THE RAW AND THE COOKED | POEMS COMMON PLACE Number. 27 | AUTUMN 2020
These poems were written from late December 2019 through 2020. They appear in the order they were written. Although a few were omitted as I assembled them in their original compendia, and I made some edits, they still adhere to my belief that it's as useful to work out loud as well as to make selections, submit work for publication, etc. It helps me, in any case, to see the poems unfold over time—to look back at that unfolding and think about it. (N.B.: the title is of course borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, although I'm not sure it was original to him.)
THE RAW AND THE COOKED
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Are you activists? We looked at each other, although not really. Out on the streets? No, not for decades. I keep expecting protests like Manila, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Tehran— crowds, water cannons, helmeted police. It was breakfast, Rick and Ann’s, over easy and gluten free, the students away, roads empty when I drove over and drove back. Hudson Yards came up and I amused her, parroting the patois my mother loathed, the suburban, nasal dialect of closer in. Later, I read a friend’s long post desiring the languages held back, a writer wanting grandmothers’ tongues to give her words a truer history, rescue them from neglect. We draw from the same well, East India and its clerks, writing novels on the side. indigenous people protested on the stairs as we listened, smoke and calm speeches delivered sharply, decades of oppression against millennia on their own continent.
Apples partly eaten ring the tree. A waste, but this is how it is. Domesticity eludes these creatures. A fork of some sort, wielded at the branches, led four intact ones to drop. My wife ate them. She uses a wood ladder on the same mission, leaving it standing. A friend’s New Year’s card arrived, her kids standing on posts on a Nantucket beach. On the flipside, they jump off. It prompted thoughts of two as newborns, now older. My friend their mother’s black, lustrous hair and pallor spoke of her Armenian descent. My daughter gave me Charles Olson’s poems. Inside, a penciled dedication says, “To Daddy, 25 on 15 October 1972.” I was 25 that January. Walking with my grandson, the draft came up. It dogged me in college, I told him: Vietnam. I read that revived fear of it crashed the site. In York’s cathedral, foreign wars are named above a wing set crosswise from the nave. “Afghanistan” dates from the 19th century, whereas ours is recent, our dead’s survivors present still, pondering how a distant place could waylay so many for so little purpose.
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All the forbidden words, the line traced from one to the next, some running aground in convents, attics, the parts omitted from portraits except for royalty, hatchets, moons birthing Velasquez’s miracle. Dwarves are at the edge of forbidden, unlike words no one should use, Mercury slipping across a page, enticingly. We want in, we want her spinning, we want our histories to mingle, a world prettier than us from her. The parts portrayed, celebrated.
The way Odysseus encountered the dead, each clamoring for an audience, expression beyond neighboring shades—we find them between our lines in all their spectacular ambiguity, the inner lining of their coats, respectably turned out, most of them, or decked out in other uniforms, hung by the door while in their room colors unfurl, flesh tones first and last of all— these are visible. There’s no dissembling. Use your nib to pick them out, revive them. In the half-light of violation, things look odd. Let us examine each oddity, hobbling to court with dubious crew, carrying evidence with him, it stuck out, yet could take in, a curious detail one would remember. How offers are threats, as they often are when their coats are shed. Use your nib to scratch out, line by line by line. The way Circe made them what they were, rooting for pearls she’d scattered, laughing.
4. Simple language, much emotion figure in Natalia’s oeuvre. It reached me here, an ocean and two land masses distant. To write is all that behooves her, she reports, a point consistent with prose that makes no claim to be more than it is. Ordinary. As the I Ching says, “No blame.” We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry. A big, familiar city is a redoubt compared to exile in a village. The vows made when we marry place us on an unseen ledge. Like a diary, the everyday. Like alleyways we overlook that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm. Looking back, the time it took; how it came anyway, the harm.
6. It bought it all to mind, your anecdote. In those three years, how many drafts I’d read. Life is viscous, fragments that sink or float as luck would have it, some living, some dead then exhumed, a so-called coincidence to find what was lost, to mark what was read with an imagined censor’s eye, how tense the reader then. This game of counting stamps, signatures. Scholars bring out the sheaves, dense and dust-covered, musty under the lamp, but we smell nothing, only see projected houses by a river, life amid the damp of such a place, but a caretaker’s life without much hope: a few men, no wife.
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Oh marriage! What’s real and what isn’t? What lies between these poles, honesty and deception? Overrated, the one, and the other’s misconstrued that was mere awkwardness, the way ghosts emerge from walls and the dog though put away lingers, scents, sounds too prevalent to ignore. We go on fruitless errands. Despite ample though belated coverage, a romp, pilfered wine, names were dropped, fathers scorned. No issue. An ending. A borrowed staircase, anecdotes mingle, mine and hers. I glossed rather than copied her prose, the phrases I stitched together as a preface. Long runways end in wrecked and burning planes. A borrowed heaven, afterlives doubtful and we daren’t write. The path seems evident. Trudge another day amid stolid trees, winter coming, alone but for letters, visits, the spells broken then restored, the breaks, chasms, basins, geologic time inserted just because. Seems evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, sunlight. Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing, then manifest, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.
He sang, I read, to hear it sung. No singing, but I thought of you in your growing misery, the way time undermined your hopes— or was it me, always leaving? The gods had pity on the girl who needed a name, a face— proofs take all kinds of form, none good enough if renewed day after day, since wavering. Wavering is inexact. It’s more that longings went unfulfilled, tangible signs desire seeks. They broke through at moments. Qualms arose in me, despite my knowledge, doubt in theory set aside. The present a refuge for us both and the future always a cliff. 9. A layered life, women loved in sequence and in parallel, families vying unknowing for primacy as marriages are ventured, ended, continued, restarted, and revived: all this across two decades. I wrap it up in golden tissue, red ribbon such as she might choose, these layers that obscure the marks such living leaves, deep blue in places, like the stripes of fish caught after a struggle, their radiance muted. 10. Twice I sent proposals and they received no answers. Am I again persona non grata? Unhinged, yes but not deceived, no thought of a revival. Alone, a cloud of feeling trailed after me. Typing it out produced baroque words, love stifled for so long then released causes hyping, or is it that you root around, rifled phrases pulled from consciousness, one two three strikes and you’re out, enraged others weigh in. All this is speculation. Didn’t see any possibly offended ones. My sin apparent to me only in the seams between half awake and half in my dreams.
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I walk back and forth. This time it was colder. The wind picked up along the walk. Somewhere above you might be or you might not be. The odds are, I thought, one in thirty-five thousand; the route indirect if homeward, so smaller. What would transpire, though? Quick, overly cheerful, civil— that was one; a studied snub, or something else? A name said on the phone, a voice needing no naming, a face still comes to mind, absence notwithstanding. Now older, we two, a parallel distance only death foreshortens.
In a dream, between the folding train sliding in and out rhythmically and a slot in the wall standing for whatever Freud indicated, there was a reckoning. “Hard” was heard in the press. Yes, there’s desire there, I know, but then an added remark, how love wants its time and place, atmosphere. We exit through the door with others, stairs alive with tree trunks, lost sight. Later a hotel or a building, ramshackle. Been here before. Remembered. Found again. In another dream, things were mended. As they should be, I thought. Not right they’re unresolved. Make love once more, then friends again, desire set aside save in blameless embraces dreams afford.
