We are temporary arrangements, assuming some improvised access to autonomy, exploring surrounding chaos, telescoping, with what filters appear to be in reach, at whims through traumas of temperature and contact, sensing our reflections at bodies strewn scurrying or rooted in the nearby mush.
Struggling to ease the effort expended in the ongoing advance nearly to absentia, we dawdle over accessories, fussing over articulations, applications, and attachments, needlessly nattering over the ever more instantaneous circuit.
So much so, that now walking trudges before itself, through shadows and the hum between them. Our innuendos are posed and we ape annihilation.
Compulsively treading again over the same patch, with prodding proud incessancy, the pokes and probings so deafeningly essential to knowing this or that. Teeter-dodder, the playful melody of wisdom and experience.
Soloists in the clamor, we swerve, we amplify, we spin on our axes. But we only pretend to dwell, where filigree means bogged down to the pits, stuck under glass yet still humming, itching to ooze out vivacious. We identify as surge protectors, sniff the air for current, prowl the ground for plug-ins, and yet we perpetually short ourselves out. We cannot light without extension, and our filaments are cold with mourning.
We had hoped to start with a bang and end with a flash. Aspiring to phosphor before being let into the darkness. What we found was blindness dressed as razzmatazz.
How can someone breathe so loudly in the acrid air? The expectations we had for banality were wildly unrealistic. The objective, it turns out, was not universal proximity at all. Now I wonder how to get you to do things without calling attention to myself.
Wherever lies after the last lost and no knot will tangle here beyond the rub and after the unraveling.
And yet I foible, in my freefall, in my tumble. Fulfill was where we thought we began, and so we jostled, we gushed even, for effervescence. Such bubbling over, however, when it came, was so internal and emetic, that we were startled from froth to splatter, from thence forever elegized and lamented as another sticky patch on the pantry floor.
Such spills are ever the result of unyielding aspiration. More endures after all, transparent, just above and to one side.
Meanwhile, the slight taste of sulfur reduces the choir’s crescendo to bouts of coughing, and the occasional phlegmy hock or two.
In practical terms, the tenderness I feel for you extends only to finding ways to prolong your agony. I make you go to the doctor, I disappear certain foods from your shopping cart, I try to convince you to walk everywhere. Everybody raise their arms who has not had a stroke!
Other than that, I keep a version of you handy in which you are an insufferable monster, where living with you is not only no longer viable, but where in fact it is a mystery of almost miraculous proportions how I have lived with you this long. I have an updated list of your unpleasant noises, your pungent smells, your visual grotesquerie, and finally, but by no means least damningly, your ethical pusillanimity and inherent disfiguring selfishness, that places the very proposition of you beyond the possibility tranquil contemplation and situates the dark reality of you in the realm of nightmares and feverish delusions.
So yes, that reedy whine you hear is my sopranum ad hysterium, as it comes resounding toward you beneath the trees, putting the coda on my most recent bout of sustenance and provisions gathered shred by scraped forth shred from the cornucopia rind that is our firelit and coziest of hollers.
Dwelling is the marrow of it, the concentrate. To live a nearness, and thread it, as it unmakes itself with ripening, is to be the sediment settling down into the stench and ardor of touch. The sweaty ligature outlives the limbs it once kept close, and it is somewhere in the muddy weeds.
We cut flowers to commemorate, and we can linger only in silence. In our absence is our presence kept. Places where passing was are empty now. Rather than being excised from me, your warmth was woven into what I have been.
As for the last bit, it was an exposure, an outing like everything else.
Ever more was where I walked. We walked together through the wood and across the meadow. It seemed then like a long time. Later, as night fell, you slipped away in the darkness. As I kneel in the dirt and stars cover my weary eyes, I wonder which of us should say, “God, who am I that you have shown me such mercy.”
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About the Author
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
