Counting Down

 

 

 

 

 

For FP, after Amy Gerstler’s gangster soliloquy

 

 

 

Fragments of sordid recollection come careening down on me at this time of year like the surplus missing posters of her danced on the airstream of a bonfire in a North Cascades meadow when we sealed the end of 2004 with flame.  Fragments of sordid, I said: the piss stink and shuffle lurch of dark figures in the alleys she might have crouched in; the gravestone faces of swing shift workers huddled in a bus stop, deadpanning us like the poster of her deadpanned them; a huff of plaster dust and arc of blood from a knuckle traced by a laugh that is not a laugh; the butt of a large knife pressing my hipbone while I cut my eyes at a lying addict.  The whole city reels through a rainy nighttime kaleidoscope that describes rivers of embers, stoplights and blood and if we could have stayed vertical long enough perhaps we would have tread every loop and found her supine and pooling away in time to give her our breath.  Everybody’s looking for something and when I disobey the leash law of my mind I suppose I’m looking for a wormhole back to those streets and a different dawn on a different horizon but she laid down in a neighborhood called the West Edge within screaming distance of the black Sound and the end of this land.  While the city sleeps toward the Holy Days again I am most awake when the gusts hit the top of their velocity and I am free to shiver in bed and pull whole fucking soliloquies of what might have been said through the cracked window.