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Who is this? Notes are compared. I gave it up. Walk, dream, think— there’s no query, there’s no denial. Landmarks appear. An inventory comes along with one or another. They’re empty, they’re not empty, hard to grasp, weigh, evaluate, they stay, they come, a string of places alive, of places dead.
Social distance is likely to stick, how it was and how we took our chances for reasons mundane, profane, and sacred, life’s dance or trudge too much part of us to give up. I write my several pointless letters, others estranged, indifferent, harried, or listless— I know not, but stir the pot, my devices pointed out by the first hexagram: desire has a long afterlife, even for forgiveness for crimes not committed, the show trials revisited, internal exile. Petitions follow. All this needless, the I Ching tells me. 15. You, let me call you that, a friend who’s never been a companion. The word takes in old ladies having tea and attachments of heady sorts. You never were. We’re not, except in an epistolary way, poems that write themselves, a form that elaborates without meaning to, as beauty can’t help being seen and felt. These things, dear friend, attach you in a sense.
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To be silent is deceit. But wait, it gets worse. Seduce the daughter, destroy the marriage, laugh in the face of “There are children.” When they broke up, she got the Lexus. Came upon her while shopping, great with child, the cycle resuming, the one seeds another, two bodies make a third. To be screaming, but stay, offer breasts. Time passes, washes away most stains. The Great Demons have their defenders. Mediocrities cite them. Terror abates. At the piano, I recall, so not silent at all. Intact, her and it, and no one laughed.
Composition is aesthetics kept up, appearance as art although also cuisine, as persimmons carry mixed messages in one pair of hands or another. I compose constantly like a hotel manager might or a curator noticing a distant frame’s slight tilt. Bounded space—we share it, although displaced. Outside are versions of distance. How distant should we be? Another left off two years ago, the place defined like a mapmaker. How far now from that spot is unknown to me. Moon orbits around it, touches us, coming into view. Don’t know about her, but once I did, am reminded. But you, closer in time and space, composed this small and boxlike universe, savory in look and soon devoured as we are. A smaller horde awaits demise, hoping for more than ashes. Sumptuous is an aesthetic too, stripped down, laid out one last time. We were born for this.
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How is it that these gods of philosophy falter? Take to their huts, write as cowbells clank and farmers rule out the city. Take to power like binge drinkers, wrapped in importance and wearing their pins. How is it these gods fail us? First time as tragedy, second time in a coma in a Moscow clinic, a daughter explaining how it makes sense, it must, the grand scheme of things dictates this. As the pandemic rages, an old classmate posts photos of rural life: cows and sheep. Is she writing to these rural sounds? Ginza hotels played them in the morning hallways. In the alley at three a.m., the limos lined up for moguls and paramours still to emerge. Philosophy of the bedroom once removed.
Titan laid low. Animus prowling. Not even the art merits much thought, it’s said; the houses, marriage sterile. Dinner parties are cited, guests appalled. At Sam’s Grill, his funeral deconstructed. It brought them together, quarrels alive still who will be gone, are gone. Jackals tear at the hide of an old beast. At MoMA I saw their names, evidence of largesse. Flecks of skin mix with pigment if we look closely. Walking I saw the vault through the glass. Gold or jewels, stock certificates imperviously stored. Lenin in Red Square, Napoleon in the Invalides lie as quietly. No jackal, no animus, harries them.
21. In two days, return mail arrives—a note and a postcard. The note asks after the dead; the postcard is formal. In between, the widow’s note arrives. A postscript follows. I burn my paranoia once again in a dish set aside for this. It has an acrid smell, in a way, but leaves only bits of ash. Time will pass. Patience walks down shorter piers, stares at the dark river with its floating ties, unholy currents. Turns back always, waits. Eventually the mailboat docks. The island has emptied out. A last helicopter left at one. The postal people exchange boxes. Masks protect them. I am the lone recipient, gathering the city’s mail. Notes arrive and I call out the names, especially of the women as their returns are so sorely wanted. Though absent, beachward or ridge-dwelling, the longing is universal. I call out the names as ash drifts by like snow, acrid yet beautiful against black water, on sand, the dark pines, the porches where they smoked and paced, then heard.
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Farewell, I think. I would remove my hat. Passing, passing, and then lined up. I ask, who are these potters? In Tokyo I ate off their plates. Ginza. It closed. Centuries of glassblowers, lineages. Insert a plague or a war or bad luck— euphemistically speaking, no more, no less than that: the ground hoed, a rectangular crevice, as they are. My hat in my hand. Almost Easter. Risen, risen, the Queen said or a disembodied voice, her photo.
A lack of fauna. Birds and bees heard but not seen. Deer or dog skat. A beetle crossing at its own pace. Over Point Reyes, my son said. East not southwest. A large white hillside house built without permits. Pioneer pines along a ridge waiting to fall. Nitrogen to feed the oaks, a generation after the Vision Fire: shallow roots, spawned by exploding pinecones, shoot up and stop. High winds bring them down. Parts of the forest littered with them, dry, rotting. A hawk along a line of trees. A woman jogging. Sun out, fog burned off, sweater shed. I’m cold usually so glad for heat. The bay Caribbean blue coming back. “Never seen it like this.” Here it is. 25. Regrets lie around the house like cats that seek moonlight instead of sun, rub against your mind. My friend cries as she talks to me. It’s all forward in this world, but we always want to walk it back.
26. What elements make a drink? I never grasped this science. The grip of alcohol came quickly and then it went. Hashish and its variants—acid saw them off. That leaves the vineyards, terroir bottled. The language is baffling, but the taste’s fine when it is. The counter help sometimes gush at one place; at the other they tote it up. When the virus hit, they wrote. They had a list of every bottle. I ordered a case by phone. At the grocery store, liquor’s the main even, the wines a pale shadow of a once-decent offering, barely drinkable is one thought it raises, but with doubt if even that’s true— I’m writing this because I read a review earlier. A poem quoted first deconstructs a cocktail. To emulate this move came to me as I walked upstairs, but I never drink them, so.
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How blood flows when it can’t be stanched. I swear, it wasn’t me who was violent. The kings, the princes, their attractive women—no harm was meant. A man’s home is his castle, we felt, and trade beckons. Many a lad’s fortune made in some distant place, the company he kept— but I digress. It wasn’t violence I desired, just reward for enterprise, effects from causes. A revolution, but only briefly, just enough. I never thought of shooting them, winsome as they were in their pinafores and smocks.
She is said to be singing. Who writes it down? Once an eon it’s heard and sung on. Erato’s traces on a balcony, among a garden’s vases. He wants to hear her between other sounds. He wants no others. Alone, alone, alone. She is said to be distant, said to be close. Once an eon she’s tangible, her verses so many lines setting out a form, page after page of procession, flower girls with their baskets, their pleated skirts. They are said to be striking, a beauty needing its songs, its dancing steps. Sang and sang again, and then died. Who sees her now? Silence, empty yet pregnant, the sound of breath taken in behind a curtain. Erato takes her sweet time. Her entry.
