Somehow, the importance of what was taking place became caught in the flaking shards of its surroundings.
I found you in a minefield.
A mind field.
A mined field.
You told me your name, and I cannot remember it at all.
The telling, not the name: that I remember. But I stubbornly refuse to repeat. Your name. Like the ocean, it must have always been sounding. It was only now that I noticed. So it feels like that is how I know you - just as I know the ocean. There was a time that I met you, though I do not remember it. I was raised at the mouth of the bay.
I would do better to know you if I did not know it - your name. You would become a place again, I would walk in and out of you, the way memory works. I would hesitate before drawing vowels and consonants with each look to your face; you could be new each time we came together, infinite each time we come apart. There are no syllables to this sound, there are no letters. I want to listen. I want to use it to make music.
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in air. It moves.
I cannot find the shape of your name between leaves of grass, no matter how many lines I pull from that field. I cannot connect your name in the stars, there are not enough of them. I cannot find your name anywhere on your skin or in your hair, I cannot tell your name from your smell, sweet, which I have come to know.
And if I shook your hand when we met, I should have taken it and walked, made you follow, given you a place to meet me again, and left. That is what we can call ourselves: we are here.
this week i heard our eyes rhyme
and it sounded sweet, but you used a word
i didn't understand. my thumbs tapping
on your neck, i didn't ask the meaning.
i'll be sounding the vowels for days.
