Second-Hand

Before us, who sat at this table before? Did a contractor here hand his plans back to an employer? Did a broker here, over the price of some goods, haggle with his customer? Or did a man pluck the white petals of a sprig of longing one by one and toss the petals into the blackness of cold coffee and leave? Behind this round wooden surface - from whose grain rises the smell of the darkness of forests long gone, - who were they, before us? Before us who now - facing each other - are here with a gaze we drew out from among the dark, tangled branches and brought forth, and grafted onto each other's gaze; we who found ourselves in each other. From the pupil of the eye of a boulder - a boulder that perhaps one day was a gravestone, buried beneath a mound of rotting leaves - a spring of drops spills out, drops that found themselves together in one another. A man washes his dusty face in the spring. A girl scrubs the soot from the sides of a pot with the moss and algae beside the spring, swirls the pot in the bright spring and sets off toward her hut with the big chipped vessel of clear water above her head: with a spring amid the tangled forest of her hair ... Here we sit facing each other drinking crystal sips from the cups of each other's hands in the evening hour that together we drew out from the terrified life of the forest and brought forth; in the evening hour that began with your being across from me at a round table whose wobbly legs we have glued with wood glue ... 4/7/1381