29. The past in a photo, a dead friend brought back at 40. The architect’s pack of cigarettes are on the table, two white coffee cups, standard issue modernity. Taping it with a purse-like apparatus, dressed in a striped blouse and skirt, summer wear for an oceanside, cliffside place, the house, now much sought after: read, fuck, walk, eat. “The city of the dead,” my wife described it. A bad visit, probably. I never made it there, but have read accounts of journeys to the shrine, hedonism’s board-and-batten, weathered like the architect’s fiftyish face. He didn’t last. Only the house, scene of a thousand rendezvous. More, I imagine, but no one chalked the walls as prisoners are said to do, marking days. We carry boxes with us, all that we possess stuffed into a weekend bag, a watch around our wrist, car out front cooling from the drive. We bring our expectations and she brings hers. A visit sparks an argument or a child, carried back barely felt. All that we possess a bit heavier, tipped to the future.
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Brazen, subdued, flip it on its head, over and over. Haven’t, haven’t, won’t ever probably. Don’t haunt the market. Don’t park on that street. Don’t take elevators to offices that might, might not. Once or twice or many, yes, can’t count. Where oh where oh where oh where oh came once and left. Adrift, adrift, so reeling it in, letting it out, sailcloth in a tornado, sailor’s knots, no anchor.
The sliver brightens as it waxes. Hanging almost out of sight above my window. A fox’s bark crosses so many states, heard as a remembered echo. Unearthly, I told my neighbor the morning after. It left. It must have gone east to find a poet who’d hear it as I did, at night, sliver to light the way to the window, to ask, Is that Death come all this way? No, the fox answers, it’s just me barking.
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Sliver of a moon, the sun plunged, bands of it remain like the ring I wore until the shape of that finger changed. Once in a while I try it. Will it come off? It had a specific meaning when I got it, a vow still honored in some respects. It’s Venus, my mother said, despite a star the song mentions. Wish on it.
One woman collected dictionaries. Another wrote in snippets, images dodging through marriage’s traffic. I collect dictionaries, perhaps 20, one-thousandth of hers, I just read. Now that every definition’s digital I rarely crack one. There are words I promptly forget every single time, words that pepper scholarly work. (I’m not much on spices, either.) A “one woman” plus verb set-up resembles another, but I meant no borrowing. It was a coincidence. My writing, too, accrues, the bits unrolling from my head. My kids were no obstacle; my colleagues neither, noise notwithstanding.
32. Bourgeois: the word’s like crisp bills or the tap that gets you on the bus. Orchard Road’s roaring flock, streets lurid beneath their din, this milieu foreseen in merchants’ houses, maps unrolled, guilders changing hands. No droit de seigneur that isn’t earned, a trail of bastards to support the price of emission. All this brought down to air-conditioned commerce. Life was upstairs once, walls paper-thin.
35. No or maybe yes, the undoing. No. we weren’t undone like that. Ever. Just glimpses of it, grey forms. We were done at points, so done. Edging close to over. Never. Just glimpses of it, grey forms we’d have to fill out. Each went her own way. Persevere. Life adheres, done and undone us two, our progeny. Still one.
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Searching for a name. Doubts set in. Unprepared again, I think. Awake later, I speak with a friend. Not many calls. A note arrives, and a text. A stroke: self-reported and a photo. Paralyzed and then not, it’s implied. Not dead. Heat arrives. Nap in the worst of it. Comatose. Another call. Family. I read an essay from the thirties. I write in exculpation. Bourgeois. Can’t shake off Stalin or Mao or Robespierre, their purges. I tend not to write politics. Names fade, even theirs.
Samuel Greenberg, drifting on his mattress, notebook and pencil, titles and the memory of words and phrases, form incidental, to spell no encumbrance to his predecessors, clearly, and so, they appear or well up, tubercular is the adjective invoked. Nothing is said, can be said, that the notebooks haven’t. Blame the mattress, he might reply, the art or the books, how others write and paint, how misadventures dog some lives, hound the random alcoholic but leave me prone or propped, my hand and mind animate. I drift, but purposefully, my notebooks a trail, a gallery, a catalogue of oddities seen up close, described as in antiquity.
37. In place you could be in Shanghai again, but in time you’re proximate. Others are so distant that I’d need a clock set to ebb to uncover those islands, fields once fertile with possibilities. I heard of a river, saw the photos, but these fields were ours, a cabin or a tower marking them, a bed. Shanghai can be lonely, empty, narrow and hard, warmth gone. One can live there exiled, driven not to long too much. A film took this up, theater of regret. In life, we write or speak. Walls and doors have messages in ink. Others are nowhere, vanished; fields are tilled by children now. I watch, write, dream at night, complicated, inverted visions that play with every distance.
39. The writer recounts the revelations we make to one another early on. I remember one such exchange and the look of complicity I saw. Desire’s mutuality relies on it. Wanting to be seen is prelude. Her name came along with her. As then, I can’t see her as parts. 40. Rational life has doors, gates in hedges, shadows behind columns, other rooms. Irrational wraps her hair up, then slips. Time and space alter on both sides. Back’s another place, the child minutely older, one touch different from another, lips and much else ache with memory. Later the ink’s a slightly different hue, words and lines colored, darkened, lightened. There’s no way to know. Each side’s a mystery to the other, but she bleeds in both, bears signs of crossing. Bears perhaps, another minutely sparked.
41. To accept this oxymoronic life, how the ending dogs it, how so much else follows it, if only in dreams: houses where we lived, parents our own age. Transcend, we think, naked come and go, ignore talons barbing flesh, the pull of decades of gravity. Thank God modestly for one more day of it. Accept however we got here, time a hallway or a wormhole, doubling back to move forward, as angels are said to drift by intention (but how do they fuck? Or are angels truly without sex, a species apart? Swedenborg’s my main guide, but The Buddha said it doesn’t matter.) Accept and then do what you can. Aid your sister or your son, be less imperious, for Christ’s sake, who turned out the moneychangers but loved the whores, the lepers. 42. In two days, a note and postcard arrive, replies asking after the dead, and in between the widow’s letter comes and a postscript follows. Time unfolds, I think, my patience finding longer piers, a dark river where I wait until a mailboat docks. Men with masks unload the crates. Everyone’s away but I’m still here to read the names aloud, call them out. Women’s scripts acknowledge how the men long for them or do I imagine this? Absence holds their places but that’s not my affair. I’m here to say the names for those who sit and wait, their women distant or not at all. It may be that the men are also gone, a one-handed clap in that case, falling unnoticed. 43. Privilege is the word. Born to it, it’s said. Idiocy is another word, and narcissism, words that behavior throws in our faces. How to make fiction of it, a writer explains, but we saw it filmed and others saw it in real time, lawful assembly swept away with cherry bombs, stink
bombs raised to paramilitary strength. Clear it, the fat guy says, impatient that his order wasn’t carried out before. Privilege is the word. Torch the earth to make clear who’s got it. To destroy is to push these words to lower levels, sowing the fields with salt. After us, a drought to end all droughts. Greenland, we can escape there. Closer than Mars. Bleak like Queens. Furs to keep us warm, money to burn, or something. 44. And so, I learn that it is but not this other thing or anything to which anything else compares. It is in the way that Aix sways on some afternoons when I think of them, still swaying as you once did. Things open, then close. There’s a motion felt, a sound among sounds, a motion among others. Opening, that attribute, survives as a blessing. It is this and not that, unrepeated in the end. Never clambered nor sought, felt the close in its finality, if final can be said even later. Anything else? No, it ended there. If you turned away it was another, mistaken identity. I was just out walking. Marked death in between and snubbed, walked back, mistaken, a switch in time or place, cipher in this game of love.
