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Please speak to meonly of the present
or if you must bring up the past
bring up only that which you and I don't share. I know this is a selfish thing to ask. Yes, as Ihave often remarked, shore lunch at hanging rock was lovely. Yourhair and mine stayed put. Later on we didn't, as we do now, pull it fromeach other's clothes as if for final proof that we've been sleeping with each other. In the glorious picnics of the past we simply knew such things. The rockupon which we sat, ran beneath the lake, and was the same rock wewere both looking over to the other side at. I almost felt, believe me,as if we were two people. Person, I nearly could have said, hold on.Instead, I used the name we had agreed upon. Not your fault. A nameis useful, it helps with the blankness I am sometimes feeling in regardsto you. I apologize for saying this out loud. You are not the blanknessI am speaking of. Plug your thought or daydream into me, and theyor I will often fail to light. You are beginning to see what I mean aboutthe past, how I, despite my facility with pliers, and eye for detail, may notbe suitable. What was your name? I am not kidding. What comes will run us throughfrom the front, we pull our way down its length if only to see, at lastwhat has ahold of the spear-grip. Therefore, the future, as a topic, is sadlyalso out. Instead, let's cast the deep side of the weedbed together. The lakeis black, like slate we scrape across with paddles toward the weedtops,sticking up, like alien flags, above the invisible settlements, the castleyou've dropped your hooks inside of. I love how destructiveyou are with the fishes, so go ahead and bring your war against them, Ramona,against the duck, against time, against any things that swim. Our fiber-glass canoe is of burnt orange; our shapely hooks of shining gold;our giant rock, also somewhere in the lake beneath us, is the bottom, towardwhich the minnow, lip-hooked, dives after the lead, its weight a thingthe minnow seems to follow, as if we sent it dropping both for what we hadto give away and still we didn't want the lake to have. |
| Copyright © 2010 by Joshua Bell. Used with permission of the author. |
