flat on the polished granite, your fingers

buried below your posterior thighs.

It isn’t through my ears I hear you.

I find myself listening with all my body.

We search out in each other’s gestures

and expressions some evidence of what

goes unspoken, of what has remained

invisible inside each of us.

*

All this theorizing about the erotic—

an overlong introduction to no one at all.

But the wonderment that came over me at first sight of you.

I remember it in slow motion. My impetus jammed, slipped

into deep reverse. I stood there blinking like some animal

just released from hibernation.

Your intelligent gleaming voice, so often staggered with high laughter.

I was taken somewhere I haven’t returned from.

Never again the same person.

Dude, you are purely titty-smacked!

Your charmingly thick calves and ankles.

Amazed. Like an insect blown by an updraft onto a mountain snowfield.

And whether we are aware or not, these years later,

the manner of our familiar, daily exchanges,

our movements, even our separate moments

of solitude are persistently relational. There’s

a sub-level attunement between us. Our interactions

dilate, contract, and extend. And the feeling of all that

is the measure of how we’ve lived.

It’s called the long encounter.

And still, the aperture hasn’t narrowed.

Had I only loved before with reservations?

I married a pear tree.

*

Even when he’s far from her, her voice

remains with him, within him. Sometimes

he hears himself speak to himself. In her voice.

What is it you’re thinking, your forehead knotted up like that?

I was thinking of you.

What were you thinking?

We may appear to survive

even after the substance of our lives

gives way like a tent cloth

collapsing with a soft huff.

The core hollows out, but the tree lives on.

So it was until I swan-dived into you and

into you. And you stood up through me.

From Singapore she sends him a photograph

a friend has taken. She’s sitting at a small pool

set with coral tiles while an invisible swarm

of goldfish defoliates the balls of her feet.

He spends the night sleepless, failing

to keep from rewinding and replaying her voice message.

As if something not being said was all he could hear.

Around him, the hillsides are laned

with burnt trunks and their shadows.

*

The coffee capsule still lodged in the machine,

the used cup precarious near the edge

of a bureau across from the bed

with its white tumble of duvet

and sheets. Just a sprinkle of urine

on the toilet seat and the closet agape

as I close the door on another unremarkable

hotel room in a place charged with memories

I cannot metabolize.

Maybe Pascal had it wrong. It’s not

that our problems stem from an inability

to sit quietly in a room alone,

but that our problems, so

precisely coincident with us,

suck up all the air in the room,

leaving us no choice but to flee

or be expunged.