I asked Lucy why I treated what I love like a commodity. We were outside, January, and I was heading home the following morning. We had decided against sleeping, and we drank a beer each, a Peroni, which made us sleepier, and that was okay. I had one cigarette left and I wish I had more. I wish I had walked back and forth into the pub until they were closed or we were denied. But it was too cold, and one beer each served as the sun-dial over our heads. She was trying to hide her shivering, and I pretended that the end of my cigarette was enough to warm my hands, whose skin was tightening, whose bones were thinning, to be restored to looseness and thickness under her electric blanket—later. We talked like “old acquaintances/Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance./Our horses neigh to each other/as we are departing” (Pound's translation). We soon left because it was too late, our breath had changed to bruised, and I had spent too much money. A TD green flash in my face and a 20:00, like the floodlight of brakes, and in the hesitation I treated what I love like a commodity.
What’s been hardest for me, when it comes to writing, is keeping away from the thought that my love is a means to any form of wealth, even slightly. And when I am allowed a moment to rest in what I had diligently resisted, I breathe in-and-out-recitations and am reminded that what is beautiful is useless, stones in my shoes so that I have nothing to do, and sit, and breathe, and not-know with a not-self that the lively and untied colorful ribbons which had served as the sinew around the phenomenon of vision move past like a steady stream in a remote pit of the Arnold Arboretum: they demand nothing, and I watch.
Whatever else we shared together that January evening belongs nowhere in the not-knowing of a not-self, not displayed and unable to be displayed in trembling stalks of digitized ink. I cannot count myself and I ought not count myself and what little belongs to me, like that January evening. The other day I counted sticks in the park and realized others are counting my fallen fragments to make me up a whole, undisturbed self for pragmatic uses. But I am disturbed; a silk finger makes my body echo like the closed throat of Zechariah: I believe the angel who touches my hip and changes my gait and calls forth an unnamed miracle from my loins. Yet the movement of words still entices me, and I've rendered out what little I can afford to give up to empty symbols. Language is, always, a tool for counting this season's crops.
It was enough to have one beer with you and my one cigarette and to leave the next morning. It was enough to spend what I had. It was enough to not say more, and to let the rest of the memory pass through USELESS, but beautiful, and for me.
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