The yacht (he said) had twelve drunken poets on board, and when they sighted land they all dove into the sea to swim the rest of the way, and had to be pulled out again.

          Lines are drawn across or down, or up to lift gaze and smile: as yours are lifted now in the wet and darkened street.
           I think of the painter Jay DeFeo, standing full frontal and naked to the waist in the middle of the eyes she’d drawn huge in pencil line.
           Do you also stand within the image; is there a story to tell? The affective lines descend and ascend, from your eyes to your pudenda and to your eyes.

          —And your writing’s at an impasse, too! the woman flung at him, at the end of a series of accusations. They sat together in an area bruised to the extent where friendship loses its purchase.
          Some months later, he had a dream in which he traced the whereabouts of a singer he’d long admired on the evidence of a few recorded songs of almost thirty years ago. He’d feared a story of alcoholism or drug addiction to account for those years; but when she and her grown son met him at the station and drove him to their house, he found he couldn’t believe the supposition to be true of her. —Why, he eventually asked, did you only record those two albums? —I’ve made other recordings, she told him; it’s just that you haven’t heard them.

          Formless yet complete. One register’s juxtaposed with another; there are erasures and connecting lines; marginalia.

young woman
in front of me
nothing speaking
between us
like the distance speaks
rows of trees
mist and rain

… form dissolved into feeling.

          We were remembering events from the past, which had happened in a distant country where we’d both lived. In my late adolescence (I said) I would sometimes catch sight of a young filmmaker who resided in the same house as one of my friends. He was praised for a film that combined animation with live footage, occult symbols with shots of a young woman naked on his bed. One evening I entered the hallway of the house as he was shouting at this same woman, telling her to get out, that he’d finished with her; he was on the landing, and she stood on the stairs below. Her look of pain spreading through disbelief as ink through water caught me; it still catches me — while his film remains as a mere schema.

           —The heart’s affection is enmeshed in vicissitude.
           —What’s most real is that which we never know, yet there — mid-point, invisible — constancy comes to find itself.
           Inscribe these lines beneath a portrait, in which the eyes’ impress and the mouth’s disposition evoke a perpetual vigil.