the woman who dies. the man she loves, the smell of his hair, his
face asleep, his body warm with fur, his hands, his voice, his eye.
i'm crying.
the woman dies at the sill of doing. untouch, the abstract, plastic
and metal, circuits and cables. machines are sculptures that express a
concept of mind that is painful.
the way it happens. many days i don't remember you. yesterday something
stood up in the centre of my heart: yes, that's what i am. it snapped into
place. it was like seeing i'd been in despair and not known it, taken it
as normal.
i have days with my work saying it's lucky i lost him, if he were
here i wouldn't have these mornings working in my bed. that is true. i
love the working balance of my brain. so interesting a companion.
there is an agony near that. this cut, that i love my own company
better than his, and yet his company, even imagined, brings me to a self
more real than the exquisite self i've made for me to love. do i give up
the self of my body? maybe that, because what came with him, with you,
was the self of a body, the self of the life of a body. landscapes made
of the light in the dark of sensation in a body.
there is the boatman's crossing in a fiery mist. there's a marsh.
there is the descent of a god. there are flowers of color, springing ghosts,
there is my starling iridescent black.
there is more than one otherworld. one is the underworld inside the
world, inside me. one is the otherworld away, an away world, the world
away from natural love and pleasure. it is the mind made visible in this
machine.