In the blue light

In that hour when the world has forgotten the names it bestowed upon itself in daylight, when every roadside dwelling, every weather-stained refuge raised for the lost and those merely passing though, seems less a place than a pause between one loneliness and the next, I found myself inhabiting that peculiar blue illumination which neither belongs to heaven nor to earth but to memory itself, while the flickering apparatus in the corner exhausted its endless procession of borrowed lives, and I wondered — not with the impatience of youth nor the certainty of age, but with the slow, incurable bewilderment of one who has already mistaken longing for destiny too many times — by what hidden and terrible geometry the human heart is forever drawn toward the thing which, even before it possesses it, has already begun to vanish.

Desire does not travel by roads visible upon any map, but by those ancient channels worn into the spirit long before speech, and so it was that in the fevered country between sleeping and waking there arose a voice, not merely remembered but returning with that inexorable authority possessed only by the callous and the obtuse, the brainless and the dead, by forgotten summers, by promises uttered without believing they would survive the morning; and the dream did not begin so much as continue, as though I had merely stepped once more into a river whose current had never ceased carrying the fragments of myself downstream through the innumerable nights.

Beyond the rain-soaked highway the procession of automobiles moved with the solemn patience of stars that had abandoned the heavens to wander the earth, each pair of lights gliding through darkness and finally projected onto this wall of the Belvedere Motel, wandering and wondering as the television burns until the moon itself seemed less an object than another traveller, pale and distant, keeping its own silent appointment with time, while somewhere at the shoulder of that endless road a figure waited — not because he knew where he must go, but because waiting had become the last direction left to him, the posture by which hope disguises itself after certainty has long since departed.

The hill returned, as all true places do, not because the feet remember them but because the soul refuses to relinquish them, and there we lay suspended above the sleeping world where the passing lights below resembled rivers of forgotten years, and your embrace gathered around me with that mysterious warmth by which the darkness itself seems briefly persuaded that dawn need not come, until every breath became both shelter and wound, every whispered syllable another spark falling into the dry fields of memory where nothing ever truly burns away, only glows unseen beneath the ashes awaiting the smallest wind. I’m on fire.

After the rain on the interstate there remained only the narrow enclosure where words must be measured against silence, where rehearsed confessions dissolve before they are spoken and courage returns to the pocket from which it had briefly emerged, as though every attempt to bridge the immeasurable distance between one solitary heart and another were governed by some ancient law permitting approach but never arrival, permitting pursuit but never possession, so that the deepest truth a person discovers is not the object of longing itself but the endless motion toward it, the sorrowful grace by which the heart, forever incomplete, continues nevertheless to incline toward the thing it cannot cease believing was always meant to answer it in a phone booth in some local bar and grill.

Rehearsing what I’ll say, my coin returns. How the heart approaches what it yearns. How the heart approaches what it yearns.