Underneath the glass she looks the same but her hair is different. I remember the smell of her room and the window barely opened looking down onto the small yard and how the breeze lifted her drawings from the wall. When she returned I would hear her bicycle rattle against the tree, the front door open and close, and her hurried footsteps getting nearer to our room. I always thought to myself and sometimes whispered: 'be careful on the stairs'. That's how much I loved her.

There were three decided. Finally and unearthed. The Spenserian model and the luhkow. Bath to bath she balanced tea on her mandible tongue. When the prawns and mercenary scabbards came to shave her of her purpose she protested to fracture go when. This was an introduction to her brow and down beneath. The poke stick hint of her shanty, her eye blood swelling in a puddle of rain, and the pork stench of her hollow. I followed her through the recoil [a french disaster] and consoled her of a time not too long ago when the presence of mercury suggested fossil degeneration and of men later revealed as Hermione fainting on the beach.

At night she lay on a cold bed with me and through a roofless hut watched mandarin leaves travel through the jet stream. So different from the time of Hammerstein of the Volstein, Royal Chrysanthemum of the Haubsfelt.

But as if on a living she modified her thinking with a reckon and showed me the door. And though it was not to my liking I set off for out there but feared I would return one day to gather mud from this place and find pieces of her in my hand. She ate well (sir) but what good was such good when it only prolonged her bad? Die I whispered from the horizon. Die for your own quiet deathness. But she lived on. Were she an animal, they would call her human.

This is what they describe to you while the Martinique revolution plucks the roots of her lightly moistened wheat fields. There is a pause and then it continues. She harbors a sleight predilection for plaster. Three times the weight of heavy. Horn made of Punjabi silk. Enough a) to make one festoon. And rightly so. For the compromise dissembles her bungalow. Soft width pillows and shams, designed for maximum comfort. Maria, how little the time ticks when dressed in stripes and plastic blaster spoons.

She warns me that (uh) here come the stupid words again. And they're all (all) around again. And I read (read) them again. And nothing (nada) new again. Same old partitions and eyeglass suck. And she's right as a bauble in that come with me (so I fondle her) way.

Through the phonoplane to the pigeon house where they give words to everything. Even silence and nothing and bob who is nameless. Oh yes, mathilda, the boo-hoo makes her sad. But I pop wheelies and hammer her nipples into a smooth child-like fluffy.

Presently she sips tea beneath palm leaves, and makes pronouncements as bare as winter while mangos sweat in the bowl beside her. Lately I've been meaning to tell her something along the lines of a parable. But after a deflection of her existence and in spite of distractions, it seems she'll never let me go. And I should love her as one might love a mother but the Roman in me finds fault in even love.

She laments that nothing ever happened to her that was big enough to connect the world {the whole Nicaragua bullshit and fucked up alcoholic and tangerines like pornographic bible verse}.

To say to someone: this is what happened to me under the awning while planes fired overhead.

To say to someone: they once made jam that looked like candle wax and sent it by boat to barely remembered outposts and that one time (one time dear Cletus) I jarred a note that read: come back for me.

"These things happen to prevent one from floating away and I have no stories to tell."

All of her responses, impersonations—she loves hemoglobin for what it's worth. A pressing sensation of Thrasymachus the conniver, the iron made collapser, encircling her residue, cubing her—not what you're thinking—porpoise flail.

But she's no stupid girl when she leads you by the hand and plunges you pinky first into her hammurabi wigwam. Jesus Christ, she's got pudding down there.

But you're never alone 'cause it's never allowed. Even sitting beneath the palm trees that grow through her roof like leafy plugwig and scrubby and her head in your lap as the warm, night breeze calms her to sleep, you hear the crowd mumble {chromosome}. A drone in the pontiff's ear. A stream of blood like a locust swarm.

Rosemary (heaven). The gentles call to you from Hibiscus. The bare settles in. The cardinal falls through the ice—his mitre a maypole for more graceful children, who having filled their cheer with scrawn, live artfully among the mundane.

Stricken with night, the dog breaks its own leg and vomits the stars before us.

I can't remember the songs. Only the women who sang them and the ground they stood on. The bluster of hair as clouds moved behind them. Praying to the old logic. We who are human never wanted the necessity. The looking up in shock. The inevitable coming to this of life. When she died I followed her to the door and held her face in my wound. They say there will be more for those who are beautiful.

In our pain, we can split with old times, always breathe so logical new times. We can look there though it's different—in the universe where the dust in which gods sleep, soak up the blood of good men—in our pain there, though it's different, we can split with new times, always breathe so comical (near) times.

And in a jar in a place more real than the world, we saved her last breath and imagined the molecules of her lungs building a world of their own. We remember how her mouth twisted and how she fell to her knees and tried to sit in a way that only she knew, one more time to be reassured that this strangest of feelings would not be her last.

The compassion of Seneca and the kindness of noble men are spit. A dying body flails and settles on itself. The old widows know this.

I once kissed Rosemary on her earlobe, that piece of skin too small for love. But I destroyed it with love. I sat on the chair beside her. I heard footsteps on the grass outside. I placed my lips on her ear. The wind blew sheets of music onto the floor—ballade, saisir, sonata a due. She leaned down to pick them up and whispered something into her own mouth.

Darkness never came for anyone as light as she. The guardians of the soul of hell. The tight bandage of hell where wisdom sustained only itself while we descended into the lurch of dog and pig and the excess of discharge.

