Archaeology

This was our archaeology: no such thing as a border, as keep outs and not in my backyards, as I don’t know you and don’t want to know. You could be loved and hated so rashly that it seeped to your core. I hate you, you’d yell with every artery bulging and nerve tingling, then trounce the concrete’s faults for a few minutes more, only to return home again because you were loved, because you were loved. It was where nothing can stay except the exhaust and grime cutting through winter wind, and stop signs tagged and dealers in the back alley pushing and sirens leering over the sinks and sidewalks did. As he had done--eliding time, as shapeshifting as the neighborhood angling its features beneath the seasonal muck and sludge and slope.

At our lookout over the lakefront, I always tried to feed the fish we anticipated underwater and the gulls that never rested there for long. We thought we would be able to let them go, to release underneath full moons and harvest moons and the skies’ bowstrings, your eyes glowing like the streetlights. When people stood to say felt there was just something in the air he had been breaking down wood by the alley after getting the pushers drunk so they would leave the corner and try again another day. Dust-air thickens to brick when it comes from junk lumber kicked up from pavements and scraped of paint, the scrap people burn and hurl in fireplaces when the heat gets turned off or shut off and that’s all there was to it, that and some shots to keep warm when wind off the water ravaged the roofs and you could hear clapboard screaming. I always dreamed that some day the two of us would visit distant destinations and find ourselves as part of street traffic in faraway continents, in foreign landscapes that were ours. I invented stories of future secret identities, of shorelines, shadows along routes of places I had never been. New constructions.

I always knew seeming was not saying; it was an invented something that you would keep unused. Like the measuring tape that I constantly saw in his hands, its little ticks matching the creases of his skin where it was disintegrating near vein. He kept the gauge mere feet away from him, perhaps from fearing he would soon be losing track—but it never had far to go. Sometimes I stepped into the bedroom or the backyard to find him scrambling things over themselves and then returning them to their original position, mumbling that if things weren’t right you had just better shut up about them until they are. And since they never were, you pretty much better just shut up. Never say what you mean, as he one day, sanding in the backyard, skimmed his finger with the sander and swore, Your mother, your mother! crying out that she had done something to move the power cord on the ground. I had imagined her specter keeping nascent hands busied, applying antibiotic and gauze and bandage while murmuring I’m sorry, I am so sorry, pursing lips as her eyes welled glass walls until she vaporized. I had imagined it then when I watched him rest his head against the gates and convulse like an inhalation. I had imagined it again when I watched him crumple to the sidewalk of the back alley, loving more than anyone can love a thing that’s made up of invisibles.

This is our archaeology of excavations: of our unvisited locations, the words of ours that refuse to say what they mean. They camouflage our breathing while channeling the marrow of years, events, and moments sight-read. I tremble at the marking hand you will extend to me to chart this course, when I no longer became able to place your landscape after the city abandoned its shelter. Where you stay now, imagine this, and be able to see me.

Walking upon the expanse from an unrecognizable harbor, I dive off the docks, land on my feet, and wander eastward. The skyline dissolves into frost behind me as my steps grow longer and further apart, and the snowfall exhumes the heaviness beside my hands as it unfurls into the horizon. Here are the fish underneath puddles. Here are the gulls flying overhead. Here are the clouds that will cover us. And here, here are the concrete fences and concrete gates and concrete stones etched with single years, events, moments; here is the winter wind intercalating our vista as I step onto the rows beneath the ice.