While She's Gone - Jim Carroll
It’s too late to change you with language Your boundaries are always too narrow, and you bury Yourself beneath a shallow grave of artifice, flesh and perfection Look up above the mountain, to the right Of the castle’s turret, that’s not a gull That’s a heart. And of course it’s tattered Swooping too low crossing The Atlantic to find you, its stomach Was slit open on the horns of a caribou in Greenland. Many species of birds have feasted on its eyes. So, having come this far, I can now barely see you It’s two weeks since you’ve gone The fragrance you left Still remains in this apartment As if it were bracketed to the wall like a shelf It remains sweet yet somehow stale The pressuring scent of expedience How I hunger to devour it to devour you Slowly, gently, vicious. I chew on the pubic hairs you left on the sheet Like a country boy chews a blade of grass as he walks Near a pond, skimming flat rocks across the water. If the angels knew, were kind, That is where I’d be. Instead, I have been been sitting down by the Hudson At the end of the Gansevoort St. Pier Reading Schiller on the sentimental and naive Melville was a customs clerk there The streets are still cobblestone I’m hoping for an experience that pre-dates you. For example, being chased by a dragonfly. What is not perfect, you deign to destroy. When you find your idea of perfection You relax on well-cut grass leading down to the stream. You make a stranger a lover and a lover a stranger You isolate the curve of longing Then accelerate the flow. It becomes the curve of binding energy. Under different circumstances, I could admire that. I keep finding your long straight hairs In the blankets in the carpet on the arm Of the chair where you were working Perfecting your calligraphy The lavish tyranny of words Now I watch the red in each long strand shine, twisted Between my thumb and forefinger in the window light I tied one around the neck of an alabaster bear The rest I just continue to drape across the roses In the wine bottle beside the kitchen window It’s beginning to look like a spider’s web. It seems That each symbol possible, in time, finds its way back to me. I put my faith in I put my I put mine in I put my faith in you While it rains outside through the night Through the twilight of the gods I want to watch the rain falling with you inside Inside you I want the rain to fall inside you Lap the drops that drain Lost, I remain inside you When I took off to swim the river last week I left the wine glass on the table beside my bed The one you drank from here Near full with bottled water, as you asked The capricious symbols are turning cliche and wet When I got home it was five days later, the humidity In the city heavy that week but still When I held it up there was something left, just enough drops To wash down a pill to fall asleep Then I filled it again and left it to the sun and defiance There are times I hate you there is no question But an unforced grace remains. Your generous silence Listen, With our tongues we could tie the laces of angels, Light or fallen, no matter Your thighs moved smoothly as Latino gangsters It’s hard to walk from a love that never ended The fury is deadly, as if I were locked forever In a room with movies of bridges collapsing Too rigid for the quick wind You see, your leaving occurred without The foreplay of anxiety which is essential Before one flies through the window of a car Out of control Unprepared, only a certain yet vague prescience which didn’t Seem to concern me much I left it in your hands As I took you at your word. Now I see the only means I had to heal the burn was to replay again and again each permutation In all its bitterness, and illusion. It becomes tedious As the tedious becomes essential apparently Cassandra: that’s you incarnate Sweating the details of a future bliss As if you could control it The angels are more confused than ever For once they call out, and there is no one to listen You called from a phone by a lake Deep in the canopy of black forests The entire country deciduous, leaves rotting Among the fresh angel skin a heart flown so far, it’s fallen It’s grey among the leaves like a dying frog And, seeing it, you step away, glad you avoided it I found another of your hairs on the floor This time I just threw it away it’s becoming old Gravity It keeps us from floating away. yet presses down. We stumble and fall. I thought dusk was the moment dividing Night and day, all things possible. Yet, tonight looking out from this terrace Twilight is filled only With red taillights moving away, to bridges or tunnels Yet always water, above or below, red taillights And the mercurial sadness of another darkness descending A thicker gravity. So many lost loves Your boundaries were too narrow Everything planned assiduously Within surgical thin perimeters. Now and then you would test the borders you defined But never too far, inside the fear of finding yourself Even for a moment lost. At times you did Step beyond, paler slightly from the risk, To burn in the