brighton beach

The light was yellow as if in a dream. It came to me and I knew. I knew then that things are never going to change - never do change, really. In spring we watched the ducks and moor hens nurse their young, the pale light slant over the green pond, in the suncurve there was a presence that I clung to. Living in a home without windows has led me to believe that I will never take the sunlight for granted. Windows are a way out, I spend a lot of time dreaming. I am always impelled to write in the midst of great change. You see, I was under a spell, this will be ugly but I need to do it, the hideous cries out like a bell; 'you hurt! you hurt! you hurt!'

In my dream I have skin like a cloud, I am carrying the trauma of my mother and my mother's mother in the pit of my stomach. I let go in the morning and the light is grey.

The light we have come to know is fluorescent, the glare of the screen, of the flickering bar. I think that the mystery of electricity lingers, when it first rippled out in beams, with the radio and the telephone and those other mysteries, people thought we could tap into the waves, the strange false light, to contact and channel the dead. After the first world war séances played out in our grandmother's drawing rooms. I imagine, china tea cups, the powdery regency wallpaper.
The crackle and flicker and the shock of a voice. I want to pick up the telephone. I want to pick up the telephone and dial a strange number and hear a strange voice I can later record in my diary as 'warm, rich like cream, but just a souring of annoyance - who could be calling at this hour?'

I do not dream about you anymore. Instead, only high ceilings, crowds without individual faces.
On the coldest day of that year I found the fish skeleton on the sand, still bloodied. Our hands red with cold and your face hollow as the fading light.