Alarmed, today is a new dawn, and that affair recurs daily like clockwork, undone at dusk, when a new restaurant emerges in the malnourished night. We said it would be this way, once this became the way it was. So in a way we were waiting for it. I still haven’t eaten, says the cook in the kitchen. A compliant complaint. I never eat, says the slender diner. It’s slander, and she’s scared, like a bully pushing lettuce around. The cook can’t look, blind with hunger and anger. I told a waiter to wait for me and I haven’t seen him since. O it has been forty minutes it has been forty years. Late is a synonym for dead which is a euphemism for ever. Ever is a double-edged word, at once itself and its own opposite: always and always some other time. In the category of cleave, then. To cut and to cling to, somewhat mournfully. That C won’t let leave alone. Even so, forever’s now’s never, and remember is just the future occluded or dreaming. The day has come: a dusty gust of disgusting August, functioning as a people-mover. Maybe we’re going nowhere, but wherever I go I see us everywhere. On occasions of fancyness, or out to eat. As if people, stark, now-ish people themselves were the forever of nothing, the everything of nobody, the very same self of us all, after all, at long last the first. Copyright © 2015 by Brenda Shaughnessy. Used with permission of the author. |
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