Beckoning

Necessity need not beckon. Beckoning assumes scope for choice. I am beckoned at – I can ignore the beckoning or allow myself to be drawn to the one who beckons. However, if the beckoner does not actually stand at a distance and beckon, but instead approaches me directly – allowing me no escape – then things are different. Better in this instance to conceive an erotics or an etiquette of necessity. Scrupulously polite and reticent, but always desirous, necessity makes a show of beckoning when it actually imposes itself. Arriving in a split second – in a darkness that cannot be countenanced – it is an intimate breath from afar. The stench of an ancient cloak. Necessity strides along with a spritely step and an invisible laughter. I can only follow. I would inevitably follow if such a grim figure were to appear, but instead we have only this. The table spreads out before me tonight like a graveyard, like the clucking of geese, like the temptation to sleep.