Veil

The old brutalist towers on Bloor St. made you nostalgic for your childhood.
The slabs of concrete were a comfort, gave you the illusion of inviolability.

Last night, we stood outside the theater, still under the spell of A. She talked about manufactured insecurity and vulnerability to authoritarian rule. About flushes of feeling and the weirdness of Agnes Varda.

I wanted to go home with you but I had to hurry back to my mother and change her briefs. I sat at her bedside, reminded her of my name. Read the news aloud.

The cops are storming the student encampments, I told her. The cops are doing what they are told, she said.

Once upon a time, it was best to walk backward and keep your eyes on potential predators. But now they come at you head on, brandishing their invisible weapons.

S. tells me, If I was a snake I could locate X. by heat alone. I could store up my venom and steal all the serum from his medicine cabinet.

You said, an unbroken heart and a heart too broken will both turn to stone.

And like a story without a gap, a house without a door is no good to anyone.

Find a place to let me in, let me roam around the fleshy rooms. Let me make my repairs.

The ivy has entered the building. It crawls along the corridors. Its roots ruin the foundation. Eventually, everything will go this way, give in to the laws of entropy.

Crumble into the earth’s giant maw.

There is mystery in folk music, the voices of ancestors and ancient flora. There is the mystery of fingers that touch my body from the inside and play me like an accordion all night.

I don’t know whose hands the fingers belong to or how they got in.

My mother crosses the veil and returns days later, her eyebrows raised in a permanent look of shock. She wants to tell me what she saw on the other side, what she cannot unsee, but she has already forgotten.