You sit in the coatroom checking and rechecking your phone while the dancing begins outside under globe lights. We arrived here together but only externally, which is why in dreams I wake cold, wanting to dance, planning the periphery of a garden laced with continual blooms produced in Denmark. I concede to the nesting texture of camel-hair coats, leather, brocade cape giving way to nostalgia for grandfather’s cigar-smoked study and so perhaps I should call you from Paris, which is what we call the patio. I could pretend to be the Fawn producing old-fashioned English-style blooms, soft pink in such absolute profusion they completely cover their own mid-green foliage, so let us dance.
So let us dance for it would be difficult to disguise the voice of someone who has actually begun dancing. If the scene is set liquidly we will come upon the party by noticing first shadows on the lawn and then differentiating orchestration from what the owls do. Or coming upon something floral as leaves shake gold and bronze. Nature viewed as a shop getting ready to close, the street asserting itself against the notion it might as well not exist if existence is to be useful to commerce, that is to say, to subject-formation and point of view. I might be shallow, or perhaps just primal, but I love the blooms.
I love because a phrase, heard before, cradles. But what’s the point if one is to be just a statuette fitted so nicely in the palm of a hand? And you, preferring to stand outside the scene as if someone appointed you keeper of the terrarium, clutching your interlocutor close in the glow of your phone. I exaggerate, but what else to make of your story where the chick’s pushed from its nest, not yet dead when insects begin their devouring?
Dancing was much easier when it commenced in formal fashion. A thick black line formed by men in proper dress, women unfurling their floral. And thus I could have been the Fawn in dusty rose with private knowledge of thong and peek-a-boo bra hinted by the shock of pheasant hair plume. But we don’t live in such a time and talk to each other internally, communicating remarks by text message and gesture as we walk down the mall. I would like to have this and this and this. Or nothing here is good enough for you.
When you point toward the trees asking after my favorite I understand this as a test. Because what is not to like about a tree? This one willows as if longed for. This one flames out, nonplussed. And the Magritte trees lining the periphery begin so very slowly their suburban illumination.
