The Business of Falling Asleep (2)

                                                          Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.
	                                                                        —Rimbaud
	 
        Days, things, times of day.  Big things like unseen bells.  Unheard
	moments. Suburbs are pale orange and a greenish blue I associate with
	fire escapes and school.  The school looms now: a person with five
	questions at its back.  They can’t stay there, for now.  They’ll be back.
	 
        The interrogation was like a question mark.  Once you stop to listen you’re
	hooked.  No, go back to the stone please.  What did it say over the stone?
	Don’t say I can’t remember, you remember everything.  That is true but I’ll
	remember the stone
	 
        like the face of only the third dead person I’d ever seen.  Well it’s
	happened, he seemed to be saying.  The eyes were closed (I suppose they
	always are).  What are you going to do now?  We don’t have to stay like this.
	We could meet perhaps outside.  Have a tea like we used to.
	 
        They moved the hotel boat to a less ostentatious location, still it felt hard
	coming to you through trees and other animated life.  “Its music doesn’t
	gel.”  Yes, but a weird creepy feeling came over me that you might know
	about all this, not wanted to tell me but just know.  It’s amazing how the
	past shrinks to the size of your palm, forced to hold all that now.  Falling
	down the steps in Marlborough Street.  That was just one thing, but others I
	don’t know, never will know, are cupped in the hand as well.  To brave the
	day turning outward like an ear, too polite to hear.
	 
        Rimbaud said it well, though his speech could be clamorous.  One accepts
	that too within a broader parterre of accepting, a load of sun coming over
	the house to dampen discreet despair, woven into the togs of somebody
	standing up to go having remarked on the time as though there were a
	time to go.  One would rather be left with few words and the resulting
	remainder of unease than never to have left the party.
	 
        Visions of a terrace with a cell phone ought to be engraved on the waiting
	skull, like Brahms.  Anxious in the predicate but adept socially, pressure
	to have the music come out in a certain place, where it can be abandoned
	if desired.  How about it?  I care too much
	 
        not to leave it all.  Set this down too…