4. Excursion

i think i saw a sign for Barstow...
by the by, why are we going out this far?
oh, yes, i remember now, it was purely an act of spontaneity.
you always said that i needed to be more amorphous of thought,
and yet i'm a terrible chess player. my thoughts, you said,
though organized, are not forward looking.

1. Rift

anyway, this winnowing was the scattering of
our minds, of some intangible form of mental mass.
gravitational, inertial, it makes no difference,
since the difference is only theoretical anyway.

6.

in one month, the first since
last we spoke,
i made more friends than
the year previous.

2. Measurement

i felt the waves crash on the shore of the beach last night.
and i thought i heard the distance (quantified, spelled out in
an exact and finite number) to the point from which we divided. i heard
your presence,
in a dream.

5. Retort

i prefer to hover here, the only one among us
capable of not flying forward,
but you make these names like they were shameful,
like nostalgist is the worst insult you could muster;
like hummingbird is as base a reproach as knuckle dragger.

7. Farewell

but the waves fall on distant shores, now,
perhaps even evoking a smile on your lips,
which, for the life of me, i cannot see.

0. Diversion

in the third year after the scattering,
or the winnowing of our seeds,
subtle levels of intricacy made themselves clearer to me,
like the sudden cognizance of a stereogram,
or a simple vase becoming two faces. you were a kindred spirit,
or at least that's what i convinced myself that you were,
but this is all tangential, the lines of our paths intersecting,
where we met for an instant,
exactly at one point, of the same mind,
but veered off, never to return together again.

3. Playground

skip lightly, now, along the enigmatic grasses
which we once called our thought-stomping grounds,
where we rarely tried to stab one another with quick wit
or bladed tongues in the realms of ethics or philosophy.
but you were always adept at cornering me in my logical inconsistencies,
pummeling me with doublethink, using logic against logic,
repudiating subjective truth while laying claim to it.

Timothy A. Clark
1997