From my window I could always see crows on the wire.
They followed me from town to town and when
there were no crows on the wire, I knew I was in a city.Say in yours. I want to be where you are.
Because where would I be without you?
Without you I sat in a chair I'd dragged in from the street. The season's first hard wind was blowing; the window rattling in its old wooden frame. Disorder and uncertainty, that's what I heard. Disorder and uncertainty and sorrows arriving at the speed of sound. From across oceans, from across avenues, from other rooms where others sat in a chair, the wind blew at my window with the sound of distant shells exploding, of the pistol brave man breaking in...I no longer know what events are mine.
Without you I went out walking in a jacket I'd picked up at the flea market. I enjoyed being wrapped up in someone else's idea, in a kind of riding jacket, a fanciful kind that brought to mind hounds and horses and a fox in a hole with a bugle blaring. In the nearer noise of the street with its cars and its crowds, a woman took hold of my sleeve, she said, of her dead brother's jacket, with its corner shaped rip at the elbow. She said, it's where he slipped on the ice before he stopped going out, having become too weak to support the weight of wool. And here I was wrapped up in horses and blaring horns and, now, cracked elbows and ripped wool...I no longer know what memories are mine.
Say I hang up my jacket and never wear it again. Say I put my jacket and chair and other such things in a pile out on the curb. Without you, I never could have skimmed the passing wealth of this city, the piles along the curbs, the trail of labor and loss and events and things passing I can always see from my window... say like a carcass the crows feed on when they come down from the wire.
(Oh. I do not mind so much that you see me patrolling down, down, far down the scale of stories that get told -- where the borders are eroding, giving away completely.)
I remember hearing that in the future to seek sustenance will be to taste of all human undertakings. With every breath people will inhale fuels, buildings, machines. People will drink roads, clothing and electricity. They will eat endless things that were made by their hands. In the future it will be impossible to keep such things separated. And already, already, I no longer know what is mine.
