yellow building

I am leaving tomorrow:
seven am from the door
of the yellow building.

I don’t want to go.
From the yellow building,
from the walk along Blindernveien,
from the snow that gets caught
in my nostrils.

My lover says nothing
about my staying, although
I assume the implications
of silence.

But it shouldn’t matter
and last night I dreamed
the red-haired woman and her child.
I dreamed about fear and things, which
of course, I can’t remember now.

The planet is too big for me
to understand what I am
going back to.

Clusters of semi-frozen water
are flying about the sky,
the air like an office
torn to pieces.

There is a major question
about money here.
       [And I will think on this.]

 And in the quadrangle
- the quiet, fragile one -
there is a triangle of planted
branches which are redder
than her hair.
     [In summer I will not care so much
for it here.]

Am I yearning for someone
to tell me that
they cannot live without me?
To feel the plonk of need established
- a heavy stone dropping into dark water.

What can I not live without?
Sub-zero temperatures and
a large, bright library.
        [I think I cannot live without
his arms that wrap around me
safely and five times, it seems.
But I am wrong.]

Every day I look forward to
the slow, crunching walk,
the space, and the green lamps.
         [When the wind is white,
I am surely euphoric.]

Can I not seek this pleasure in the country
dried out with history, with sun and with
my own remembering climbing the walls?
Is it best when I am far away
from mother and father?
 
And I can’t believe that I will leave
and yet there is
nothing to suggest that I will not
set an alarm,
roll from his arms and her bed,
eat, gather, zip-zippers
and amble with luggage:
Majorstuen/Central Station/Gardermoen
München/Frankfurt/Narita/Tokyo
Sydney/Melbourne/Kensington.

I may well arrive
exhausted and dreadfully confused,
regretting that I didn’t leap.
But 99% of the leap is ours,
For the other percent we are leapt.
And this to date
hasn’t happened yet.

          [Remember, remember – she says to herself –
there are things, so many
things to do.]