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Sometimes you come back to me, not just because one of your signs appeared, a fuller image with its connotations. Long time, I thought, and all these things accumulate, not in drawers or shelves, not put away like clothes sometimes are when we can’t bear to cast them out. There’s no room, no house, no field, nothing that contains you, only emptiness where you were, like what a vase enveloped once, a space for stems, the flowers in their season, then they disappear, or jars of preserves, these vessels filled, laid away against tomorrow. It’s elusive, this contingency. Wait and see, befriend, answer letters, the same number always, home.
Like Mahler, he said. I try to imagine based on flimsy or non-existent, let’s face it, Mahler is a mystery, but this was his reference. I met her twice. Will, he said. Get to the table, write, a deadline, an artist painting a show. It could hardly breathe, he said, as if lines were ribs or subway turnstiles or elevator doors failing, pressing. She was good looking, he said, was married to a writer. I didn’t know. Occasion it, he said, happening or not, waiting for it a mistake, doing the other thing, annoyed when the lines sit blank, vowels unspoken, leading nowhere. A poem, the child asks, gets one.
47. To go where poetry occurs. (I paraphrase. Conducive to it, he meant.) There’s a muse on the sofa behind me, her leg crossed or reading a book or looking at my friends’ artwork or at nothing at all, thinking how the gods pass through, how far she is from the mountain where they gather. We have Mount Tam, and I think she wandered in from there, skimming the bay with her toes as sailboats pass captained by whoever’s out these days—it used to be lawyers, teeth set to win the race. Tech moguls supplanted them. No poetry there, she thinks, I’ll keep on a line with that window that looks out to Tam, that man who’s always thinking about it. A muse likes that in a man, to be watching for her where a hillside rises, look in wonder. 48. Dreams are travel now, I thought. In one, blocks with colored segments demonstrate an argument Isaiah Berlin made, I think, how democracy forms because, as Aldo van Eyck noted, each house is a tiny city. Those who crowded in stood warily at first in the corners but then slowly relaxed; small bubbles forming molecules with others was their practice, although theory lagged. Looking for answers, empiricism turned the city inside-out. We’re all evidence now, the old men thought. Ambulances took seven hours. Travel becomes a dream we put off as long as possible, like flagging down a hearse to ride instead of cars we used to hail by app. We walk, masks ragged from overuse, hair like ancient gardens' neglected topiaries. Barely a car, only vans and young men with masks, packages brought, takeout fetched, women with dogs, women with kids: we step out onto the street, gallant as they eye us over masks of colored, patterned cloth, the kids uncovered, and we who should have been in Naples are out with them taking the air that is admittedly clearer than it’s been for ages, the houses on distant hills visible again. We wave on getting up and blush to remove our bedclothes without the smog, wondering how it will be before Mammon’s switch flips, the birdsong plundered by the rushing trains, trucks, motorbikes, sirens, by society and its calendar, by corner tables, by beauty close and sotto voce.
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Immortal yes, so I can see destiny given form and space. Too soon over, so I imagine all of it, oh cradled one, sleep resting a mind life overflows. Suitors will call you in time, their allure, beguiling tone, and you will have yours, too, mortal fires, sometimes raked, the fires others stoke, the rivers women bring, their mystery. All of this, unseen and seen, arrives with you, those weeks of arising, a moment’s spark. Immortal yes, but not to be more than blessings on lips, the way their spirits flicker when the lanterns float by.
If immutable, then not like a dress or even skin, although both might mutate what’s incoming, bombing in that systematic way, carpeting or mining, making it treacherous.
50. It’s years later. It seems we no longer speak. But I wrote and so did she. I forgot this remnant among old papers on a lower shelf amid books on Slow, a topic of that period. Desire shapes everything to fit its trajectory, initially to give itself expression, then to write a backstory, a narrative in parts, a chasm or a landslide, the road impassable although here we are on the other side of it. Odd to be separate— we were conjoined, the stars suggested. Our incantations did no good. Burn mine was the last of it, a one-sided withdrawal, and here, fragmentary, like bones to cast, these, whole and not ashes, a sign, a rite.
If immutable, then the head stays on the body unless both topple owing to a blast of history, karma, or simply that it was pulled down with ropes, an echo of much else. If immutable, then each echo’s its own thing: a shove, a lynching, a dog, a horse, a formation, men puffed out, brandishing the tools of an art and craft of domination. If immutable, then each sidewalk tells its own version of the phrase, and autonomy its particular space. The march is glacial and electric; local bands play their own tattoos. 52. The painter, getting old, turned to the mantle as his subject, with its objects and paintings. I thought of him earlier in the garden, bees nosing their way through lavender, their heft varying, and butterflies, white and bronze, also testing if flowers could make a feast. In the night, I woke to hear a woman’s voice, words that emerge when women come, force enough to wake another. These are primary: nature moves its creatures to flit and copulate. Later, we wake up or we paint, the mantle recording our nakedness, raw attraction. Awake, listening through the silence, observing the brickwork, remembering the pond, the lawn chairs, and the kids.
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55.
How is a life? At one or so, heat led to sleep. Two workers ate their lunch and then one sang. My neighbor had two poles to navigate my garden stairs. “A volunteer,” said of an oak, “or a bird brought it.” My life is too much, a woman said or implied at her perimeter. No contradiction, in short. A trench was visible, design ambiguous but decided. “If there’s any fault, it’s yours,” she concluded. Her man’s mask was blue. Her workers wore no masks. Sung a line, then he hummed, something about love, I guessed. Debris is to be recycled. Meditation here, eight feet and a trellis, she needs privacy. Plum tree not to be discussed. My life is too much, a woman said. "If there’s any fault, his mask is blue, the trench runs long. Look how much they’ve done."
Speaking in our separate rooms, we seem to be related. Must be karma, as my daughter would say. You may have been me, I may have been you; occasionally we meet halfway, I sense, then we each go our separate ways.
54. Attached and detached and attached, this cycle without destination, memoir’s impulse to drag it out onto paper and look at each one on its own, conflated and separated. They shake their heads but he’s unmoved. Shake and move they did, remembered, reasons to resume the chase, scramble for a taste of that good thing, a banquet and then the bill, the reckoning, blind he was and then saw and heard clearly. The road, stepping out and stepping in, the Fates with their contagion, the mind snapped open by the shock of nothing, blasted into consciousness, the road to here, finally, attached again, this cycle without sequel: he sets it down.
