In the Shadow of the American Dream by David Wojnarowicz Page A

the end you know that it’s the gesture, that gesture towards loving that is the most important in the stream of life and consciousness and body and grace … So we’re rolling along talking about the countryside which is beginning to emerge between desolate factories and civilizscapes and suburbs and now it’s rolling hills of dead blond wheat and cows and sheep and moomoo animals and huge fuckin’ blackbirds which give a quick example of one section of words from our mouths: He says, Ah see that bird, I like them what are they called in English? Oh uh blackbird or uh magpie … Eh? Black baird? Oui oui mugpie?… Non, mag -pie, like mag in magazine and pie, you know, like grand tart, pie … Oh oui, oui, well, magpie, ah! Megpie. Ah oui oui … You know those birds have special meanings surrounding them, yeah, in English they are considered thieves, voleurs, they fly in your window and steal anything shiny—rings, coins … Oh oui? Oui. Ah yes, voleurs, yes, same in French … Ah yeah? Yeah, they are my favorite birds, like Edgar Allan Poe ravens … Yeah similar to ravens … Corneille also in French … corn-kneel? Oui oui … un blackbaird … yeah … un l’oiseaux noir. Ah hmm … ah … oui oui And by this time the bird of the discussion is ten or fifteen kilometers behind us and winging off in directions of the wind and we point out other discoveries in the landscape, cows take on added pleasurable meanings and little goats and baby oinkers and the trees of soft gold floating effortlessly in the foggy distance and soon the sun has broken through the mist and I say, Yeah, a symbol, two seconds later it gets dark again with fog … secretly embarrassed at this knock at my pleasurable symbol … silly notions circling my mind … He takes my hand at times and lifts it to his mouth and sucks on my forefinger and tongues it wet chills into the palm of my hand and I’m half delirious and every time we’re stuck behind a slow car on a long curved stretch, I mutter, Escargots … he giggles and says, Oui oui, and at times I reach over and caress his belly under his warm sweater and chills run through my spine and heart and my hands sweat at the palms and every so often he leans over and kisses me on the lips and I’m amazed as if it’s never happened before like this … and I drift in thoughts like great collages of senses and past images of the previous evening and projected scenes of later and I get hot in the forehead almost like fever and in the midst of all this at the end or near end of the three-hour drive I get struck by this sense like some great revealing section of his mind and body has suddenly merged within my bloodstream and I’m breathing a sense of him in such a way that we are just about indistinguishable, this is all in silence in the car with landscape drifting and what I suddenly feel is that he is mine and in some sense possessed within my coarsing blood in my pores, not a selfish owning sense but just a total merge within and at that exact moment in comes arrowlike a realization that he is an entirely separate person and living independent of me and my blood and that it’s a subtle unknown thing that has drawn us together that is by no means certain or everlasting and from that I feel a striking and sudden faintness, a fever in my throat and forehead and my hands tremble invisibly and I’m about to black out in this fever and wanna grab onto something for all the frightening bareness I feel like a solitary kid drifting through all this time and space and landscape searching for connection and a vast unexplainable feeling that has a tag called love … it’s all here in front of me and I have fears of it ending at some indeterminable point in some future and yet feel that this has taken place as it’s meant to be and whatever comes of it, continuance or ending at any time, it still