the day, the dais, and Piotr Diaz, she said?

Ready. Set... am I pre-empting the cause of a post-exultant coup? The road, how will it fly? Depart. Taking care of the easy things: cards and old books, shampoo, and vague necessities that resemble a wool sweater or water-resistant gloves. She has her hands full, she says, doesn't have time to carry water, bowls of spinach salad, or even dressing made from scratch. This moving, impending move, has brought her living to a standstill, to a full and unabridged stop. Yet the expressions continue... I'm ready, she says, with a seeming unhesitance, and there another podium emerges. And there that twinkle in her voice derives a less obscurable answer, a persuasion of skin, of triumph and muscle from the lower curves of one's spine... I listen then, I follow the folds of cardboard and old warm bedsheets. I follow the voice, the lilt of silk and recognizance, the plan that she, a woman abiding in transience, the one whose lead is as simple as another slab of concrete on a suburban sidewalk, she that never loses her way, her footing assured like an evening walk... I listen then, the names of people in photos without enough light, Tanya, my best friend, she says, Peter, and that ridiculous guy from who-knows-where, another camp perhaps... I listen though the pillows leaning against an empty dresser drawer allow me a moments' reprieve, an inch of space, the lowest slope between hope and fear. What does she think when she talks without stopping? What is the catch, the equation, the loquacious hook, that which amounts to the pulpit of all bare shoulders? Is this the weight of the world? Fate revered, or the personification of blame, critiques? Momus (momentum, I would hear) was still a god reproaching Zeus for his greatest creation, man (humanus), because it had no window into its heart: that its real plans, he said, could never be truly seen.

Ready? Truth. The thought has its own repetition, a reiteration of what can or cannot be fathomed. Depth. She stands alone, unencumbered by the brevity of her own silence, the aloof siren of some emergency vehicle growing ever more distant on another street. A direction opposite to her chosen route. The city, it seems, will hold no goodbye, no parade or final embrace. And she, she prefers to leave nothing to chance, the i in "it" especially, she amends the mirrors of this rented cube downward, adjusting everything else until it is "just so"... she doesn't need the impressions of cork flying from a fine wine, she doesn't need a patch of blue sky rolling behind her, getting smaller than any blind spot could ever be. The horizon, she once said, will never determine what one actually sees!

Go? And the living goes on... the living that once stood like an unending plain, as still as a stream in the sultry candor of remorse. What guilt? She would say. What umpteenth river? Her eyes awash behind a defiant shade -- only noticing the width of the bridge or the bumps and curves that lie beyond its span... and I, I would listen then, to every thud of imperfect pavement, to every breeze of an open window, of other cars going by, wondering what direction us and them will turn, return...