This is called "Waking in the Dark."
I was walking around the American
Museum of Natural History in New York
once, with the husband of a friend of mine,
and he told me that the shape of the cobblestones that we were
walking over was the shape of the, sort of,
fundamental molecule of living organism.
"The thing that arrests me is how
we are composed of molecules--
he showed me the figure and the paving stones--
arranged without our knowledge and consent,
like the wirephoto composed of millions of dots,
in which the man from Bangladesh walks
starving on the front page, knowing nothing about it,
which is his presence for the world.
We were standing in line outside of something,
two by two, or alone in pairs, or simply alone,
looking into windows full of scissors,
windows full of shoes.
The street was closing, the city was closing,
would we be the lucky ones to make it?
They were showing in a glass case,
the Man Without A Country.
We held up our passports in his face, we wept for him.
They are dumping animal blood into the sea
to bring up the sharks.
Sometimes every aperture of my body leaks blood.
I don't know whether to pretend that this is natural.
Is there a law about this, a law of nature?
You worship the blood.
You call it hysterical bleeding.
You want to drink it like milk.
You dip your finger into it and write.
You faint the smell of it.
You dream of dumping me into the sea.
The tragedy of sex lies around us,
a woodlot the axes are sharpened for.
The old shelters and huts stare through the clearing
with a certain resolution--
the hermits cabin, the hunters shack--
scenes of masturbation and dirty jokes.
A man's world.
But finished.
They themselves have sold it to the machines.
I walk the unconscious forest, a woman
dressed in old army fatigues that have shrunk to fit her.
I am lost at moments.
I feel dazed by the sun pawing between the trees,
cold in the bog and lichen of the thicket.
Nothing will save this.
I am alone, kicking the last rotting logs
with their strange smell of life, not death,
wondering what on earth it all might have become.
Clarity, spray, blinding and purging.
Spears of sun striking the water.
The bodies riding the air like gliders.
The bodies in slow motion, falling into the pool
at the Berlin Olympics.
Control, loss of control.
The bodies rising, arching back to the tower,
time reeling backward.
Clarity of open air, before the dark chambers with the shower
heads.
The bodies falling again, freely, faster than light.
The water opening like air, like realization.
A woman made this film against the law of gravity.
All night dreaming of a body space
weighs on differently from mine.
We are making love in the street.
The traffic flows off from us, pouring back like a sheet.
The asphalt stirs with tenderness.
There is no dismay.
We move together like underwater plants.
Over and over, starting to wake, I dive back to discover you,
still whispering, touch me.
We go on streaming through the slow citylight forest ocean,
stirring our body hair.
But this is the saying of a dream on waking.
I wish there was somewhere actual we could stand,
handing the power-glasses back and forth,
looking at the earth, the wildwood where
the split began."