Christina: 2

                                    Do I wake or sleep?
                                                                       Keats

And yet nothing stops you. The wilderness of bodies. A tangle of clothes and sheets. She whom your father loved, whose body claims all you will ever know of his legacy, the stark tremor in your loins.

Why confuse the past with the present? her eyes spell out in their own confusion, how does a woman feel to have her thirst slaked by a young man she might have mothered though he be her contemporary . . .

Bobby wrote what he could remember. Then he set the page aflame. Then wrote it again, the way he wanted it to read, what nothing but these words could see, and they so paltry he stayed unhappy.

She said, My god, what have I done, dear Bobby? Thee hath consoled my ragged soul, he replied. Where is there to go now? she wondered aloud. He wanted to smile but no, he said, Back in thy bed . . .

But he did not mean it, she knew, he was as sad as she that there was nothing to keep him here with her, and he, what did he care? she thought, he had a woman already, she who was his world’s light.

And that was how they spent the day imitating, commemorating, becoming the night’s way of life, what bodies do when mystery prevails upon them to seek the unknown within the ordinary,

quotidian pleasures that do not weary the mind but prepare the heart for ease in the city’s streets where nothing is or will be to quiet the staccato heart, the sudden sheen of knife and a gun’s pop.

And even that was tabu, the hope anger dissipates, a narrow corridor down which we go to our next appearance when the wheel stops now to turn within the loveliness of a woman whose ire

needs no priming, the boy who is more than the man his father was, if for no reason other than he breathes . . . she should have known he didn’t need her to make his biography complex.

(6, 13 April 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander