Stone - Someone Elses Wedding Vows

SOMEONE ELSES WEDDING VOWS SOMEONE ELSES WEDDING VOWS BIANCA STONE OCTOPUS BOOKS TIN HOUSE BOOKS PORTLAND, OREGON SOMEONE ELSES WEDDING VOWS By Bianca Stone Copyright 2014 All rights reserved Published by Octopus Books / Tin House Books www.octopusbooks.net www.tinhouse.com/books Cover design by Diane Chonette Internal layout by Drew Scott Swenhaugen Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710 www.pgw.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for ISBN 978-1-935639-75-6 (ebook) FIRST EDITION FOR MOM WHO RAISED ME RIGHT AND BEN FOR ALL THE VOWS I have lost all luscious dreams beyond all kingdoms of thought. But then I feel happy thinking of you the way we invite our love to the table to eat whats left. I make a stream connecting the baseball card in my wallet with the you in my mind. See how the sun carries certain weight? It looks like a wild egg from a prehistoric bird broken open on a baffled hill. I want to go out and ride the back of a parable or walk up and down the city looking for something that thrilled me back in the day. Back in the day I tore jubilant Edwardian script across a savannah.

I wrote that there was no stopping a forest from taking what it wanted. Man burns at a certain degree but I always burned a little slower. When I went into school I left a trail of blackened footprints to my classroom of spelling words, never starred. At the end of the earth well be locked in our own spelling mistakes, our arms around the legs of our mother so she wont leave, our heads filled with beer, the light receding. What kind of death is reserved for me? The green plastic soldier has his gun up against everything. And what does one do with a gun really? Ive only held three my entire life.

The third I held was the first I used. I was with Rebecca and her father, deep in the woods of Vermont when she was staying with me in the heap. I shot at a beer can until my hands went numb. And I loved her the whole time; the car accidents and barbiturates, the way she got wasted, knocked her teeth into her lap and told me I loved her too muchwhat was all that? What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. I have mine in an enormous envelope two feet behind me. My name looks good in gangster font.

It makes me want to alight on the thigh of my beloved like a moth because I know all careful grief comes out from behind the thigh and makes a fist at the grey sky above Brooklyn. The destroyed continue into the snow-filled future, shoveling. And love is either perpetually filthy or intermittently lewd. Im sweeping the entire apartment because its mine forever. And thats valid, too: domestic eroticisms. The way he gets up out of bed before you and puts on clothes and cant find his keys.

All of it, without parents, without children, without roommates. It feels good to get something back. And the whole feels detrimental and complicated and forever stimulating. Which is why we liveand why we send out balloons into the atmosphere with notes tied to them that say Nothing bad can touch this life I havent already imagined. The air was like a bullet made out of silk I saw him at the curb on old upholstery saw him with his counted-thread-point and tent-stitch, bent over an embroidery hoop the trees lifted their drunk limbs and leaves while the evening looked through a succession of windows into other peoples rooms the evening was a powerful gun the evening had an Uzi broad evening in a neighborhood full of translucent teens sucking on one anothers backpacks filling up the trains with their heat their intelligence pouring out into the street, sobbing I saw the devil with his sewing threads making something special for me and it wasnt thunder it was perfect clouds I saw the devil with his stitching techniques textiles and shadow saw his hands that never stopped the clean amp of his forehead tight intervals of flowers in his teeth bright as an earing in the drain and I made a force field with the wilderness in my face and a fortune-tellers neon sign that glowed a painted light onto the street and I said his name and his crimes three times against a curse and found a coin on the ground and read the tiny date and blessed a bag of weed and a wild bore I left my bones and my scars and went out like a poltergeist totally empty Even in a window box we fit even in the dogs collapsed grave even in the wreck and everyday therere more and more memorable Hamlets within us football season is almost here so even we might make it through the air I thought we fit well in the bottle from the wine club even if I wasnt happy with the grape I was thinking more of the bruise on Jupiter and the Christmas lights that appeared in the densely populated regions of space Ill probably never leave this planet even if I actually get a postcard from 2050 like we fantasized about it wont matter well still be yanking the rope and mowing the lawn walking out to the field to toss plastic sporting goods around I almost understand the moons extremely slight axial tilt to the ecliptic plane but certainly not the collapse of Lehman Brothers though both would illuminate the limits of this earth lending and trading our bodies in the darkest rooms of Brooklyn not speaking necessarily about economy coming to its knees but seeing that it does and seeing the moon once in a while at its best every time shocked and even mewith my terrible health and declined industries am looking up When I blew smoke rings they were blindsided geese in the air, they were ships docking at my face. At night I heard the mice screwing in the walls.

Heard them stop, heave into one another, flail back onto the pink spun insulation and I heard their terrible dreams begin. When I shaved my legs it was the sound of dogs barking. Not the low, consistent bark but the shrill ones that rise and fall in intensity. My eyes made the sound of a date being set, of a photograph being taped to the wall. When we kissed it was whiskey with ice when we kissed it was two swordfish, vaulting when we kissed it was hay being torn off the bail by a mouth when you went to the dip of my neck, it was the sound of a fur coat being buttoned In the rain I heard each drop crossing the immaculate bridge of your nose. Your penis lifted like a crane lifting a piano to the top floor.

In storms I could hear earth. From across two states I could hear my mom reentering the atmosphere, a demigod in her purse. I could hear her sadness converting itself to pure energy. I could hear her crushing a carpenter ant with her thumb. I could hear her hearing the cheese and whey factory hum. I looked and I saw my body sunning by a river and the river was the sound of a circumstance of blossoms and the bees that covered them were barefoot women on wet concrete.

Today I flew over the Midwest filling out a questionnaire on the emotional life of the brain and personal capacity for resilience against despair. I was making a sculpture of my limbic systems in a huge conceptual neurosis. Under the simulated middleclass environment of the fuselage the snow was falling. And in everyones skulls complex rgimes went on and on and on. I seek forever the right way to know this. That there are bridges not built in me.

That there are areas that do not light up You are at a party having a conversation with an interesting stranger. You are in a restaurant and the service is bad. You have experienced profound grief how do you react to this? Down on the ground your family writhes. Down on the ground you are surrounded at Starbucks with a terrible glow. And you have seen someone you love, with a colossal complex vehemence, die. And it is pinned under glass in perfect condition.

It is wrapped around you like old fur. Youve looked at the sky until your eyes touched zodiacal fantasiesright there in the void. You know this. That the body lays down while the mind bloats on intellectual chaos. And you have just eaten a bag of cinnamon-flavored chips and assessed that if you met a wonderful new person who ran from you in horror you would fill their space with calculated desolation. Thus, you are waking up having traveled through time.