Why He Refused to Discuss It

poetry by RICH IVES

The evening swells, white moths so thick it seems as if a snowfall had fluttered itself dry and found the air erratically uplifting. We cannot be concerned is what the grass is whispering, and I'm happy to have lost something of myself to it. I’ve come to a position of acceptance, pouring over a dusty chair.

    A map of her hair spread out till it reached the scented ear posteriors and then documented an experience outside the room. Perhaps I perched on a thimble if a thimble was there. I trembled. I moved and moved again. I was a small voice traveling to an event of its own since it no longer belonged to someone.
    I felt my mouth become an ear without any preconceived territory. Silence breathed its question as if it were the only one. I wanted an unobstructed view. I no longer needed sentencing, but I could accept it all the same.
    The body is just the other house out back, I thought. I must have been swept away by the kind of mind that makes brooms. I used to be who I thought I was. I used to be me when I wasn’t worth being. Then I separated myself from my expectations. I was a dress handkerchief that didn’t have any practical considerations, a potential held in the breast pocket, accomplishing something merely stylish, without reference to its original cause.

    I had become airy and reflective, so I decided to admit that it’s not that easy to tell zombies from sales clerks in the used love store. The air smells like fish and hairy legs. I’m trying to delineate the dimensions of what it smells like so that its indecency becomes my decency.
    The curtain of odors rolls over and flaps out of its threads I remember saying to myself. I tip my head and try to lick the fat knuckle of it, the only endless flower I know, the slow visual love-song of a bee. You can’t escape it, but it can escape you, bumbling dutifully from one lovesick rose to another. Or it could be an ant no one notices inside one bloom of the beautifully wrapped gift, falling out, and then soon enough you’re the only one left who can bite.

    Before this, I answered with reasons and confused myself with now and then, so this time I positioned upon the next. I have a goal and when I get there I keep going.

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