But the fruit of the poor lemon . . .

I admit, sadly, it would have been complicated. And the jury is still out as to whether it was Allison herself who was complicated or whether the world is, in the end, filled with complications that kill. "She died of complications." It is true, after all, that no one gets out of here alive. Sometimes, of course, only parts of us die, so that a person is no longer fully alive, or perhaps they are still alive but in some way new or altered. I don't know. I'm comfortable not knowing, better off I think. These days my only real complaint is that my hands keep shaking and I do not seem able to steady them.

Though I am decisively saddened by the whole Allison passage, by those four drugged-up fuck-heads, apocalyptic horsemen who trample and who kill whatever and whoever lie in their path (the thing I could not save)--the goddamned sadness feels different than the dreamless dark I have known. It's not the same as the black and incapacitating veil of dolors that wafts over my body unpredictably, that circles my hands and feet and steals the peace of sleep from my baggy eyes. I am much clearer about things now: clear that things are never all that "clear." Rarely is anything ever yes or no. Life events and experiences are more often "yes and no," although more "no," I think, than "yes." No is the operative ingredient of every fatal complication. A friend of mine once said, "the word 'no' has five meanings." He'd encountered that in a dream. To this day I have no idea what it means. The only thing I think about the word "no" is that it is serious. No blood. No air. No voice. No dreams. (that's four; perhaps "no sex" is the fifth). When I'm dead I expect the word "No" will be standing over my body in all its multifarious no-tarieties. No nothing. No shit.

I continue the habit, from time to time, of running my fingers over the scars, my face marked like an advertisement, a scarlet evisceration of self. Effacement. I too am like one of the four horsemen. Lethal. An arm of death. Armed.

As best as I can remember things, it had not rained, nor was the night in any way inclement. In fact, it had been a beautiful night. I'd been out, a dance recital, and beforehand drank wine at supper. The dance troupe, Latino, lithe, sexy, hastened a beauty that rose with ferocity inside my chest. When the recital ended, exhilaration caused me to jump out of my seat. On stage, the troupe bowed in unison and I shouted "bravo!" Vigorous applause all around. Finally, the last chiseled dancer traipsed off into a wing, the lights went up and the curtain came down, and I, abruptly earthbound once again, felt rude disappointment on that point.

The moment passed, transient, impossible to hold, and fending off a sense that I had nothing to go home to, I shuffled back up the ramp toward the lobby with the rest. I felt like an imposter. Poseur. I stepped outside. Cool air. Transition. I took my bearings and began walking in the direction of my car. Approaching the restaurant where earlier I had taken my supper, not wanting the evening to end, not wanting to return to my life, I went in. I remember doing it: Assenting. I still can't remember leaving.

What comes back to me, the thing I do remember: a moment of hesitation. Turn? Don't turn? I'd begun to turn and tried, too late, to pull out of the seconds that had already whizzed past. A concrete barrier. Impact. Initial disbelief. Then acceptance. Airborne. Car flipping. Falling. Spinning. Glass. Concrete. The world all upside down. Then the concrete rejoinder to my face, hands pushing off, scraping. No escape. The side of my head, my nose and chin. The sound of something cracking in my ears. Surrender, Succumb. Overwhelmed. Black. Accept.

No light appeared, no rehashing of a life. Out. Cool nature, plain and simple. Blood. Teeth. Bone. Fleeting experience of an undeniably overpowering fact: the flesh is weak.

Still, I hoped Allison might have been wounded enough to have loved a face like mine. An unfaceable face. I touch its scars, and sometimes the raised flesh that stretches jaggedly around my face feels like a net, a net of voices, of accusations. It is like a jury that has written out a verdict. A judge devises apt sentences. Yes and no. So very complicated. Sad.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

Just So; In Light

"The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love"--Thoreau.

It's about a shift
in point of view
he says, a slight raising
of the veil, an angle turned,
just so, in light,
as to reflect what lies behind,
beneath, inside.

