versions

I.
she finds a small apartment in st. louis for herself and her cat, gets a job at a bookstore and makes a few close friends, he changes the oil in her volvo and she calls her parents every week, at first it is so perfect, and then her cat gets nervous around him, it becomes the same old thing after a while, and she cant get him to snap out of it, he becomes impatient and irritable, sometimes he teases her cat, he leaves poems he wrote for her hiding in places where he knows she will find them, poems about this man who cannot break away from what he has become, about how all the answers to their problems are waiting in a cardboard box in a corner somewhere and how they cant stop looking for it, about how someday they will fly away together, about how to be patient, as if his words could change anything by themselves, as if all he needed to do to get something was to want it this badly.


II.
he leaves everything behind except his motorcycle and some clothes, finds a sculptor named luis in minneapolis to apprentice with, he starts making things again, he builds sculptures that try to express his sense of how fragile he is in the middle of everything, he is sometimes overwhelmed by the sense of continuity, by how his life has twisted around on itself and sometimes it almost chokes him it is so tight, he sees her almost every night, showing up at her door covered with rock dust and shards of metal, bathing in her clawfoot bathtub as she unwinds her day, they learn to dance the charleston and tango, staying out late friday nights when she doesnt work dancing and sweating into each others arms, she looks for grants for the two of them, and they stay up late writing out reasons why they should get money to go away together to foreign countries and write poems about the exquisite pain of the things they cause in each other that they sometimes call love, he buys a set of learn to speak italian cassette tapes and they stay up late repeating the words together to each other, good morning, how are you today, what are you thinking ?


III.
he writes her letters, joking about running away with her, just to see how she reacts, but she doesn't, her letters tremble on as usual, overflowing with images of fire escapes, and motorcycles, and tears streaming backwards from the wind, he calls her apartment when he knows she isn't there and talks to her cat elizabeth, he asks her what she knows, if she ever hears his name slip from beneath the bathroom door as her owner masturbates in the bathtub, elizabeth's answers are all very evasive, she speaks only of the weather and how she doesn't get enough attention, he tries to sound sympathetic, but when he hangs up the phone he feels this strangeness in his neck, a tickling that keeps him up all night coughing, thinking of her in fever dreams that don't let him rest, this feeling that he has only been talking to himself tortures him like a hairball in his throat.


IV.
they go on like this for years, meeting halfway every twelve months, meeting halfway between their lives, some years she has a boyfriend, sometimes he is spoken for, one year she is engaged, on the odd year they are both temporarily taken, but they meet anyway, she dates a man who rides an old bmw motorcycle, he becomes involved with a woman who knows six different languages and jumps out of perfectly good airplanes, she falls in love with a chiropractor, he becomes infatuated with his neighbor, but they meet anyway, they have to share this perfect ache they have been cultivating separately together for so long, this bitter thrill that is the idea they are truly, romantically, eternally star-crossed, why else would they keep meeting like this, why else would they have to live so far apart.

(written with rebecca stewart)

the second part

the second part
says you are too young
to be thinking backwards like this
run away with her
it doesn't matter where
find out what happens
how the story ends
do something, man
there are the keys to your truck
you know where she lives
and how to climb the fire escape

there are the keys to my truck
and between them
and the door of my apartment
is the flexibility of fantasy
and i can see how it twists
and chimes in the wind
always making the exact sounds
i want to hear

the first part
is this string around my ankle
that is tied to you
across these hundreds of miles
it grows taut
until i can almost hear your voice
carrying through the line
i can almost feel you twitching
in your sleep

eventually the string relaxes
like the tide easing away
from the shore
like how your hand fluttered
away from me
on that hot iowa morning
trying to say something to me
that only now
i am beginning to understand

i have become the raccoon

i have become the raccoon
that broke into your green cooler
at the campground
the raccoon that ate
your last two loaves of bread
and the rest of the potato chips

i came home with you
hiding in the trunk of your car
next to the sleeping bags
you were so tired
when you got back to your apartment
that when you unpacked everything
you carried me inside
by the scruff of my neck
and didn't even notice what i was

when you go to bed at night
i creep out from behind the bookshelf
and search for the cooler
trying to remember as i look for it
how to pry the latch open
how to open the lid
and how to eat what i find inside
as loudly as possible
so that you will wake up
and find me
with my head buried
in these things i have found
that you could have only left
for me