A Novel That Is A Letter.

(Remnants)

by Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers

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A deer, when trapped, its forest on fire around it, circles slow then lays down.

This is how he slept: one needs to surrender; it is a preservation of faith.

———————–

It is the seventh gene; my disintegration, this anomaly.  A nick in the chromosome and I began from birth to congest.  Cystic. It is progressive, that is, it does not bear a steady decline but quickens. I have been happy.  Have been content.  An innocence, ever enduring, lingers in me — though it seems with a clarity less particular than in most.  Color and detail forfeited for speed.  I will tell lies of August.  Of a harvest lost, when it was not.  There is very little I can account for – cannot feel the grass beneath my feet.  Others seem to know more, sense, say by name. Their minds hold landscapes, languages and years.  Taste.  City streets.  A face, intact.

How?

I do not.  Lack history.  But I will tell you what I can.

I knew him.  And it is important you believe we did love, though it seems to me now we were but these children of our memory, in a time that preceded intention.

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An Outline.

1.  Begins:  The current state of this

> Finally uncertain.

better to be this way, happier;

has not always been so

(never was one to be at ease).

Very few things are absolute (are known):

(thank you Socrates,)

1.  I have lived.

2.  I am still young.

3.  I will die, and

4.  I have loved another.

It has been established that I have been awake more hours than I have slept,

this accounts for absolute #1.  There is more that I have not done than what I have done;

#2.   There is more that I have not done than what I will do; #3.

As the first three are temporal fact, and have been disputed by others far better and far before

me (cogito ergo sum, cogitas ergo es) I will concentrate on the last.  The last would not be

possible, would not have been, without that which preceded it, that is, without the first.

That said: it is a love story.

Simply put.

It could be nothing else.

2.  The first Story:

> What I could not know and what I do not remember

(therefore, yes; it is made up).

1.  Mother on phone.

2.  Dolphin on beach.

3.  Small Talk:

> His belt

my eyes

the architecture of brick buildings

and of trees.

> An uncommon Prayer.

> Three children by the road-side (one farther, jumping rope)

wood and oil

a cough at night

a thought.

>What happened.  What seemed to happen.

4.   Momentum.

> Stepping out.

> Coming back.

> What is gained by difference.

5.  What is lost.

…………………….

Simpler Still:

1.                         2.

They meet.  They meet

They part They part,

They meet again. They turn to face —

3. 4.

Boy meets girl Girl meets boy

Boy leaves Girl forgets

Boy returns Girl remembers

(classic.) (abstract.)

5. 6.

Boy is little Girl is little.

His parents die. She is atheist

He tries to love   anything again She cannot sleep

(true.) (objective.)

He sleeps.

He runs. .

He wants to come home.

She fights.

She tires. We were young.

She wants to let go. We were angry

We were alone.

They were young and tragically stupid

They thought they were going to do something

They thought they knew what it was.

They were young,

they were mistaken:

they never were alone.

A lot happens in between, themes of external loss, internal corruption, unavoidable declines, unavoidable aspirations.

What precedes (preceded) us:

1.  He has lost, she will lose.

2.  What transpires in their time apart is necessary, and

3.  There is, or there must be, as one better said, “a  sundering before a reconciliation”.

There is a reconciliation.

…………………….

Time line (more or less):

1. A dolphin

2. A thread

3. A church

4. The sketch

5. A drive in winter

6. A little sleep

7. An argument

8. The raking of leaves

9. My friends

10. My fault

11. My father

12. the Spring

13. the city

14. Laurie in Brooklyn

15. the airport and a blue dress

16. A way out

17. Mikhal

18. The street light

19. the turtles

20. the spinning wheel

21. Easter and Marlboro Reds

22. The bridge

23. The kiss

24. My mother and the music chapter

25. The return.

But first, there is love, and then, the rest of it.

— Shannon Powers

September 18, 2003

a Thursday.

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A Dolphin

I found a dolphin, years ago, far down on the sand. There were more I have been told, beyond a breaker wall, laid out in shadows, but I did not find them.

I was shirtless and my hair was long.  My mother, legs open, feet apart, straw hat, sat out of the sun.  My father called for me.  They had brought me there to teach me to swim, to love water.  I left my father waiting, half immersed in shallows.  Distracted by a distant glint of sun, as if from mirrored glass in the sand, I went for it.  I ran.  Straight for that gleaming, and reached a body that was still, sweating salt and foam, my eyes the color of its skin.  I knelt.  Held its fin, cleared mucus from the hole at the top of its skull with my index finger.  It did not breathe.  There was blood in its eye socket and nostril, stains from its rectum spread past its tail.  But thinking it alive, thinking it living – I tried to raise the dead.  I ran down to the water and filled my fists.  I soaked my hair, returned and wrung it in her mouth, spread my wet palms along her sides and face.  I remember looking out, and begging, asking the ocean to let her come back.  I think I said I would do anything.  I think I said please, as if it were something simple, that I wanted.

But she had been dead a long time.  Maybe since morning, with its darkness, indiscernible; the hues of land and air unvaried and indifferent.  The moon perhaps to blame, or storm or sirens.  The tide came in quick and high and she may not have felt it; the unfamiliar score of sand too near beneath her belly.  Expelled by her ocean.  Abandoned.  Or, did she choose to climb?  No:  they may have climbed together.  A creature, clever and desperate; she may have known.  Trusted.  Kept nothing.  And the night gave way, and the ocean, gone, and then the sun, and time, and nothing left to keep.

Did she sense the tide recede?

Small hands, small feet never had a chance, I knew, and did not try to lift her.  I lay down,  My form fit to the smooth curve of drying spine and we sank into the sand.  Made an odd impression – extending hands, a bottled nose, girl hair, and tail, serpentine and reeking – two of the strange faith, laid out and wanting breathing, just beyond the tide ebbing black, minerals at its edge.

My father found me sleeping, sand mites jumping in my hair.  When he woke me, I remember, I asked him for something to eat.

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My father

My father walking me down the rocks towards the tip of the pier, my mother’s fear for us, her calling me back.

— action that resembles some lost intention; what was meant.  And the world hits me harder than it might had I these references.  I have become a sieve of days collecting what I can and then forgetting.

I remember another conversation, very early on, with my father, when I was a child, not believing in God an instant, I remember saying to him, smiling: “But isn’t it just like falling asleep?”  and he said, with some consideration as is always given these questions when it is a daughter who asks, “yes, in a way, yes it is like sleeping.”  And I said, “Well then, what is everybody so afraid of?  You don’t even know it happens, it doesn’t even matter.”

I know I said this.  Exactly this, and years later I am on some front porch, I am alone, and every moment of my life I can recall comes to me like dying.  And I think to myself, I shouldn’t have said that.  Not that way.  Not even having been so young.  I should have thought better than to have said that.  (Even having meant it, as one always does, in the nicest way) now I am caught trying to get back what ever peace it was I held that let me speak so quickly. Whatever confidence in nature and in time it took that let me say, quite clearly, with a smile, death is just a moment turned to sleep, and I will not know it to have to leave.

Instead I am sleepless. I am twenty (-four) and exhausted of eating and speaking and reading and being awake, of restless nights spent beside soundless bodies who can find that rhythm of breath to take them out of waking.

I cannot find that rhythm of my own.

I am not ready.  There have been other times, times of recklessness, of clear motion, independent of thought or circumstance, when I could have been ready.

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My friends

My best friends when I was very little were two boys, Ben and David.  David was more the friend, Ben, more the lover (don’t let anyone tell you children cannot tell the difference).  We led each other around the neighborhood, I always had them chasing me.  That was the most fun.  They could really give me a run for my money, up and into trees, through forts built by the other kids, into the Belfrey, down around the fields.  Sometimes the games were organized, “give me sixty seconds, then come”, “the boundaries are: the street, the fence, that big tree and the stone steps”.  “Time out is a whistle.”

My sense, ours, of justice and injustice was never more clear.

David was the son of two liberal idealists, political and intelligent, non practicing Jews, he lived directly across the street from Ben, the youngest of a family of six, three boys, one girl, also Jewish, but practiced, conservative.  I entered David’s house more frequently than Ben’s, perhaps because it was more chaotic (food eaten freely, messes made, books opened where they could be seen), more comfortable to a child who herself did not pay heed to material order. When I did enter Ben’s house, I was struck always by a control beyond what I had known, everything was put away, glasses, dishes, cassettes, photographs were framed, beyond it though, there came a sense of holiness, almost undetectable, but it was there, in the hallway, in the living room, in the locked box, beside Ben’s bed, where he told me he kept a piece of paper on which he had written Elohim, in Hebrew, that he said he could never throw away, “I wrote it by mistake”.

There is no need to compare these two houses too much, or the families within, only to say both were unquestionably good.

The point is that we lived close to one another, we ran, we played, we created stories and battles, we were young together.

