Deborah Landau

I had the idea of sitting still while others rushed by. I had the thought of a shop that still sells records. A letter in the mailbox. The way that book felt in my hands. I was always elsewhere. How is it to have a body today, to walk in this city, to run? I wanted to eat an apple so precisely the tree would make another exactly like it, then lie down uninterrupted in the gadgetless grass. I kept texting the precipice, which kept not answering, my phone auto-making everything incorrect. I had the idea. Put down the phone. Earth, leaves, storm, water, vine. The gorgeous art of breathing. I had the idea — the hope of friending you without electricity. Of what could be made among the lampposts with only our voices and hands.

• Well look, the wedding guests are here again. Why not just send a card? Snapshot. Snapshot. Smile and kiss. But this bride has such a red face! Let her scramble past pardon en route to the loo. Evacuate the taffeta dire and paunchy. The groom is erect. The groom downed three pints and stole from the caterer. He would never be no grown-up, This part we'll remember. Dull and easy. Before the spawning and apathy. Before the dementia nurse and waiting for mama to die. Silverware. Cloth napkins. Carafes. Gather round. Sit pious and clench yourself. What's within should be held in. Choke it down. Medicine for the long haul. No more wildness is why I chose no more wildness. Now scurry ho, before someone else goes down on the bride. Isn't that her in the distance, up the pole? • By pineapple, by pamplemousse, we find ourselves back at the table armed with forks and particular ideas about what to drink. Go on, order what you want. Turn up the music, you. Lucinda, you have a great voice. You have a lovelygone face and teeth. O gums! Pink and alkaline. We live in the city with crowds of fallen. Soon I am dead and soon you. We'll all be dead together! Anne said. • Marie, you are not unclean. You are rose-oiled and shiny and ensconced in the corner with the witty anesthesiologist, inhaling ladysmoke at the café. It's a pleasure just to watch you scratch the crud off your lotto ticket tonight. Then in comes Jackson, looking like he's left his wife. And again Larry is extending his feelers toward Clarice. Larry, what gives? You'll soon lose interest. Eh, Mr Candlelight? I want to give you a good close reading. Come this way. • Oh skin! What a cloth to live in. We are not at the end of things. He's tuxedoed and I'm in a cocktail dress. How gussied up we get. Drink this, roll that. Another sender different gender. We're going to hit a winner. We're going to swallow vodka and slap down money and stand around frocked and gossiping and bleed a little in the bathroom from earlier today when we were a little minx. (He really is of the masses, mama said.) • Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Mr and Mrs of the moment now and dancing. Mr and Mrs End of Suffering. Mr and Mrs Safe and Headed Where. In the reach of night she'll have him. He'll have. A series of days filled up and emptied. A welcome closeness and a womb. He pours her a fizzy one. She pours him hers. Let's keep on doing this, let's do it together. A bit of drunk and full of wishing. (Two people jumping out of a building and holding hands, R said.)

Sybaritic afterlife I don’t crave you. I like daylight. I like crowds. I don’t think it will be charming underground. The silence will be sudden then last. What’s chic will shrink. There won’t be any pretty, pity. Will never peaches there, or air. We’ll be so squashed and sour there. I don’t want a cold place. Don’t want a threadbare clamp and consequence all old. Our loneliness will be prolonged then go too far. Oh fuck it’s true. Then nothing left of you.

Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one running in the yard pulse pulse the absence. Leave them not to the empty yards. They resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes one was angry sometimes someone called her "wife" someone's hair receding. An uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness and oh what to do with it. (How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.) It had been some time since richness intangible and then they made a whole coat of it. Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale. A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along. Borderless and open the days go on—

It scares me to watch a woman hobble along the sidewalk, hunched adagio leaning on — there’s so much fear I could draw you a diagram of the great reduction all of us will soon be way-back-when. The wedding is over. Summer is over. Life please explain. This book is nearly halfway read. I don’t have a pill for that, the doctor said.

Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time? We’ve wasted our time. Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table. Our day after tomorrow. Our what to do now. The stink of us so undignified. The end game of bloom. We will lose the sun struck and disassembled lightly down and crawling like a worm. This earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we. A puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious. The raving lunatics they are upon us, but we are raving too.

