Carpentry (she smashes clocks)

Up, carried by a dream wiping clean the patina of chronological life to find myself where I had fallen asleep yet surprised at being in the midst of an existence having all the features of mine while foreign to me. The short-haired carpet underfoot; the smells bearing more of themselves from the coaxing heat that's recently arrived to remind of the grit and sex and tumult of life; the clock above the mantle like so many clocks above so many mantles, as if they were born to pair, the former an almost organic and symbiotic lover of the memories sitting upon the latter, tick-tock we lived and died; the humble rustling of a hamster cocooned in a little globe of shredded paper she'd lain there; her, adrift in her own ocean, lids like petals softly concealing wherever the dark or light played lambent in her eyes as the red plush chair already sold and nearly gone gave her solace a final time--all the same in a visual, sensual pattern of familiarity that somehow breeds caution, if not fear.

 Caution: this is not your life. How did you come here? Up and up not into clarity but amnesia or a return to an amniotic state of innocence compelled by our leaving here soon, compelled by wonder, a naked eye visiting a potential future unprotected by repetition, those physical motions we imagine locked into an invisible and unyielding choreography set by a rational and divine order. We relocate our lives soon, we enter a portal of creation, everything blank and black with only our mistakes and the blood they spill to paint whatever house we'll call home again.

The sorrow of imminent relocation cloys and crabs my heart moment to moment now, compounded by the same I sense in her. We leave together but also in a renewed and fierce isolation from each other as the uncertainty of an untested path forces us into ourselves to reexamine the fortresses inside, slap their walls to ensure their soundness, feel our armor, and by its purity also feel an intolerance towards those acts or duties still a part of this place we will abandon, an intolerance to the compromises made and dignity divested in making them to construct a house now proved vulnerable to the circumstances of others, wills not ours. The order we thought divine shows itself illusory and we weep like children watching death claim and disintegrate the bodies of their parents. We weep for what we do not know, as well.

From my selfexamination I emerge no more or less emboldened by the reserves of strength or weakness found than when born; and with the same impertinent joy do I hold in the realm where sky and earth kiss the hand of my partner, my best friend, the person in whose gaze I will always find my solace, my being, my dream, the only certainty, the house withstanding all winds.