Ben was the strong one, he could move faster, and wanted to fight, as I did.  For this reason, we left David out, not entirely unaware of the meanness — it was the meanness that awakened in me for the first time that feeling of innate attraction, of wanting, that is stirred up when one has found a true competitor, a match, someone who will inevitably push them forward, but will not ever leave them behind.

I was fearless and he was willing, to go where my running took me — higher into the branches, across the top of the jungle gym, standing up on thin planks of wood laid across tree houses.  He told me he would watch me climb and think, I’ve got to follow, I can’t be beaten by a girl.  And I would not be beaten by anyone.  And so we kept on.  I thought he was the greatest thing I’d ever met.  I recognized there was something I could not touch between us, something deep and intrinsic, I would go home at night and think of him before sleeping, about how we were, the fastest runners, the best rope climbers, and if there was ever a war, if ever anybody needed to be saved from an on coming disaster, if Forest Court and Muzzey Street were ever rendered into a battle ground, we would doubtless win, because, he was the fastest boy and I was the fastest girl and we would be on the same side then, and who could beat us?  I knew it.  I believed it to be true.  I vowed to never let him down, to give my life, if for some reason bombs began to fall, if for some reason it came down to him or me, I would push him out of the way, I would take the bullet, the knife to the throat, : Take me, let him go, take me.

Dramatic? yes, beyond self important.  I suppose I was trying to put a name, give a purpose to, breathe life into that thing between us that we shared that I could not touch.  I wanted to say, that we would remain, Ben and Shannon, no matter what.

But we were children.  And promises were made silently, by action alone.

How was I to know, that we would not always be the way we were?

The thing is, I did know.  I knew it, that this was not the end, that already we were changing, our imaginations beginning to fail, and the unknown having been explored, became less interesting (still is at times, less interesting).

And now he is leaving.  He is already gone.

He called me to tell me, he had enlisted, “I’m going to be a pilot, a navy pilot.”  He is going to fly.

He among others.  They are leaving, these boys I knew, one by one, each finding the momentum to gather and to leave.

Terrified of a life without — that moment, “take me.”

And I cannot bring myself to go just yet, cannot seem to fool unending, as if I am still young, younger still than I have ever been.  As if I’ve got time.

“I’ve got time.”  I say to myself, sort of.

Off they go.

They are leaving, one by one.  Starting years ago.  I never did follow; never was one for following.

These boys.  They chased me.  Used to.  Up, into the Belfrey, into trees, gaining in the open spaces, sprinting the soccer field, running, coming down the vacant middle of the street .

This was my childhood.  I had long hair.  I did not believe in God.  I ran.

I remember the chase (that sparse few other girls share), how they gathered, more and more each summer, paths more complex and weaving.  They began to separate and speak, map out the yards and fences, the crossings of the concrete.

Never enough; their traps.  Crew cut heads behind the brush, a blonde behind a stair, never startled as they thought they would.  I never stumbled, did not fall, only turned, and when I had the lead, I won.

And loved it.

It seemed my truest self, these days, so few in the percentage of my life spent.  Small as we were, and foolish in the seriousness we gave, each time around, less than a mile, really one square patch, of settlement, of family keeping watch, the block, the neighborhood, our home.

And if they were to catch, what would they do?  We were too young for rape, or even kissing.  Too looked after to do much harm.  And I was healthy then, doubted those who called me ill doubted illness, I did not know anything about being sick, or losing ground.

I thought about the next day while falling asleep.  Do you know how long it has been since I did that, just naturally thought about the next day?  Looked forward to the simple events that make up the morning, the afternoon, thought it was enough to get up, walk down Forest Court (the small dirt road I lived on) stand at the bus stop.  How would I walk, what would I be thinking, that is what I thought about, I was so big in my mind , so important, every walk, every bus trip to school, every conversation in the hall way.

Not to oversimplify.  Even then I would get bored of envisioning the possible realities of the next day (there aren’t that many), and turned towards imagining the unexpected, what I thought I wanted to happen, what would be exciting.  True love, torture.  I imagined the boys would finally catch me and elevate me to prized captive, tamed shrew, subdued savage, caged lion.  I would fight, “she fought bravely until the end” they would say, but there would be too many, I would be taken.  Loved it.  Thinking about what would happen if they did catch me, in my bed, windows open, raised above the street lights lit  and distant in the night we all know.  What it would be like, to be held, undone, tormented desired.  And then, in this time consuming expanse of thought, unfolding always longer before sleep, it was no longer the hands of those boys who were my friends, who were not capable (in their existent but shallow menace) of the darkness I was looking for, but the hands of nameless characters, shadowed faces, typical of dreams, stark and dim, circling around, speaking quietly, about me.    This seemed to be the appealing fact, that they spoke about me, what they would do to me, the words, the words were what got me going, their careful consideration of every part of me. Entirely self centered, these little fantasies of childhood, where every outcome is possible and disconnected to the reality of the possibilities so that the idea that they will eat you or kiss you or look at you seem of equal weight, dark, and grim but somehow, unthreatening.  At least that was how it was for me.  I ran with the boys, but dreamed of something different, something else, something strong,  Something that did not give me the time to recognize and to run.  Something without hands, that held me still.  That made me want to lay there waiting for the decision, what will be done with her?  Something where you don’t know if you are there because you have been taken, or because it is where you most want to be, because you want to know what is going to happen, what they will do, after they have weighed it out, what it will feel like, after all they’ve said, to be kissed or eaten or killed.

How did I get talking about that?

Oh yes, Ben Bines, first love, pilot.

They come like an idea, the opposition through the sand streets, across the stones, the boy, the virgin, watches through his scope, remembers a song about soldiers who let go their guns on a Christmas in the trenches, trenches are like these drifts he thinks

I have become something other.

But they are taking to the streets in Mexico and Argentina.

And you, one by one, are joining

A pilot, a marine, an officer, a guard.  What trust you gave in childhood, you give now to war.  And I cannot blame you for it: for the giving for the country  (the neighborhood, the home).  Was I but a training ground, a boy-girl girl, left wanting in her womanhood, never having wanted womanhood at all.

I was your brother too, remember the one who did run to catch, and wrestling we met and tumbled round each other on the ground.  A match.  Thin child arms in bathing suits and jeans, my legs around your rib cage, your fingers in my hair the dry earth in our mouths.

We fought as equals, never ceased, we never ceased our play at killing.

I hear of a war that does not end.

I hear of hunger and try and starve myself.  (I as one of many disillusioned American girls).

Retreat, into cinema as into dreams  — those of us who have lost, not just our faith in dreaming, but in the matter of the dream itself, the very thing.  Watch what we will not know reveal itself (the Thin Red Line, playing in the background as I write, Platoon) a bit of life revealed, like the novel, the epoch; (we watch and understand) the one among the many, thrive, and suffer, and end, complete.

We grow exasperated of the separateness inherent to the hearing of music, of symphony and native song, tired of perceiving, wanting to create, to join, to leave our seat, this impotence (of audience) behind

and enter into it: ‘the nightmare of history’; the finishing of dreams —

— as you have done (my girlhood, boyhood friend, left) and stopped dreaming, stopped the useless thoughts that come, that came, (a child sleepless in the unfamiliar quiet of night) and were enough.    dreams given to you that were not meant  and so you joined the life that is, that has been– a film unraveling, viscous and unstoppable.

And I would have gone with you.  — There were times I really believed this, that if you had only asked, I would have.  Now that so much has become impossible, I am not sure what hopes could have been.

You did not want enough for me.  (You did not want me enough)?

And I am watching soldiers, young men, characters that bear your name

I am imagining the touch I never let you give (for fear of one thing or another) the one I think you wanted, but never caught

and you run, across a beach, into the jungle, across the desert into the sand  (on a screen so small I could pick the battle up)

and I remember

I said I would be with you.  Because we were young together.  Because we were the same.

How did you find the momentum, to gather and to leave? and I cannot bring myself to go, just yet (the one who led you into fields and tree tops wild)

cannot seem to fool unending; believe myself to be still young, younger still than I have ever been

and cannot choose

One mountain, they are taking, slowly and with care, and dissonance, and some are hit and held by other men surviving

and this is some years ago, a different war than you might fight:  Terror.  Terrorism:  a country of orphans in their youth.  Those that have been damaged beyond repair.  Those that see but cannot put it together, make it good

do you hear (will you heed, have you understood) the prayers of your opposition,

at daybreak and at dusk, more frequent than any you did give any I give now for you.

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A Thread

There is he and I.  The two loves, misconceived, borne of childhood, lived out into grace.  And there are the words, gentle reminders, always the same, the syntax and intonation, each point of consequence, unchanged.  They run as does an epoch, as if all is said and done within,

as were we,

ended by the start.

He walked home thinking of his mother.

I was shirtless and my hair long.

And we did not know each other then.

