That was the summer of rage. Months of swirling inconclusiveness spent dizzy and veering and hushed. It was a swell of days into which my body pushed. Rage, not as a buckling state of frantic and wild living, but leaping into bewilderment and its turns, keeping a lean against its hold. The delirious shout down during a long dive to pools that brim with the surprise of memory and the known folds of future. Draw it as a knot where rage is an activity that courses along the bends, always pushing, always pulling.
The long mess of those days were sketched as a heaving affirmation, one that would writhe within the cracks that cover oneself, and would make an account of living only as a series of affairs that seek to edge past a shadow. And that was a summer spent alone, sometimes, and sometimes not alone. I look now at the paint left by some voices here in this house, rings on my tables and ghost flecks on my couch. And a slow growing water stain on the ceiling in the corner of a room. These are the strands left to pick out now and tuck into a coming autumn. Some strange feet on my floors, steps that pressed sometimes once, sometimes enough to make paths that might still be soon swept over. All of these a rage in its moving parts. Phrased into the mold of skin and the tic of hands dragging through new and lengthening hair.
Rage is always with--it is always with whatever is its lack. It is a relation, and in spite of itself, in its burst and reach for reassurance, it is always only kept in relation. Its reach is a drag through vapor. It is where everything is a remains of possibility. Nothing else but the fleet of its moment, not fear nor regret, only the pine of its activity. Existence. And those were months of wooded quiet.
That was a summer which turned out a joyful rage and all its costs of aches in the morning and slow sips of recovery. Rage does not make you strange to yourself, I think, but it is yourself finding what is already there and strange within. It is a foamy realization and fulfillment of absence. You can clench its taste on your back teeth. And at its end, when the summer calms into the cool, it lets loose the swell. This summer I made kinds of music in hot rooms, drove past the night and drank into the sunrise, wrote passages in the breeze of a porch. I held a familiar fur, and I thought and threw. That was the summer, one which wanted nothing, except, and what did it get, but.
