When you get there,
you’ll already be there.
—American Girl,
—American Girl,
Twin peaks: The Return
There, the crackle
of electricity through air
will not have needed
to scare us so much;
our rooms
and our calendars
won’t have finished
with our stories.
You’ll have declared:
though my memory’s
a blank, maybe I did have
a dream last night;
it’s just that maybe I dreamed
of pure uncut time—
the one thing
that all aspiration requires;
or perhaps it was
just an very vivid and precise
dream about what nothing
will have been like:
you and I in free fall,
and everyone not arriving—
but already being there,
with no memory of the days
in between when we weren’t
damned with faint praises,
but exalted by all the universe’s
faintest damnations.
There, the crackle
of electricity through air
will not have needed
to scare us so much;
our rooms
and our calendars
won’t have finished
with our stories.
You’ll have declared:
though my memory’s
a blank, maybe I did have
a dream last night;
it’s just that maybe I dreamed
of pure uncut time—
the one thing
that all aspiration requires;
or perhaps it was
just an very vivid and precise
dream about what nothing
will have been like:
you and I in free fall,
and everyone not arriving—
but already being there,
with no memory of the days
in between when we weren’t
damned with faint praises,
but exalted by all the universe’s
faintest damnations.