Inflections of the souls of things
--the soul of things--
he corrects, as if he and I and
the walls are all composed
of the same thing--
Holy--something inside, beneath,
behind--
He's right, this poet with me softly.

Plow it all under, release the shine.
--no, what's apparent's just fine,
every mundane bit divine,
you and me, yours and mine.

Hip_-Hop

Disjointed-Jointed

The view through this first-morning
window is something right out of Flaubert--intersecting arcs
and rectangles presently reflect the morning light as it scrambles
across the city's rivers and bridges. The light converges; remote
eaves hold the remnants of night, its cool shadows. Glass, brick,
metal, wood and sky--essaying deliberate flats-and-narrows against
columnar towers, window upon window upon window--black fractals,
smooth onyx set in elemental relief, time-buffeted and rubbed, sands
of industry and invention--durable utility, yet light shows forth from
every intersecting line, eternity runs along all-diverse trajectories,
trajectories that circle back, fall one into the other, endless
repetition, immutable processes of variation--

This synchronicity, my friend, welcomes me in my New York City
hospital bed, the morning after surgery, convalescing as I think on
Flaubert, knitting back together while ruminating on Mallarmé,
and looking out the window.

Promontories

Prayer Approaching Nothing

When a promontory falls . . .
mum. da.
I am fearfully,
fearfully propelled towared my own isolated inevitables.

like an appendage whose use I’ve lost, a tail cropped,
banded and dropped, fragments . . . not of life only . . .
but even segments of my own True Self, killed off . . .
and what? I do not know. And so I pray. Whole-heartedly.
Consume me, and, amen.

Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats

Cats, Old Cats


My cat, Frances, is nearing twenty, which is very old for a cat.

She must sleep twenty-three out of twenty-four hours each day.

The one left-over hour she dedicates to being fed and being loved.

Oh how lovely . . . to be a very old cat!

some kinda sing havin' to do with the in-b'tween spaces

Between, and Out, and You

There is this murky world:
all blacks and whites and
overlapping blues,
none of which feels
forced.

The love you do not feel.
It’s all too stark. It’s hard.

In this world I am a kite,
slicing in and out of clouds,
slung between ecstasy and fear,
strung between joy and despair,
tethered to a world of apathy and tears,
a world I'd gladly leave behind for sky.

But they're all One World in the End.

And so I set my self to write a poem,
a poem that flies without a string,
once and for all, after all these years,
salt, seed, cloud, rain,
and me cut free.

I used to be able to describe in detail the tissue-thin
roach eggs lying in a corner of the hot apartment, black and
brown babies emerging, their shit-seeds found
in unexpected spaces, between white pages stained with
the small brown remnants,
baseboard lined with boric,
glasses filled with cheap rum
despair--

When I grew up I moved out,
tried to leave that house behind,
all its dissipations,
I gave up drinking cheap liquor
started drinking wine instead.
Between cutting ties and burning bridges
I'd barely time to think, to drink.

Then to find,
beyond the blush of wine,
You, and the open sky.

All I Have to Do is Dream

April 27

Strange dream:

A pack of deer charging up a hill

And onward, majestic, their grace-filled hinds, heads aloft,

And a tiny newborn left shakily behind,

panicked and eager—both;

And myself, caught up, in the woods, cheering the straggler along.

What's Love Got to do with It?

STOP! In the Name of Love

I am broken. I think that’s why I have trouble articulating my feelings, difficulty locating my thoughts. I have trouble making clean connections. I’m all association; never deduction. I suffer from a failed coherence of selfhood. Self-incongruity. I lack poetry. Inchoate persona. He-he. Not funny.

Whatever great thing it is I decide to attempt, I do initially set out with some kind of “vision,” although, even from its inception, the vision is never very clearly established. Never simple or plain. Not entirely. I stab at things, great and small, as if with a dull knife, leaving only masticated valves, lacerated tubes, sucking blood and air, all the result of desperate action. Behind are left the things I maimed, unkilled. I am unsure, unskilled. I ignore important details, overlook simple mundanities. I opt for that which lies beyond me. I am ordinary. I insist on achieving the exceptional.

