Be With

by Forrest Gander

At Leptis Magna, when your mother & I were young, we came across statues of gods with their faces and feet cracked off by vandals. But for the row of guardian Medusa heads. No one so brave to deface those.

I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love.

At which point the driver turned and said it doesn’t need to be your fault for it to break you.

The eye that was open on Friday. The portent and the portent’s flensed hide. Ribbons of flesh swarming downward. Like a school of leeches deserting some unlit cataclysm. And a briary phantom there, Stygian, erect. Saying, here is the untranslation of the world. Mounted on a spire of form.

Every event drags loss behind it Dark, be bright There’s nightshade in my brain

He observes the shadow thrown By nothing is thrown by the nothing he is

Addled by busyness, I crumpled my life and let it drop and then I outlived my life, rocking on my misery like a cypress in the wind. I watched stars emerge from a black egg. Lucidity of loss.

Saturation point. When your own misery preens you against the misery of others.

Carrying the rat of affliction between my teeth for all to see. Just. Try. To. Take. It. From. Me.

Field flecked purple with nightshade and lupine. Ruby-throated bird at the bottlebrush bloom. One’s own mediocrity sharpens it.

And so days-to-come will crack open without you, dropping their yolk over places you walked. And the white lowly primrose will foam wild like some scrap of your happiness refusing to abandon me. Blah blah. The mirror in the shrine is memory.

Until you’re sub- tracted from the visible escarpment and I’m a throbbing waste-heap of ghost.