Systemic circulation

There's great gaps and silences
while I'm watching the patterns of your veins
as they splay upwards and return
to the center, to your heart.
From across the room I can feel
the beat and the flow
a hint of a smile when
spent cells become reoxygenated;
a little laughter when
I have to win you over ev'ry day anew.

A few words from "Two Gentle People"

"They did not exchange addresses or telephone numbers, for neither of them dared to suggest it: the hour had come too late in both their lives. He found her a taxi and she drove away towards the great illuminated Arc, and he walked home by the Rue Jouffroy, slowly. What is cowardice in the young is wisdom in the old, but all the same one can be ashamed of wisdom. ...

"...while he sat beside her and remembered the street outside the brasserie and how, by accident he was sure, he had been called "tu."
'What are you thinking?' Patience asked. 'Are you still in the Rue de Douai?'
'I was only thinking that things might have been different,' he said.
It was the biggest protest he had ever allowed himself to make against the condition of life."

--Graham Greene

Old house dream

I dreamt last night that Pat and I were carpooling to work, south on 89. Pat was his usual self: funny, charming, cavalier about work. We talked a little about Stanley, his dad. He was looking at some drawings and photographs of mine, and I guess I mentioned that I wanted to get a picture of the old house at Cherry Street. So he got off at exit 17 so we could stop by. We drove up the street and I saw it: changed. It was brick (which seemed right, even though in life it was clapboard), but the new owners had taken down the front porch. It looked naked. They had attached a beat up old barn door across the front entrance, and there were a few abandoned junkyard cars on the left side of the building. My heart sank.

I had a key, so we went in. Oddly, it appeared lived in. There was furniture, and it looked in reasonable shape, though the configuration of the house was different. In the basement, there was flooring, but the flooring was interrupted by rock formations that jutted from the floor. When we came back upstairs, I noticed water seeping in at all the joints, and cascading down the center of the double-paned door. It gave me chills, all of a sudden. I looked around back and to the side, where Tina’s house should have been. Instead, there was a huge outcropping of rock. The rocks were gray, peach, and sandstone, mottled. It was much too large to have been put there, but I knew it couldn’t be natural, either. Instead of being flat, out back, there was a steep slope down, after which I noticed nothing. Everything was strange, and silent.

We heard a car pull up, and I was afraid we’d be in trouble for trespassing, so we hurried outside. As it turns out, it wasn’t the owners, but a rental agent who thought that we were looking to rent the place. I was angry and chilled at the same time. I tried to find Pat so we could leave, but for some reason, he went back inside. And then I woke up.