.

not caught within the what of he-said-she-said.
nor does it really matter how he might have
placed his arm around my waist (and why).
much simpler just to study prussian shadows
on the snow, to track how long they grow.
their hue. how much longer than my notes
they float. into infinitives that chase
diagonals away. discernments. disappearing
puffs of chimney smoke that lift the sky
into my windowed way. up and up they float.
away from words. while from the other side,
through glass, the wood of my piano shakes
them loose. until they pass through skin.
seeping into fingers. tipping time like
heartbeats do. taptaptapping thought
through notes that shed their thickness
into smooth-and-cold rectangularities.
lines of sound that trip from black to
white and back again.


this morning plays a tune on me and I am strings.
sailing blue across these keys from somewhere
else. words and things become an incoherency.
there, on surfaces that lift and fall, are
sense-events that capture your effect. I play
them for awhile until you finally disappear
into the corners of this empty room. saving
something for another day.


Lewis Carroll's Duchess sits beside me, teasing words
that beg,

"take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves."

but unlike her, Deleuze is tying up my eyes. taunting
smiles. nestled near the keys beside me. shifting weight.
scales running up and down the day while listening to the
creaking bench. there. counting all the blacksandwhites.
lost in wordless thought. a crease upon his brow. he
wears that look, the one that holds B flat against the
eyes a little longer than it sounds. as if to say that
sense does not reside in syntax. is not measured by the
interval between each note, but somehow folds itself
into a fingered blue.


he whispers meaning in my ear. promises. sense unfurls
from his effect. of interactions. bodies. his and mine.
"although not bodily, nor corporeally so", he adds.

"think about it.", he implores. "what makes sense?".

how like him to suggest that these effects are different.
playing words as if they are piano keys. sharp and flat
disruptions. even so, and just to layer some striations
onto smooth, he qualifies expressions. names them,
saying,

"states-of-affairs are a finite set of relations
that things or bodies are found in, at a particular
point in time."

I shake my head. there is no sense in trying to decode him.
instead, I close my eyes and lift my head to let his meaning
wash across the heart of this idea. of course I miss a note
just as his elbows crush dischordant keys. they pound his
slow amusement. whenever bodies interact, there are so
many sideways glances. they produce effects; he names
them too. claims them as "events", saying,

"these don't inhere in the same kind of time as
states-of-affairs. they are not coextensive with themselves.".

I sigh. it is finally clear to me that what he wants
to talk about is time. the time of his expressions.

"time is just a watch..." I say. "a manmade thing."

I prefer to mark the day by shadows on the snow.
but he insists that there are different kinds of time.
the time of states-of-affairs is the time of
"interlocking presents". rectilinear time that
floats into a docking bay. in only one direction.
from past to future. a one-way street with past
and future boundaries praised like signs that
block an omnipresent flow. as if to hold it in.


but he is more interested in the time of an event.
the time of its effect. time without the signs.
expressed in the infinitive. captured by the oh
of it, the unendingness of verbs becoming-mine.


ultimately, he marks these two kinds of time. shoves
the harsh existence of physical-things-and-their-relations
up against the subsistence of incorporeal entities that
slide across surfaces in both directions at once.
the persistence of sense deposited in the mind's eye.
the third eye that flows from jump-cut-stills to mergers.
time is a moving film. how willingly the mind connects
the two into a pastandfuture present, becoming
something new that bridges meaning. that makes up
the movementandduration of time-becoming-sense.
that there is meaning-in-the-gaps.

the oh of it.

"like piano notes and whiffs of smoke that float into a song?",

I ask. he nods. sense equates with these effects.
"a pure event". an intangible space between words
and things. their inbetween-ness spilling into
rectangular particularities. pulsations on the skin.


a note becoming-sky.


so.


somewhere in-between, dripping from within the gap
of words and things, are all my Sunday-ed coalescences.
shaking loose like blackandwhite from blue. and that
is how this morning makes most sense from me to you.