night, knocked on our door,
and said: At such and such time,
in this or that place, your son
thus and thus.
They quickly wove
a dense web, hour
and minute and location,
but the web had a hole in it, you
see? The dense web
must have had a hole,
and our son
fell
through.
TOWN CHRONICLER: As she speaks these words, he stops circling her. She looks at him with dulled eyes. Lost, arms limp, he faces her, as if struck at that moment by an arrow shot long ago.
WOMAN:
Will I ever again
see you
as you are,
rather than as
he is not?
MAN:
I can remember
you without
his noneness—your innocent,
hopeful smile—and I can remember
myself without his noneness. But not
him. Strange: him
without his noneness, I can no longer
remember. And as time goes by
it starts to seem as though
even when he was,
there were signs
of his noneness.
WOMAN:
Sometimes, you know,
I miss
that ravaged,
bloody
she.
Sometimes I believe her
more than I believe
myself.
MAN:
She is the reason I take
my life
in your hands and ask
you a question
I myself
do not understand:
Will you go with me?
There—
to him?
WOMAN:
That night I thought:
Now we will separate. We cannot live
together any longer. When I tell you
yes,
you will embrace
the no, embrace
the empty space
of him.
MAN:
How will we cleave together?
I wondered that night.
How will we crave each other?
When I kiss you,
my tongue will be slashed
by the shards of his name
in your mouth—
WOMAN:
How will you look into my eyes
with him there,
an embryo
in the black
of my pupils?
Every look, every touch,
will pierce. How will we love,
I thought that night.
How will we love, when
in deep love
he was
conceived.
MAN:
The
moment
it happened—
WOMAN:
It happened? Look
at me, tell me:
Did it happen?
MAN:
And it billows up
abundantly,
an endless
wellspring. And I
know—as long as
I breathe,
I will draw
and drink and drip
that blackened
moment.
WOMAN:
Mourning condemns
the living
to the grimmest solitude,
much like the loneliness
in which disease
enclothes
the ailing.
MAN:
But in that loneliness,
where—like soul
departing body—
I am torn
from myself, there
I am no longer alone,
no longer alone,
ever since
.
And I am not
just one there,
and never will be
only one—
WOMAN:
There I touch his
inner self,
his gulf,
as I have
never touched
a person
in the world—
MAN:
And he,
he also touches
me from
there, and his touch—
no one has ever
touched me in that way.
(silence)
WOMAN:
If there were such a thing
as
there
,
and there isn’t,
you know—but if
there were,
they would have already gone
there.
One of everyone would have
got up and gone. And how
far will you go,
and how will you know
your way back,
and what if you don’t
come back, and even if
you find it—
and you won’t,
because it isn’t—
if you find it, you will not
come back,
they will not let you
back, and if you do
come back, how
will you be, you might
come back so different
that you won’t
come back,
and what about me,
how will I be if you don’t
come back, or if
you come back
so different that you don’t
come back?
TOWN CHRONICLER: She gets up and embraces him. Her hands scamper over his body. Her mouth probes his face, his eyes, his lips. From my post in the shadows, outside their window, it looks as if she is throwing herself over him like a blanket on a fire.
WOMAN:
That night I thought:
Now we will never
separate.
Even if we want to,
how can we?
Who will sustain him, who will
embrace
if our two bodies do not
envelop
his empty fullness?
MAN:
Come,
what could be simpler?
Without mulling or wondering
or thinking: his mother
and father
get up and go
to him.
WOMAN:
In whose eyes will we look to see him,
present and absent?
In whose hand
will we intertwine fingers
to weave him
fleetingly
in our flesh?
Don’t go.
MAN:
The eyes,
one single
spark
from his
Lynsay Sands
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