I think it was Aurelius (or was it the Buddha, or David?) who wrote “don’t sweat the small stuff.” But it took some complete ass to determine “it’s all small stuff.” Not everything in this life is small stuff. I know. Instead of wisdom I was given to masturbatory idleness. I was disengaged, avoidant, from birth. Not wisdom but “wasdom.” Wasdoomed. Boom. He-he. Again, not funny.

This soft underbelly of pain—the scar across my face, the arthritis that locks down my vertebrae and causes my hip to seize—I would never have believed that I was capable of such self-mutilation had not even more serious consequences passed. Which they did. “Consequences?” you ask. I didn’t know then. I did not wake up one day and decide that I would inflict tragedy on some person, on some people, some family who did not even suspect at the time that I existed, that I might have lived nearby, just down the street even. We might have passed one another, more than once or twice, in the supermarket. They probably saw me drive past their home a hundred times but never really noticed. Not until that day. This is bad. And although this sense of things, these memories sans Beauty had come forward in my mind only after encountering her, Allison had nothing to do with any of this. The accident happened long before I met her. I need to stop now.

The End

Souled Out

It is admittedly soul-boggling, the fact that I have bones, a full skeleton’s worth, a thing I’ve come to know only by viewing other disembodiments. How else would I know that I am a biologically sophisticated vertebrate?

Bones and red jellies. I’ve been living on beef, red wine, and chocolate for far too long. I’ve been in love so many times that I have learned love does not exist. I no longer believe in love. So here I am.

Wishing I were wrong. Reflexive. Not quite suicidal, but sad, not far from that meaning, that je ne sais quoi, a thing she once possessed, now all my own.

Silence is Golden

Hunter of Silent Flight

I don’t know how to bend her heart. My word-barrages only
tend to separate us. Its her fault; she drives me to these flights.
Near her I grow increasingly lost, energies dispersed, elemental
and dissolved. Nothing like control remains. I am all gut, windy.
All Desire. All Want. All set in flux like nature, moving
everywhere at once. I try to hold my tongue, think "Quiet.
Steady," but the word-tide I cannot stem drowns my cause,
threatens to deluge my best, and tender, and kind intentions.
Why should words come into play at all? Words are strangle-holds
in an ill-advised and hopeless cause. Silence says much more.
More silence tongue or else, I fear, she’ll point us toward the door.

Or maybe words chisel things, hunt for
a voice that would not speak, that would prefer
to sing if only sing it could. And I a Michelangelo
confronted with a silent block of promise, a figure locked
within--one only I detect--then called to name the yet-
born thing the only way I can. Still, because she knows
my oafishness, and all the clumsy routes I’ve gone, she
knows that I’m no artisan. Not only can’t I sculpt or
sing, words remain a clunky thing I toss out like an
army made of breath, excavating passing things,
things beyond my depth, the things that pass between
us pure, beyond all fashioning. Unspoken flights I seek
to name with an arsenal of words, though pass they do
like eyes askance, or flee like flying birds. The meaning
that I want to make, with words I hope illuminate, of all
these words that come and go, the best of them is “Love.”

In the Still of the Night

Maskulinity

I suffer periodic delusions of grandeur. I move in nighttime spaces, blurry spaces between grandeur and despair. This despair comes to me in colors I cannot name.

I ask why. Often. I suppose grandeur weighs more heavily after one publishes a book. But after that? I didn’t know. Don’t know. Self-accusation. Doubt. When I began to write it was out of love. How do good things go bad? Acclamation. Artifice. America.

It’s that night-space between, lingering, interminable, that makes me want that sleepless, dreamless night to end. I drink to close out the dark in-between. Drink shuts things down.

