from Curtis Bauer:

There's a flower bloom leaning in the wind, as if peeking a view into the studio on one side, piles of books and papers from a box sent from Spain a year ago that finally arrived, double-boxed and torn, blemishing the table top around me, bikes against the wall, the old Signal fan on top of a shelf, silent and peering at me, and behind it tree branches lounging over the fence top, massaging it or gesturing that I should go out.

I've just come back from a walk across town for the Times, from my new presence in this place that I have called home before, will call home again though now it seems foreign because of its lack of habitants, though it is inhabited, its grackle cackle, Bluejay screech, squirrel grungle--I know it's not a word, but I'm thinking it's closer to what the squirrel sounds like than any other word I know-- I've forgotten I've heard before. Habitation, orientation. I tell myself crossing 19th Street to look at these places, weigh them, sense them. I'm dizzy and wobbly, as if hung over or because i'm not wearing my glasses--could be logical conclusions--but I think it's my body's response to being here, in Texas, suddenly, in summer, in heat, in a life I left in December beside people who think I am that same person, and I am starting to have an argument with myself about how cheesy this sounds, cliche...the man who went away and came back, changed. 

"Was it dangerous where you were?" someone asked at the party I went to last night, making conversation, being kind, not knowing how to talk to me, I suppose, and I said yes, because it was, but thought I should have said no because he didn't deserve a response to such a stupid question. I talked, or maybe the word is jabbered, and was conscious of being at the center, at being pale in my shorts and short sleeve shirt, feeling like one of those middle-aged college professors I studied with once and was both thrilled and slightly uncomfortable to see in the summer in the park with his family, or mowing his lawn, who wasn't aware or didn't care how his life has changed, how he is pale from so many hours inside, pudgy from sitting...and I was happy to join Dennis when he interrupted and asked if I'd join him for a smoke outside, said, as he put a cigarette between his lips, "I want to hear everything, from beginning to end. Don't hold back." We couldn't get out the door, like to aliens in front of some new technology, turning the handle, flipping knobs, pushing against the door, and then we could, and he smoked and I talked, felt the mosquitos biting me, was aware of the bites and Dennis was, too, and we talked about driving, about drugs and crime and me chewing coca, about the disappeared, the disappeared everywhere, and how in English it's so easy to use that word as noun, verb, adjective. 

Slow like the realization that a quick wind has whisked away the mosquitoes, or sudden like the surprise of the first explosion of fireworks, I can't recall now how the party moved outside, but Dennis knew that I couldn't keep this up, and I apologized for talking so much, said I haven't been around a lot of people for a while and he nodded, said he wouldn't forget where I left off, that he'd invite himself over for a meal, and I stood, saw the angels against the fence and suddenly missed my friends everywhere, took a picture as I passed by like I've been doing for months on my walks, wanting this moment to be placed inside the heading anywhere, any country, or America, wanting to hold it in some kind of memory, which these words are and have been.