arrange: [dramatic lights and shadows]..and advance.

It's these creases in the faux wood paneling that give it away.  It's those circumstantial gaps and particles of false snow clinging to unnatural surfaces.  It was the fake, dual suns semi-rising.   In short, falseness.  Falseness was everywhere.

"Do you remember the way we ate the ghee in the firelight, the way you captured the Victorian curlicues bas-reliefed to my palm?"

I did.  It all.

"No, I don't."

It's always those lightspears stabbing the spaces between.  Prying them wider, wedging the crevasse vaster and faster.  We are all clamoring, for her.  For authenticity.   

I had sat inside the bedframe as she allen-wrenched it all together, my rectangular cell.  Then I spent the morning hours looking up Amish barn raising, watching the sun's palmleaf light fingers fan across the empty mattress; the thin brown sheets a handful of hours from the dryer, still lavendering my room.
 
"Here it is, your double entendre: post and beam like a century-old sun."

She laughs and then it becomes real. 

mindgrackles and headcrackles: a trilogy.

I.

Adhering to the blind dictum of tradition mandates that one must forgo the pleated swathes of common sense and intelligence.  Declaring an allegiance to something simply because its what has always come before it, because it has always been done, adamantly forges the consent for free-thought.  Reasons are forgotten; intentionally even, by the barbed and rusty throes of the subconscious.  And they raise their voices in an anthemized unison.  And they jab their pointy fists in perpetual salutation.  Squawks and a squeamish screech for nothing.   

II.

Her lunar stage will be phased out.  Crescent lips, full hips.  Those new bright eyes.  And her gibbous turn around that crackedconcretecorner seals the deal.  Her clout wanes in the inevitabilities of that some kind of dawn where the creatures release their clutches from the sinewy powerlines before a backdrop of waxy blackness.         

III.

Smoke has penetrated the bellows.  An unrelenting infiltration, a failing in filtration.  Tailfeathers splay: a Japanese folding fan unhinged to do battle with gnatty humidity. Or, perhaps, for mere aesthetic acknowledgment: uselessly unfurled for the delicately imagined koi or the foreboding blackbird who, even in such accordioned composition, is rendered as terrifying as ungrounded loyalty or vanishing Earthly satellites.

   

A one-time offer.

I am taking this huge chewy bite from my cinnamon raisin bagel while watching this cocker spaniel leapfrog through the snow when she comes up behind me.  I can smell her wet, shampooed hair before anything else: so refreshingly non-floral, so purely clean.  

"Thank you for making me second guess myself,” she says, her palm quickly spreading across my back like a butter knife.
           
I just finished reading the Tomine comic in this week's New Yorker (they really love this guy) and, for some unknown reason, I have moved on to the Pottery Barn catalog below it.   
           
Free shipping.  Special Price.  No Surcharge.  Delivery Discount.  Closeout.  They must really be hurting.
           
Moments earlier, we had been in bed, below the immense weight of our down comforter, watching the snow lazily pile onto the tree branches level with our second floor window.  The curtains were completely parted and this vertical rectangle of pure white had cast its simplicity onto our bed like a geometric stagelight.    
           
“I don’t want to go to class today,” she had sighed in complete seriousness.
          
 I had rolled over and looked at her.  Her face had been awash in a snowy paleness, catapulted across her features by the woody boughs.
           
She had just looked at me, waiting for a response.  We could have read, we could have gone back to sleep, we could have fucked, we could have got up and made Belgian waffles with strawberries.
           
“You will just regret it later.  You will just hate yourself for it,” I had frowned, all to myself.  
           
Now, I am watching her brush her teeth while simultaneously, somehow, shoving a Gala apple and an individually wrapped cylinder of flaccid string cheese into her backpack.  I was up and out of bed, sitting at the kitchen table scowling at the sharp black edge of my bagel—this toaster could be so hit-or-miss.  Below this window I can see the neighbor’s spaniel bolting after a tennis ball, which burns with this ridiculously fake neon against the new snowfall.     
           
“You’re the best,” she kisses my neck while already heading for the door.  She smells like wool.  I look at the clock: she wouldn’t be that late, if at all.
           
I thumb a few more pages of Pottery Barn’s absurd offerings.  Special Prices on all Dining Tables—Purchase before January 8th and receive four chairs free!  They must really be hurting.  But then again, so are all of us.
          
I watch the lock turn from her twisting key on the other side as she seals me inside.  By the time I turn back to the kitchen table window, the dog is gone and the flakes are beginning to sprinkle down again.