A Tracing of Shadows: Prose Poem
What do we know of hearts?
She left a suicide note the next morning.
Both booted out from the life we’d been living but I had the place, a place you could rest that wasn’t the concrete, just hanging under a bridge — I don’t know this darkness — well, not then, confronted by this decision —
Wasn’t I helping? In the Fishbowl at UW, taking in the smoke and energy of coffee between courses — you bring your pad too, drawing while I scream into the perplexity of this constantly single existence —
And you’re way young to be smoking— back and forth between your mother’s place, I don’t even know if you mentioned your father — ever —
Feeling strange and magnetized, though, by the life you’re going through — couldn’t really express wanting it, didn’t want it — my own sheltered darkness, leaning forwards, trying to trace the shadow of eyes and mouth and a heart — shrieking Neruda into the empty bowl: arranco de mi corazon al capitan del infierno—
And what do we know of hearts? — when you change your position, the shadow does too — no longer able to capture what we saw, nothing has gone into still-life—when I went to bed you were on the couch, in the morning you were not — she left a suicide note…and a story with pictures, brutal — and now?
What now, B.? — hope you made it out.
J.D. Harms 2021
*Line from “Caballos de los Sueno.”
“The Fishbowl” was the name the students affectionately gave to the glass enclosed room at the university I attended in the early 2000’s.
