I entered and stood in the foyer and dropped my pants. I started a fire on a couch and choked it with a bed cover. The room was like a vein in an arm. The harsh white afternoon sun demanded to be seen.
The owner of the house a tall red headed woman asked me to leave.
She avoided eye contact. it looked like she had a half smile but it could have been
a tense mouth. She pointed her closed hand to the door.
I said I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
I know she said.
I wanted to apologize to the red headed woman I called Susan. I felt that she
looked like her name would be Susan. I thought that I may have known a woman
like her but with a different name who I thought should have had the name Susan.
I had never known a Susan and I would have liked to have known one. I was very excited by the chance encounter with the red headed Susan. I had high hopes for a love connection. I was very upset when I grappled with my penis
and I was met by an obtuse man with hairy ape arms and honest blue eyes. I held him down while Susan tied his hands with his shoe laces. I thought I had broken his right wrist.
I’m sorry, I said
Is your name Susan,I said.
No my name is R.
Please don’t hate me, I said.
Are you going to sodomize me, the man with the blue eyes said.
Of course, I said.

R was a tepid sadist. Her gaze was a horror movie set on mute. She liked to inflict pain.I wanted R to talk to me when she didn’t have anything to say. I wanted to feel the slowness of her mind.

R and I met for lunch. She met my gaze when I greeted her and avoided it when
she talked about her youth in Philadelphia. She likened a west coast conceptualist to Kafka because he kept a diary and wrote a memoir about nothing. R wanted a woman who looked like the clean cut boys in a Minor White photograph. She said it had been awhile since she had pussy. It was obscene.

I saw a room I hadn’t seen, the door was ajar. It was a room that had been shut over the year that I saw R. It was peopled with brown leather furniture. I was happy to have seen it. It was another side of R I hadn’t seen. I stood naked with a towel wrapped around my waist looking as I scrutinized family photographs.
I don’t want to be in a room with someone I don’t have a history with when I’m
sixty, I said.

R dreaded aging. She had been thinking about death every day since she was ten.
I became aware of death when at five my father hit a rabbit with his red Citroen. He
cooked it with vegetables and we ate it.

I thought of the German poet I had been reading to understand two other suicidal German poets. He used a footbridge and the Alps to cross the void.