Deciphering by Andrew Bertaina
At night, we search for the darkness. We stumble around inside of ourselves. Someone says they can still see the fireflies, and I think, perhaps, I can still see my lover—pale pink lips.
We cannot make sense of what we’ve lost. We keep looking for maps to the places.
In June, we stumble down by the red walls of the canyon. Who made the marks on the walls of our heart?
We cannot interpret the petroglyphs. We have lost our ability to decipher things.
Once, we’d sat in Slovenia, pale light through a scrim of clouds, the Volga in the distance.
You said you wanted me, just once, to love you with the exact fierceness with which you loved me.
The waiter was listening, and I forgot what I was supposed to say.
What are the doorways between two human hearts?
Overhead, a crow was screeching from the pinnacle of a church. I was reading the Gnostics then or maybe it was the transhumanists. Whoever it was, they kept telling me that the body wasn’t real, all was spirit. But I kept having to piss while I was reading, and I had the vague sense that I couldn’t shake the contours of the body.
I thought of saying all this to you in a letter months after we’d parted. But the doorway had closed, so I watched the cloud formations, listened to distant sirens, calling for a life that was not my own in a language I could not understand.
It was a warm November, so we made love, and the light flared in the window and lay across your pale stomach, ridge of rib. This must have been before we’d let things go.
I’ve been carrying on a long term affair with memory.
I think, lately, about thinking, which is the sort of thing I’ve been noticing about myself forever.
But look, I say, to no in particular, save the cat who is gently making biscuits on the snow white quilt.
The snow white quilt in the window.
We’d been making plans since before I’d even met you to hike in the Dolomites. But everyone is always making plans for a future that will never arrive.
On a walk today, I watched a gaggle of mallards fight over bits of bread. This contented me, reminded me of the wild circle of life.
Overhead, a plane was flying through the sky carrying a banner. I tried to read it all afternoon, but the plane just kept circling and circling in the blue cathedral of bright air.
Author's Note:
Lately, I find myself moved by the work of John Ashbery. Oddly, I'm not really always certain what's happening in an Ashbery poem. And yet, there is something in his work that's oddly comforting. It's as though he's managed to distill consciousness in a way that soothes my soul, which is a mark of first rate writing. Here's a link to one of my favorite poems:
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus 2024), the book length essay, Ethan Hawke & Me (Barrelhouse, 2025), and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You (Moon City Press Award Winner 2021). His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and elsewhere
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