Where X Marks the Spot
Not long after you had told me, gently,
that you still grieved for your last love,
though that had ended almost a year before,
and that you could have no intimate relationship
with me, maybe not with anyone for a time,
I stopped my fork in the air with whatever hung
on the end of it that I was eating.
My throat wouldn't swallow.
I felt weak and sick, as if it were myself
that I devoured, piece by piece, as you talked away
the hopes that I had put in your lovely face.
It was the old story coming true for me once more,
though you were hardly mine. . . .
When we finished I walked you back to your car;
I don't remember having much to say.
Why would I? Buildings drifted by,
and cars, and faces. Then we arrived at the place
where, afterwards, I would never see you again,
at a parking lot near Times Square.
There I marked the sidewalk with X's
visible only to me: "At this place
I was lost again," they'd say to me
when I walked there in the future.
"Dig here and find what's left of me,
or what I left behind, where X marks the spot."
I felt like the death's-head and crossed bones
that surmount the treasure chest.
I only felt a little like gold coins and jewels.
I have signed the City with these sphinxes
—in parks, in streets, in bedrooms,
in my own apartments. And there we stood,
you and I, hemmed in by the stitches of X's
that could not hold you to me. But X's
mean kisses, I realized, as well as
what is lost: all the kisses I couldn't give you
chalked like symbols on the sidewalk.
After all, you yourself had been marked
by loss, even in your laughter that afternoon
at the show I had taken you to. Bright-eyed
and smiling in the seat beside me, you
stole my glances with your dark, dark eyes
and your long hair. I thought that I had not been
this happy in a long time with a woman
and was ready to become even more happy,
ready to do anything that you wanted
in order to please you, to see that smile come up,
not knowing what you were soon to say to me
as we dined. And when you spoke,
I felt life fall away from me. Again I felt
that I would never be happy. I felt the words
that I had wanted to say to you leaving me, rushing
out of my chest like dead air, until I had no more words
to say. I seemed to cut and swallow my food
as if it were me myself that stuck in pieces
on the end of the fork I had raised to my mouth.
Had I been chewing on my own flesh?
Self-Pity the Devourer took me by the hand
that held the fork, and once again I feasted
on all that was dark and hopeless in myself,
in lieu of all that was beautiful, desirable,
and unattainable in you. And then
I stood beside you in the lot where you
had parked your car, with the X's buzzing
in the air, sticking themselves to you
and me and the blacktop and the cars.
When you reached out to embrace me, I
moved to embrace you in return—and then came
the part that I don't want to remember,
the part I hate: I caught a glimpse of your
face as we put our arms around each other,
and your face said everything to me about
how you had wasted the afternoon, how eager
you were to speed away in your car, a mixture
of disgust and relief that the thing would soon
be over, that I would be crossed out forever
from your life—and everything that I hated
about myself, my stupid chin, my ugly nose,
my hopeless balded head, my stuck-out ears,
my wreck of a heart, crashed over me,
spinning me into the vortex of a palpable self-hate
that I have only ever let myself feel
a little bit at a time, though it is always there
Copyright Credit: Bill Zavatsky, "Where X Marks the Spot" from Where X Marks the Spot. Copyright © 2006 by Bill Zavatsky. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.