Menagarie of Hands

It is in moving underground, looking above at the glass pyramid that was only built in my youthful visit to this city, that I can be transported to another time. No, it is not with the wings of the headless angel that moves me so, but with the swift step through vine-like exhibits, a world of art, of aching, a world so akin the Central Park palace of sculpture gardens and green roofs that grew me. So overflowing with spirits are the walls, that I am taken aback by a million photographers looking to remember themselves in so sacred of place. I am taken aback by their pristine postures beside fallen angels, the broken, battered faces of Divinci's wives.

It is an overwhelming space, so full with bent bodies, so styled by sharper times. It is a world of corpses, of lurid, limp, luscious limbs come undone. It is a world of serpeants embraced by their architects and the very faces of our gods. For me in this winding world of halls, no mirrors but others' eyes to look upon, there is a menagerie of hands. Even on the winged creatures that crawl under my skin, those hands hold tight to each other, all that is left at the end of each era. In piles, in grappling for a painted story, or for a woman left alone by time.

No wonder I am exhausted by the thought of sterility, of clean places that hold such troubled pasts. Before, it was always whales, that giant under which I saw stuffed, encased time, silken hides of sand stood next to those yellowed eyes, so like the wolves I had watched for from my windowpane. There the love I had anticipated, anguished, abandoned. There the felt of fountains that told untrue futures, fetted with some kind of peace.

And now it is the fingers I see that I want to bring back to life, to re-blush with breathe and murmured beating. To caress back into being, slide along my wrists, human strings of music, both silenced and now seen as mute. I can finally understand the longing to go back, , to unsettle the mourned, to link their fingers, their stories somehow into our own. To make men, as we do mistakes, at once ours and everlasting.

Russian Dolls

It is bad enough to breed promises to those we love, who fall to their knees in city bus stations, beg us not to follow fanciful, flighty paths. Those who love us more deeply than we anticipate, or can replicate, and realize only when this draws blood from our hearts.

Breaking promises to ourselves, however, cuts somewhat deeper. I see it in my own actions, in the steps that carry me east, that blow back in my face the most unforgivable fact of all: all that I want, that warms the smallest, truest part of me, lies parallel to my past. It is not a replication, but only slightly altered, by circumstance, by time, a new regression to what I find innate or learned. Am I re-learning the smallest of steps, to walk again in a manner much more true to myself, to allow in, perhaps, in whole and unforgiving ways? To stop wagering on possibilities, stop turning my back to not a blank but dirtied blanket of honesty? These moments still breathe fiercely inside of me, wake me in a manner akin to the ache in my arm, burrow themselves, icy--engendering a splintered, spent warmth. They seem to me insurmountable, to want to come back to me no matter how I try to put them out, to write them out, to reach out to other aspects of myself. I am still stuck on understanding how I have lied so fiercely to myself, how I have wounded, how I have waded so deeply in hipocrasy.

My excuse has been sorrow, has replaced other excuses with a force un natural to my times. It is sorrow, or the emotive, however, that I have past played upon, embraced with my bitten tongue and bred into my fingers so that I could write. It is my only inhuman love, or unliving love. It is the only art that brings tears to my eyes, that breaks open the parts of me I need most. And it is in this crashing of waves, waves of longing, lust, unearthing a past of pasts. It is where I find stregnth, an unstrategic path to soft redemption.

I can write about forgiving, even when I cannot forgive; can write about a past of pigeons and love, even when I cannot look upon the photographs that brought me there; I can write about my father, create my own manifestations of his ghost. But still I seek to trump such possibility, afraid perhaps of a Russian doll effect, a wound, inside a wound, inside a wound. Or a need to live through stories, not truths, to build my life upon the canine teeth of fairytales, from the outset smeared with beauty, but so fast to fade away.