On days that suffer,

my true stature is about two and a half feet tall,

and I say “I” as a grammatical necessity since someone

must say:  the condition of suffering

has no “I”, anymore than pain has a body but is the

situation

of days that suffer. On such days,

I am only an inch and a half taller than most, like

these two figures,

both women because shrouded

in horse and human hair.

The hair looks like a dress,

even though it falls

on the floor behind them and goes on for several rivers

of unraveling braids, loosed meadows of manes.

They could almost be brides trailing trains

except that they are wearing hair, and I say ‘their’

hair as a grammatical necessity

because it appears to be growing

out of their figures, but, in fact, they wear

tresses harvested from many heads, until they are only the

historical condition

of hair. Figures of wax cast statuary,

they each have no face

to look with

or to be looked into. One to the wall;

the other a foot away, so self-absorbed

the face becomes an interior wall…

We too are made of wax,

we have no face with which

to look into

what is scissored from the suffering

of many horses, many human heads,

that we bear, dragging along:

the situation of suffering is

also the situation moving

surely  to the wall, and also the wall itself.

Like us, they appear unaware

of one another,

though their hair meets in the middle of the floor,

the almost black river of one entangled, entwining,

with the chestnut colored river of the other,

and if the tips touch, the coils entwine,

it seems by accident. Unaware that they

touch, they are oddly one,

oblivious to the hair that they wear like a single dress, that follows

behind them like one bride trailing one train, one stress,

one tress, one wax face, scissored apart,

moving through a world made of things. Perhaps

this is how we are, in our suffering, moving slowly to that wall

where there is no I and no one to say you,

where this is how we meet, on days that suffer.