erin gay
The Symbolists’ Report
An anecdote, pages of anecdotes, but in the end only the paperclip.
This spiral inwards, elbows disjointed in calling to or was it the opposite, swimming that slow cavalcade crossing the Baltic, preparing for that longer distance and the banquet that would meet her at the end.
As a child, this woman I admired would stand and let the breakers crash over her. This was her idea of marriage:
carloads of balloons, plastic tablecloths, hemlines limp from the summer rain.
Everyone crying, even the photographer, so that it took a fortnight to decipher who was in each picture.
Phantom blossoms. Strangers vicariously tiptoeing into the frame.
It took so long to happen, that the smiles became weary, and everything was remembered through a windshield - those secrets we share inside the car without the bride.
Waiting is its own passage.
Camellias circling like maids around the abandoned house - I called to you from the window, only this time there was no glass between us.
Sometimes it is enough to steal a mop, enough to go over the floors until the bucket of dirty water becomes the problem.
I would have stolen the bus stop and the bridge where the river stones gathered, I would have taken down every street sign if it meant I could stop anything.
The studied mystery of proceedings, the book my mother never finished at fourteen.
I would steal the ending.
Bosphorus
He was a detective of old grudges, those dotted family lines that snap off, buried with a shovel of dirt. There were always missing parts in his mother's story.
Ask him, he would say it was like following "the footprints of a damp snail" on the Sunday newspaper: an obituary, the accounted for investments, the ring that was once someone else's.
But he was no talent of age. In the end the river would flow under the Bosphorus Bridge without him knowing how old was each leaf floating amiss the various plastics.
It is not his talent that pains me now.
There was another agent, who read all his notebooks, who sat on his bed and wept when he left the room. She was a sister of sorts. Was he aware of the risks?
Shiny prints on their map of irregulars, a child's foot bruise.
Someone had been checking on the baby since after-birth. The girl's mother? Not the girl.
The girl couldn't stop reading the notebooks, and he was off somewhere writing more. Names, missed appointments, first love letters.
Three different pen tips.
A thousand arrows self-referencing, pointing to conclusions, circles noting two people who once shared a room, but no mention of her.
