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INTRODUCTION
"A short story is narrower than a room in a cheap hotel; it is narrower than the wombs through which we descended. It does violence to any large dead man to force him within it, to fit him (even his body) into the casket of a few paragraphs, he must be twisted and contorted; his stiff arms, his extended legs must be hacked or broken. A rigor mortis operates within the memory; his image stiffens and resists in every inch. One must n(m)ame him to fit him in."
Jack Spicer, The Scrollwork on the Casket
It's never enough, Jack; love, I mean. There's never enough of it. It serves, as buttress, against some bigger physical action. When we move together, whether walking or loving, our bodies are there, with us, and it is never enough.
A lot of people are standing around, waiting for a bus (a buss) or a streetcar or a parade of demons. Waiting; and they move. They pace or they shuffle or they rock to and fro. All those strangers there waiting, moving; we never move with them.
You'll see it up ahead as we go by, Jack: a big billboard that explains how nice and expensive it is to fly to Miami, stay there ten days, and then return home. A picture of the beach is up there, in four colours; but no return. It's not enough to paint a picture of that beach, or we are ghosts who look at it believing somehow we will be there, on it, tanning our shrouds in the picture, chipping at the edges. It is on those billboards a real little piece of Miami. Her orange groves; a little peace. It isn't physical. The lies we continuously tell one another.
When I'm with you, as now we ride together in this box, we can't ignore the heart, knocking. You. Me. Riding along looking. I often hear you remark how wonderful that we can be together and I believe it when we are. The feel of you is more than faith. When you weren't there, before, I found myself not wanting you. Part of the lonely moving waiting was. The strangers were there, always, inside their own moving waiting and I could regard them howsoever I wanted and they me; though I confess to a superfluous grace.
If I have this much of you here in this box with me, why can't it always be so. Why must the lid open and then close in on us? When you are not here with me a new hand crawls into mine and when I squeeze, as tenderly I would squeeze your hand, it is not there. Memory. The sensation is not there.
The movement of my hand and your hand into and out of and through our imaginary bodies is not so much articulation of terms as conjunction of those imaginaries. Hands would move as easily elsewhere. These same hands that I touch you with now. The same pain.
So I'm talking and it is not enough; this touch of ghost against ghost; not enough of fulfillment to do away with what I know to be empty in our world. That I would deign to call it ours. The face of your ultimate parking lot.
I can't stop; or am in the process, always, of stopping; as if there were some stance (the stanza) to go and then stop because I know that when I get there (Miami?) my direction will change, fast. Slow. Like rain into hail. As immediate. As much direction as that rainbow.
Returning to the house, your warmth, we found the electricity had malfunctioned, so we got out some candles and they burned dimly silent where we lit them. The oil heater happily chugged, keeping us warm. Inside each other. Moonlight came through the window and lay on the floor like a big rabbit and I could see the debris lying about just where you had left it. Papers everywhere. Your innocence, strayed; some nails, a hammer; the thunder from a storm.
But there are no windows here, the hammer and nails have done their own work and no light comes through to the present. We can't talk to one another any more. The silence in this box is a light verse, a dry space, two thousand years. We can't confront that with which we are conjunct. It seems useless to try at this point. You're staying here in the casket and I have to leave soon for a warmer clime three thousand miles away.
We` are those machines which in certain or uncertain weather naturally cease. Sing. We have the same sounds for one another, the same silences. If you try to talk now I'll find myself explaining away your death, convincing myself of my own. A process I am not quick to discover. Leaving you now, or loving you when, in the same breath. Unable to phrase the graces in my despair.
But as I leave you suddenly blurt out some 'last' words, for me, for memory. Some thing about our progeny; that I should stay with you and look after their needs. But I was listening to a dead man: Jack. You. I can read the scrollwork on the casket. I'm not really leaving; but no explanation would tear those facts from your eyes.
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