Jean Valentine

A woman ladder leans with her two-year-old boy in her arms. Her arms & legs & hands & feet are thin as crayons. The man ladder is holding his glass of bourbon, he is coming out of the child’s drawing in his old open pajamas— he’s in the war. The sky is blackest crayon-canyon. When does he leave again? When he leaves, I leave.          I like that river the sky.

Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass, everything goes somewhere—and everything we do—nothing ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs. Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings, our solitudes. Our eyes. A bee careens at the window here; flies out, released: a life without harm, without shame. That woman, my friend, circling against her life, a married life; that man, my friend, solitary, anarchic, driving away from home; them driving, to each other— I know, the hard, half-lost, knowing will; the cold first loneliness again, outside the commonweal, unmoving; But to say, I know —is there any touch in it? The words in my dream: “actuarial file.” Actuary, 1. A registrar or notary, who keeps records of the acts of a court ...