56. Backstories surface. Mine aren’t the stuff of novels. More like bad jokes I told myself that another overheard, said for effect or because I couldn’t say what I felt. It is rough when thoughts pile together, don’t fit the narrative, diverge because life has. It came to mind, one such episode, said in a sense accurately, but completely off it proved later, there being nothing at all to hold on to except everything, the stuff of novels, but reality may differ and does. 57. In the dream, he was first my old design instructor and then morphed into someone heavier. I was his object, it was clear to me. Door key in hand, it seemed he boxed me in. I woke up, gazed out at the gray of five a.m., the dream pulling at me. In the sequel, a woman appeared, as they will. It brought home the terror of their situation. Were we at a tailor shop? I’m not sure. He, the tailor, brought my antagonist a snack. In on it, I thought later. He grew grosser, in the manner of the disgraced producer. My old design instructor kept to himself. Only the closeted one was out cruising. No closet for his older peer. Old school about such things, he left us to ourselves.
58. My erasures a different kind, genders blur, synapses whir, a mind that Forster sends— the only sex organ, really, or the most orchestral, capable of timbres, hallucinations, sleight of hand and eye, seas undreamt of yet dipped into. Each smudge haunts me, holes dark like gravity, worms in time looping back to reconnect past and future, if only—not so fast,
we think, smudges a border or a line of smoking pots, blazing tires, stink of death amid the splendor, love is wreckage close up or the reverse, distance a beast with two backs, frogs croaking, bats all swoop. (Light a cigarette, come in darkness save a window, noticing she came, a mind, the only, the one and only.)
59.
61.
Remembering walks taken, sometimes accompanied, the sight of dried thistles in the dead of summer, field of horses, the lower gate ending temple grounds, a barrier for novices. We were novices once, too. There’s an element of this that makes it possible. It drops away and the walks cease, gate breached or car gone, love gone or fleeing. I took refuge in a friend or two, no novice now, a kind of sage only, old enough to know the knowing’s past and what it meant and didn’t mean, this mystery I left unresolved, left remembered and remembered. She scoffed at this, but it comes to mind.
A full moon seen through a window. Part of a neighbor’s house lit, no tree to obscure it as her workman fell it. Her new fence hasn’t yet taken form. Nearly ten years since 20 November. In back garden corner are persimmons, I was told. It’s not the full-bore tree. Birds may be stealing the fruit. Later there will be apples with one bite in them. The tree of knowledge is over-sampled. I have a plan for the back of the garden. It owes a lot to a park in Paris I visited as a kid, although how it comes out may bear scant resemblance to it, if at all. It’s like fish soup in Nice, you can’t really make it here. What passes for it is a travesty, mislabeled, so I’d better say this is just my back garden.
60. The sub-commander, who remembers him? (These are the eyes of a man who knows he’s dying, I think, looking again.) And the wife? Divorce crosses our minds simultaneously, a trick of the New Science, Jung might say. The sub-commander in his odd headgear anticipates this moment perfectly, a man before the letter of all that ails us, stalks us. It was different then. Hungered for it once or twice, a year or maybe seven. I lost count. It’s different again, the streets littered with it, a kind of lice or Lyme disease afloat in grass sprung up in the cracks when traffic stopped. Fuck until the sun went down then rode back, then back for more. It was different, slower amid the rush. Do they rush? Amid flora, fauna unabashedly straightforward, even flitting in arcs of purpose, hither thither. (I quote.) A pipe encased in wool, a man for our times, so misplaced, found again.
62. The wind tugs at the window. Late in the afternoon, Sunday it was, I had a glass of white in the garden, bees causing the lavender stalks to rock a bit as they drew the stuff of honey from the flowers. The sun is French, although I was far from France. Nor were the bees from there, but Bonnard would know these scenes were he alive to take them in as I was, alive as noted, for when the day begins, I thank providence for it. Another day, oh miracle! that the earth was still, heart beating, head in possession of itself, body functions. Bonnard knew these moments, doubtless, how life blends with its surroundings and they with it: one. 63.
65.
How did I know where the fish were? I went with what I sensed, ripples or darting shapes. I had a terror of horses, disliked riding, so I left at dawn. The fish went along with it. I learned that a brace of trout convinced my father I was manly enough. Distance then between me and them, those giants.
Lost in early 1940s England, the Germans a menace, France—beloved France—distant. This writer is my double in some sense. While he outstrips me in scholarship and much else, the same sorts of things resonate. Buoyant more than him, I think, although he’s cheered when a bon mot rolls in, some bit of notice. Perhaps most accurately I am the smallest version I can imagine of these shared traits, based on what I read, this long note he left.
64. Planetary life rolls on. At dusk, drink in hand, I watched two bees taking a last floral hit before returning home, disproving my theory that sunlight attracts them. A photo arrives of my granddaughter asleep. Earlier, fitful, she cried out for solace, but then crashed, a month old, oscillating in and out of sleep, brain cooling down from absorbing a house full of stimulation, her family having driven from one town to another, changing scenes.
66.
68.
Death might mean some other thing, the critic said, thinking of Keats on how a woman comes in bed, but I never thought of death in that context, only of variation, a mark of singularity, words, vibes. Still, he might be on to something, the critic, led on by lines of displacement, a supposition that wed or not we’d rather fuck at certain points than die, even when another wants us dead for fucking. Red the sheets, light blue the curtains, red brick the wall: these are the photos one could take in flagrante. Oh, I might say, as each comes back to me as a hologram. It might mean near or far, inevitable or forestalled, immortal prose, lines on lips after, sung, hummed: how a woman comes in bed or on it, wrapped up in the diffusion her body brings, overwhelming all the rest. They say the male has a half ear cocked for the jealous husband who wants to murder him. Death over the telephone, death by email, proxy: it wears like an infection, low-grade and mortal. I reach for a cigarette, although I haven’t smoked since twenty-one, after the wet of come’s begun.
Rooms afloat—this is how I think of them. The walls fall away and there you are. You speak of cabin fever. This week I’ve been to Montréal, a monthly visit. My friend’s stories made me laugh. Characters emerge from them. Your life too has these actors with their reference letters. In New York City, the detritus of the past was set aflame. To burn it seems to be a woman’s thing, but kings do it, too, and emperors, dictators, guilt-ridden bureaucrats. In your half of conjoined space, you looked at ease. Seize the day, I say, but only as a reminder: do so.
67. Spectacular, I think. Oceans also come to mind. The world is leaking methane, beneath Lowry’s volcano or another, the kind that spew towns under, blow sideways, blot sunlight for years. Bound we are in one or another small space. Where are the features we expected? Resort fees are squandered on this lavender, bees that fly in freely from some other place. See how the world’s contracted even as it hasn’t. Some days I stare at this small thing, talent. I comment on it, criticize it, deprecate it, yet it ends up here or there, the smoking cone a reminder that life’s precarious, a spectacle.
69. Before birth and approaching death, expression takes form. It makes sense of light and dark, the pitch and pace of life enveloping us. Nothing escapes us, if we listen. Love’s ceasing is not love’s ceasing. Intimacy persists. Mute is as good as whispered and blows are struck just as before. Not ceasing but unfolding, life’s barriers burst. Their orders shift as rhythms change. Words find new places, the voice yours who spoke, may speak or decline to speak, an emptiness is a garden, is intimate speech, silent as roses and the color of persimmons, preserved, dried, lavender tied and kept, a faint smell of the giver. 70. Words are just words are what we’ve got. Of course, we have other things, but here’s where our vocabulary aids or hinders us. Proposals were made. Seduced was claimed more than once. Intention means nothing, I learned in retrospect. May as well be direct. Pessoa’s stand-in or parallel man abhors touching, wants virgin mothers, babies appearing without birth’s apparatus. It is a big order. Not even the Virgin spared but he wants more, an alienated purity. Not me. What’s the point? Fecundity is the frisson, chemistry aside—I always had my doubts and doubts were raised. I raised four, so experience writing here. Take it from me, etc. Words as verities.
