Upstate the summer smells like Floridian winter. There are the rush of breeze through full leaves, does along the bend in the road, lawnmowers, but no din of birds or crickets. No fireflies. No grey waves of heat thinning the road at its horizon.
II
I dreamt that when I awoke I couldn't find her. In the dream, I stumbled through her house to find her sleeping on some couch. We shared a cigarette with the living statue in the living room, and the trains in the front yard rattled the window casings.
Really, there were no cigarettes or living statues, and the trains are but a distant rumble. Really, when I awoke I heard the shower running and saw light under the bathroom door. Really, upstate summers are colder than Floridian winters, and I burrowed under the covers until the shower had stopped squealing.
III
I squinted til the sailboats on Lake Ontario turned into tractors mowing wheatfields. She kept fingering the ignition and pressed the plastic Madonna back against the vent. She sat erect every time violet headlights slowed, all trembling and pained. She's superstitious, she says. I think she just likes pushing her luck.
IV
Look� we were told it was another time. Look� we were told what to do. Wait for the gulls to settle for the night.
V
I missed his mouth when I tried to sleep at night. I missed his hands when I pursed my own lips. When the sky opened up outside of Cornwall and we ran to the car clutching painkillers and pasta, I thought of his hands on my legs and my hands on the steering wheel, the stationwagon pressed between semis and torrents on I-40 through the Smokies. But she drove me home through Ontario, and I kept singing after the songs had ended. I told her of Asheville and chilly midnights outside Vincent's Ear. I told her I want to take her to the South. I guess I feel like I have something to prove.
VI
In Montr�al, she slept with a camera on her stomach while I took a bath in a blue and brown bathroom. We awoke three hours too late, surrounded by our own out-of-focus Polaroids and hungover. I vomited all over that goddamn town, pockets picked clean by American strangers, and linked my arm through hers to keep us both upright. I still don't remember what day Vendredi is, but it must've been then because by noon the car was gone.
VII
And what about living? What about it?
VIII
There is something about the way other people live, those I love but whose pasts I can never really know... And there I was sharing salt shakers with a flat-voiced boy who painted like Rauschenburg, cream pitchers with an apologetic girl as sincere as her baby, a filthy mahogany bar with some stranger who didn't speak our language.
I could never know her past, and I could never know all of her, but I want to try.
She'll tell me of life while she changes lanes. She'll tell me of God while she opens the garage.
IX
There's a baby in the next room, but I just watch her with her face in her palm. I count the windows, then the blinds. Twenty-two times six: one hundred seventy two. What was it again? His robin's egg wall, his lace curtains. Their remnants in strangers' living rooms. All that silence. All those photos of silos snapped while backing into cul-de-sacs, leaning out the window. All those nights of driving past the diner and lingering over the windowboxed faces of those I should once have known. There was some night when I couldn't really see the road for your face against the windshield. Here I am remembering it, and I don't even remember who you are.
X
Four am on the old model Greyhound. I'm through writing my letters. These women have weak grey ankles. I write by the glints of their bifocals and the thin orange glow of New York City four hundred miles south.
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