God Only Knows

And you, what do you seek?

—Rene Daumal

The love of books

is for children

who glimpse in them

a life to come, but

I have come

to that life and

feel uneasy

with the love of books.

This is my life,

time islanded

in poems of dwindled time.

There is no other world.

—Robert Haas, from “Songs to Survive the Summer”

She waits for something to change, for her planet to snap back into place.

The seasons roll over, cart-wheeling into earlier and earlier darkness, taking the way it was further into the way it is.

What is the way it is? What happened to her heart? How were these invisible wounds acquired?

The touch, once so familiar, is now harder and harder to remember. Old routines become untangled, the strands of that entanglement scattered.

The trees shed their leaves. The moon waxes and wanes. The stars recede, yet blaze all the more brightly, as if trying to keep the cold at bay.

Something rustles in the walls. The creek where they walked together all those years ago will soon be paralyzed by ice. The din of a wedding party fades in the distance and the night settles once again to silence, a silence that will eventually –mercifully, soon– be drowned out by the idling of the furnace.

Another jet clears the city, and is gone.

She gets up in the morning and dresses so carefully, spends a long time in front of the mirror, turning, scrutinizing, critical. Probably nothing she would do would matter; no one would do anything but look right through her. She hoped each day to be simply noticed, to feel herself observed, seen, alive to another.

It was increasingly embarrassing to be still looking, to find herself loitering so long in the self-help and relationships section of the bookstore. More painful still that she actually bought the stuff. What did it say that she’d go to such trouble to hide these books in her apartment as if they were pornography, fully aware that there was no one she was hiding them from?

She’d had exactly one date in the last year, and the memory of that awkward, almost completely silent evening left her anxious and queasy. What should she have said that she hadn’t? What might she have done differently? What –or who– did the man see when he looked at her across the table?

She had already spent too much time rolling that night around in her head. The truth was that there hadn’t been enough there for her to have learned anything at all.