Then they all got drunk
Sylvia continued to mourn her brother
Madame please? A bit of newspaper. I would like to relieve myself
He sings to the work-for-nothings, the die-laughing of hungers
As if his voice could grow pumpkins out of the white ground
Even the sign warning us away implied an obligation to go on
A bottle, a red bandanna, a yellow bucket of bones behind the gate
We find a shovel near all of this
And as these were the final months, a radio

It was an island wrapped in white fog, Angel Island, a wingless rock, a way station
Now it isn’t possible to go further, paper thin and floating
Each small act of defiance a force
There would be blank winds in the debris and palm carnage in the half-life
Our faces are there
Mine bears the mark of your palm, yours the marks of gelignite
A bar of light touches the floor of a house long since torn down
Where the walls were, silence was
The playing cards you clipped to a window fan
To imitate the sound of helicopters all those nights
So as to return to the ruins of a wished-for life

Their flesh like fallen snow
Leaf shadows burnt into a post
Burns of bamboo on bamboo canes
These ruins are to the future what the past is to us

VII

Someone has written fuck with dogshit on the walls of Simone’s atelier
A pall of exhaust over Paris
The woman with the shaved head seen twice in different arrondissements
And on the Rue Victor Considerant, a boy with a white toy M-16
The days marched shouldering their little events
Tiny birds on the dining tables flew from spoon to bowl
As far as anyone knew, no one drowned
The hotel is no longer there
We were its final guests
A stone wall, white roses, birds and the whine of bright aerial antennas
Every window casement an empty portrait: radiant, formless, ancestral
In which he longs for her, whomever, her white bed
The remote possibility of another life
To look in the windows of that little place expecting someone
The two of us, the child, the two blue boats and the brown
The child comes into the room and leaves, comes and leaves

I loved her, he said, she was the woman of my life. Her blank eyes, her_____
This is what he loved
She sliced the photographs from their frames, chose what to bring with us, said
“Look what they’ve done to the windows! To my life.”

You are a child, you think only of love, in whose other arms you will find refuge
The man walks on, blank and without veering
Where there are objects, he walks over rather than around them
The knife rises in her hand as she wipes her eyes
Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi?
He departed with great pledges of love and went back to his life never to call her again

VIII