It is her and the rushing water, those sounds of loss that enter my nightly self-estrangement. Again I am desperate lonely, only at times, and when I speak to Jude there is the temporariness. There was a time when I was involved with my neighbor, a woman I felt I could perhaps erase Jude with, but things fall apart. The giving I had was only momentary and never full, but always I faded with the inconsequentials, with her name always on my breath. On days as now, when I can hear through the wall the laugh of the woman who was not quite and a new lover, I feel again the longing, the emptiness, the desire to recover from her something I don't really want, for reasons I will never be clear on.

Perhaps because Jude will, for now, maybe for the length of this unknown narrative, her story and my life, always be distance. I may always be in a lock of want, stuck underneath the pins of some irrelevant god, with a singular desire that will always be on the other side of the gyre. So I sing of stipulations, lack, revolving shadows.

Jude is a breathing poem. My muse. It is hard to describe the moments of my mind that bring her near me, that provide the comforts of distanceless. She once demonstrated the proper way to peel an orange to an empty room, so the dust could learn of technique and patience. She did not tell me of this, but I can admire the silence.

I have locked myself into absence. I will sit near the snow of days and wonder. Believe in elegance.