Tuesday Fell--A Prose Piece

April 17, 2002

My image of desert is cooling now, against the ice-cold fair of snow-capped mountains through the open window. I can hear our laughter trailing late and long through the sallow atrium in the hush of night, as voices and footsteps steal our hidden moments. I look from the windowpane and I see us there, children at play—long lost friends in flight, lovers that lie in wait. We hide from the world in our hallowed vestibule, in the dawn of the morning, in the wake of pretending. In the hour the world sleeps, we have no name, no face, and no identity. We are shadows in the corridor, we are long goodbyes and salt stained kisses. You held my head to you as I poured my tears into your shirt pocket. One by one they gathered there, collecting time. You shiver under the covering of wide open spaces, night falling all around you, your brilliant blue vanishing in the dark. I reach for you with closed eyes, ebony eyes wet with April rainfall. Heartbeat against heartbeat you are mine under the midnight dusk, under the silver glow of heaven’s stars. I feel life course scarlet through the frozen of your hands as ambiguity steals your warmth from me. Ashen stroke for ashen stroke I whisper your name into the unmoving heat of the spring wind. Stubbornly, you cling to winter.
Dormant against the flurry of storm tossed fears; beginnings are sown into silence, sown into auburn soil unearthed.
You dig deep.
Into the hollow of your heart I fall, endlessly descending into hidden corners of false affection, of artificial disquiet.
There I stay, kept distant, kept buried.
There I stay waiting, waiting for the gray moon to turn the tide, waiting for the nocturnal seasons to amend; waiting, for the sun to rise again over our frozen desert.