He walked past beehives, auburn grasses, the yellow hues of gardens and homes, a paper mill, a wire fence.

He was tired, walked too quickly for one so small.  He talked to himself, repeated inaudible sounds, as babies or animals do.  For too long he had been remembering, trying for one moment that had passed, to reconstruct it, in its entirety, to recreate a happening — just the one; all others, like traitors, had gone.  He did not know impossibility.  He had been left with scattered words, disjointed tones of varied pitch, crossed patterns of light and shape – a corner, a window, a chair.  Only she had spoken, that he knew, that he had said nothing seemed right to him.  Her voice, of sweet and vague confusion, trailed into being heard.  It held long pauses and came to resigned ends.  This is what he had so far.  He kept to walking, kept to bowing his head.

It had been a small thing of which she spoke, insignificant, something about winter and the frost, and he remembered, something about flowers, magnolias and the twisting of thread,

“A frost this early will kill them,” she had been twisting a thread of string between her fingers and he had been at the table, eyeing unwanted milk.

“Not much I can do, not anything really.  It’s just, I was so looking forward  — No, I know, you’re right, it’s not much of a thing really, just a little sad, that’s all. — Yes, it is, to be expected. — yes, maybe they will, — yes, I know.   yes, I’ll see y’all Sunday, — I’ll see y’all then.  Alright.  Alright.  GoodBye.”   And she sighed, slight as rain, slight as a voice can utter, like the sound that comes from a body touched after a long time of not being touched, she put down the thread and hung up the phone and took the back of his head in her hand, she smiled at the milk and looked him in the eyes, “I don’t think they’re going to bloom Raine, I’m frightened of the weather.”  She reached and untangled a piece of his hair, he smiled, they had the same face, she stood, she took the milk, she poured it down the sink and for an instant, by the window, she rested, when she turned, both still were smiling.

And so he stood, this child, a breeze vacant twining in the leaves, having remembered.  And I did not know him then, but I can see him standing, a bean pole bent against the breeze, his shirt a sail behind him.  A fool in the road unable to stop smiling.  At nothing, at a mother gone.  Everything about him, this.  His eyebrows raised and open, sole remnants of his face, echoing the moment that he recollects, quiet pillars against the barren worth of memory.  Until something wakes him, and he shudders and forgets.

As he did that day, and began again his walking, the bowing of his head.

It was all he could do, parents dead two years, and he was terrified,

mistaken,

he had come to believe he no longer cared.

And perhaps this was our difference, his and mine;

what we had in common, an infant surrender, a moment where mouths opened and were unmet by sustenance of any kind – a breast, a mouth, a kiss . . .

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A Drive in Winter

In Exodus, we pass the dark rock crevice of a holy man content to follow the bare back of his Father.  Walk with him, the present tense.  Yahweh.  Do not look back.  Pillar of salt.  I fight this impulse: to beg the face of god.  Turn away from what I have comprehended to what I do not know, Remnants, write it down: pseudopygrapha:  I refuse to say I understand.  Refuse to decipher structure, the construction of a phrase, of childhood:  What I am composing.  A brilliant darkness.  But from sleep, a demon can arouse us for prayers.  Renunciation.

I do not make music.  Cannot.  Harmony eludes me. I have not the strength of sound nor image, lack their complete nature.  I see, I hear.

I left home without difficulty.  My flight, though eminent, came sooner than expected.  I applied and was accepted and chose to attend a boarding school (of only the highest caliber) in New Hampshire, close to the shore.  I sought rigor and ritual.  To devote myself with virginal abandon, ha.  how else? I was still a child  (fourteen, seventeen, twenty, how old were we?).  I believe Ely had not wanted to leave his home, but that a sense of isolation, drove him from what he knew.

He from the South and I from the North came together for the first time driving through a mountain road to get back; our driver, having gone the wrong way from Boston, overshot the school thirty miles west thirty miles north.  We had smiled and introduced ourselves, shook hands, but did not speak again for a good long while.  We sat beside one another looking out our opposing windows.  The car abandoned the highway to descend into the Kancamangus; follow the river road through the range.

“Es linda.”  I practiced, barely a murmur.

“Well, where you been?  I just about forgot you were here.”  I turned and saw his face, steady and ironic, grinning, as if he knew from where my voice had come, my words.  I looked away.  “This way’s all right, ain’t it?”  Southern.  He spoke low, out the window.

“We’re lost.”  I raised my eyes and spoke quick. As if to say, you idiot.  How dare you speak so intimately.  Then pause, and an odd sense of shame. And I complied, “But it is pretty, yes.”

–”Sure.”  He grinned again, right up at me, half mouth, apple-bite, as if my resignation pleased him.

Quiet, movement of hands.

Snow began to fall.

A last red veined leaf, I saw, clinging to a branch, the tree bare.  And I did not speak again but returned to face away and watch the snow.

It fell humorless, one of an army bound in droves.  The flurry turned to storm.  Its density thickened with distance; the mountains were gone, the river.  The whole of our surroundings became this space between: the air and its contents, driven down and constant.   Despite a pitch within.  A divergence.   Small and solitary, it seemed a part of the storm would break and lift,  twirl up, gather itself, and once collected, rise–one after another, led by one, followed by spiraling multitudes.  I watched these lifted gatherings of snow pick up speed, and gain, becoming a widening spiral caught within and against the invasion of the constant falling masses.  All churned, a shifting masquerade of dancers without mouths, with arms built like stars — intricate and far reaching. Those who failed to climb joined the others felled, fallen, the others dead, the nameless, outside, cut down like trees.  Laid to rest in the whitening earth.

Still I followed the inner swirls, somehow climbing, until the wind shifted and they scattered.

I looked at the boy sitting next to me. He had seen it.  And he looked at me.  And we could not speak..

The driver, one of many faceless orchestrators in my memory, did something to the radio and crossed opposing tones, static or sonar, blared out and all of us jumped.  Then laughed.  Then nothing.  Music, Albinoni, Adagio in G.  The first notes came through static as though through a phonograph; a needle’s trip to catch edge.  Our ride kept this circularity, a steady ascent and steady decline, never reaching any great height, never any low. We drove on, engine muted by snow fall, the road dissolving.

I heard the music play, the first drawn notes like cast stones, and knew:

I had been young.

Had been.  Not any more.  Not now.  I left home, had to, chose to, wanted — my mother pleading me to stay, my father taking her outstretched hands in his own wishing me well.  Within my breast abided the cello’s resounding pull, come from that same dwelling place as the dark wind that coaxes the last red-veined leaf to fall, where sound the deepest instruments that guide the piece to descend.  This machinery, a body of hollowed wood. The guarded ribs of my childhood.  The unlucky gene.  The origin of currents.  The rain scattering the aphids.

And his, his would find their place among these.  Vestiges;  an oiled canvas, a piece of cloth, a bullet shell, a puppet’s spine, collapsed.

I heard the violin rebel; against the cello’s slow progression it lingered at heights beyond an earthly weight.  But thicker strings, cold and unvaried, uprooted, as if in harvest, the resonance of higher sounds, the piccolo, the flute, the horn.  The struggle of the melody at times overwhelmed the deeper rhythm in a triumph off beauty and intensity, but it is an orchestra that plays.  One cannot, despite much company of brass and string, release its center.  It is the force that brings the piece to end, and though harmony would never have existed without resistance, eventually the high tones tire.   Their fading music finds comfort in the low grace as what is left carries itself towards silence.  It left us too soon.  We did not hear it, that last ascending note, doubtless unending.

The signal was lost, and we passed on, unfinished, in the mute light of the early fall, in the veiled and narrow belly of the mountains.

We believed in its antithesis; what we loved, separately, silently, beside, we were not.  That what we loved–even then the same–failed, the high tones, a mother, a beast, ourselves, driven down, looking out, ahead, left with absence, static, and the failing road.

Who were we to mourn this way, grieving a sacrifice, not ours?  We, swollen with promise.  Disappointed, yes — a weak word, others dead.

Afraid.  Better.  The snow.  The Fall.  Minions.

What I wanted: to give.  To give to this.  All that remained: to give, to fuel, with disjointedness, with our frail figures.

–A baby.

–No.

He spoke first, but not to me.  The words slipped from his mouth, the spoken conclusion of long thought quietly given to the air to be done with.  I do not think he heard it himself.  As for me, I have never known what I meant to say.  My response came too quick to be an answer.

But then he did turn to me,

–You ever seen a baby being born?

–No.

–I saw one, just through the closing door.  Happenstance.  It had a hole in its heart.  It was something.  They saved him, cut open his chest and pumped his heart for him, with their hands.

–To be able, to do that, I can’t imagine.  I would love to.  Be able, I mean.

–You don’t suppose you could?

–I don’t.  You?

–Maybe.

–What’s your name again?

–Just Ely, a boy’s name for a boy.  Plain as that.

–Have a last name too?