Sometimes (rarely) I cry. Anxious moments instigate tears. On those few occasions I do cry, that surrender means I’m on the edge of some annihilation. I feel unstable. Vacuous. Afraid I’ve never lived. Bravado slips off night’s ledges. Fear inducts tears that cling. I can’t even ball up a fist to shake at God. I’m a poseur. A dilettante. I go limp.

Nothing has ever come easily to me. Only this mask. I am Mask-uline. Ha-ha. I drink. It helps me every bit as much as it kills me. It helps me because it kills me. It helps me. It kills me. It is killing me. Help me. Don’t.

You see? I am beyond delusions now. I am only sharing feelings, feelings like rose and indigo inks drawn and set down on paper. An image from another time. Ink is no longer “drawn and set down.” I don’t know if the past was any better. It was another time. My gut has history. My sense of things has been forged over time. In the end, my feelings are tied to the past. My life. A history of wasted time. Of not knowing. Dreamless life.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? My feelings. Very Dr. Phil. Very Dr. Joyce Brothers. Lost in an age of celebrity shrinks. And for all of it, I no longer feel. This is the extended irony that runs this narrative.

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

I’m Sorry
or Hemlock

How can I not love you? Please tell me, because
I am afraid that loving you means pushing you away.

Tell me how Beethoven could not have loved the strings,
the piano, music. How could Shakespeare not have loved
the quill and the stage, his art? How might Socrates not have
been enamored of the Truth?

My art? Loving you. Help me extricate myself.

I am hopeless. Driven toward masterpiece.

You, Me.

Dear Prudence

Darling Richard

I want to say the following thing, I don’t know whether I should be saying this to you, I, uh, took a picture on Main Street where the Metropolitan Plant . . . was, where there’s a little wired corner of the senior housing with a unicorn in it, I took a picture. It’s no longer there. I don’t know if it was vandalized or not. I haven’t been there in a while. But I asked one of the resident’s what it meant and he said, “Hope.” There used to be a unicorn shop in town, I discovered. Just for novelties. I was out there once and there were some boys near this woman sitting. She demanded, you know, not demanded she said there was a boy throwing gargabe so I told him not to litter. I have a right to say that to him because I am an adult. I called Champagne Rivera. I think I just wanted to make sure I was really there because I lost the paper. I spoke to a nice operator. I think that’s where they do government research, there. I used to ride past on my bicycle, government research and I think there was a CIA office there also. And the last thing I want to say is I had a bad experience with my dog last night and I called my doctor and he said I had a bad habit with my dog. I have lots of bad habits. My doves. There were these boys by the recreation field. They were playing, throwing a ball, I don’t know if I should say this, throwing their balls, ball in the air, and I yelled at them. There was truck, a Good Earth truck, parked. It was there blocking them. They probabaly had a right to be there playing those boys. I think it was a Good Earth truck. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing.

Mother Earth will swallow you; Lay your body down.

Bone on Bone Grounding

I loved my father.
He failed--in more than one thing only.
(we all failed).
My father loved me.
His bones are in the ground.

I cannot retrieve them.
I would spend nights inside a cage, pacing
All against the claim "my father"--Not Our Father--
My father whose bones lie in the ground.

They lie buried there with grandmothers' and grandfathers'
Bones, uncles' and aunts', cousins' bones, strangers' bones--
Ulnas, femurs, tibias, metacarpals, once noble skulls
Dislodged. I suckled, took sustenance from father's
Visaged marrow in the world.

I move toward him:
His
bones
are in the
g
r
o
u
n
d o
b n s
e
Wh n I bring my bones, and my mother brings
her bones too, grocery shopping, all these bones together,
I will carry this buried thought
deep inside--Your bones are not my bones.
Where can my love go?
I look around at all the people wheeling carriages in aisles
filled with jars and sacks and boxes.

I wonder about this and watch as my mother,
bent, rump waddling, propels her cart (a thing not unlike a
nickel-plated skeleton). It is packed with flesh and bones,
with pork as well as bran. She eyeballs a soup-bone for its
several possibilities. Broth? Doorjamb? Bookend?

