ISSUE: Fall 2018
This hill, even if a small one, this hill with us and the dog the same dog
forever moving shadow-like down it, to where the hill disappears…For
some of a winter long ago, back when empathy still seemed a form
of love—more static, maybe, less steep, but just as complicated—
I stayed in a small house, cabin-like, but no cabin, at the end of a pier
that jutted out into a harbor as piers tend to. It was January. Why so
this quiet, he used to ask, in his language. I barely knew his language.
I’d turn him over, and there was sex or not, then, and there was
sleeping after. At night as I lay in bed, the whole place would rock,
mostly gently, which was the tide finding higher shore again, or
sometimes the wind making rough with water, as was the case one
particular night when it was snowing. Snowing over the sea,
and windy. I know resemblance is not equation. I know
equivalence doesn’t mean translation. I say there was a wind,
and that’s often how I remember it, but tonight it almost seems
the night must have been windless, I remember the steady verticality
with which the snow fell, falling into the sea. I’d turn him over; I barely
knew him; why so this quiet. The crown looks good on you, the veil
does too—when you lift the veil, the future’s everything you wished for.
