hauntings

I remember the precise look you gave and the way you put emphasis on which exact words. I could write it, like music, with accents and phrasing notations-- and do what with it? music for whom? why write it, what use even remembering? no use. use not the point. just something you sit with, that humbles you. because after the other person picks up and moves on-- the lover, friend, whatever-- after the connection is severed, the tendril hangs until it atrophies. lots of people feel a ghost limb all their lives. others train themselves to see the air that sits there and move through it, unobstructed. I keep thinking of photographic double-exposure, three-dimensional chess, avant-garde film, club sandwiches, british buses, ladies' bathrooms with mirrors set reflecting mirrors to infinity...

vanity talcum powder that itself seemed to pull through those mirrors from another decade-- so still, so expensively appointed, the very room persisting from another era, a nicer one, in the classic sense. and when I was in there, running the silver-handled hairbrush through baby-fine, staticky hair or dousing the air with sneezy powder, it was as if I too stood inside a different time-- an imaginary, tidy world where I could pretend for that moment to belong.