Improv' #1, Week Ten

"Misery and Splendor," by Robert Hass

Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room.
The window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her as tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years.The light in the
room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal
washed up on the shore of a world--
or huddled up against the gate of a garden--
to which they can't admit they can never be admitted.


Improvisation:

Nostalgic, she walks to the room
next door and carefully crawls over
to bed nearest the wall, she hates
thinking of him awake and her drunk
again on silly nightmares where
she lies shivering alone with the cold
loneliness of their house, housing empty
space, and a voice-- nothing more than
sounding words in her head, heard
and answered by flat panels of sheets,
street lights shinning in pairs through panes
streaked with the remains of breath, hot

as the night he had held her tightly at
the waist, legs wrapped around, and torso
to torso they twisted, tangled like one
kink in a steal chain. She knew
him by that moment, when claws drug,
dug deep to the bone and sweat
dripped drops, like tears, of
salt, healing the exposed wound of
fresh flesh; that night all was dead
but for them.

Gently, she turns
to tug him out of dreams, pull
back his body into this life where
the real living live, but in the
reach for body she only grabbed
air-- a handful of reminder that
the mind forms many rooms for
want of filling more space.