Rosemary played for me as I left. Each moment I turned to watch, she placed her hands on her lap. I heard the music behind me as I closed the door.

We thought we were too old to be trapped inside of ourselves. That too many dull blades had left their mark and revealed what was at bottom. But at bottom, we still had enough strength to hide. To move away. To think better of saying it—the one thing that would have made everything different between us.

Rosemary exhaled for the last time and I heard the word she whispered into her own mouth: life. All of it. Every piece. Even the waste and the vile and the hate that infected every part of her skin. But when she was young her body trembled with the beauty of what it was to be human—when we wanted to forever have her in that moment before we did.

In modern day Europe one observes a crisis of American proportions. The sub-valleys and tinkers, swathed in their own egress, migrate like flan against the ever-fluid Tiber. On either side one sees abandoned stalls. The sun over this epoch shimmers in the way nets of dying fish do. A period of long twilight awaits man. A time of deep and revealing sleep. Fish will rot and die, their fossils providing a thousand blueprints for the evolution of a far greater and noble breed. The basic sub-structure of the current dilemma is the culmination of an evolutionary conflict between a pre-a priori process of the conscience (synaptic cross-lattice burbling) and one 'resultant' of this conflict (phonoplane deceleration). Although one appears to follow the other, a causal relationship between the pre-a priori process and phonoplane deceleration cannot be determined.

We're on a ship that's sinking and you and I move away from where the water's filling. They'll bring a fire truck on deck to put out the fire. It's a long ship and there's lots of space. But we'll have to jump over. Near the ship there's a pond and we see pond things while we're swimming underneath. Storybook pond things that invert words like vespertine (from the viny) or crepuscular just for this sense. It looks like an old city but it's just an old town. And when the Indian sailors come rowing over to tell us how they fixed her up, we'll tell them to row back because we'll be staying here a while. We'll say 'you'll find us waiting here Matilda, our sweat collecting in the creases of a bamboo porch.'

It could be the land of turtles or the land of underneath water. But we are a relevant species, scraping chum along the briny, humming jingles while flowers bloom from the bottom of our shoes.

On your ear he said, so fervent and nubile in his enthusiasm, a quasi-liturgical membrane strutting from his turnip hut. Some whispered his sociopathy, others his relegation to the mutter fields, while après mort lay sidlewise and pressed their blood cabbage to the ground.

There is lip everywhere. And nose. And strump.

In the doorknob summer comes early but out here all is gray while Hiroshima father breastlespur consumes himself. His twin bourbons metastasized with youthy flailings. Oh swine but singworthy messenger. Trinkets flea like big, materializing in astonishment cymbals for the martyr. On friar purr day, the protozoa march in wiggly [wait for me oh she!], in her summer clover and glistening lips of sardine (punctuation for a whisper).

I think about walking and meeting people who want to talk to me. Who. Who stop me and ask me questions about nothing. In a park or adjacent to a park. Someone sitting on a bench while kids fidget in school where teachers talk about nothing.

"Your skin is very dark and pale", you say.

I move closer. You had a girlfriend you were seeing and she made you very happy. The breeze is light and the leaves crinkle under our behavior. How did she sleep? I touch your hair. Yesterday I slept on my side and thought about legumes I planted in a hidden plot near the train station. Two little legumes grew but I was anxious and plucked them before they were ripe. I spy them under my coat when no one is looking.

"I don't like the sun", you say.

There's no texture in the grass here. It's too smooth. Almost like paper that's colored green. And the sky is the same. The sun looks like the face of a child that a child has drawn but I don't stare because of photosynthesis. There are paintings of cannibals in the museum. Strange women with postures of gold and Persephone tincture ranging down on servings of humanity.

"I want to go somewhere with you and fall asleep", you say.

We hold hands. You comment on the innovation of my fingers. Their slender precision. I tell you that my sleep is appealing—like the space between two branches of a tree. It breathes. The air flows through and around my sleep. Like a ballerina around a perfect éphémère. If you walk beside my sleep you will feel it on your face. Something changes around me—the consistency and hue of the air that navigates my musculature.

"We can go to where my bed is and sleep", I say.

You hear the sound of a blanket on the clothesline. The grass in the yard is unfinished. Dogs appear from the dust and run through the opened space.

"I just want to be quiet for a time", you say. "There's too much noise and without saying it."

There is enough space for all the wrongs in this world. Even ours. But ours is freakish and slit with rungs and the pounding of Galileo. They spit everywhere and hate us for collecting their bile. But my room is clean today. The walls have been pampered with loving and the floor by my bed cozied with and snuggled.

"You have many books", you say.

"Yes I have many books in my room, most of which I haven't read but of those I haven't read my favorite is Notes from Underground given to me by an uncle who thought it time for me to broaden my horizons. I was, but no longer am, a country girl in dress and temperament. And he, in his way, had hopes of improving my lexis while I had hopes of gaining insight into the ways of the world. The book has been well kept despite its discoloration. And though it is a paperback, the spine is sturdy and bells a convincing tone when tapped against the edge of a table. I suspect the story takes place in a sewer with a single manhole that one cannot open but can see through to the outside world. I believe it to be a metaphor for the human soul."

You circle the room then settle onto the bed upon which we hope to cultivate our loneliness. We hear the sound of iron and stone. Children who search for trinkets near the factory make piles of chrome. They hold up pieces of broken glass to the sun.