My love, where can my love go?

Bottom's Up

It makes no sense, the bend to drink,
to hear the clank of glasses clink,
the cheer proclaimed 'spite grief unnamed,
denial, which is truth ill-framed.

And in my body I bear scars,
a tribute to rides home from bars
with drunks behind the wheels of cars
who shorten lives of future stars.

Words gone slurring blankly boast
yet can't remember last night's toast,
the thrumming of the car's front grill,
the dying words of last night's kill.

Insanity. Approach the brink.
To think that I could use a drink.

Teacher, Student: New Rhetoric, New Colossus
*
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Emma Lazarus
*
To the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the purpose of education is human liberation.
Professing the New Rhetorics
* * * * *
COME, said my Soul,

and there came a time I was dropped inside this Seven Story Mountain. I am the atrophied lava, viscous slag of a volcanic cavern, claw marks on its vulvanized walls where inscriptions tell others’ stories that feel terribly, fearfully, like two sides of my own simultaneity.

We willing learners of all, teachers of all, and lovers of all

I laugh and cry, one voice, laugh/cry, disparate constituents. I have a side not very many detect. Legerdemain of self. I’ve been sawn in two, even yes, asunder—which when taken apart reads, “as under.” Class. Can we take that strange word apart as well? Why should not a man or woman do as much as the
seasons . . . ? Teacher, give me a word that I might be saved. . . . Emergence, Rhetoric as Love. Class is inscribed all along these watchtower walls.

Time passes, but I have not emerged out of this tower, have not traversed all these seven tiers, and have no idea where I am in relation to where I began. Memory fails. I am a spiny insect clinging to an outcrop—Where the top? Where the bottom?—I am somewhere, some unlit somewhere.

It is dark; my eyes have read so many texts that, by now, they suffer from myopic overnearness. I claw my way along walls inscribed with lines that say things like, The Man Who Became Himself. Names and initials mark the way. Paul H. Joe C. Bill W. Julie L. Tom M. John E. Jim C. Walt W. Who are you?
What-Where-Why-How. Epideixis. Essaying the stones. If I let go I will fall like a brick.

Cling.
Scrape.
Climb.
At times I [clap hands] STOP.

I stop to breathe. That’s what I’m doing here, right now, stopping, remembering to breathe. Remembering things that have yet to happen.

Soon I will resume, will search the craggy undersides of rocks for niches dug by others’ nails where I will dig my nails, where I will finger dreary-inch-by-inch this wall, moving toward air, toward other hands—there must be an opening, somewhere. I am persuaded. Breathe.

Earth, freshly dug.
Flowers, heads shorn.
Dark shroud.
Light, shades of light.
Water, pooled and stale.
Shoal, scholar, shale.

I cannot tell whether I am a hooked fish or an anchored ship. I’m nobody, who are you?

The scholar kisses the teacher

“Comparison Shopping: Degrees”


and the teacher kisses the scholar

"Mene, tekel, peres."

With finger pointing to many immortal songs, 
And menacing voice, What singest thou?--I just want to live before I die-- The writing’s on the wall. Perish. Publish. Teach. Publish. Learn. Publish. Perish.
you are no scholar and never saw your name in print

I peer, peer downward, nomic-detritus filling the cavernous bottom of the Martello. Shards of broken bottles, glass scattered all along, everywhere. I see one of my many faces reflected there. Among the refuse. Above us only sky. The Jinn have been released. Release. Imagine. I inch a finger further. The pull of gravity gathers in my body. Write or be written. If I let go I will fall like a brick.

I am a Fusi dancer. I choose. I let go. I fall, stall, hear a word, find a hand.

Light!