–Haven’t thought of that yet.  Yours?

–And I told him.

–Well Miss, it’s a pleasure.

He held out his hand and I took it.

–So it is, Ely, so it is.

He was funny and he was kind, he wore a tie and a jacket and a white cotton shirt, his hair curled and stood on end, his face opened and closed as does a harlequin.

I loved him then.  From that dark moment on.

A baby, hold it in my arms, cradle me from behind: all of us moist.  All of us young.

I should have thought of history.  A far reaching past.  I could not; my impotence: tomatoes, dust. I did not have history, I had imagination, art, but there are no specific faces there, none to touch.  I do not see birth.  Or death.  Hospitals, yes, pictures of the dying, yes, the process of renal failure, sickled cells, too thin, my own self, I have seen, choking awake.  I have read it all in books and faces.  What Is To Come.  But I have not bound wounds with gauze, killed, held a baby’s heart and made it beat.

I would have liked to.  Now that I am here, alone, recounting what I can remember.  Would still like to.

Magdalene. I should think of her.

But there is no oil for me to waste, it has been spilled; there are no feet for me to kiss, they have been maimed.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Beach

I went to Exeter.  Phillips Exeter Academy (somehow just mentioning the name makes you mention the whole thing — tradition, prestige, the sound of it etc.)  It was a nut house.  That is the first truth that comes.  Somehow, after I left the public school system, every place after seemed like that, certifiable, full of brains and bodies lacking the correlation between the two that provides for sanity.  Even the very sane, the very bright, elegant, the bred, those that were meant to be there, now and fifty years ago, you would hear about, after “check in” after “lights out” doing things like duck taping “preps” (freshmen, first years, what have you) to the ceiling, or to a chair, you would hear how the Webster boys smuggled a twelve pack into the dorm on weekends, and drank and called this little girl (the one who would come without fail, making her way through bushes and fences and trees, risking her ever promising future, her status, her place in the academy), over to fuck around.  She must have weighed all of ninety pounds, a first year but looking even younger than that, bleach blonde hair and braces, no kidding, braces, really.  It was horrifying.  So horrifying that we, the McConnell girls, liberated but not lesbians, (not yet anyway, that was Bancroft – a little more advanced than we), even talked about telling faculty, not on the boys (never, ha.) but on this girl, and not on her, not in anyway to get her kicked out, not in any malicious way, only to put a stop to it, this little thing (annoying as fuck, but so small) walking around campus like she meant something, like she owned the place, still that young that her action preceded her psyche, that she just did, not yet knowing why, no repercussion, no shame, no fear — not yet.

We, the McConnell girls, an unintended sorority, composed by fate (the choice of whomever was responsible for housing from the years 93 -97) sentenced to live beside one another, day in day out (at the very least from 8p.m.-5a.m., 11p.m.-5a.m. on Saturdays) were an odd mix.  More than once we tried to make sense of how they put us together.  We came up with the reasonable (at least at the time, wasn’t everything just so reasonable) conclusion that they (they, the unseen conglomeration of souls composing the “other” administration, those that maintained files, and organized dorms, class size, seating in assembly, those unnamed and detail oriented few, that worked steadily, anonymous, behind the scenes) had sorted through all the names and personalities, genders and races, countries and denominations, the PSAT scores, the extracurricular activities, athletic ability, family lines (or lack thereof), interview notes and personal essays, and with the expectations derived from the sum of such information (all that paper has to cling to), they had placed students in dorms that made sense, you know, providing a good balance.  We decided we were what remained.

This all to say, that the girls in McConnell consisted of varied and indiscriminant experience.  We were all “shamewounded by our sins”, we all felt deeply, but the extent of sin differed greatly, for some it was not returning a borrowed sock, for others, it was sneaking off into the projects to have sex with some older guy.  We had a high moral sense, if a confused one, but we knew that what the Webster boys were doing, what this girl was doing, was an old story and not a good one.  Some of us had reasons of pure ideology, feminist, anti-patriarch, others were her, this girl, just with a little more sense, maybe a year or two years ahead of the game.  I don’t know if we said anything, I think we did, just in passing to a woman of the greatest nobility and kindness who resided in our dorm, my advisor, I think we said something, in passing, in confidence to her.  And I think she tried to do something.  I think actually she said, that she knew, that they knew, the faculty, and had tried to step in, and she couldn’t say anymore, but that she thanked us, and wasn’t sure what could be done.  And I guess not too much, because the girl got caught, sneaking out one night, crouched in some shrub or crossing the street and was asked to leave.  One of those same guys I heard put a pet goldfish in a microwave to see what it would do.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

That was it

“Baby, I’ll see you just as soon as we get back.”

That was it.  What got me hooked, a dark southern voice, a way of speaking with which no one was familiar.  Not then, not in New England, not in November, not in any way, too deep, heavy and as full as water, to have been heard ever before.

I had never been called baby in my life.  Sexiest thing I’d ever heard.  I must have re-played the message ten times, Baby, just as soon as we get back.

No one said baby like that anymore.  And he was so young, less than twenty, less than eighteen.  I’m sure he had no idea what he had done.

He didn’t have an idea about much back then.  Certainly not about how good he looked in a pair of blue jeans, and a loose black shirt, his hair standing up on end.

We were never formally introduced, he just stumbled in the door from September, looking for someone else, no doubt, someone his own age, perhaps, someone form the South, where he was from.  He was a boy.  He was a gentleman.  He apologized for getting in my way, he held the door as I stepped out.  I think he may have called me mam’.  I think he called all of us in McConnell Hall mam’.  Harrison, a girl (one of the twenty some odd ‘students of color’ at Exeter), used to always walk on from him holding some door, saying, “I don’t know about that boy, my mother always told me not to trust anybody from Kentucky.  If he starts asking me about my roots or some shit, there are going to be repercussions.”   I remember asking her if she knew him, and she looked at me like I had two heads, “Do I know how old he is, is the question and yes I do, young.”  So I let a year go by.

And he stumbled in again and this time, knew my name.

This was when he painted, before he had realized (really realized, he knew it the moment it happened), his parents were dead, and he had been sent to New Hampshire, and he had money, and a gift for languages, and distance.  He had not contemplated the certain isolation that comes from reflection on ones life before its time.  He was fifteen, he was happy.  I remember him.  He does not.

His hair stuck up in curls from his head and his eyes were round and big and he spoke slowly, with a drawl that boarded on incoherence.  He was very tall and very thin, and on first meeting many made the mistake of thinking him ridiculous.  The Idiot of Exeter.

We met.  We would walk in those first months.  Around town, to the church.  It was dark around four-thirty.  Sometimes it snowed.  One evening, he said something odd, both in its clarity and in its content.  Leaving me at my door, he said, “Be careful with me.”  I said, “What?”  He said, “Be careful with me.”  And he grinned, and he turned, and went, and did not speak that way again ever.

“You will have to be careful with me.” He said.   That is what I can still hear him say, he said it as I had already turned to go back in, after I had let go of his arms and kissed him, low behind the ear and on the neck, where I knew this heat would carry, where in this cold he would feel it most, he said, “that’s it.” and smiled, “I don’t know what else to say.”  He turned, I watched him walk across the square, straight by the path that ran from this door to his, not looking back, but up, maybe at the stars or the tops of the trees, and then I watched his neck arc back into place, his shoulder curve into his chest, his arms brace against the cold, his head tilt down, towards his feet.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Church

I remember one night walking after the snow, in late November, it was when we were very young, still in boarding school.   We had just met and already we were walking my arm in his from the stone church, its tower low into the sky, its frame solid and dark in the clear night.

Evening Prayer it was called (anyone who went to Exeter will remember that), where we had been, and I remember as we walked away from it, that he spoke, at first saying nothing, comments on the people walking at a faster pace, beside us and then past, his Kentucky whisper, and then his laugh “Where do they think they’re going?”

The bell in the academy building ringing ten o’clock, therefore all of us heading the same place, where we had to be, back inside, to our doors and our desks behind.  And we watched them go, disappearing into the lamplight, doors opening and closing, figures in the windows up the stairs and down the halls, until we were the only two behind.  And all the doors were silent and all the bells had stopped, and we could see the paths were empty, and the yards, and all that stood were the buildings, old and dark, their towers, and the church, and the trees, all were spires towards the sky, the endless height of evergreens, and ourselves.

Alone and walking back.   He brought me home.

And I knew then we would have walked those steps that we had made, forever, back and forth, towards and away from the church, again within the path we made, if only to keep each other’s company, or at least until our steps were worn and a path resilient to the elements remained.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

On a street side, on an iron stair

Of course, how to do this, without dramatics, without falsity, without irrevocably setting them, the people I knew, in a state of idealistic fiction, to be mistrusted.  This is my difficulty, my aim.  What is an argument if easily disproved?   And what is a life if it must be altered to show its purpose?  Already I have lied; there was no dolphin and no piece of string.  And I am not in a city as I dream to be.  I am on a street side, on an iron stair, I am in the cold.  This may be repeated, has been — I write often on the street, often in the winter.  Interruptions do not cease; I have held more conversations with old and homeless men about this story I have been trying to write than anyone should.  That is what happens when you cannot write inside, when you cannot distract yourself enough to get the words out in a closed room.