• When G died began the midnight panic attacks. He spoke French and English but that didn't help. How the body can betray. It frayed and decayed and then he was removed from it promptly and with force. To begin with, a bit of pressure in the throat. A tendency to choke. And then how lavishly it grew to overtake him. • At the funeral his wife had a gaudy kind of beauty. Sheer and elegant in a champagne silk blouse. And where did he go? No matter where on this earth and you could never find him. Flowery and young came the mourners, like bridesmaids. G would have liked it that way. Stilettos and stockings. The curves of the widow sleek and sublimate in blacksilk pants. Elsewhere people went shopping or to the movies. We drove to the crematorium. I can only hope so many beautiful women come to my funeral, M said. • Just at the moment when the person has disappeared forever they tell you he's alive forever lucky him. The church hushed dark a ruin and all of us inside it. (The city's a brute the sky is a brute though the day is calm and clear and mild strain to comfort console but there's no dispersing this. O incidental fragile beloved one, chance of recovery none.) • The city of Paris has you in mind tonight— Let its bridges lift you up. Let the city of Paris write you a letter, the men of Paris open their windows, tending their gardens of giant snapdragons. Let the city perceive you. It is infinite and slow, it will have you back. The beds of Paris are made for you, the city of Paris is sending you steak and water, wine and eggs, it has cafés for you, a broad-flowing river and many crossbreezes. When vaulting under, when the body has shown you its foul airless destination, let the Saint-Sulpice declare living and visible your clever spirit your kindness. The tables of Paris will give you food here are some macarons pink-sweet with jam. (Rude-blooming the flowers of Paris as if snout to blossom could uncover could reinvoke.) • How is it to have a body today and walk in this city in the sun, a bit shocked to find ourselves actually here with books and teacups and ghosts and time ample, a slow greedy feast. If there's no one to walk with all over this city you can go to the movies can hurry stop buy a bunch of lavender, a book, pastry be someone distinct true personal and new. The mind rivers out, angle by angle. He was sick and now nowhere and soon the cities and soon the planet and yet the decadence and festivals boys running, couples swooning on the bridge. Tonight G's attached to a city, where I carry him along in my head, ordering dinner, sitting in the square drawing the sheet up over the body that happens now to be lying there. • How emptily the time goes, how rosé. The waiter, he had a frank stare. He wanted to be admired and I admired him. In the café everyone was alive. Everyone was eating, the garden full and flowering wet and pleasure-dome the earth the days go on and G not and G just and how can a person and now one less and she crumpled thing now as if each were an original grief now gather here and look. (Everyone this summer is obsessed with Michael Jackson. A cold place in the center feel it. In central Paristhe French are saying "moon walk.") • I drank the tiny coffee but it didn't work tried the pills that are supposed to make you happy the pills that are supposed to make you free. The man on the corner is a flasher his skin bright blue. In front of the Métro grandpa is dancing. When he looked up there were so many cracks in the sky. • Walked until the caffeine wore off. Until the buzzing stopped. Walked. Food everywhere and everywhere people putting it into their mouths. Butter and cream, fruit and sugar, coffee and wine. People on the island swirling gelato. The private inner sweetness. When the rain comes down you can feel less lonely. You can feel cozy even shut alone into your private room. When the sun comes out it's a disappointment. Who on earth can live up to it. The days go on despair and elation in alternation. Blazoned swinging moods so big they bewilder. And what is the arc of life. And up ahead nothing. On the other side what. • The city says just live with the mystery don't fight it. This is your life, life using you. The great diminishment coming— You're not the only one who feels it. It's not like you're any more mortal now you were always mortal. So try a moment of lightness like when the red bird appeared on the terrace and it wasn't mystical wasn't anyone returning just was • The old man in the wheelchair smelling of garlic the little dog in the grocery cart the homeless dog and his homeless owner the dog's sad-looking face he stays all day in the grocery cart the sympathy one feels for a dog helpless in his dog life the sympathy one feels for a man helpless in his man life for the grey cat leashed to the fire hydrant the sympathy one feels for a woman alone at the dinner table. In the hot courtyards Paris lowered its awnings. It's hard to walk in a skirt in this weather the wind catches you. A gradual slowing and she turned transparent just a window, just a sensation of walking, a blister.