The wrong’d made right

C'mon now touch me babe

BEGGAR'S BANQUET

I’ve heard that you should always have a plan B. I didn’t even have a plan A. The only thing I could admit to for sure was that I had gotten romantically hung up on a beautiful and deeply wounded woman who, up until that week, I never knew existed. And, that in some eerily providential way, her life had crossed paths with my own. It all seemed dream-like, unfathomable. How else could I explain encountering the box, then meeting her, and the Fab Four’s arrival here in Ellenville? It was all too creepy.

It had been a good day, up until a point. Allison (and Angus) had both come to class. Everyone had the opportunity to speak, to share about their week, and to say goodbye. Allison exchanged smiles (and notes) with her classmates. I expressed my gratitude for each of them. We would meet again later in the day, our class gathered with all the other classes—“Poetry,” and “Memoir,” and “Fiction for Dreamers” among them—at a banquet, the week’s closing ceremony.

I admit I got a little misty, listening as the speaker read a poem her class had composed for the occasion. “Why stories,” she asked. “Why poems? How can we justify such trivial pursuits in a world where people are beheaded by zealots, slain over drug turf, where death seems to gain the upper-hand every evening at six?” The answer, it seemed to me, was self-evident. I looked at Allison and I was crushed by want. I turned, glanced at my watch, leaned and whispered to her. She nodded and I rose. I adjusted my tie, shook hands all around—an occasional hug—and off I sped across the floor and out of the hall. I wanted to get over to the Melrose Group for another round of very important goodbyes. Allison and I would meet up later. I had a good idea where we might confront the four dingleberries and get her voice back.

The long corridor that led to the elevators was carpeted in stainless brown plugs. I loosened my tie and ducked into the men’s room, the door swishing shut behind. The tiles gleamed; every surface had been buffed. I was alone and it was silent—the air-conditioning whirring in the ceiling vents. I did my business and ran the spigot. I thought I heard some feet patter past, but no one entered. I turned the water off. Again I heard a scurrying past the door. The lights dimmed, then came back up. I moved to the door.

Crowds of people were charging past. I stood in the open doorway, floundering, at a loss as to what this all might mean. The air-conditioner humming behind, feet shuffling the carpet in front of where I stood, suddenly I heard the shrill crescendo from without. Sirens. I entered the herd streaming steadily toward the stairs. A dull whistle buzzed the outside of the building. A razor-like wind, the sound contracting and expanding, gusting fiercely. Then it dawned on me: tornado! I half-smiled, half-shit. I surveyed the tide of faces all around me, each one more somber than the last—bodies giving way to a fearful undertow—not quite panic, but close.

I followed down the stairwell with the rest. Once at the bottom, out through the door we all poured. How strange to find it dark. Though it had been nearly a week since my last drink, it felt as if I’d lost several hours to a drunken tear. It was two in the afternoon, nearly black as night—and cold. People rushed for their cars but to no purpose. A long line of traffic clogged the one thoroughfare in and out of Ellenville as cars inched their way toward the Interstate. I recalled the warning tacked on the back of the door, up in my room. I jogged off in that direction, dodging passing bodies at every turn, scanning the crowd for a glimpse of a beautiful woman with an enormous dog as I went.

This sudden turn seemed the strangest thing to me. Looking all around, only confusion, people of every size and shape running past, heads bobbing, bodies weaving. This was the closest I’d come to anything dreamlike in some time. The line of traffic along Dubuque wasn’t moving. Folks wanted to get home. I wanted to get as far out of town as possible, until I could be certain disaster would not visit this inherently good hamlet.

The siren began another pass, a gradual heightening. Dogs yowled in response. I wanted to raise my voice in unison with theirs and cocked my head against the rising pitch. The sound felt like something solid and it mixed with the wind that whipped us all. A shrill and sensate wail started thrumming in my head. I imagined a hilltop, one as high as Ellentine Road, its peak set against the sky like a towering brass reed set to cut the wind so that even the air was sliced in two as it flew screaming past. The howl grew so fierce that I was about to cover my ears when I heard something filter through. It was faint. I did not acknowledge it and stayed my course, heading steadily for the Mayflower Tower with every step. But again I heard something and this time I turned.