They always ask me what I am writing about, and I respond, quite easily what I know anyone will understand: “ a boy and a girl”.  And they say, “Ah, a love story”.  And that is when I get sucked in, for I cannot resign to let them think simply that (which I implied), and I shut the notebook or the computer down to tell them, “No.  Not simply that, not just a love story”, for though there is love in it, it is torn up, divided among many things, not to be relied upon.  Not the only thing.

And I go into it, the many things surrounding, I say something of biology and of parents flown into some mountain in South America, I say something of external loss, and internal corruption, how the two combine to make love, in circumstances, impossible. “You know.  You of any must know this impossibility, you must know all of this”.   I say, I do not know how it ends.  I do not know who she loves or who she should.  I say all the vague descriptions one could of what the story is, and avoid entirely the writing of it.  And in the end they say (all of them, without fail) “A boy, a girl, a love story.  You’re a pretty girl, a writer, do you have a dollar or a cigarette?”

“I have both.”

“God bless.”  God be with you.  Go with God.  “Are you a believer?  Do you believe?”  Why this is always said at parting, I do not know.  Should not such questions be addressed as foreword to the conversation?  I would think one would want to know the state of the soul that contains (that rests beside? within?  behind?) the person with whom you speak before asking them questions of seemingly (utterly) less importance.

But it is not so.

They do not ask before.

Only after.  After I have stuttered out what is that I am trying to do.  After I have laid bare the love I hold, my purpose as it is, broken, unpredictable, unsure (Isaac on the alter, his faith unknown to him), I sit before them silently without an answer, until,

“Of course I believe.”  I say it with that same simplicity that I use, the one that is easily understood;  I believe in God (– a girl a boy a love story).  I say what I know they will hear.  I speak the base, the bottom of what need be known.  So that they may leave.  I end it.  So they may part, may leave, may in good conscience, go

and think of me — a pretty girl, a writer, one that can be left.

Return her, the girl is obviously in the midst, in the middle of, something, she need not, want not, be disturbed.  It is a matter not to be given another thought, not to be thought of, anymore, again.

They are not sages after all, but men.  This, by time spent with them, has become clear.  If the conversation is allowed to continue, if I continue it, by complicating matters with and an answer unexpected, (however true), it disintegrates (as conversations often do with strangers) into offers and requests: how  far  can we go, what can be asked?  Questions, of sex, of sleeping with or in some vacancy (– a lot, an alley way, or  building door).  All the talk of poetry and Christ dissolves by that loneliness that draws us out, to speak, to one another, in that evening growing damp and more frigid as the hours pass.  A young girl and an old man.  This is the catch, the comedy; neither of us are what we best want to be.  Buy him a drink, give him a kiss, a laugh, a line.  Let him pretend to capture you.  As you pretend; to light up his jaundiced face, give to the dirty trembling hands something to hold and your life purpose that it lacked before this instant, that it will lack again an instant after.  Better not to.  Best to end it.  Quickly.

It is not that I have come to regret these meetings (that I instigate by my insistence of place and time in order to compel myself), I have no doubt of their beginnings, their original intent; they are interested in me, and I in them, as people who speak plainly, who are willing to speak.  But by speaking as we do, the dialogue runs the logos out rapidly, and we are left the choice: to go or stay.  But even staying ends.

So I have learned to not tell them    everything,   not to say,

I do not know, I do not know about believing.

This small doubt is all either of us would need to give up.

And one mustn’t give up.

Isn’t that what we say? (as if giving up were some eternal state and not a momentary lapse, that rather than being, brings eternal consequence),

You cannot give up (can not give up, cannot sleep, cannot lay down, —  not with strange men in alleys, not with old strange men, not with the derelict, the addict, or the thin wired youth sparing change / spare changing, who sees you as you pass more desperately clear than anyone will or has that day on the street.  You cannot give up, you who have so much, you cannot waste it, cannot turn towards the lost, you will only enable the habit, only further the decline, by giving in, by giving liquor or by taking it, by being beside them as they do, you cannot keep this company, cannot give way to diversion, cannot turn, be diverted from, the good path, the blessed).

It will only bring you low.

So I end it.  I do not join them, in their evening, do not follow

(around and down, into the store, the subway, the project apartment, the one room, the

darkness, a stove, a clothesline, an iron pot, a broken kettle in the sink, the torn curtain on the shower, the razor and the comb tipped into the drain, the yellow smoke stained windows closed, the woman, layered in clothing, to hide the thinness, who sits, and rises, when you come in).

It is offered, by this questioning, the point at which we choose to either speak it out or not, it is offered:  Come with me.

I do not.  Not anymore.

In part because so many of these strangers, when all is said and done, do not understand anything of me beyond the loneliness, the longing that braces us, the cave dug out below our characters, that rests, un-exhumed, beneath our few words, that goes unsaid.

There was a time I did go, did speak it out (“yes, that is it, that is it; we are both alone and do not want to be!”).

There was a time I could easily say that in truth, I saw no reason not to go.

But there is reason now, time has run out.

The anesthetic of company (not to mention of narcotics themselves or, the lesser demons, cups of vodka, rum, what have you), while intensifying the moment at hand, also serves (as any good anesthetic will), to quicken the moment’s progression one into another driving them towards completion.  Anyone who has ever had to stomach the morning after, having been jarred awake by some recognition of all that transpired the night before (so much!) but nothing, nothing to show for it (maybe something streaky on the wall, and one sock – I woke up this way once, nothing on me, just the one sock, and not a clue as to how I got that way),  anyone who has experienced this, this shock, really a kind of loss, can understand — if you have come to an acceptance of what little you have, what little time, and have resolved (however foolish it may be) to try and extend it, the last thing you want to do is give in to distraction — shoot up, nod off, or follow some guy into an alley.

Or so I tell myself.

When they ask.  I do not admit that I am alone.  Instead, I answer, “Yes.  There is God here.  And He will go with you, though I cannot.”

I smile, I lie, I watch them go.

But conversations unended tend to continue elsewhere.

And I do wonder, how did these conversations finish – if not with my honest answer, if not then, where?  What becomes of it?  The unadmitted base.

Where we cease to continue as we were, and come to see differently.

Where we turn.

Where it is possible to turn.

The last of these conversations was not a conversation at all, rather it was an era, an evening, that extended into two or three evenings, nothing more.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The city

I am not from New York, but I am one of those who grew to miss it when I am not here.  I had decided to have no mention of place in this story, thought place and time to be insignificant — this may have come from reading, recognizing how despite the context, the content does not change.  But, I changed my mind

I am alone.  I am not tired.  Funny.  I thought I might be, but no.  It’s a good thing, sleep brings dreams and I am always tricked by dreaming — that they will be,

things past

will be again.

I hate it.  Dreaming.  The precision of content, the happiness that does not vanish when I wake, but instead lingers dangerous into consciousness.  Traced with their remnants, their pieces scattered around me in my bed like leaves, I open my eyes to nothing, over and again, to stone, and find I am still waiting.

As if these musings could wander corporeal.

As if, in just a moment, there will be a knock at the door, or a look behind a corner, that holds on the other side, a person, a place.

I have no ability to reason, these mornings, cannot grasp my will.  I believe it.  That they are there.  That I will find them.  That I will take their hands, both of us, happily confused,

“Oh, hello.  you’re here.”

The disappointment of all this lasts longer than it should.  It’s embarrassing.

Waking is precarious, so I write not to sleep.

Other than that, I’m doing okay.

I try and keep busy.  Each morning I buy two figs.  During fig season.  From the shop downstairs — Brother Fruit and Vegetable.  They sell flowers too.  They know me.  They know each morning for two years I come, ask if its time, if the figs are in yet, buy a couple, and they comment on my smile, “She is always happy this girl.  You always happy.  Big smile every morning”.  And I smile, dead on, keep it going, keep it, light.

Sometimes they call me too thin, say I should buy some bread, some cheese.  Sometimes I do.

This is it.  This is life for me.

Some people choose to live out last days in ocean towns.  I chose the city.  It reminds me of the people I knew.

This is significant, that I have to be reminded, it gives a little away.

You know now that anyone you will become familiar with in these pages will, by the end, cease to exist.  At least for me.  At least in the way you will know them.

I’m sorry about that, not the nicest thing to do.

Perhaps you will have the same consolation as I, to have known them, to trust there is little more than this, than knowing.  Than to have been introduced and to have loved — maybe you will love them, and forgive, that I held such people, as immediately as I did,  but still somehow faltered, and spilled them out.

