the lawless heart

Stealing words, reclaiming others, as if the word was the thing itself or that it could conjure it up. Years have passed by, or so he understood from her eyes. The more he spoke the less he became himself, less sure of what it all meant. He struggled to remember his first words to her, thinking that they might hold the key to some unsolved mystery, just as a cave painting is said to be the prototype of all art.

What was it, he thought to himself. She looked quite primitive herself, and that despite her fierce intellect, or maybe it was because of it. Her jaw slightly protruding, her eyes bright like an ancient fire, murder on her hands, the plain, shining brow...she had a face one could never forget, or settle for.

Of course she was arrogant to the hilt, her lips provincial, full, but slightly cruel, fashioned from years of self-protecting habits, adulation, and other-worldly disdain. There was no equal, and nothing suggested commensurability with anyone else. She took delight in acknowledging this, that each person mistakenly thought he was the centre of her world.

He tried to concentrate, become serious once again, but he couldn't hold his thoughts together. It was like his thoughts were circling in a whirlpool, picking all sorts of random objects, unable to relate one to another in any kind of system. And sometimes he failed to recognize himself in this courtly game, failed to see himself slipping away from the image he held of himself. His breathing betrayed him as he folded and unfolded his hands.

Distinctions! She had said something about distinctions. As if to say: 'you were you, and I was I, and don't you forget it'. Remembering would be a disastrous sign of giving in, so he drew up a list, like a keen child, or a fisherman who marvels when the nets are down and the counting must start...when did it begin, how will it end, this calculus of pain and pleasure?

But she only looked on in a detached manner, looked deeply and darkly into the dark rain, her lips sweetened, the measure of her mind something like the abstractness of the stars, brilliant and telling, her starred heart triumphant, her forehead radiant, her half-moon eyebrows raised in mock indignation, like someone who can afford an excess of emotion, and she whispered quietly and coldly to him,

the years radiating
toward the so-called first days,
toward the so-called last days,
inadequate boundaries
of the heart you hold to.