Confession as self reflection and falling as the unwalked city; in short, all the things I say to you at this poetry reading in a dim alternative club

Lend me a line is the first thing I whisper to you, and the first thing I think of you is quiet—

as in me, stilled,

staring from across the small and rounded stage in this dim alternative club,

no words to say because I had originally come here only to recite about the

summer Sun.

It is 10PM above ground—still early below, and you have sprawled your burnt-wheat sunglasses out on the table, reflecting eyes that look like

clouds after the rain.

Weary and relieved; still learning how to storm, and I convince myself that you

are also a poet. This frightens me.

So Lend me a line?—tell me what to say to you, please do, and this time it is a question with a

tremor at the end, because so much is balancing in the air tonight—

Perhaps not the delicate flitting of the underground moths over your hair,

perhaps not the thunderous stillness of your sleeve resting against a wet glass—

but still, so much else.

-

I will die. I am so certain of ending in this moment, of fainting

away

and of the wilting light still pinning me hair by hair to the stage, but I suddenly want you

to live well. So well

that my own heart combusts with a cry of colour; so well that I could ask you to

forget this night with me in it; find a house by the sea and live with another

chapped-lip girl in it, reading poetry unlike the floating free-verse slipping through my

teeth because I know I have no solid thing to offer you, but at the very least I understand the

virtue of sacrifice, which is golden like winter sun.

-

It is still 10PM and in ten seconds I have already planned your future, my qualification

not being any pretence to know you but only what I think I know of myself, and

how lovely I think you will be without me.

-

10:01PM now and I have shaken dry my poem about the summer Sun. One smile in your

direction, one glance down to my feet, and I am ready to return, emptied, to the

above-ground; cry into the white-pepper sky.

-

But perhaps you do not read poetry at all.

-

Perhaps you are not a poet. Perhaps you have only wandered here by mistake.

This frightens me more.

-

What then? Suppose that I really do not know you at all

in any solid way, but I could tell you how I know beauty—

I know flower stems; I know poetry and the myriad

pellets of light pouncing from city cat

to city cat, weaving between the soft dips of their paws into

juice bars, into preening eucalypts; into old school

gymnasiums, and the shaking

voice of a girl clutching a now-foreign poem to her

chest at 10:01PM in a dim club underground.

I know cold summers, and warming books.

-

And I want to give it all to you.

-

So I speak again, softly. With my best practised

lines, I say hello and maybe and hello

again; I tell everyone about the birds I’d spoken to once

in the Rockies but really, I am only talking to

you. I stay shaking; falling

-

I feel like crying, still quietly:

quietly until I become the sea I imagine you will stumble

upon again one day—the one the wind first brought you to

when you were five to teach you how to swim.

-

Do you remember how to swim? Do you still recognise the path of

light in the water, washing over and cutting through—

do you remember how to run? I shake off the sea,

I still remember.

-

I confess: every poem I write starts with its ending first. Every word that emerges

is a bottle-neck baby, locked in a heartbeat, fighting for its

future. At the grocery store I always get the seven-flower bouquet—one

blossom to cover every day, and I still count my change in the checkout line

to be sure that I have all the

hope before I need it, the words before I speak them—and the love,

before I see it:

The only time a critic came to this dim alternative club she told me

that I punctuated

every line as though the whole world was new

But in truth it was only the metallic newness of the city

in my throat: my snow-heavy falling for the purple-prose streets—

for the sticky swish of discount jeans on the sidewalk and every three-point sunrise,

and all the want to hold myself to it and show it

what I could give.

-

And all you have is silence. Like this city, your eyes hold an everything

void: a place to rest, speaking without noise and

using our running feet for song.

I sigh, you smile—and we meet in the fleeting fingertips of applause

as new friends; old companions—

two small sparrows, joining their wings to circle around the sun.