By James Richards
I have listened as carefully as I can, outside Honeymoon Chapel, to all the advice: a bluebird's breath, soft as a spider's filament; a plastic shovel and red bucket in the grass cracking raindrops open to release the click trapped inside each one. I knew it had to go on. Is that what you knew? Look for it, under the letters the way you look under a face card when playing blackjack. The green-felt table tops, stools keeping your feet off the ground, the click of drinks and click of plastic chips. "Can we get out of here," can we get out? The air is smoke, the eyes numb from seeing. "Excuse us sir," will you excuse us? The whole city yawns in my ear and stays there all the way from Vegas to Big COttonwood. Driving asleep and not asleep, we let the day show us its colors: straw, old snow, and tired sky. "Are we there yet?" Winding up the drain of the canyon's sink are we there? Each curve a kink in my side, a question mark carving its way up my spine. At the lodge, the smell of money on my breath, my hands are discovering how to help you come up the stairs -- your white dress -- help you through the door, the threshold. Is that what I'm lifting you for? A voyage into another dimension? Maybe it is. Maybe I can't take a step because I don't dare disturb the universe. "Oh come on, that's so stupid." That's stupid, isn't it? There was a question I asked myself all night as I slept beside you. Now, because I woke up before you, because the room is white and the window is white and your face is white -- I remember what it was. I remember my dear, what the question was. And I can tell by the way your eyes move behind their lids and the way you breathe with your lips parted, that you are asking yourself the same thing.