They are what kept me going; fighting the good fight.  They will be my argument.

(They will be) what stands.

What lives.

These days I seem to walk a lot  —  up the block, for groceries, cigarettes, company.

I notice people.

I find that I am easily impressed, a true idiot, full of humor, thanks, and discontent.  As if I were just beginning.  I am still hopelessly a child.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The raking of leaves

For so long I had kept distance.  I remember the instant things began to change, walking in the fall along a path and watching some workers rake the leaves.  Four of them and rakes and kerchiefs across their mouths.   There were others on the path, all walking quickly, doubtless thinking various thoughts, as one does while walking past.  And no one noticed these four men.  And  I thought it strange,

not for any reason other than the wind,

it was so windy that day, remnants of some hurricane.

And there they were, gathering the leaves, putting them in piles.  And there were the piles, being taken up in the wind, gusts of wind, the piles blown to smithereens, little tornadoes of leaves, of leaf spirals, catching in my hair, catching in their hair.

And I stopped and looked at them and pointed towards the sky, spun my finger once around, cocked my head, and grinned, “Hay viento”.  (I was happy to have remembered these words in Spanish, to be able to use them, in some real context; so much I learned I never got the chance to speak).  And they looked at me, all four, stopped and I was so nervous they wouldn’t find it funny, I was well aware of how foreign I appeared, a young American girl, dressed like hooker – big dark glasses, ankle boots mini-skirt, pointing at the wind.  But they stopped, and looked at me and smiled at each other, “Is funny, no?  La chica y el hurican.”  the youngest of them said.  And they laughed.  And I must have fallen in love with him then, with all of them, and walked away.  And no one noticed after me.  No one else laughed.  As if they all knew something I did not, that the leaves must be taken care of, and the workers paid, even if each day the task be done again.  Even the men, they kept on raking.  Even as I turned, they started up again.

And so each day for me passed; small triumphs within inconsequential conversations, some truth revealed in each, but unrealistic, words bearing little weight.  Bear little weight.  This phrase would find itself in me without me.  Later, I would try to match it, as people tend to do; stubbornly fix the outer with the in. I became intentionally thin, and made less sense.

I remember how the faces of my friends dissolved into pity.

I had been original and strange, beautiful as is a thought, a spark.  But many things happened, and I changed.

My friends, they too, were beautiful and strange — three girls with Venus bodies, eternal faces and complicated minds.  Wild, insistent and shameless, loosed nymphs, drugged and articulate, always changing clothes in our rooms with shades pulled down.  Half-dressed, all the time.

One had a brother, he had my same disease, that is how we met, he died some years ago.  L. Savage was her name.  She had skin like paper and vines, blue vein at her temples, and loved Ona, another of the three, who was darker, and thicker skinned. These two cannot be separated.  L. had eyes that played innocent, that emerged like clouds from lids edged in black, and only hers met Ona’s, whom L. called O.,  whose eyes remained unalterably violent and full of want.

The third, Alexandra, Lexi, my favorite, and the one closest to me, held a frame that seemed to be rebuilding itself, as if an instrument built of string and hollowed wood once torn apart.  Bone still showed at shoulder, collar, and at hip , but her face had begun to show some color, shape.  She understood things, put one and one together where I could not.  She had dreams that happened.  Sometimes he hands shook, in the mornings.  She moved delicately, even when holding a cigarette or a drink, her legs, her neck, her back, her wrists spoke for her, each movement, precise and wounded, carried what she could not say.  She, more than anyone of us, was stronger than she appeared.

When the four of us met it was a collision of desperate and viscous personality with a bit of genius to each.  We wrote together, A. and O. wrote poetry, L. and I wrote stories.  We smoked and wrote and read out loud.  Intoxicated by one another, and by various substances, any we could find, there passed a full semester where we left each other’s side for only classes or sex (each of us had epic love interests at the time).  We were a mess.  But knew it.  And reveled and died within the disorder; that which we created for ourselves.

But the calm of friendship, its quiet nature, eluded me.  How do people find one another and combine in a way that is not all encompassing but constant?  Old women sharing a bench.  This simplicity, my friends could have been to me, but I would not allow it.  Everything I loved I tried to hold.  But they were not mine.

Somewhere along the line, I became unable to show myself, could no longer undress with them, could not speak.

They seemed naked all the time, teasing the girl I had once been — clear and ignorant of my form that now seemed to lack some intricacy of architecture, some health of theirs that held.  I began to hate them.

I think I had realized they were going to live.

I think it was that same autumn as the leaves.

Bear little weight.  This was all I could do.

I ate less, spoke less, had less to say.

They were.  They tore around those small dormitory rooms like banshees calling, more caught up in youth than ever before.   I saw.  Only the veins that showed blue beneath the skin, of their breasts and ankles, of the temple and the wrist.  I knew I had not love nor breast nor bone to give.

And I hated them.

For their ability to sustain, to flourish, to concentrate on the minor details of their own lives, to plan, to joke about love and what would come.

All of a sudden they spoke of things I did not understand, how they were withholding, slowing down, saving themselves for something that was coming, how they knew now what they wanted, how they were waiting for it.  Something better, how they were better, how they knew.

It seemed as if my fall had freed them.  In truth, it was coincidence.  Their time took a different pace, the ending of our childishness left them open and me lost.  It was only this; that time takes a multiple and varied course.  My friends, they had to leave.  And I was left behind.

Besides, what do you do with a girl like that —  who laughs at the wind and cannot let it go?

They were like others, passing by, those men raking and my silent company on the path,

angels, brief and wandering, and necessarily so.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Laurie in Brooklyn

I am thinking of Laurie’s brother.

and how I can’t believe I am not going to get better.  I don’t know how to die.  There isn’t a way to put this on, to carry it.  At least, I have not found one yet — still gain my strength from thoughts of ancestors in battle, women tied to stakes, and crucifixions –from the fight.  Where does one turn when the transition from the hero to the dead has come? when you have been triumphant, counted on, resourceful, when you won and momentum seemed to only take you with it, to this no longer being so.  It must be like having a child and noticing how the parent and the offspring grow to change at an opposing rate, with a difference as exponential as the clock is objective and unchanged.  as a pendulum simply does not stop.  Taken over.  you will be surpassed.  Maybe I wouldn’t have such a hard time with this if I weren’t’ t so fucking competitive.  Working on it.  Maybe someday.

I wish I could talk to him.  J–*.  He’d probably laugh, at me, at least I hope he would.  I hate that I only met him once and all we did was sit three feet apart from each other in a room, he on the bed beside his sister, and Fer beside me and six other people in the room passing around a mirror and cut straws.    His voice was much higher than I had expected.  He was much smaller.  And it took me off guard, how small he was, how little he seemed.  How he laughed a lot and really only talked to her.  As if he could have curled up alongside her, below, within, and listened to her translate the room for him, in a language of birds.  She would have.  Lived a life to tell him how it was.   Would have given half her life to him.   To tell him, how beautiful were the things she’d seen, how terrifying.

But you can’t.

Her brother died in the back seat of their older sister’s car in Africa.  I shouldn’t write about this; it’s not my life.  Not really.  It’s hers, Laurie’s, and she is probably the more gifted writer.  And I know she may write these same exact words someday, except it will be, my brother, my brother died in the back seat of our older sister’s car in Africa.

I have always wanted to go.  To Africa.  Despite the seeming damnation of the continent from this western vantage point.  I am sure the continent is not doomed, I maintain that it is the only real place there is. that it is most truly representative of our human condition to date, and that it will survive, survive us, survive me, survive itself.  I maintain.  Listen to that.  I don’t know jack shit about the Beloved Country, except what I’ve seen or read or wanted to know.  But I want to go.  I really do.

I know about her brother because she told me.  She was in Brooklyn, doing dishes over the sink.  Surprisingly characteristic, the dish doing, incorporated easily to her character.  Surprisingly.  How old was she, twenty? wearing black, a tattoo of a bird she had designed on her arm her light eyes darkened, I had never seen her in any dish doing context, but she stood so simply in front of the sink, like a mother, a young mother, the baby asleep somewhere, the father gone.  But she was not a mother, she was just this girl I knew, had know for a little while, a small sum of years.

I had been gone when it happened, off to California to sober up, read Plato finally, and bicycle on sea side cliffs and not speak to the three girls I had left behind in New York, Laurie Ona and Lexi, strung out, beautiful, but deadly sick with grieving and waiting to grieve. and sex or wanting sex, or not.   Not knowing, but knowing everything already.  Totally innocent.  Wholly intelligent.  Entirely proud.  Not to be too serious, we were fucking hilarious.  A joke, a real riot.

