J. Allyn Rosser

we all got tickets to The Truth finally we thought finally when the curtain fell away our indrawn breaths could be heard even in the next theater even the gasp of the mime who had slipped in among us a loud whushing like reams of litter whirling upward in a gale hands shot to mouths and mouths fell open I couldn’t say within how many seconds all our minds shut some slamming others just a click like 300 parallel rows of tipped dominoes a racket of almost unison believe me we wouldn’t have resisted anything but the truth so instantly and universally yet we sat there and waited for something else which you could say we also got if you count the mime’s unpleasant remark so she wasn’t even a real mime probably part of what was clearly just a performance

joy in the day's being done, however clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists, the packages nestling together, no one home waiting for dinner, for you, no one impatient for your touch or kind words to salve what nightly rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling that one is really as alone as one had feared. One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy to see over the strip mall darkening right on schedule a neon-proof pink sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth, cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up and lit as if by a match struck somewhere in the throat much deeper down.

Go home. It's never what you think it is, The kiss, the diamond, the slamdance pulse in the wrist. Nothing is true, my dear, not even this Rumor of passion you'll doubtless insist On perceiving in my glance. Please just Go. Home is never what you think it is. Meaning lies in meaning's absence. The mist Is always almost just about to lift. Nothing is truer. Dear, not even this Candle can explain its searing twist Of flame mounted on cool amethyst. Go on home—not where you think it is, But where you would expect its comfort least, In still-black stars our century will miss Seeing. Nothingness is not as true as this Faith we grind up with denial: grist To the midnight mill; morning's catalyst. Come, let's go home, wherever you think it is. Nothing is true, my dear. Not even this.

What could have been the big to-do that caused him to push me aside on that platform? Was a woman who knew there must be some good even inside an ass like him on board that train? Charity? Frances? His last chance in a ratty string of last chances? Jane? Surely in all of us is some good. Better love thy neighbor, buddy, lest she shove back . Maybe I should. It's probably just a cruddy downtown interview leading to some cheap-tie, careerist, dull cul-de-sac he's speeding to. Can he catch up with his soul? Really, what was the freaking crisis? Did he need to know before me if the lights searching the crowd's eyes were those of our train, or maybe the train of who he might have been, the person his own-heart-numbing, me-shoving anxiety about being prevents him from ever becoming? How has his thoughtlessness defiled who I was before he shoved me? How might I be smiling now if he'd smiled, hanging back, as though he might have loved me?

The afternoon slows down, the town in steady rain. That one with the trendy chicken-plucked look— hair a tufted circle on top, the rest shaved all around— I can't really care about. Of course I hope he grows up without totalling himself and his car, but he's the clown in this act. He seems even to know his place as unworthy twerpy follower of the one no one would look away from for long, whose James Dean stance, hands deep in pockets of a rattily natty maroon corduroy blazer, shoves his shoulders nearly to his ears. Beneath the blazer, long sulked-in jeans, oversized black boots. He lifts one to kick a milkshake someone couldn't finish standing on the sidewalk, and it lands on its side, explodes and rolls a vanilla graffito, expletive unfurling. Expressionless himself. The other boy smirks before the rain douses and sweeps it stupidly into the gutter. Even if I were not invisible through this darkish window, they would know how to erase me. Well, he would. I would enjoy that, just to see how he would do it, what sort of panache he'd pack in his shrug. Raining harder, and the tuft-headed one shifts unhappily under the Revco awning, pivoting his whole body now and then to see what the one I'm half in love with's doing, fifteen, maybe sixteen: he's twitching in sublime irritation, lighting up again, hard to do with both hands in your pockets but he pretty much manages no problem, and now comes the move that gets me. He strides out from under the awning, a spotted Lucky sticking straight from his lip, walks two buildings down and turns at the corner so his back's to Main Street and me, stands, his twitch becalmed at last, stands without heeding his friend's pleading jeering calls, you idiot , you idiot , you idiot , stands hunched, not looking up or down, and I can tell this is his moment, this is where he'll break off, he's going to unload everyone, he doesn't blink as he hawks up their nothingness and spits, feeling himself filling with what's left: he takes possession of his spirited bad luck for good and mounts and rides it without moving a muscle, stands letting the rain collect behind his collar and drench his gloriously inappropriately maroon corduroy and his hair that looks not combable by anyone alive, wild and bunched even when the rain has patted keeps patting at it harder and harder like an obsolete humiliated hand that wants to feed and fend for and in general do for him, and he has turned his back at last on the clown, and on Main Street full of clowns you can both see and not see, who wouldn't dare try to keep an eye on him or try to follow him from now on.