Now, what did I know, except books?—not just books, but cases of them, a library full lining every wall in my house. And here I was among all these people, people swarming in every direction, seeking refuge from the threatening tornado. Here, when I looked around, it wasn’t shelves I saw, not the backs of books with faded spines. Real live people were all around. It occurred to me that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch some of them. A chugging and a periodic POP drew my eyes to the right and the orange color registered. In the traffic, a pickup, three roustabouts sitting shoulder-to-shoulder inside the cab, one in the bed behind. Yes, them.

My feet changed direction. Looking round, I spotted a familiar face, and then another, and another. A girl carrying a guitar; purple hair. A man in a blue jumpsuit, hair pulled back behind his ears, his step determined—the Melrose group, where I'd planned on being by now if not for the threat of a twister. My eyes drew down on the jalopy chugging along six inches at a time. I could see the Ohio barroom. I remembered every orange detail, and tasted the stale scent of an old spongy carpet in the back of my throat. The music they’d blotted out with stupidities, crassness—their assault on anything civilized, anything lyric, harmonies, guitars, voices—a song began to play in my ears. Everything faded to something else, distant—they alone, these strange new people, drew into focus. I flashed back to purple days, days of wine, red things. Days of short skirts and girls whose kisses I scarcely recall, a boyhood and an age of becoming. Thighs. Backs of white calves. Heat.

Round Here

After a Fight on a Last February Wednesday

If I lost you
I would be like a lonely recidivist
sentenced to a place where there is nothing good
to touch or hear or see or taste.

If I lost you
the desperate psychopath,
would break in all over again,
out to steal this light.

Once beautiful together, have we
suddenly derailed,
lights dim and flashing red?

It’s true. I’ll beg.
Turn these bars to air, once more,
white crinolines fluttering in spring,
breezy lace curtains
shadows hopping sprite-like in

the light of you.

* * * * * * *

What is it about this woman, other than the fact I find her mesmerizingly beautiful?

Even her soft laughter—beautiful. But also tender. Its sound is worked into her anger like a vein of running water. Her eyes—beautiful too, beguiling. Within their translucent hues she hides and discloses all at once.

Her reticences are part of that same confusing lack of finality. If I wait she will arrive. But, I still talk over her, never meaning to. Her voice bubbles up in starts and stops, and I haven’t learned their cadence quite yet. Listen, John. Listen.

The insights she shares speak intelligently about the multifarious world. I think she and I share a plane of experience. We see the world, not exactly alike, but in much the same way. We have felt the sting of fear and the staunch courageous stand. We have felt the surge of anger in the blood and the tender drift of caring that unfolds in tears.

“We.” It is that one personal pronoun that speaks to our pluralities. Old familiars occupy the space between when we sit around coffee, always too strong. Perhaps our feelings have been brewed that way as well. Her silences are movements of the self, her words are rungs to climb. She encourages me to rest, inspires me to action. I can be who I am with her. She can be who she is round here. And, I guess, we will sometimes fight as well.

Crazy

She would later tell me that she thought I was crazy.

Though I did not intend to mention it, had not even thought of it, when she finally showed up, she and her dog, both being very surprised by the fact that I was there, on the side of Ellentine Road—I spilled my guts. Not only did I tell her that I did not think her story was a work of fiction, that I believed the events actually happened—to her—I also told her how drawn to her I was. I took her hand, looked at her and said, “Allison, I am enamored.”

She pulled her hand away. I’d made a mistake. All of it, I thought, was a huge blunder. “I apologize,” I said. “I made you uncomfortable.” But before I could retract what I had said or in some way qualify my feelings for her, she scrunched up her lips, exhaled, and resumed chugging up what had to be the steepest hill in Iowa. I jumped into the air, raising her story over my head, waving it. “I know who they are,” I shouted to her.