We got heroine on sixteenth street, all four of us, one big happy family, hauled up in a diner taking turns smoking outside and holding the table, I think I may have ordered mashed potatoes with gravy to look inconspicuous.  We had to spot some guy called “Turtleback” (sorry Turtleback, if you’re out there, didn’t mean to put you out here like that) and it was my job (as I’d had some experience in these things) to trail him until he turned around, luckily my experience was limited, “You’re too close, back up”  and I knew I had the right guy.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A way out.  Mikhal.

To remove one’s self.  Is it possible, to remove oneself —

to step out. This was my solution, my effort, to let the argument alone.  To stand apart for a little while, by the juke box, by the street light, to pull myself out of windows, out of doors. To love them, to keep loving them, assured of their being so a part of living that nothing changed in them as I went.  Form a love not for myself, but for their faces, their voices ringing out, from whatever space in which they stood, without me.

And then to come back in.

To step out.

To stand, on the final edge of railings, or of roofs, to knit into the spaces in between the bars of an elevated gate, to brace oneself, and then, to be quiet.  To listen, to hear your friends speak, as they always have, to hear the sounds go on. just as they were, as they are, as they will be.

To step out, to turn, to face

what is, and then

the rest of it;  beyond them,

a door closes on the street, a cup tips and blows down the walk, the trees settle and then move again.

I do not need to make such an effort now.

Whatever perspective it was that I sought has in other ways been gained, and I do not anymore venture innocently out.

Not that the pull is gone, it is innate.

This became clear recently as I visited a friend who is working, living in Brooklyn.  Her room had a small fire place, brick that is red and gray, unusable but beautifully made, beautifully orchestrated, the room: a bed in the center of two windows, long dark green curtains reaching the floor.    And out the bathroom window was a fire escape.  I would not have seen it, but that I pulled back the shade to look.  Someone knew what they were making, a thing maybe never used but necessary.  I sat for some time, looking at the railings spiraled, parallel, following the wrought iron around and down.  It was difficult to leave.  Difficult to let the shade fall back and hide the frame, the stair, the crossed precipice and the ivy bound to it.

To remove oneself.

I knew a boy who fell from an escape like this one.  I thought of him.

He fell from the apartment above mine, where I used to live, that year, the Spinning Wheel year, that winter.

He fell in October.  I was not there when it happened, but returned to it, the solemn space set in front of my door, the yellow tape and flowers.

(I hardly knew him, one late night  a year earlier, he had called down to Nessa and I as we walked, beckoned us to where he stood, up on top of one of the college roofs.  We were honored to join him, only too happy to watch him throw bottles down, and talk to us about us, he was like this, a poetic cynic, and he had a voice peculiar to his time, unpracticed but melodic, cut like the renegade character in an old movie).

It was not so far a distance to the ground, I had considered it before, his falling must have caught him off guard.

He didn’t sleep much.  And he had this tendency, to pull himself out windows, to disappear. To observe, in solitude and in silence, how the world, how people, how the people you have known, keep on, how it will keep on, how it does.

A need of stepping out

I can hardly remember his face — he was my friend, but only so,

what we had in common, I knew, a love, of spaces intricate and raised, of being able to stand and see the street beneath you, of how rain collects on flat iron rails,

of echoes, and the clarity of height

that brings you out, into these places, onto them, to find the thought, the one that comes clear, that comes alone, the one that comes and settles and does not leave until you pull yourself back in, and join again the place you left that has been continuing inside: a party, or a paper, or water on the stove.

A party, the night he fell, going on inside, one that would notice, in just a minute, just a minute, that he did not return, had not returned back in.

I did not fall.

But it is in my own mind remembered.  I remember looking out, onto the trees and night and windows parallel across the way, the old hospital, I remember the buildings, and the tops of buildings.  I remember his clothes as if I wore them.  I remember the view, out and across, and the thought that comes, when one sits in the dark, in the near dark, in the cold, in the presence of where rain fell but is not falling.  I remember looking, not down, but out, across, at my hands for a moment maybe, looking out.

Can you see it?  How I remember something that is not mine?

I did not, I do not

fall.  But I remember

what he said once, I can still hear, he said he loved the early morning in the city because so few are there, the sun rise, coffee and a roast beef sandwich.  That is all we ever spent, just once, we found ourselves awake and on the ground, and he was hungry so we walked and ate, and he said only this:

“This is why we stay awake.  Into the next day.  As awful as it is.  At least this way you bring it.  You bring the morning in.  Before anybody knows.  Then you can sleep.  And they will come.  Will wake up, but late, but later, after this changes and is gone.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The bridge

“You were on the bridge.  I can’t believe you don’t remember, you were standing with one foot above the highway, in those stupid leather high heeled boots of yours on the stones, on the fucking stone wall, screaming about how you hated everything, hated this, hated him, hated us for Christ sake, and the cars, you were screaming at the cars, that you hated them for driving, and Josephine held you by the wrists, and you tried to scratch her face, and she said something to us over her shoulder, about letting you go, laughing, and I can’t say that I blame her, but still, she held on, she could somehow, even when you kicked your legs out over the side.

You were something, scaring all of us with falling, balancing on the rail, then running up the yellow line in the street, singing, following the road up the hill, until you were home.

You were something.”

The next morning, I woke up before her.  She still had on her jeans and boots and undershirt.  I slept close beside the wall.  The sun came through the window, I had no shades.

Her body, there, asleep beside mine, collected shadow, in pieces that influenced the continuity of parts.  A rise and fall — it seemed she had been built entirely of these — one part to another, delicately met.  I watched her, before getting up, considered how an artist takes as little space to shape how light will sit on paper.  Only what is needed, just the fine line and enough darkness, so imagination can bring out, can finish it.  That is how I saw her, as a body made of varied light, careful and exact, half-unclothed, and sleeping.

And there she slept, apart from me complete, breathed in and out and would regardless.

I was not built to accept such things.

Better suited towards fault, as if the separateness of beings rested on some incapacity of mine.

The sun came through the window.  And it hit her face.

My room was full of debris – charcoal dust and ashes by the radiator, pieces of dried flowers, feathers mixed with bits of leaves,, scattered in corners, paper, a box of nails, and  all my dresses on the floor, piled at the foot of the bed.

The question is, would I have been on that bridge at all, had she, had anyone, not been there, to keep me?

I am not sure.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Turtles.

She came for me.  She did not know it, her story winds its own way in and out of my own.    Her middle name was Josephine, and that is what I call her in my mind, to conjure the cajoling laugh, the ironed collar set below her chin, the broken shape of her littlest finger holding a glass.

She was a story teller.  And maybe it was the accent that kept my interest — for so long I listened to her tell the same stories many times to many people.  Sometimes they listened, sometimes not.  She said once she wanted to write, but, instead, she raised her four brothers, kicked her father beaten into the street, and saved her mother’s life.  She left Ireland so as not to die.  She almost killed a man.

Some night two women fought each other over him, and she, always ready for a row, to stop it,  pulled the two apart, and while she held their necks in her hands, he got to her face and punched out both her eyes.  She found him after.  She put his head into a curb, left him bleeding by a tree.  “They had to stop me.  But I couldn’t.  Not at all.   I just kept on, like this here,” and she would show me with her arms how she held his head to hit it.  She did not tell this story often, I don’t think she remembers telling it to me.

And the part that ends it, is always how, the next morning, her eyes were still bloody, so cracked around the bone the sight of them struck even she, who had been hit enough to know the look of two black eyes.  She said,  “I had to hide them from my mother.  She was just downstairs.  But I remembered these glasses in my jacket pocket, Elvis like, sun glasses, must have got them off the bar.  I put them on and waved myself out the door.  I hardly spoke.  She didn’t ask anything.  I went down to the corner store like, and I saw my friend there and he pointed out the paper, and it read ‘Gang of Men Left Boy for Dead.’  They were looking for a gang of men.  The kid had lost his sight.  And my friend asked about my night, knowing like, and I smiled and just pulled down the glasses a bit to show him, it was me,”

The part that ends it, the part that will not let me go,

is not his name,

or if he lived,

or how she knew then she would have to leave her home. — any moral on the permanence or transience of wrath is of no consequence to me,

what ends it, and what I still can not cease to see, as she turns down into her shoulders for a breath, is the vision of her face, how it must have been that morning, jaw set, pupils dark and discus framed in black, short pieces of her hair falling on her forehead,  what will not leave — the faint and lasting color of her cheek, the round and perfect shape that her mouth takes, this face I knew, this simple beauty, subject to any harm.

This was not the only story that she told.  She began with the turtles, the ones stumbled accidentally upon, walking alone, away from Mytilene, Skala Eressou, across the island Lesvos, Greece.

She had gone, in the summer, to see that a sick friend had a good time.  Lizzy was the friends name, and she had a lover.  I saw them in pictures.  They were strong together, enigmatic and attractive.  Sometimes you can see the humor of a person, can hear their voice riding you just by looking, they were like this.  Both were hollow faced and thin.  Lizzy was wild pale, and the woman beside her had darker skin, her face was full but tempered by a subtle fragility not present in her partners, and it too, seemed pale.  They had been captured falling, onto one another, against a stone wall, each had one hand wrapped around a single uncapped bottle, and you could see the whiskey spilling on their hands.

