this was the Europe I made of her as we sat
in hard chairs and breathed. I dreamt I was seized
like a nipple by a mouth. A mall can dilate,
can't he? A man can receive.
This was our romance, making a third body
that was chaste and sexy. I'd forget myself then remember
the romantic sees the schizophrenic as suffering the truth,
the truth was the romance was killing me.
It can couple and blood. It can woo and work
its placebo effect. And I was afraid my desire was an open wound.
My mind was a membrane between her
and the turbulence. I sensed her tremors
and fugues, yet I was distant, as if in a book -
a love story by von Clausewitz.
I saw that love's not shudder and sentiment
anymore than the racket on the wards at night -
the call and response - is the rhythm and blues.
She said:
That's the rain, I collid be the rain.
It's a terrible thingJor a girl to be the rain.
She became my Crazy Jane and I was the thing
to be torn, the way one might unravel
the double helix from the stem of our self.
I was a mess. An emotional petit mal,
my self-diagnosis. For five years I was in the furnace,
the wine press before we could dream an end.
I dreamt of wolves: a limb bit off, a cord chewed through.
I saw her vanish into the Rorschach of the world,
hues and saturations of her, those solids
and voids of the Actual with its
Jade to black
and
jlll1lP
wt.
She sits in the room and becomes otherworldly
at dusk, it's like trying to touch perfume as she
Jades
to black.Jllmp wt:
I'm
in Vermont, sleepless
