Argument for Tenderness
If there’s a difference between watching the hawk circle and understanding hunger, I haven’t found it yet, though I’ve been looking—the way one looks for a word in another language that doesn’t quite translate, that means both longing and distance and the space between two boats when the rope has just gone slack. You’re sleeping. Your hand opens and closes on the sheet like something underwater, deciding about surface, about breath. I could wake you, but then what? The morning has already made its pale argument across the floor, each shadow a kind of punctuation I’m still learning to read. Yesterday, or was it longer, you said the problem with devotion is that it looks too much like surveillance, but isn’t that true of all attention—how it makes the watched thing both more and less itself? The way the deer at the field’s edge becomes the deer at the field’s edge the moment we see it, freezes into symbol, into everything we need it to mean about wildness, about fear. Though maybe the deer is just hungry. Maybe everything is simpler than we allow: the hawk circles because the air holds it, you sleep because the body demands it, I watch because watching is what I have instead of certainty, which was never mine to begin with, was only ever another word for the particular way light falls between two people who’ve agreed to the beautiful impossibility of knowing each other, which is to say: who’ve agreed to love.