griddlecakes

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered
laughter? only the dissolution of the
mission, only the one chance to run
from the final dismembering of who
we were originally. Smells like buttered
toast here today. I yearn for sausages
bursting with fat, surrounded by the
pickled cabbage, a strange bread
the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly the way I hid this entire time
with smoke and bourbon and too
much vodka, too many years. Nothing
remains of that once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the redhaired
woman below the tree and me still
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?

This piece, as turgid and obtuse as it is, is still one of my favorite poems. And it does talk about a sort of romanticised longterm vision of being. There is a concept at work here that certain people in my life have been in it before, over long periods of time. An old idea, but one that seems truer and truer to me as I go on, sorting out the universe and discarding most of Phil Dick's ideas for my own. Certainly the "woman's graceless destruction" is meant to refer to Alison Gaughan's destruction of me, romantically. The cartographer reference also means me, by way of the Keye Luke on Mars poems written twenty years before. The child that was meant to be the gate means the child I thought I was meant to have with Alison Gaughan. She did eventually have a child, quite late in her life (43).