wilder sun, yet always returning In time for the mail and the certainty and the phone perhaps Inside those boundaries assurance and fantasy blur and merge Inside those boundaries, thought and action become one Without distinction. Those outside Get spun, unravel. Your arms shrink in the cause of embrace What you try to comfort you can no longer reach. And I’ve done everything I’m accusing you of. All the while I was staring straight Into a wavering blue flame Among the flaws, I watched Your necessity bloom Like careless crawling orchids So imperceptible I didn’t really notice until the first petal fell And a strange arboreal wind blew it away I was always seeing you on the move As if passing in airport after airport The smell of jet fuel, vanilla, fancy soap and ambivalence Without an hour hand, a minute hand emblazoned On its heat and glow, I could have Watched the dew in these days reveal you as you opened Perhaps I could have unveiled my own hesitations, washed the poison From my lips, held you down by your wrists and watered you In all resistance. Once again build myself a thirst and drink your overflow I could have taken you to the dark gods Still getting us back home on time To sleep with the anorexic angel Who I would pin motionless, radiant Between your breast and my hand My hand unyielding Extended outward as light, the light You learned as you lost it in a single moment It’s months now since you’ve been gone And what I feel I’ll tell you what it’s like It’s like a last glass of Spanish Champagne slipping from my hand Taking months to reach the carpet It’s like a slow hanging This city is a scaffold my room’s a trapdoor beneath Not rope but a long red scarf a silk noose Tightening slightly more day after day Even now as I type My feet are dangling a foot or two above the floor Breathing only through vanity and my fingertips The time hasn’t changed since you left That moment in front of my building throwing your suitcase Into the trunk of the cab, a Hindu driver. I check the airport route He has planned for you. We kiss long and sad and I Watch you drive slowly off, your head craned back at me I watched until you turned at 19th St. and were out of sight Leaning my head to the side and feeling the cool of a marble pillar Against my cheeks making one last wave one last I went upstairs, called her, and slept Forcing myself not to wake until daylight the next day. You’re in Amsterdam. You know, If they took those reinforcing beams away From the old wooden houses along the canals in Holland They would most likely have fallen into the water by now. That is your art form Creating vestiges Out of lace and lashes. Everything just fell away. The bridges over the canal They’re quaint and banal Tourist boats pass beneath. I was a tourist To your body. Why do you smile so widely in every picture I have of you? Sometimes it makes me feel like slapping you In this room everything comes as a whisper. So what did you say? Why do I want to know? Because that’s the way it is for me, and always has: To be amused, bewildered, bemused, and fucked Without the slightest aspect left out. I thought I had been floating with the tide easily These last three years, not looking ahead yet waiting For some small island Even a rock would have done To land on and survey how far I had come And if it was worth going on And all the while I now learn you had somehow fixed, shifted the natural flow And I have been swimming upstream against those vacuumed years. Salmon are an endangered species Man, and the paws of black bears I’m tired too tired for conjunctions. Having reached land, Are you worth love in any form? An old story getting older You may not possess irony, but you carry it like a silk purse Now the mute fog rolls in off the river And I can’t speak. It makes me listen too hard With an urge to believe. Why couldn’t we find a love in that too-American exhaustion Melt into each other as the hour that moans In Europe how you have reached a mountaintop Whose scent is things dead a thousand years That is the fragrance of betrayal. A cologne you took years to create A chemical pun you mailed me in a white envelope A white wedding envelope The chemical wedding of C.R. Child bride antelope Collide and elope This cologne is what you would have me press In two subtle drops around my neck Like a noose of splintering tears. I flew straight through that car window Without the essential anxiety And the only way to recover Is to play it over and over On a screen too small For the curve of time in this ward where I have been waiting It makes everyone a fool, awake and in dreams. I wound up Loving something I was forced to reinvent, deconstruct Though I know you so well now Come to understand your meaning That’s the worth of a lifetime Everything else collapses Or repeats often enough to forget Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us It’s hard to find comfort In this world. You brought that to me That’s hard to let go. Only you and I know only you & I See You have always been so far away You have always Been right here
