The feeling. Let’s say i had a hot cauldron and some sense of how to reproduce it with a few very specific images, memories, and shapes that might somehow be condensed into tangible ingredients in a form possible to sprinkle. These things would be added with equal measure: an old pair of snakeskin shoes–tips and heels worn bare; Scott Walker’s cover of “Lady Came from Baltimore”; an emerald green room with long shadows, wood floors, and a tiny bed; soft cats on laps; cold hands on hot foreheads; marshy ponds at the end of docks lined with the skinny old knees of cyprus roots; the time you were sat alone reading at the table in the piano room and the redheaded girl next door was playing the Rachel’s and those eerie sounds blowing from across the way into our rooms whipped around the chilly early evening so strangely that, wired by the sound, you wandered through the yard and knocked on her door just to find out what was playing; long drives lit by a shoebox spilling over with cassette tapes; “2HB”; rooms and halls and stores and aisles of old things to be sorted through, slowly; and the way it feels to know and need a body more than food or sleep or sense. If i could dry these sensations out in the sun and grind them into dangerously potent powders, i would siphon them into tiny dark glass jars and, like the distraction of clipping stems and fixing handfuls of flowers carefully into a single bouquet, that movement: sorting, grinding, filling–just might bide the time, but i doubt it.
Early Sunday morning we unloaded buckets of flowers into the freight elevator of a quiet old warehouse in Long Island City. Alone with the flowers and one of the men who’d helped us bring them in, he told me in Spanish how to drive the elevator, and, like a mechanical music box, up we cranked slowly to the cavernous third floor. As you might imagine, the air was full of dust and there was a porcelain claw foot tub in the bathroom and then there were rooms upon ramshackle rooms. One was full of nothing but upturned velvety old chairs, another had mirrors and tables pressed in rows against each other. i thought about Waldo. People use the space for weddings and films and, in our case, floral design classes. Just the day before, we had spread out the Buckminster Fuller poster for Jonas and explained how the Dymaxion map made it possible to render the globe accurately, with all of the continents at their proper size, and i took this as a model as i shaped and molded the chicken wire over the floral frog in the bottom of the vase making not-quite-a-circle, preparing it for the gooey, thick hyacinth and tulip stems stems and the thin dry spirea and the fat, firm roses. All the time i am finding better distractions, but there is always the feeling. Like how i imagine that, impossibly, it was you i was talking to while i sat perched on the edge of a black rubber swing at dusk in the playground, twisting my toes around the deep circle i’d drawn in the lavender October dirt wanting with all my bones to be able to stay outside past dark. i close my eyes and the blank glows all amethyst with the pull of you that, like every night before and since, keeps me out.