Kate Camp
Dusk falls on the cinema
Dusk falls on the cinema
How strange life is! How incomprehensible!
One may know everything, may actually enter the body of another
taste another’s blood like the Christian host
and yet be secretly thinking, as you walk the streets of a foreign city,
what I would give to be away from you and reading about Napoleon
or really, anything.
In a dream I feel faint at how handsome you are
think to contact you though I know you are trapped in a mountain village
accessible in winter only by horse or, at a pinch, helicopter.
And I know you packaged everything we had together
and shipped it in a trunk to the forests of your homeland
not caring if customs caught you with sex toys
and the photograph of a sock, tied in rope and with paper eyes,
held to ransom in the heights of my apartment.
What fools we were, what shiny sweet and chain-smoking fools
we would drive through the night
packets of Benson and Hedges on the dash like gold bricks
just so I could hurt you over and over
and you inflict affectionate injuries on my body.
Sweetheart, the lights are going down.
What takes the stage will be thinner than a biscuit
passing through the air in tiny droplets
like any illness, time, light and the past
into these small particles we are surrendered.
