From This Height

Cold wind comes out of the white hills and rubs itself against the walls of the condominium with an esophogeal vowel sound, and a loneliness creeps into the conversation by the hot tub. We don’t deserve pleasure just as we don’t deserve pain, but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist keep rising from the surface of the water to wrap themselves around a sculpted clavicle or wrist. It’s not just that we are on the eighth story of the world looking out through glass and steel with a clarity of vision in which imported coffee and a knowledge of French painting are combined, but that we are atop a pyramid of all the facts that make this possible: the furnace that heats the water, the truck that hauled the fuel, the artery of highway blasted through the mountains, the heart attack of the previous owner, the history of Western medicine that failed to save him, the successful development of tourism, the snow white lotions that counteract the chemistry of chlorine upon skin—our skin. Down inside history’s body, the slaves are still singing in the dark; the roads continue to be built; the wind blows and the building grips itself in anticipation of the next strong gust. So an enormous act of forgetting is required simply to kiss someone or to open your mouth for the fork of high-calorie paté someone is raising to your lips, which, considering the price, it would be a sin not to enjoy.