71.
72.
End of July brings August heat anticipated, a rumor typically confirmed. The valley, scorching in July, sucks in fog. August sends it out.
Late July midday repeating the month’s trope: fog, sun. Then at night a long line of cold, striated, light almost too bright, solar flare, the planet rolling.
73.
76.
Break in bloody nights: they withdrew. Linked women, naked one of them, scared the horses. Flesh, womanly, is meaning-laden. Some object but these things evolve.
Pliny the Younger loved landscapes and found Rome depraved at some point. Pindar alone praised of writers from Thebes. Dutch cuisine maligned too by the snooty French.
74.
77.
How it is: sunny afternoons back garden scene, bees, butterflies. Pessoa picked up again, bits, depressing, this persona, down. The next half if I can get there not so much.
When the Greeks catalogued authors, Thebes' Pindar alone got the nod among the writers of that place Athenians, like French critics, dismissed the others. No cuisine in Holland, I read. Snooty French matched the Greeks, writing off the rest.
75. Wonderful, she writes. We concur. Life's variety at dinners: who is suitable, who isn't? A sense of a match. Premature to say so? A jinx? Destiny overrides all this.
78. His suitcase disappeared. The grave, a stone rolled or a name reversed, gave away nothing. In my mind its contents close in, the end point, converging as a particle not a wave.
79.
82.
Strange life, yet prayed for before sleep, that morning will come, formula, in short, but God hears, morning says. Superstitious, yes, always been. Umbrellas kept closed are safer inside and spilled salt the Devil's cut lest he act up. Sidewalk cracks, rabbit's feet, colors, whatever's safe passage, skirting time, space, harm.
In a clip, someone steers a boat. He's older than then. Not the same I imagine. Yes, time passes. We're all older. Time wears us down and enmity slows, maybe halts. Not that I would know. No one calls. The line's gone dead. Yes, there's no sound. A malfunction? No, an ending unless cosmic is still in play.
80.
83.
His hair Einstein like but mind sharp. An hour passes. Later, spoke after a delay, Emily, friend across the bay. Days entirely digital. Better than nothing.
Contingency runs downward. Forks shunt off to dead ends. One survives, another doesn't. I was born a survivor's son, my life spent somewhat warily. Qualms are sins in a way. Fortune— blind they say— spins her wheel. So, luck. Destiny, gods intervening: these are myths or so people say.
81. Biden picked Kamala Harris. A poem can be made of this. But I want more: Trump sent away. Far away. His young son can stay. Only fair.
84.
85.
Once upon a time Poseidon gave Midas a bull. It was white. It wasn't offered. Poseidon cursed the sun's daughter, her lust fixed. Wanting the white bull: architects practice these black arts for a fee. Fucked the bull and had his offspring. The story grows complicated. Betrayals. The moral: white bulls are bad luck and yet a good fuck. Poseidon no doubt foresaw it.
Sometime, anytime, a god may take umbrage, a slight: the white bull is typical. Gods don't leave it alone. They lay traps. Architects haunt these marble halls, their bedrooms, to give their dreams form. How like a cow, then, was her bed. Estrus a perfume, registers across species, but sometimes it's genes crossing: bull's head, man's torso. One day she wanted, then a month waiting. Cows take time. Sweet time. Sweet. All said and done, she savored it despite the damage. 86. Midnight brought my friend's mind into hearing. A series of jagged lines, set against her voice, incongruous. She, appearing as images as she spoke, at first tensed in a way by the medium, her thoughts of lovers, how thinking of them, sensed as they are sensed who shared beds and brought mind and body to bear, the energy humans desire at times, to be sought— she brought this up or brought it out to me. and I listened and then considered it. I wrote a note, a first thought, and quickly against the morning: "We are so equipped that we get free, however tightly gripped."
87.
90.
Nothing is the safest choice. Await death. Walk the empty streets. Observe the flowers. A mask to screen the virus, catch my breath in its black volume. A woman glowers if I come up the driveway without it, daring to test the limits of powers she feels she's gained. What she sees: my limit. I am fifteen feet distant at this point. I stop, as always. Nothing comes of it except she walks on. She's made her point in her mind, another carrier held at bay, a death deferred. Is this her point? Meanwhile, scores more are actually felled, numbers so big they conflate, start to meld.
Helicopters come and two refuse to leave. Amid wildfire, they put their faith in what? There's a reservoir. If necessary, jump in. This feels like a metaphor for our politics. This feels like a metaphor for our planet. On to Mars, and put your faith in that? So hot you need to live beneath a rock. Perhaps the refusal is to say "Too much." In Minsk, they bundle women into cars. In Berlin, a patriot wakes up, responds. There is no reservoir, nowhere to jump. There are only unmarked cars and men. Refuse to leave. Refuse Mars and men. Or save yourselves and others like you. Perhaps it's time to say, "Not enough!" Not good enough, this constant offer, lies the hard men feed us. Lies of Tech. AI lies. Boss lies. Party lies. Tyrant lies. Time to send it back, send it packing. We'll refuse and propagate. We two will spawn hunters, gatherers. We'll hunt and gather, live at peace. Revive Neanderthal ways, our palmprints red against the rock, our DNA in play again, downstream from these cretins.
88. My friend talked and I listened, heard things unfold, and in a poem getting loose was mentioned. Turns out that she said something else, not just the past's hold— making sense of it. A life's work I wrote, as it is. 89. A year or six, seven maybe, just about, or forty-eight, counting from the cafÊ where it began, or six, from the station, or one from the sidewalk or the lecture: time takes a false measure of the heart. We plumbed, was that the word? Found a cervix at the end of it or more, no end to it but a bringing forth. Brought forth. Eleven years a measure, moving in time. My grandson his dad's age midcentury I thought. I won't be there to greet him. Or maybe there in spirit, like my father, like my grandfather, great-grandfather. Brought forth then plumbed, a measure of our distance, our fallopian trajectory.
91. Yes, soon you will be sixty-two. This is my seventy-fourth year. More than in the middle of it. How dates persist when all else falls away. How middle names and children's names remain. The moon's still here, and stars recorded in your last diary entry become like an explorer's notes.
92.
95.
What are my follies, I ask myself? You could pose this question, too. Some of them work out, of course, while others may be best forgotten. Some are paired constructions, mad about each other and eventually not. Some are "did it (to) myself," foot-shot contraptions, Popular Mechanics sorts. Where are my pyramids, my sphinx? How is it that I came in parts, even as I came as men come, offspring to show? So many follies I've lost count, and yet a few things to show for it, a roof, walls, a bed, dreams of better days to come.
We watch our senses atrophy in duet, a diagonal subterfuge, each talking past the other or gaining second sight. I try the Buddhist approach of letting go the small universe of aggravations, too small to enumerate, too petty. One by one, they tear at the fiber of my ordered self, a joke I play in this tiny realm I don't control. Last night, a tremor woke me up. Like Pliny's nephew, I could read and hope it passes, or try to sleep.
