Susana Plotts-Pineda

THE PARTS I MEANT

I made a plan to. I made a plan to examine all this rage. I meant to write from. I wanted to write from the bottom of the street where I am listening and only there, and from the city in soft romantic browns down there with its shining tar, wet stars, boxed grief. I wanted to listen only but the rage kept getting away or in the way. And the gray dancing off the windshields and the cars waiting as if for somebody. But there was no one in this initial plan, or I was nobody, or the dark cars kept waiting as if for some. As if for night when it was only raining in the morning. The shape of it in the garden and its grief, I meant to keep trying to hold on to. Instead of the remainder and what emerges suspended like an O, silver in the clearing or the blank– the rat terrier and her cataracts, a shallow pit, a tin mug, or an endless fight. Or I meant, and that I promise, but have nothing much to hold for. A black welt of a shape, as if a woman, and her hair, pass through the street, its brown facades, its rain, its lack of  depth. And if this woman is me, I don’t know. I meant to be her in the plan. In the plan there was some other way but this is what I meant at least. To not always have something to say but to have something to give. At least to listen, if to listen is to give. And I kept asking what is the part that loves when I kept trying to. Forgetting all the parts. Emerging from the backroom like a smear, the speaking not quite right, my light too big or forced or half drawn on, a crystal grove above, the lids batting like Adela’s dewy, black-winged moths. Her fear of them. And the sheet that covers the sleeper in the dream while the moths kissed away the lids. I am the lids, or the emblem, or the silver, batting away my embers here and your life there, forgetting I mean. The plan. The parts I meant to save, collect, or share.