Shoes

I was speechless. That never happens. I should have taken off my shoes but was so conscious of the time and of my leaving. With intention I memorized the pattern of flecks in each iris. With intention I wondered what would happen now and which outcome to even prefer. In some future I may sell Viagra while she assembles collage. I may be somewhere wanting while she is somewhere wanting. I may be just an anecdote while she is just an anecdote. The flecks are in gold and hazel like the chiseled lids of canopic jars and if I could reorient myself within her I would see the secrets they still keep. I should have taken a picture. I should have taken a thousand pictures and reassembled the room like David Hockney the better to pick furiously at these same knots and get nowhere.

...

Fuck that, that's not the truth. That's not the whole of it. That's caution and artifice and sensible boundaries.

Truth is when you look at me I spill lillies from my throat.

I started Early

Emily Dickinson never saw the sea.

I made a joke at her expense yesterday and I feel badly about it. I feel badly about certain other things, as well.




Young love is such a fragile thing,
It is itself uncertain how best to thrive -
When the thrust of mandate finds the time is fit
That you depart and in your place these words survive.

“April is the cruelest month,” he said,
Eliot and I at the okay party room.
Expectations sliced as hoods and served in bowls,
I know better now than to eat of it.

Well before I stood and watched,
Put your drinks up, Sumo, I never would have guessed it.
I guess the change in my pocket wasn’t enough and I’m like
I can’t even write this.

Well before we lay together on a couch,
Lacing fingers gently pressing lips against your hairline.
It’s darker than I would have expected and I kiss again -
I am still on that couch and where are you the rest is nothing.

“I started Early – Took my Dog –“
I did, too, and it was so much harder than I wanted.
Now is not the time for this she’s not the one
How did you get in here you’re hogging the blankets.

Spring Break

It's like that.

Magic Spells

“Don’t worry, dear Pamela. I’ll do my scientific best to command your fleet.”

Let’s talk.

What we have here is, perhaps, a complex spatial relations issue. Consider the position of each. Consider the duration of each position of each. Consider the relative distance between any two points as a function of that duration. Let us narrow our focus to those sets that include two or more points sustaining a relatable distance from one another for a period of, say, a year. Five years. Ten years.

My question is: what is it that determines the continuity of these relationships?

I’ve never been able to figure this out. There were people with whom I had a deep and legitimate intimacy. This is not code for sex; I’m trying to be truthful. There were people with whom I exchanged revealing detail and sang and screamed and grew. Made things and went places and shared formative experiences. Mostly, we parted ways.

Sure, sometimes there are simple reasons. Someone moves away. Someone else becomes a dick. I become a dick. Other times, though, it’s hard to remember what precisely caused those two points to separate. There is always a story you could relate if called upon to do so, but that’s just the nature of narrative. If you examine such explanations carefully and honestly you’ll find that they usually wither. Like any story you relate in order to make sense of yourself and your past it is reductive, perspectival, and, in some sense, comforting.

For a long time I pinned this all on Quality. That there was some system of evaluation at work, sorting people into piles. This is not true. At other times, I would imagine that there was some emotional threshold beyond which a real connection was established. Again, not true. There are just too many counterexamples – people who had real worth and with whom I formed real bonds and these people are gone.

It is also not the case that this is a matter of insufficient attention. There were relationships I hated to lose, struggled to resuscitate, that failed all the same. There were relationships I just no longer cared about where the other participant tried and tried to no avail. At this point, the easy answer is that people develop and change and sometimes grow apart. I don’t believe that. I’ve walked away from others after experiencing no particular change. I’ve been walked away from similarly. There is something much more subtle happening, some kind of incongruity between a thing and our internal model of that thing. Fantasy, I guess.

A lie, basically.

All this said, the issue has only been deferred. There is some mysterious factor, be it an attribute or a relationship between attributes, that allows the normally fluid system of social interaction to change state. I’m talking in circles and have no particular insight to offer.

I choose to classify this as Navigation.

With my charts, sextant, and astrolabe, I must relocate this vessel from berth to berth. The process is then begun again. The Great Sea is filled with traces of our passage. Each voyage has been carefully recorded, and viewed together describe a pattern so intricate and so beautiful that you will recognize it truly. It will touch you in a way that you have never been touched and likely never will be again.

Keep on the Borderlands

In this series we will assemble a vast and terrible mythology. It will take a very long time.



I.

The foundation, to begin, was uncertain. Timber and hastily quarried granite formed intercessional vaultings of repeated post and lintel design. Depressions were shorn up with shim and mud plaster in generous amalgam. The various basement recesses held still incidents of original flaws in both workmanship and enthusiasm. These competed with newer, buttressed descendents and galvanized cinctures in necessary metal. The soil was dark. As testament to the great pockets of water, gone now, that once riddled this underworld, moisture crept into joist and connective tissue. A solemn permanence held board to board and stone to stone.

