Indelicacy

by Amina Cain

If something flows through me, I think it is mine. It is not mine.

It wasn’t my energy I was responding to.

I don’t like to hear a person’s voice during this kind of moment.

A portrait of her desires,

I was thinking things that I was afraid I would forget.

In books I found even more strongly my desire to write, to write back to them and their jagged, perfect words.

And I knew how lucky I was; I could have had to work at a glue factory.

Now I am used to it. I think it must surround me, everyone able to see it, the way I am able to see what surrounds them.

I want France to be behind me too.

But I take my evening walks here now. I begin just as it is getting dark and then walk into that darkness.

but filling the pages of my book was satisfying. I felt I must be filling myself too.

In those moments I felt like a giant ear.

You see, everything came to me in the evenings and I wasn’t doing anything, I wasn’t writing, I was just learning how to walk differently, and how to live in a tent.

Learning can look passive, can look like nothing. Im learning quiet.

wanting to costume myself in something,

I love this description of clothes buying.

Hidden behind their makeup, cloaked, inaccessible.

In this lying down I became another part of myself, the part that was more like a tropical bird, and this helped with my writing.

THE FUTURE CAME, as it always does, with its changes and its things that stay the same.

Everyone always wants sense.

even if I am now gone?

The violin was much more precise than I was or would ever be. Compared to it, I would always be dull and general. Still, it seemed to cut through something inside me and then soothe what it had cut.

Outside with the stray dogs, who have all of their freedom but not enough comfort.

People can be this way.

and I was starting to feel as if I were having a conversation with it.

Dana, not warm or cold, just endlessly present.

Outside, the sky looked like a cliché of heaven,

Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room.