When we all moved in together, Tony brought flowers. Roses actually. For the dining room table where I tried on potted angel wing begonias and woven placemats. Plateware I bought at Mervyn's, a clearance of solid green or pink sets. So everything we ate swam in their utilitarian pepto-bismol, four bowls, mugs, plates, salt and pepper shakers, a spoon rest. All but the spoon rest survives, retired, in the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet where I store an old hope I'll not have to eat off of them again. Which I don't understand. Because I don't remember eating. I remember we sat on the carpet together, we had nothing to talk about. The phone was in front of me and I dawdled before calling in sick. I watched him cut into a thick chicken breast, working at it with a steak knife on the pink plate on our beige floor. The meat was dry. He was shirtless and his shoulders and neck were sweating. It was summer. Do what you need to do, he said. Do what's due first. You know? For a long time he was more capable than me, and more kind. I started walking at night in the medians against the headlights on the highway. I was restless, just restless, though I thought I was dying. Before I turned twenty-two I told him I'd never seen the ocean. So he drove me to the ocean and when I saw it I saw what was due. Sea, and I was starving, I wanted something vastly beautiful. Like shells worn to sand. He pulled the sheets from the bed when he took the bed and left them crumpled on the violets. The violets I thought were beautiful. They were out of place.
***
"Just as I have assiduously avoided sullying my eyes with any poetry book that claims authenticity in personal experience, especially the melodramatic (“tragic”) kind..."
Sullying? I mean, really. Sullying.
Recently I overheard a woman say she hoped her neighbors wouldn't put up a clothesline she'd have to look at. "The eyesore."
Smacks of fear of contamination. Especially the melodramatic kind. "The neighborhood's going to pot." All this dirty tragic personal experience sullying the view.
You don't really mean it, I assume. Not authentically?
***