The cadence of support was revisited through root systems. Greedy fingers blindly tunneling for superior position; proof that the surface was near. In the center, though, in the geometric center of these puzzled halls there were no such intrusions. Here was a different type of earth, alluvial deposit descended from some forgotten waterway. The roots that cracked these walls were different. Above this place was something wholly other.

The something had ascended through these subterranea. There was no clear delineation between built and hewn, grown and ground. There was no method by which to index one thing from another thing or to separate accident from purpose. It was simply clearer somehow, here in the center, that there was something up there, vast and portentous. A weight. A very great weight.

Strangers on a Train

Is that okay with you?

We were standing on the platform so long

We were on the train

We were

We

I’m skipping ahead

She said

Emerging onto a platform at last

Emerging somewhere sunken

I like walking arm in arm, you’ll find that out about me

Finding that out

Then the part with the people

Weird that Derick just assumed that we were husband and wife

Husband how do you feel about that

He asked

So I want to ask you a very direct question is that okay

Just think of all the things I’ll have to tell you

For being amazing tonight

Mostly cause you were there

From the Egg

Along a sandy shoulder,
a field trip gathering stones.
We dozen children, collared shirts.
I found one unlike the others, felt its real heft.
Battleship gray with crevices worn smooth,
some unimaginable thing might be birthed and slither forth.
Hurried forward, drew it from my bag
“It’s slag,” he said, “it’s a piece of slag.”

Africa, to start with,
are you still the dark continent?
Riotous living, too much living
The cradle, as they say,
featuring sound and color I will never know.
A man from this company went upriver and stayed there.
Chart your boundaries and unspool wire
Vile and virus and gunfire.

No room will ever
compare to the first room.
Membranous curtain, united pulses
Before the tipping point, before abstraction ruins everything.
First exploration as a spasm,
beak or feather against the porcelain barrier.
Nourishing some inner seed
The urgency of real need.

Waiting in the hallway,
squinting into photographs
Skull expansion, subsequent migrations
Muddled thinking, struggling to remember the sequence.
It’s best to record each detail,
the tips of your fingers along a pantleg.
All of this is familiar to you
It is written on your body.

A Genre

I would like to suggest a new specialization of verse. I am speaking of the love letter, a traditionally staid and rather uninteresting form for which I believe I have developed an unusual facility.

Looking through old documents, it's astounding how many of these I've written. Reams. They run the gamut from youthful and embarrassing to poignant and textured. Mostly embarrassing. More than anything else I've written, though, these seem to clearly delineate the evolution of my voice.

There's also a fascination to be had looking at the wreckage of your past. Like poking your tongue into a sore tooth, or rather breaching the stale sanctity of some lost tomb and knowing that it was you who were buried here.

When I bring one of these up from the seafloor I will change the name to Elizabeth and edit out identifying features.

Here goes:

The car stands fixed as Route 322, punctuated by both rain and the Commodore Barry Bridge, solidifies from an arching, gray planetarium. A foreign and tender softness. A gray of plumped moth bodies and the underside of garage doors heavy with age and lousy with unhatched eggsacks. A firmament of gray which undoubtedly marks entrance to the Guf and a return to unspoken places of our most sacred and solemn common memory. This sky is heavy. This sky is pregnant with water and with nostalgia.

I am here and in this car I am racing. I am a body and a mind which is individual. It's an important assertion and one I should make often.

I am cataloging the immediate history of my heart and thereby that of mankind generally. There are decisions to be made. It's been the same decisions each time. The choices made seem brave and deeply felt, but everyone ends up at home disappointed and hungry.

The cycle is starting anew and I am flush with potential. The springtime pantheon - championed by Hope herself - again enthroned on high. My limbs heal; pace quickens; thoughts become whole and deliciously melodious.

There's so much I want to tell you. How your grace and your smile were a beacon - an unfurled spinneret leading out of the labyrinth. How the rhythm of our laughter these past weeks coaxed blood back to a drowned heart and twisted fingers. For a solid moment my vision was unblurred and your walls unmanned and I stood within your kingdom. I knew you.

The lives we lead are stunted and hunchback. The pleasures still found desperate and drunken. Surrounded daily with examples of the worst of love, sick and dysfunctional. Chambered hearts like furious angels sobbing and clawing in ritual lust and ritual abandonment.

The place where we work is a thing of poisons. Its walls may as well be wreathed in gnashing teeth. Its corners choked with fiercest, jagged vines and fragmented bone. It is a temple built to disappointment and futility. We are obedient to the pulse of this hive. In the absence of any other guiding force we are shunted through its piping and waterways to rest when the flow rests and move when it moves. To bump into one another. To mumble the daily litanies and continue hollow, beaten, and unfulfilled.

