A China Cup

So much of living is done so completely alone. In dreams I speak to birds who fly in great numbers with the changing season, the geese that follow the eternal spring from pole to pole. Even they’re flight, so unified and solemn in form, begrudges the fowl the ethereal peace its countenance suggests. We strive together, but not together. Airborne, silent, our eagle eyes arrest the rivers below at independent intervals, notice the light as it falls just so, on that flower bed there, that farmhouse, that barren patch of rock. Our breath is caught singularly, but in chests that refuse to collapse, and the love we bear, the fears we relish, look homeward and pine for true minds that ever refuse marriage.

Here is a moment alone: when love’s promise took to the heavens. I can hardly remember it now; vaguely glazed, untethered, the sky one flapping sail of blue, the earth a well-used bed-sheet, damp and lightly sticking to my back and the cold creeping persistantly in.  I cannot now remember, though one hates to think that the heart might lose such a power, that I could honestly forget the feeling that the knife of your eyes ever had the power to tear, to make bleed, to puncture. Perhaps we cannot truly be wounded more than once; perhaps such instincts stand counter to our nature. 

It is not death that calls, that courts the nerves, but perhaps only to be in myself contented, as the finest porcelain or rarest china might be contented, sated in stillness and forgetful of its own fragility. Is a china cup dead? Is a china cup alive? Can a man quite understand the staying power which such thoughts possess; that I might not put a bullet through my brain because it is not death I want. Death will not let me be as a teacup, speckled with silent color and laughing accidentally in the afternoon light. 

My mother has told me the story of her father’s death in pieces. She is temperate in her intemperance, and lets the tears come in broken batches, like the waves which come and cease and come again. And I, impatient as patrons ever are, hungrily devour each corner bound ghost, each fallen promise, each last breath, triumph and trivium. Her reticence to voice such miracles, to shape in the air the unendurable which daily she endures, and her need at times to speak what cannot be spoken anyway, all this seems right to me. And yet, it is strange: we must say what we cannot, we must hold to what will not stay; we must, and we do because we must, and yet we cannot. 

But all this majesty is far from the afternoon convulsions of my spirit. I long to be a china cup. To swoon in glassy oblivion, to be cherished and to fail to notice.