One.This is the beginning of disbelief.

Start with a medium shot, curb and street
in the foreground as the camera tracks
left at a jog, 4 seconds.

I'll look and see exodus: the snow in the gutter, this collusion of footprints,
a fade-in from black with the opening shot
and its return with the first cut:

[Pause]

Into a sharp bristle of winter crawls the moment:
you walk away:
I carry your departure with me.

Then perhaps a long shot, 3 seconds, straight down the street:

The crux of a knee breaks. A finger taps the dusk in.
Voice, outline, and form undone,
 you are nothing:

Evergreens in a whiteout.
Evaporation as striations of brushed aluminum
hung before the advancing cerulean of night,
the earthbound, shelfdust moon volleying light over the desublimate
and the tired waning of your half-gone form
in the snow
of the long-gone street.


Grey is a word for nothing(bone) (a sponge, thinning).
Grey is a signal   (exhaust, caught in rising)
of loss, a confirmation
(in the desublimate)
of transience.

Grey is a word for being amongst things. A word for
the longing for more.

And here in the interval the mind fills the lapse between then and now,
tightening the outlines, occupying the space,
reciprocating with color and fiction, a slow layering-on of story. When
distance bleaches
the weight from a body,
the mind, reverting, fills that distance
with weight.

 
 
 
 
 

And.This is the fulfillment of doubt.

Catching itself, the mind(tightening)
tunnels back center (slips curbside, again),
emerges from behind a curtain, time
draws on a pulley, the moment recedes, and
we find ourselves displaced.

To begin again, I watched you leave,

and the idea of it not itself, but the presence of it carried forward,

I act as second courier:

light and the image cast from light
as form imprinted in the memory:

without me, nothing.

Each moment a space condensed 
in a sequence of shutters closing: vacate
say a name like a curse: eviscerate
even then the present mind grasps backward
for want of something known.


Grey is a word for love(with your image, mine),
for something worth sticking to.

A word for a mind not divorced from its body.
A word for what happens when it continues, without.

And so the memory of you, walking down that long
and pinkish street, receding to a point,
collapsed.

I put on my gloves.

All the while, time as movement, as a reduction
in definition.
Each dissonance
and contrast
slouching toward a drone,
each color into the next.

My gloves, my hands,
my gloves I put them on:

for work, my hands, the past the past.

 
 
 
 
 

Two.This is the failure of the past.

I looked at a painting and saw color—
curve, form, dystrophy, and segment.

Nowhere did a line hold true.

I thought of the painter,
her long arms conveying the shape
of an instance,
and there, the story appeared.

I left and it curdled in a memory, 
raised mirrors
at angles
within me.
It formed an unknown seed in my mind
and began to crawl back toward itself.

Here (now) is my collection of me,
there, this set of impressions before me:
edge of doorway, break in pane.

What I extend when I say there
shows itself to be here, now:

The cat walks away, walks
away,
a note on the stereo resolves.
The contents of my desk drawers,
the collection of the television,
the Blu-ray,
the blunt edge of couch against the
sharp lines of floorboard—


I step forward                                     (present, my collection of images),
boot planted squarely on the ground.

An escape of presence(the impression of my body),
a redistribution   (in the field
    it occupies).

The wall behind me    (The painter's long waiting)
as I advance          (for a form / brought forth),
conveying only the memory of time
(in my failure 
to resurrect),
the long, pre-dawn     (its colors),
stroke of it.

 
 
 
 
 

And.This is the loss of the present.

Growth in time, distance and entropy: that old photograph,
there on my desk in the sun.
In the corner of my sock drawer, the
shorts whose seams
foretold where they'd
tear.

And here, time, complete despite moments,
and the mind (emptying, turning), and
     still you are leaving, still the long street holding
    what cannot happen
and still cease
to happen:

that which I cling to.

So grey is a word for repeat:
the whir of time,
the loss of color and line,
the presence of things blurred,
their contexts receding,
brought forth, overlapped, and
receding again.

Grey is a word for the color
of a scene
before it goes full-on to black.

You walk down that street;

I take my images,
stand them in.

Here are the objects that signal
migration:
the street,
the light,
the legs I fold in my chair;

the objects that mean I do work:
the snow,
my gloves
(the impression of light on the retina,
the landscape out from under
my boots):

Here, this new moment.  Here, this story I bring.