She stopped. She turned and looked at me. I held the story out and again I said the words, caringly this time, “I know who they are, Allison. I’ve seen them.” The dog and she walked back to the car. She opened the door and pulled the seat forward allowing Angus to squeeze into the backseat. Then she planted herself in the passenger seat and pulled the door closed. I stood there for a moment. This is good, I thought, looking in through the window and smiling. She gestured to me as if to say, “What are you waiting for?”

I got in and looked at her. I ached. Amazing. But so sad. Allison didn’t ache the way I did. It was plain. She suffered. I handed her the story she’d written and she lifted each page looking for my comments, which at some point I’d stopped offering. After three pages I had intuited by the writing itself that it had been no fiction. “Did you want me to know?” I asked her. She bent her head to one side as if to say, “I don’t know.” Then she began to cry. I touched her arm—smooth, sculpted. My heart was breaking. I looked at my watch. I had half and hour in which to get to class. It was Friday, the last day. I would leave for home on Sunday.

“C’mon,” I said. “We shouldn’t be late for class.” I started the car and headed off with this beautiful and listless pixie at my side.

When some weeks later she finally got around to telling me she thought me crazy, her reason was that she believed only a "nutjob" would want to spend time with her, much less want a committed relationship with her. She had a point. But I couldn’t help myself. I was enamored, truly. Maybe it was pixie dust or something very like it.

He Was a Friend of Mine

After Watching the Very Recently Late David Foster Wallace Give a Reading on Youtube

“There’s an extended halt to the action during which I decamp.” Words written by David Foster Wallace. Sadly prophetic. Some Harpers piece on baton twirlers. He made others laugh.

Suddenly I want to ask, why didn’t you just use the name "Dave?” Or even Davy, or the e.e.-cummings-lowercase-thing dave, or after a six-pack-and-a-half, Dave-the-Rave Foster Wallace? No judgment here, bro. Just a thought is all. Your choice, David Foster Wallace, seems so formally elongated, almost academic. Wouldn’t more casual have been easier for you? Less pressure, less invasive public expectation, therefore less evasion on your part; less adjudication by a world impossible not to disappoint and by which we are mostly disappointed.

Saliva issues. Drenched bandanas. Hugs. Too few hugs.

Too few hugs.

I think of your wife, DFW. I could have taken that call. It's what I do. “911. What’s your emergency?” I go through the 911 script. The millionth time. Straight forward. No big words.

“My husband hung himself.” I check my hearing for the stratitude of her claim. I review not only her words, but the way they are served. And suddenly I see her. Oh, I don’t see her, not right then and there, but I see her. She is severed from her last breath by, what for most of us, will remain unspeakable. She’s seen it. She’s been hit.

“Okay,” I say, because I think "okay" is a comforting word. My sense of things tells me that it has the same effect as reading the words “Dutch Noodles” on a menu in a roadside Pennsylvania family restaurant. I repeat it, deeply, sonorously, “Okay.” I am conscious of the effect my voice transfers to hearers. Its monotone is cool and easy. Its timbre (unnoticeable is the trick) lends a body to the voice. “I am here,” it says—like music, all by itself. Suddenly, I am the Adagio, that part that lingers long after Barber has decided to be done, once and for all, with some fixed sense of “what should be.” Of some final thing, a finished project.

“The saddest piece of music ever written.” That’s what some scholars claim for Barber’s Adagio. I make it a point to tell that to my composition classes, true or not true. (In addition to working for 911, I also teach.) “The violins” I say, “draw you out from inside.” I motion with my hand. “They can kill you.”

She, the wife, will need time to heal. For him, the husband, the deadline is passed.

Lay your hands on me, please. Touch. Touch and go. A curious phrase. A furious craze.

I watch DFW on Youtube, “Thanks a lot,” says David, dave, Davy, as he steps, unassumingly, away from the podium.

Prayers, family. Writing, and prayers. Violins. Laughter. "What's left of before."

None of it "okay."