The Indicator x The Student: “The Moldau”

And in those gaps that mediate truth, I’ll wait for you in the field we talked of, grass tall enough to dream in but parted to fit your body and mine. The sun-drunken earth shatters against our backs, but there’s a kind of dignity in suffering that only children know about. We’ll spill this secondhand youth across clouds that yearn for abstraction; those figured inventions of cumulus, clarified in the aftermath of fiction. The hills are our portrait, sketched by the trajectory of your fluorescent voice drifting through a California pastoral. In the echoes, I’ll take your words, slip them under my rib cage in place of a heartbeat. I call this twenty-first century medicine, but mostly I’m amazed we still have the capacity to smile. That, in the dimples of our abandon, I seek your eyes, darker than  the tea in China dumped overboard from the box that carried you to shore.  Or, with the seriousness of a white man: I’d drink it all, and then some.

Forgive me.  Your  gaze empties my  dictionary of all but  cliché.  As in the

movies,  I’m  still  struggling  to  exist   in  the   subjunctive.   Let  me   peel

myself  from  the  literal  into  your   thumb-smudged  horizon lines.   Stay

here,   in   this    imagined   moment.   By   the   gentle    way   the   morning

receives     our     faces,     we    can    hide     from    gravity    a    little    while

longer.      Make      a      nostalgia      the     color     of      home.      A     silent

reverie       cupped       in       my       palm    .     .     .      let      it     touch     you.

Between               our                  fingers                  language                  corrodes