93.
You remember moments when a woman turns opaque who not long before reached over to kiss you, but it proves to be a test. You see it coming. The kiss is a surprise. How the room is a newly painted blue, the palace brick with an odd hall door. You're unhinged, learn later it's ego, torn away to reveal a self you encased. It seems you owe her thanks, as there's no other way to regain that self but this.
The architect walled others off, except his son and his patron and patroness. In a dream, he read the words "leapt" and "wept." Awake, he said, "Not auspicious, I guess." But the court must be served. Something's amiss. Summoned to see her, he hears her confess. Lust gathers like a storm and if a kiss signals it, immortals have other means, things that mortals, even a king, might miss. Thus poisoned, the sun god's daughter careens. "I must have him," she declares. "Make it so." So much skill. Set within, the goddess leans into his heft. Her vessel takes the fellow, snorting as he mounts, and then her bellow. 94. Like saint's days to a bride of Christ, marriage banns were not read twice. A distance traveled and then this: mark how life takes down desire, persistent in its nostalgic form, bliss a memory of skin rubbed raw, bathed in warm agony afterward, a payment for afternoons on borrowed sheets. Stations as the Church has it where these small deaths take you. Distance an unbroken silence except for dreams, moon's arc reminiscent across the floor.
96.
97. Hercules is some distance from David, vanquishing a foe. Two heroes in this Plaza of Men, one hard, one buff, invite gathering there, trade. Elsewhere, there are frescoes, mosaics, domestic scenes, fish and prostitutes, rites of spring. I missed the plaza in my walks. I saw the bridge where Africans sold knock-off purses, Hadrian on one end in his castle, a man left bereft. I missed this passion in my several lives, its object once, unexpected and without consequence, unlike my dream.
Youth is confusion, it seems, while men's intentions come weighted with fatal purpose. The walk from the Farnese passes Raphael's small church. The other way is the ghetto with its Jerusalem artichokes. A week in those parts, adrift. In her studio, tall white walls and light, a long road there, the kind artists take to find such spaces. Four studios before, if my count's right, and this the biggest. Rome sampled, mined of color, bits of script, my diary lost. 98. I've followed you for a while, marveling at all the languages you speak and write, how art lives in your mind as it does in my daughter's. There are parallels between them. It may be that art absorbs you as you absorb it, and this is slow, even when art is kinetic or disturbing, perhaps especially then. We make ourselves look, it could be said, or we stay open to it, and that openness is hard won, because then we're open to everything else, looking at it without flinching. It's a big category, life, best lived slowly in the sense of deliberately and sometimes wantonly because life asks that of us also, to abandon ourselves now and then to experience just to take it in. This is how the sacraments unfold: birth and love.
Men meanwhile are pitching, women too, their possibilities unambiguous in possibility, if this makes any sense, as rain clears streets, clears the air. 100. Fiction is memoir is reflection filtered through time or by it. I have a first line. Let me begin. Memoir is a mirror and a lens, a notebook with small sketches I drew incoherently, a terrace where the threat of offspring invoked I recalled once more, a leitmotif of horizontal life. I had a first line. Began again, only didn't, every one ending, but how they unrolled, stories, each of them, poetic material. Poetry has a blurred precision, a watch I reset every morning, remembering what's touched, the call-and-response way one moves towards it like a flame. 101. Reading Pessoa in autumn, the tomatoes ripening as the vines dry out and die, race against Persephone's return underground, Hades reclaiming of what he thinks is his and Ceres mourning, her anger over this.
99.
Pessoa is lost in a different kind of hell, not without its beauty. Are persimmons hell's forbidden fruit? Pomegranates?
Ambiguity is the kind of weather that leaves us unable to decide. We declare the sun's shining or conversely the night's cold and moonless, yet the dawn may yet pitch us into warmth. Some voice this as metatext, ballpark chatter over hotdogs and the men who pitch them.
They left her half in, half out, not like Europa, astride her bull, a continent to name and propagate, Neanderthal claims notwithstanding. For Pessoa, this striding, this tragic displacement, are only a tram's metallic screams, only rain on Lisbon streets, only mornings memorably like the last ones. Europa never graced his bed. Zeus too had fled.
The writer wrote on, left half in, half out, shortchanged of endings, left his trunk like pockets full of micro-scripts, like a suitcase misplaced, like scraps aflame, all we find or fail to find, their reception. 102. "Je vois, par taches." CĂŠzanne anticipates the knowing of afternoons' half-lit rooms, northern hills dissolving into leftward orange, hills compressed as viewed, window-framed, houses lit up, domesticity revived at day's end, the shower, the walk, the train, all we knew still here despite the disappearance of the rest. 103. (Variant 1) Awake last night, I felt regret. It is, I wrote, a desire to make amends, to take back acts that stain the past. We stain our lives. Life accumulates our negligence as a species, not simply as individuals with our faults. At night, awake, alone, no collectivity took up the burden of my sins. Oh God, hear my prayer because it's not likely forgiveness will come from another. We trespass. I forgive them hourly whose trespasses were incidental, bird shit on a car window, sponged off and forgotten. The wronged, as I think of them, may long since have dismissed my aberrations, but I have no way to know. God alone can forgive, silent as He is, urging us to repent, move on. Yet the desire's there, to want forgiveness from the source. Regret is this flamboyant thing, you see, hungering for calm like an infant who knows not what or where, a longing only.
103. (Variant 2) Awake last night to feel regret, that desire to make amends, take back the stains life accumulates. Awake alone, no collectivity took the burden of my sins upon itself. Oh God, hear my prayer, because forgiveness won't come directly. Trespasses I forgive, what birds leave on cars: we sponge it off. The wronged too may long since have dismissed my aberrations, but I have no way to know. God forgives in silence or His priests assure us that it happened. Yet desire's there wanting to hear it from the source. Regret is this flamboyant thing, hungering like an infant who knows not what or where, only longing. 104. Tomales was on a railroad line to Bodega, my son surmised, as Point Reyes Station denotes the same line and the creek's interrupted by the remnants of a bridge. Tomales could use a train coming through now and again, not the ambling Highway One traffic headed for the coast, Jenner, maybe. Logging trains, then people— the town's reasons for being were wrapped up in ranches. A church, southwest corner, a south turn to Dillon Beach, the water before and after, only the hillside pastures and some stands of trees.
105.
107.
News drifts in. The sun's warm as it sets although the day was cold. I wore sandals and hung curtains in a hallway window. At two, capitalism surfaced, rehearsing a theory broached on Friday in the car. My neighbor writes he's off to Montana with his sister, his wife, and his cats. One lolls in the back garden in the heat. Snow will be disagreeable, as it also is to me. Buskers knocked. I voted for your guy, I told them. It's true. They moved on.
Not like her. The words just came to me. Not bread nor a balcony in the mountains, not lyrical except accidentally, no memorial in Berlin. No steps, nothing declaimed, no anarchy except by marriage. A name left to its own devices, sheaves of short things in which they figure, each and every one. Estrangement is a leitmotif, but for a few, hall half empty where the rites are read. In dreams we unfailingly mingle, even find ourselves in bed again, chapters, verses we failed to finish written out. Ink's blue, handwriting's a woman's.
