An Argument Between Lovers
if not trashcans and tympanis and the bottoms
of buckets, if not the sound a tire makes
when a bicycle is lifted from the ground,
spokes and rubber whizzing, a hand
cranking the pedal turning steel into air
if no sage brush and wind, if no birds
and shifting rocks, if we are standing
in medias res, no singing,
exclaiming, no limbs creaking,
no exchanging,
if only hands, if only rough
fingertips, or the backs of hands
smooth, the height of one‟s neck,
if always lips and ear lobes, if always soft
hair found with tongues, when toes
unfold the taught sheet,
if I cannot hear enough
of your body, when we end,
when it comes, I‟ll try to signal
four extra beats: our cue
to bow (in unison)
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Dreaming Nathaniel Hawthorne
Before dinner, this girl I‟m dating explains that I should go to the other
event, that what I‟m doing for my education is important,
more than watching liberal-hippie-stoners cannonball,
jackknife, and swan-splash in to the freezing waters
of Huck Finn Pond, which I‟m sure, I tell her, I saw at least ten
dogs pissing in, or crapping right next to, one day
last summer; but it is winter and all,
and the sky will be a blue only possible because
of the sun‟s reflection on so much land, possibly
a grey and smoky day when snow refuses to
fall with any great degree, a day to see again; so I tell her, that
I need to go to the other event, the event
about local food and preservation, which I would rather go to,
but I don‟t tell her this, of course, and neither do I
mention my dreams about Nathaniel Hawthorne, mining
through old documents at the Custom House when
his ass should have been working, nor that I am there
helping him dig through all these stacks of handwritten stories
and claims, and that every time I read one, a little more crumbles,
until I finally say, “Hey, Nathaniel,” and he explains
what is happening, then shows me where I can get some tweezers
to touch the documents with instead of my hands, saying
“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it,” and I nod,
because this sounds smart—little do I remember
it‟s appearance in The Scarlett Letter. He continues,
exclaiming, “Chapter 12,” as if I am supposed to have
memorized this fact and others about his work, as if
he has had other visitors from the future, and he knows
all about us, and when we finally gather useful documents,
on which the writing is indiscernible, he shows me
the Scarlet A, but he implores me not to tell anyone, and of course,
I oblige, because I‟m pretty sure he still knows
more about why I am here, and then he takes me down
the street to where a woman is playing a harp, and as I‟m about to
give this woman my number, because I imagine her playing music
for me in a parlor someday where she would be both
a conversation piece and a distraction from having to articulate
what I am thinking, I find myself in a cold sweat, nervously
reaching for my phone, which won‟t quit with this harp riff
I had chosen as my alarm, and so I jump up to write all of this down,
because my dreams get lost in my memory, as I believe most should,
and remember a passage in a book on systems and shuffle through
to find, “Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time
in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once.
They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions
simultaneously. To discuss them properly, it is necessary somehow
to use a language that shares some of the same properties
as the phenomena under discussion,”
which at 6:30 in the morning is blowing my mind,
so I decide to draw a picture of the various scenes
I remember, setting up my page in four quadrants, kind of
like a comic book, but I‟m using stick figures, and annotating
each picture, so I wouldn‟t forget what things like the “D”
with vertical lines drawn through it represent, and when
I‟m done, I can “see all the parts of [the] picture at once”
running in jagged one-dimensional images, and I grab my computer
and google, “one-dimensional,” hoping to support my hypothesis that
a one-dimensional diagram can in no way work
for telling my dream better than words; instead I read the first
paragraph about One Dimensional Man on Wikipedia
and consider how the statement, “much of the book is a defense
of “negative thinking‟ as a disrupting force against the prevailing
positivism,” screams of Nathaniel Hawthorne and that fucking “A”
he showed me in my dream, which I‟m still trying to prod for
more details when I see a woman walking her dog,
jerking its leash, as if saying, “come along, now; quit
sniffing that fucking bush, it‟s cold out here,” and I begin to
believe firmly that at least twelve other people have had this
same dream, thought this same idea about Hawthorne and Hester
Prynne‟s need to fill an empty place in her life, having met
the same harpist and dreamt worse things than I about her, and having tried
to tie a knot between the dialogism and delirium of this dream,
and when we finish our dinner and she has folded herself
into the pillows, and then not, like some sort of illicit peek-a-boo,
I want to know if she has ever played a harp, but something keeps
me from blurting this out, the same part of my brain keeping
the names of ex-girlfriends, and all the dirty things I had ever
heard, from slipping into our situation, which we have devised
without the use of pictograms, let alone much discussion because
when she tells me she loves me, all I can imagine in the dark
through the wind brushing against the windows is a series
of images lining up like people in a waiting line
where there is no end in sight, where I can‟t even see the high water mark,
and imagining how it recedes is something—something else.
-
Adam Million is currently the editor of the Owen Wister Review and is attending the MFA program at the University of Wyoming. His work is published or forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Touchstone, The Country Dog Review, and Copper Nickel.
