Jason Shinder

And that’s how it is; everyone standing up from the big silence of the table with their glasses of certainty and plates of forgiveness and walking into the purple kitchen; everyone leaning away from the gas stove Marie blows on at the very edge of the breaking blue-orange-lunging- forward flames to warm another pot of coffee, while the dishes pile up in the sink, perfect as a pyramid.Aaah, says Donna, closing her eyes, and leaning on Nick’s shoulders as he drives the soft blade of the knife through the glittering dark of the leftover chocolate birthday cake. That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool, drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking, shuffling back and forth on the deck of the present before the boat slowly pulls away into the future. Because it hurts to say goodbye, to pull your body out of the warm water; to step out of the pocket of safety, clinging to what you knew, or what you thought you knew about yourself and others. That’s how it is, that’s it, throwing your jacket over your shoulders like a towel and saying goodbye Victoria goodbye Sophie goodbye Lili goodbye sweetie take care be well hang in there see you soon.

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin. With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap, I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts. With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight, I will love another man because I will be a woman. Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen. I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.

Many of my friends are alone and know too much to be happy though they still want to dive to the bottom of the green ocean and bring back a gold coin in their hand. A woman I know wakes in the late evening and talks to her late husband, the windows blank photographs. On the porch, my brother, hands in pockets, stares at the flowing stream. What’s wrong? Nothing. The cows stand in their own slow afternoons. The horses gather wild rose hips in the sun the way I longed for someone long ago. What was it like? The door opening and no one on either side.

Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind. I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor are animals fighting each other out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.

Your death must be loved this much. You have to know the grief—now. Standing by the water’s edge, looking down at the wave touching you. You have to lie, stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth and see how far the darkness will take you. I mean it, this, now— before the ghost the cold leaves in your breath, rises; before the toes are put together inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn orange-going-into-rose descending circle of beauty and time. You have nothing to be sad about.

While lovers sleep, I dig my nails into the earth, holding up traffic. Just now a cloud has pulled up while I was talking to the Emptiness of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves at the bottom of the ocean. My heart is taped up like a child’s drawing of the moon over the broken window of the sky where the wind always comes back to fill my lungs. I will dance on my shadow. I will open my mouth with the air inside my mother’s coffin. I will be the arrow breaking apart in the body of the blackbird, which appears at my window, singing.