106. Things float by—humiliations, for example, or features noted of someone proximate. In the morning, the day tells me how it is or I make a guess, as our days are deceptive. Autumn steadily makes it colder. It rains. We remark how we need the rain, as we do. Even I say this, and approve the green hills in early spring, recompense for the damp. By late spring, they're parched. Aridity is its own season now. These distractions take my mind off the things that float by; features linger, having once been close.
108. We're like weather, blowing hot and cold, female and male. There's no helping apparatus and a man in a dress is who he is to passersby, whereas a woman: there are exceptions either way, drifting through or tight-roping pole to pole, tricky if you meet on the same highwire, but then we make it work, don't we?
109.
112.
I remember a morning when George and I were alone in the office and a soprano sang. That was long ago, the radio switched off by the founder when he wandered in. He liked fado music. They played it at the wake. When he was dying, his daughter conveyed my greeting, "Good luck in future life," well-wishing when a life terminates or barrels on, that last gamble we all take.
I saw my optic nerves— they come paired unless, glass-eyed, as I heard— you have one. Circles of lighter hue afloat atop orange spheres: this was the evidence shown me, explained, how they're deformed, and yet I aced the test, dots at the edges seen. They looked the same, but I'm untrained. She knows and judged me stable: A year 'til next.
110. A draft from a cracked doorway is a sign of winter's edging close. Rain, they said, but where is it? Sun, but not warmth. I walked thrice across five days, a vow. Today, as my third son spoke, a neighbor's airhorn sounded as news spread: king's dead to us, a great percent of us, free to uncork champagne. 111. A piece of you, a piece of me: we must be locked together in some sense, rutting dogs bewildered by aftereffects. So often rehearsed, slights of no import, negligence merely and yet each one's like a narrow line of acid in my brain. (Possible?) Every last particle of you washes up and I lean down to look again, how shining each one is, how the sun glides specifically across where I held you once and heard your voice.
113. She, for example, wants or desires, and he puts on his clothes, wonders what the day will bring. All in its time. Deaf and blind share things, fail to note or overlook how she wants or desires, and he wonders what clothes will suit. The days grow shorter, a cliché given seasonally and remarked on. Darkness is something she puts on, but still sees, a paradox that desire needs. All in time. Time wobbles in its axial frame. He sinks into sleep at two or three. She is bothered most at other hours, craves the things she craves. Siesta Hotel opens out onto brothels, their sofas rhythmic with her hungers. Sating though days tighten imperceptibly, the gaps of longing growing longer. She wonders what the day will bring. He puts on his clothes in an order handed him at birth, mysterious. He wavers inside these trappings, evades the press, keys weighing down each pocket, doors and cars, a case once filled with things she wants. "Put away long ago," another said, but no, they live on in their heads.
114.
117.
Grief is mentioned, not for the first time, nor the last, for we bring it with us, cry out for the dark sea and seek for it, a longing tidal, sometimes tsunamic. High ground's advised but you haunt the shore and brave the cold Pacific with its great white sharks. I scan the woods and sense lions, stalked by my own provocations, the bush beating fear invokes, bourgeois tents at fault's edge or where the smoke rises above the ridge.
We look for her. A bird signals, the woods hear; we follow her and something else stays hidden. Red dye patterned across a torso, object in hand the way rituals depend on there being an object, the way a wedding is coke bottles with donuts around their tops, the way he follows, hidden and not hidden, the way a vessel takes him in, the way she signals, woods pausing to listen. Two hands hold this red ochre object, a shaft and the damage done, the woods echoing and resonant, then silence pregnant with her signs.
115. Oppression is scarce in my history. Possibly a moment feeling in exile, the constant irritation of ailments. Love was its main source, women object, subject, a terror at points. I bring them along, a narrative written patiently, as one waits for them to quench themselves, want more, a trait uniquely theirs to which I had a supporting role or possibly none at all, an object or an irritant, like grains of sand. 116. Imitate to learn, I read. I absorbed the Times, read it cover to cover. I spoke it, didn't write it, but took it in and wrote more fluently, its model gone to the neurons, an echo of what I'd heard at tea, at school. Stayed with me, crisp language spoken from 1950s cars, across rattan-and-glass tables on whitewashed terraces. A bird speaks when cajoled, another repeated phrase, whiteplumed, pleased with itself, who's a pretty?
118. I have a dread of the void, he said, gesturing at junk around his bed. It was predictive. I heard it again yesterday. The world breaks it off. No one. No one. No one. No one. Harnessed in their dresses, shake their heads. Wrapped in their coats, tap hot denials with their fingers. He dreads the void, they both said to their mirrors, their confidantes. Our voids are fertile. See? No one can doubt us, but his is lye-filled, a pit for the unwary and now he's steeped in it, yes? No one. None. There's no one left, only his dread.
119.
122.
Domesticity with an edge is a theme, but is it suitable? She can write any damn thing. Themes lie about like cats or leave traces of themselves. In the largest room, the table and rug live harmoniously, although the cane of one chair sags where some fat man sat. We wondered who it was. Idle speculation, the damage done. Here I am writing on the theme, which seems unsuitable, lies about, looks in vain for an edge, damn thing. The next room is like a men's club, edgy only at the periphery, private upstairs own-thought retreats that sometimes reek of travesty. I sleep in one, dream in the other.
Christmas although hardly so— music asked for, then rejected, the background strange. Tree missing, lights still boxed. Sung as opera passes muster. Almost midnight. Three times I heard from across the dateline. Words popping in and popping out. My mind's eye sees across—festivals in distant parts, bits of Poland and Norway, islands in oceans and women who text Christmas as if trees stood, their lights lit, and choirs echoed in churches. (We'll need a miracle, I thought. If the Virgin hears, we'll build our thanks at the water's edge.) Three times, almost midnight.
120. The writer's upbringing was dire. She fled, received help unexpectedly, a glimmer of kindness. A picaresque period followed, writing it down, sometimes too closely, but made her way. A glimmer stands out. I remember once talking with a boy his parents left negligently behind, finally reclaiming him. I could see that his life was one of torment, so I spoke as truly as I could, to say, this is how it sounds. 121. Yesterday's was a thin smile. Tonight's thicker, waxing. Seeing it, I think of you who are as gone as gone. I'm a year closer to the edge or hedge, curtain or screen, to slipping from state to state. It is what it is; the sun alone makes it seem to wax or wane, tracing arcs memorably in my sight.
123. Fortnights pass. Books float by, leaden with thwart. Poets truck their verses, wholesaled to competitions, guises handed around, identities rented out. In the grinding house of prose, words arrive squealing, are herded, are hooked and lifted aloft, necks sliced open, bleed. A dangerous business, to be taken up with long polyethylene gloves on, caps and long coats, boots that glisten, thick lenses encased in rubbery frames. Books arrive in slabs, the ink still red and wet. At night, I read them with a knife, cut thin as skin felt as the closest borders. Decades pass, but I read it by touch.
John J. Parman lives in Berkeley, California.
COMMON PLACE Number. 27 | © 2020 (except the title) by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com