DAY 6

  

I knew her as a man can know a woman: too much and not enough, then not now, there not here. She would come at noon when I huddled beneath an endless writhing sky. Her silence was infectious. And shadows dropped from her lips like echoes of laughter.      "Tell me," she would say, "tell me my name."      I would step through her eyes, closing each door behind me, one then another and another after that.      But the space was empty, time smothered.      I drank in her distraction nonetheless; I drank with the thirst of an anchorite; I drank not to appease my need for water but to sanctify her failure to give it.      And when I finished and lay back, exhausted and delirious, she would have vanished, the doors open once more, her scent lingering and floating away!

Take the first, or the second, or the third, take any route you wish to take. Then mark on the map the turn, the landmark, the moment. Set down the distinct impression of the only choice that matters and means nothing in the end. Argue the accent anyway, the precise intonation, the measure of the mouth, the quick disdain to the glance, the chin daubed in shadow, the slope to the nose. Then liquefy the memory, static the image, and trace out where the cheeks swell above their thin bird-bones the locus of the encounter.      And all the while, don't forget to sing the happiness you lost, the pleasures you abused, the mementos you took.      Perhaps you will remember what brought you here? Perhaps deceit will finally embrace you? And you will open your heart without knowing why, with whom, when or how.   And you will open your heart without knowing why, with whom, when or how.