You are wondering, of course, why I'm telling you these things. This earnest but monstrous tirade which I find in turns sincere and frightening. I've seen you glide about in the periphery of my vision for a very long time with little concern. Graceful movement, haunted expressions, a laughter rare but intoxicating. With your hair up immaculate as a chesspiece and wearing furrows in the floor to follow the same path day in and day out. A white queen on the field. This queen and I, when alone and moved by liquors, are now grand friends. There are tea parties and tinkling laughter; strolls arm in arm on the promenade. Enveloped in night's secrecy and separated from the mad pulse we put our heads together and whisper secrets.

Sorrow clings about your person like a gown. I could smell this from the moment we met. Sense the furrows and rivulets traced in eyes sunken - totally at odds with smiles and speech and gesturing hands. Eyes clouded by broken promises. The eyes of a soul alone. It is this which struck me so deeply, just as it is this which gives me reason to analyze your cruelties.

I sensed at [location] a way out, a hook in the sky. If it turned out true or if it turned out idle fancy I could follow the light and be saved again. I knew that this hook would support my weight even if it was itself supported by nothing. A bit of smoke, a bit of music, and an ardent wishing - all that beauty is ever really birthed from.

Ah, if only you could have known me in years past. I was a thing of fire. My face a tempest of intensity in vision and passionate combat. I did all the wrong things, but dear god how I meant them! In tiny stages of complacency and compromise do great things end. What you know and see of me is a husk. The abandoned summer carapace clinging to an oak branch. An armless statue. A wet letter.

The culminating note I am approaching here is one of thanks. I wish to thank you. You are a reader, and so I must assume that behind closed doors you take words into yourself and you feel them. The day's defenses are relaxed and a more primitive and vulnerable hand turns pages and makes adjustment. In this way, then, do I visit you. Dust and offal has lain upon the belts and driveshafts. Animals took refuge in the rafters and October winds blew dead leaves in lazy spirals about the interior.

No longer. I can hear the purr and whistle as birds take flight rotors test their integrity.

The heart is sometimes shut in a large box, locked, and buried in the earth. Such things are imagined to be for safety, but are in truth merely acts of demented sacrifice to that very earth.

A lazy heart surrounded by a flock of cats; a desperation of cats. To stay in rooms with some kind of shepherd. Crook driven through the reverse and emerging somewhere near the navel. Not an ear to receive a tenth of your thoughts and dreams if you'd even share them.

Make no mistake, this is not something I am asking of you. It is something you have already done. I am reminded of what it is to have your chest tighten at the sight of a face. Why men build and birds sing. Perhaps in this way we will always communicate. Trading stout notes from miles distant, subtle jokes and suggested movies and necessary pep talks. The things that define humility and worth.

Elizabeth, we grow older. Nothing is predictable. Life is a succession of moments and it is in these moments that we shape ourselves. I hand you these papers with pride, with the knowledge that I may look back from the perch of forever and know that I met love with thankfulness and honesty. Should these words resonate within you and seal an alliance forever more, then such an act is to be admired. But if, instead, it causes irreparable collapse...then maybe such an act is to be revered.

The car is still now. From a little closed patio I can see it peek above the fencing like a snail shell. Smell the ocean, face tightened by the sun.

Mission Statement

In this series we will consider particular artifacts.

Once, many years ago, a psych professor tasked our class with creating personal mission statements. It was a dark time for the rebellion. I did not sleep. I did not speak. I found myself in a parking lot, an hour to kill, waiting in the fading light and considered this assignment.

What if I answered sincerely?

The coping strategy I chiefly employed was silence. It's easiest to just not draw any attention to yourself. When you are unremarkable no one asks any questions. They expect less. I would liken this to avoiding eye contact - when you are not being actively perceived you are functionally invisible. It allows the hidden to believe that they have deferred judgment; that this is not yet real. Because I wasn't ready.

The difficulty is, of course, that as the gap between your thoughts and behavior widens, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate. True intimacy becomes impossible. The lack of intimacy increases feelings of alienation which lead to further withdraw. It whirs like a turbine.

I wondered if I could actually express myself, even in so petty and fleeting a medium as this assignment. With a notebook propped on my knee and squinting in the halflight, this is what I wrote. This was my mission statement:

I will endeavor to unite the disparate aspects of my personality into a defined and objective whole. Through this unification I seek to solidify an identity that can be displayed, tended, and understood. I will better my relationships with those I hold dear by behaving in a way which is constant and reflective of my internal dialogue.

I will endeavor to make peace with my past before bitterness and regret poison the things I value completely.

I will endeavor to distill the composition of beauty in the hopes that it will no longer hold power over me.

I will endeavor to discover whether having no convictions is a weakness or a strength. I hope to see if there is room for compromise between the fluidity of intelligence and the rigidity – and comfort – of belief.

I will endeavor to find a field which I enjoy and which fits the particulars of my talents and shortcomings.

I will endeavor to sleep adequately every night, preventing the shamanistic horrors of sleep deprivation from compounding other, unavoidable difficulties.

I will endeavor to finally begin the process of writing. It is necessary, at the very least, to create one book. This will serve to flush my system, begin my unification, and validate the tenets that underlie my reason.