i shall miss your call on purpose

i missed your call today on purpose.
your voice would have been
so many years of shock therapy---
      better you are dead to me.


but the forest fire of neuron snaps
lit up my mind like a switchboard
in new york so many septembers ago.
     i did not know you then,
i cannot say i know you now.
the best times i knew you---
we had that talent for recycling
one another's exhaled breath,
when i swore we had in another life
been conjoined---twins in love forever.


the best times i knew you are
    dust on the sun baked dashboard
of a '68 mustang, rusted out and abandoned
on a sun blanched desert strip
that makes anyone passing by turn a head,
                          salute to a passed life---
but the drivers long gone, anyone too drives on.


when i covered your body with blankets
of open air and restless sun
at the phoenix fort, in the high grass,
       upon the bed of new england kings
and watched how lovely your lids and lashes
eclipsed the singular brown of your ecstatic eyes,
how proud i was to have in my hometown
such a place to bower with you.

our second night in barcelona
was our second night together, as it were,
when as we drew the blankets over our head
i felt there was someone else in the room---
and how that terrified you!
and how many more of those terrifying moments
    i would sense or otherwise put you through,
was it i or we that were haunted?
i never meant to be the monster
but since i saw the costume, i had to try it on.

the fervor of those days is gone.
perhaps only for now.
                i am drifting in the bark
upon still, hapless, burning waters
and, within each glisten, the sunlight captures
in the black dawn of my eye
the image of my ear against your chest.

i have stood too close to the canvass of you,
wrote in my mind high praise for your making,
fancied the brush stroke of it all, the colors,
slashed and burned earlier works,
renounced earlier technique
invented deities and demi-gods to extract stories
of heroes attempting a rise in your honor,
                 all for your honor
and what honor was that---indeed,
                 i was out of my mind!

i have taken my steps back.
i have at last said out loud,
                 "you were just a painting"
and now i prefer to leave you hanging on the wall,
in some half-lit corridor,
linking no particular point at all
                      to that first moment we met.
no hoorah, no regret.

perhaps, in sixty years
on the eve of my death bed,
i will come back down this corridor, alone,
and standing there before your painting,
after the slow replay of how it came to be,
i will sign my name in the lower right corner
          and claim the monstress you became.

for now, you were just a crazy dream,
i was just a crazy painter.

my sanity now regained,
i shall miss your call on purpose.