The animal sits in her lap.
She listens to me
unreprovingly talk about my
skin,
its lapses and its memories.
She knows all about my deepest gashes,
the faults, flaws, the inexactness
and the greases
of my
surface.
She doesn't glower or glitch
because of too many words
about (really) so much nothing.
She shares similar cuts
and colors of greys and greens;
and I assume she also was consumed
by the pyridines
the hystamines
and all the viscous coats over something
once painful or threatening.
Bone oil.
Other tars
on the body.
Jacqueline
I said,
You and I we are
too vigorous and unchanging;
we're all colors and pieces
and dissonance-
too silent,
understanding.
You and your cat
you know you know
all about the illness in my skin-
my vertigos and stupidities,
hip bones and dyslexias,
my misses or sticks.
My warm body: Pyrexia.
Well. I look at her silent
for a second
made nautious
realizing
she is not the one undone,
unapart or unbought.
She isn't the one all impatient
who's walking the line too slowly
far behind, unthinking,
as if it ran straight certain as a Proclus.
Unlike myself
she doesn't have to say anything.
I am the one still being done-
catless, without my Pablo-
pale in need of sun
and a different silence
that's so important
it can't be quiet.
She does not feel the pressure of time.
It's not patience that hovers above me-
this little mob in my hair.
~inspired by a Picasso painting of his last wife