The ruined surfaces
The ruined surfaces of ruinous things swim in various shades and hues of night light bouncing pale green to deep opaque sea and dried grass to gaseous orange and back on breezes. Fingerprints, strands of hair, dried fluid stains, surface deformations and deposits ride the passage of tone. They remain when the effects of the light alter or disappear. In darkness these blemishes recede to point outward to whence the shining light arrived. The periodic evacuation of the light seals your dark chasm. Beyond the mouth of the alcove passing bodies project shadows, blinds or baffles are engaged, your eyes shut.
Before the light returns, out of the dim emerge the edges of objects and imperfections drawin in rising moonlight, pulling with them the high waters over your cheek in the sand, flowing in from tidal canals to submerge you where you settle, until the buoyant objects you clutch wrestle you through the depths. Where you had struggled not to sink you now cast away bits of the world you reached to only to sit for a moment more in the dark beyond yourself and you rise faster on the tide until you sink deposited on a bed of silt. Sleep across the causal chains. Their geometric simplicity is crushing. Moments make other moments. Moments and moments and moments make things. Moments are made of things affecting things. The chain is indelible and explicit. In the courtyard, around the corner, your breath falls and awakens a chain that leads back to your face.
You cannot see it let out around walls, stairs, arcades, still bodies of water, overlooks, wrought iron railings, and salt caked window frames to a chink in horizontal blinds the size of the thickness of her pointer finger. From the dark she watches you in the dark laying, low, looking. Your breath spreads across the water with ripples that catch the light from open windows and spotlights roving the sky. You watch the light trace across the wall of the alcove. You are no place but where these causal chains tether you. In any place the thread through the streets and canals, the footprints in sandy banks and estuaries lead back to scrutiny and to hidden moments with things that you have touched and arranged. The cups, towels, bedclothes, scraps of paper, shining tools, black oily pools, tea bags, gun blue filings, and chips of enamel loosely picked up on the tide far behind you roll away, sink, wash ashore, gather, and she puts them in an apartment. They all are no place but upon the tide and in time around you.