Crosscountry
The snow appears to be stacking up pretty good on her eyebrows and nose
as well, as on mine as we stand here; from where I am I can perceive a
kind of whiteness in those areas, and it's gathering too on her
sideburns, the way it does in imagined pictures of Elvis in Siberia,
and is about to avalanche from the peak of her snow hat, an attractive
blue that isn’t all that attractive anymore, given the moment’s
bleakness, the similarity of hat to eyes, the disgruntlement of our
hearts.
Mine, anyway. Hers seems to be more battlement than disgruntlement.
Because where the hell else can disgruntlement be, no matter who’s
writing the journal entry; hearts, because that’s where I at least am
feeling this feeling in a once red and vibrant thing that used to
beat as one with another of its kind, but now shlubs along as though it
has gone months without a bath or shave or decent cup of coffee; and
now gray, for the color of mixed emotions.
Which mine are, no doubt about it. All the more so given the fact that
only the night before we'd been holding each other like there was no
heater. I know, I know, my metaphors, but love can be so dry a well…
The tone here is overall erratic anyway, as the attentive reader will
have noted by now, who has time for metaphoric precision when the
circus tent of a relationship is collapsing all around you and the
elephants of passion are going up in flames, if there are any readers,
let alone attentive ones other than those I imagine, and fuck the rest.
I know you all have better things to do than read about frozen,
ill-fated relationships fading to a close in the doughy silence of a
circus-blizzard on a crosscountry ski trail in the woods, I’d like to
see you do better, I’m writing this live with a bit of frostbite,
fingers hurt like hell, no editing except for spelling and the ink runs
from the snowflakes, yet I want to capture the impromptu heartbreak of this
crystallizing moment, or at least the bladder aspects as we stand here
on our skis, trying to gaze the last of the present into each other’s
eyes beside the fading trail with the snow piling up around us and what
else but a frozen zipper on my ski pants.
Before dusk we’d looked at each other in pretty much the same silence
for a quite a while further back on the trail, when she’d started to
say something, but by then the snow appeared to be drifting up around
her lips, this typically frigid negligence on her part depriving me of
a chance to use the rejoinder I’d been saving since the end of my last
relationship, which oddly enough also ended in the snow, though not in
a record-setting blizzard like this, with ice forming.
I’m not going to leak the rejoinder, so forget it. I may get a chance
to use it yet, if I can manage to fall in love again and not freeze to
death first, if I don’t this time. I forgot to bring a rescue blanket.
