Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page B

witness: blind sun, blind me, blond bones, bleeding hills—put thistles and mud on the wounds, roll in the dust like a coydog, scream into those anthills, run fast without looking, close those eyes, shut those curtains, high sun, high strung, big snakes in the road, big desert, big sky, clouds zoom by …
    ten . I walk this hallway twenty-seven times and all I can see are the cool white walls. A hand rubbing slowly across a face, but my hands are empty. Walking back and forth from room to room trailing bluish shadows I feel weak: something emotional and wild forming a crazy knot in the deep part of my stomach. On the next trip from the front of the apartment to the back, I end up in the kitchen, turn once again and suddenly sink down to the floor in a crouching position against the wall and side of the stove in a blaze of wintery sunlight. It’s blinding me as my fingers trace small circles through the hair on the sides of my temples, and I’ve had little sleep having woken up a number of times slightly shocked at the sense of another guy’s warm skin and my hands, independent of me in sleep, were tracing the lines of his arms and belly and hips and side. How the world is so much like dream sleep with my glasses hidden somewhere along the windowsill above the bed; there’s a slow stir of measured breath from next to me and through the 6:00 a.m. windowpanes I see what appears to be a dim forest of trees in the distance, leafless and shivering, but it’s just some old summer plants in a window box gone to sleep for the season. I think of these trees and how they look like the winter forests of my childhood and how they were always places of refuge: endless hours spent among them creating small myths of myself alone or living in hollowed-out trees or sleeping in nests twenty times larger than crows’ nests made of sticks instead of twigs. I realized then how I always tend to mythologize the people, things, landscapes I love, always wanting them to somehow extend forever through time and motion. It’s a similar sense I have for lovers, wanting somehow to have some degree of permanence in my contact with them but it never really goes that way. So here I am heading out into the cold winds of the canyon streets, walking down and across avenue c toward my home with the smell and taste of him wrapped around my neck and jaw like a scarf. It follows me in and out of restaurants and past cops and early morning children and past bakery windows filled with brides and grooms on rows of wedding cakes and across fields of brick and mortar. Small traces of memory fold and slip back to where he and I are sitting in his place late evening playing games of poker. I had never really played before in my life and suddenly after losing a sock and a shirt I became an expert. We’re laughing about it and I don’t stop for the smaller articles of clothing. I tell him I have to get it while I can, having won my first game and I motion toward his pants and in the evening stillness there’s a slight rustle of clothing. Coins spill freely to the ground and my hands are animated and drifting soundlessly up his calves, up his thighs and he tells me he learned this game years ago with some kid across the street after school in some town outside atlantic city. When their clothes were gone the loser had to suck the other guy’s dick, only they put saran wrap around each other’s dick after all you couldn’t possibly touch your tongue to flesh.
    â€¦ Through his memories I recall hours on end sitting in the weeds in the backyard next to the lawn chair where my uncle lay in shorts and a wedding ring, his body hardened and brown from days of skin diving in faraway oceans filled with the mysterious fish and creatures he described. I stared and stared and sometimes played with his arms for hours and I remember feeling a slight dizziness that years later I came to see first as a curse and then as a tool: a