To say screw them, to be screw-them bent on one thing all but lost, one music or mystery, beyond all the necessary incidental snaggings of the heart; to train the whole soul’s beam on a solitary hill, or on it a special kind of rock or creeper; to be sated just by saxophone; to want nothing but your eyes lifelong to study Scottish otters: the snub, slippery-whiskered snout; the way they intertwine in threes at play, indistinguishably bound, long sleek backs submerging away... To make of this your being’s aim, its joy, and know by pulse and viscus the word joy. No gifts but thine to thyself: thou canst, if thou list, single out, make good, one wish. This from the dumb lips of an old god who with one endless, misty hand holds out to us too much to love, and with the other—crooked-fingered, crazed with veins—some nights and days.

Once again you’ve fallen for the lure of his deferral, his quick eyes’ brightness slinking from the pantry of the righteous. Nothing half so sleek as self-licked fur. Not that he forgot your boots, or left A single high-aimed compliment unturned. He’ll double back, affect to be concerned when he’s the secret reason you’re bereft, embracing you with his Houdini hold, repeating chewed-off bits of what you say so he seems loyal, you the turncoat jay. You’d think by now you’d learn to be consoled to know the soul he sold’s not yours but his, though where yours was a hollow feeling is.

One can’t help admiring their rickety grace and old-world feathers like seasoned boardwalk planks. They pass in silent pairs, as if a long time ago they had wearied of calling out. The wind tips them, their ungainly, light-brown weight, into a prehistoric wobble, wings’-end fingers stretching from fingerless gloves, necks slightly tucked and stiff, peering forward and down, like old couples arm in arm on icy sidewalks, careful, careful, mildly surprised by how difficult it has become to stay dignified and keep moving even after the yelping gulls have gone; even after the scattered sand, and the quietly lodged complaints.

Roadlight licks the night ahead, licks the white line on night’s new hide, licks the undulating blacktop flat, sticks its end- less forking tongue out onward, flicks itself at culvert, tree, passing truck, a sign insisting heartbeats equal conscious life (it may be) of someone’s (maybe my) forever unborn child. I let the knife of wind inside and sing A Whiter Shade of Pale, no earthly reason why, and think of what won’t be and who, and whether it be speed, wind, song, or my mind’s roar that drowns for once time’s slangy whine, here comes hope to climb clear of before; stillborn hope with desperate, Moro-reflex, undead grip climbs right back up my neck, raising each pointless, residual nape hair in ancestral salute to an absence, to the air that won’t question itself, won’t ever check the moral rearview. I accelerate gamely, wondering what makes me want to leave each person, place and thing I learn to love. What shoves me off again, racing insanely, as if to the place that will always save a place for me, a room that will contain the kind of people who’d embrace the things I’m still afraid I’m still afraid to face.

From the point of view of all time, these recent changes signal more a return to nature than a departure, than degradation. In the beginning, after all, there was boiling rock. Then waters arranging their bodies around an era of softer forms: lichen, grassland, swaying treetops. Then creatures, movingly fleshed, treading pathways that hardened. Then pavement hardening and cities, monumental. Soon mostly rock again, and radiant. More and more like moon. Soon, sooner than is being thought, there will be even more light. The creatures will have stopped being able to move or be moved. And the rock will boil.