Pill

Abstract

94 BRUCE BOND PILL Say you are high all the time save those moments you take a sobriety tablet and so descend the nerves of the heart, thinking straight, they call it, as if the mind were an arrow shot from the eye into the eyes of others, the ones you wronged, the ones you never knew you love or do not love, the black fathoms of their pupils deepening as your eyes close. And sure it hurts, how something dead walks out your sleep, how it goes from blue to red like blood. And yet the stuff keeps calling you in a father’s voice. You loved your father, so it’s more than bitter seeds you swallow. It’s quiet pleasure within the limitations of one life, until the great space of a day gets wider, brighter, as if you were slipping into summer with its giant measures of desire, the way just sitting makes it rise. And yes, with each dose comes the gravity and boredom, the slow crush of August heat, though you are learning to live here, in a town with one good street to speak of, one flock of trees to storm the night. In time you are addicted. And it takes more of the drug to get you back 95 to the world, where morning swallows flit in last night’s rain. In time you tell yourself you are the age you are: the little pains inside your arms, your legs, they are just that: the pinch that says you are not asleep, that the compulsion you feel is the pull of the planet you walk, alone. And the dawn, however deep you breathe, is everyone’s now, everyone’s breath in the sky above you, everyone’s sun aching into layers of mist, spitting fire in the eye, its one black star dissolving, like a pill. ...