They were coming apart.  It seems the two had decided to use the island, its fluorescence, its Bacchus strips of wine and women dancing, its gatherings of tree-less stone surrounded by shallow waters, to force themselves against each other and away.

Josephine didn’t know.  An innocent.

She had come because she thought she could remind them, of when they were like girls, like stallions, when she and Lizzy tore through the north of Ireland quick enough to beat the pull of things gone bad behind them.

But they weren’t beating it anymore.

And instead of giving in, she went off alone.

And she found turtles.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

Never in her life.

A better story.

I am afraid to write it because I know I cannot do it justice.

It is justice; that she was able to see this thing, this mating ground, this anomaly of earth, of sand, to where instinct leads.  Those little creatures who traveled stretches of continents and seascapes, to be mothers and then to leave.  And she found them.

They were hers.  This one day.

She fed them bread from her pockets, “What do sea turtles eat?”

She fed them the only thing she had.

“Never in my life had I seen anything like it, you couldn’t see the beach for the wee turtles all at my feet.  Lucky they were slow, hi.  It was a bit frightening.”

Aye.  It was.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Spinning Wheel.

We had just turned twenty-one, one after the other, and had gone out, into the town just beyond the college fence, to find a place to drink, permanently; a place of permanence within which to sit.

It was snowing, we were two of no one out on the street.  And I remember, we almost chose a different place, one with high glass windows and candles lit, steps leading up into the door.  We almost chose differently.  But didn’t, couldn’t.  How could we not have entered into that smaller, wooden door, amidst closed brick, without detail (reminding me of the St. Louis factory towns where one home is connected to the next, sharing the single wall, sharing height).  And the sign, comically ominous, archaic, burned into a solid wood plank: The Spinning Wheel

(we decided it might have been fitting to have also read beneath:

Abandon all Hope, You Who Enter Here.

perhaps in the original Italian, or better, Latin.)

We found out place there, in that small hole cut into the line of stores facing the street in the small town beside the small college and our small rooms and smaller beds within.  We went every night.  Nessa would sit by the window, smoking and staring out, she would dance often alone, sometimes she let me dance with her, once she let me play the boy while dancing, let me hold her close.  I would be found interesting for begging pens, writing on napkins and ‘post-it’ notes at the bar (later we named the collection: “Post-its from a bar stool”, in memorial for Dostoevsky’s: Notes from the Underground, of which I still believe a comparison could be made).

And he had been there for years.  He was a little nervous, and alone, nervous in that way that people who have been alone, or thought themselves alone, are if interrupted (we had that tendency, Nessa and I, to interrupt, demand not service but attention, and not superficial attention but acknowledgment, of our state, our state entire, that brought us there, to meet).  She liked him immediately.  I did not, thought him a bit dead (she was quicker than me in these matters).  But he was to serve us, that night and every night to follow, two Bloody Marys to start, and then cider for me to follow ever after.

Cabaret.

That is what had stuck in my head, what I could not get rid of all that winter.

It was my last real memory: Ely had taken me into the city to see Cabaret before he left.   Before he left, we had gone to Cabaret, and he had taken me home, had taken my hair down, and had looked at me, as if I were a painting, briefly let to live, and said, “I can’t believe I know a person like this, with hair I can take down.”

“Have you ever seen Cabaret?”   All I could think to say to this stalk of a man standing before us.  And he smiled, as if finally he had found something on which to stand, mumbled something I did not hear (he always did this, spoke entirely incoherent sentences but in a manner that made it clear he thought you ought to be understanding everything he said).  He walked out from behind the bar (was he going to sing?  Where is he going Nes, are we cut off already?)  And there it was, the jukebox, making its own isolated yellow light of advertisement, against the far wall.

And he played a song.

He played the song from the musical.  Her song.  The one she sings herself, after everything, after she chooses what she chose, and continues, does not escape.  It is, I think, the strongest song, if sung well, it is the strongest in the play.

The version that rang out that night was quite different than the first I had heard, almost jovial, almost light.  It came straight from the era in which it had been written in,  Louis Armstrong sang (no-use in sit-ting a-lone in your room).    And I remember standing quite still.  And Nessa looking around the room.  And Jimmy cleaning off the glasses left on the tables.

And after closing, after Nessa left, and the doors locked behind her, and everyone, I was still there.

And many would disagree with my experience.  The magic that seemed to come with it, and what motivated us.

He was very tall and

very thin, and very pale

But he was not ugly.

And he put more quarters in.  And he set two small glasses out, the only two that would remain on the dark wood, in the dim light, the one bulb by the one window lit.  He brought out apple whiskey, and I had never had that kind of whiskey before.  He poured the shots.  We drank them.  (“To Elsie”).  And he danced with me.

He did something I had always wanted, but that no one had taken upon themselves to do.  And both of us understood exactly, what it was that we were doing, what it was we meant to do.  What we had in common: just the one song, just the one, and the two glasses, just that, that we were there, that we had met, and that we had no where to go.

I had nowhere to go.

We danced slowly, parted to spin, once or twice, when the chorus came, and when the song had ended, he said goodnight, and I was let out the locked door, and in the window as I walked, returning home, I saw him, as he returned to finish putting up the chairs.

I did not see the photograph until much later.  A young man with blonde hair and wide eyes, a passionate face, a face that belonged to a dancer or an artist, its structure, stark and open, like you see on the boys in some island of off Ireland, at once desolate, at once naive.  Wholly familiar, I could not place it, could not make it fit — until someone came over my shoulder, and holding my head forward calmly by the jaw, whispered, “What, don’t you recognize him?  You should.”

Even then I needed it pointed out to me; how a face could change.

Honest and cruel.  Meant to be.  Honest because, as of then, I had taken him home with me many times, the shadow of this face, lost but within this picture smoke stained behind plastic on the wall among many other such photographs, I should have known it.  And cruel because, it was already certain that I would not take him home with me again.

And she knew it, as she held my jaw to face the wall, Josephine knew all of this, knew why I had taken him home, knew about the dancing after hours and the drinking and the telling of our stories to each other, and how I only lived two doors down and how I told him that, finally one night, and how he came with me, and how I don’t remember any of it, bringing him up the stairs, unlocking the door, but nothing after, and how after awhile, I couldn’t do it anymore, wake up not knowing and with him gone, she knew how I had wanted to give him something, more than anything, to just give him something, but couldn’t change the fact, couldn’t change, how it was that we had found ourselves together, both of us empty, both of us already having given up.

She understood all of this, as she pointed out the picture to me, making certain the identity of the young man I could not pull away from, could not stop looking at.

She knew how I would notice the changing of this face, how it had changed, how I would notice it, and how it would break my heart,

because, had this been the face I met, had this face still belonged to him,

I knew,

there would have been no leaving, I would never have left

as, of course, eventually

I did.

Turned from one thing to another.

There was a spinning wheel within the Spinning Wheel itself, a giant wooden thing, so fixed within the place, shrouded with leaves and false vines, raised above and behind the cash register (an antique metal anomaly itself), that one might not notice it.  I didn’t, until I was well on the way to becoming a fixture there myself.  I imagine it dictated my experience more than I would like to admit, half in light, half in dark.  It did not move, could not, but one might question if we did not move for it, if we had taken up the motion it would have had.  There were nights when all my glances returned to that stupid wheel, trying to figure out how this could have happened.  How one thing, stripped of use, its purpose stolen, its movement hung up, nailed upon a wall, communicates to those others who bear witness, how it conveys, what it meant to do must now be done by them.

I have always had the habit of attributing life to the inanimate.

The night is good at first.  Full of promise.  We arrive confident, more than confident, awake.  We enter already laughing. As wrecked as we considered ourselves to be, we maintained, that all was not as hopeless.  Can’t be.  Someone will make it.  Someone has to.  Two young girls, aware of how young they were, who had lost a lot, but knew, there was still a lot left to lose.  And no way to protect it.  That is how we entered: looking out.

Arguing the eyes of strangers to find some trace of what it is to live despite this.  Who did we look for?  We looked for anyone.

What did we find?  Little answer.  That time passed absolutely.

In returning to the one place, in repeating our certain acts — same drinks, same songs, same company, we sought semblance.  By continuing to store our faith in the old men, the fighting boys, the unhappy pretty women, in the place, in the scenery, the bottles, the music, the lack of light , by continuing, time did not matter, and we were happy for awhile.

But then, as chance would have it, I catch myself, maybe in the bathroom mirror, maybe in the window, (this latter is better, one does not see one’s self with precision, not isolated, but rather fading in and out of what is behind and surrounding them, this picture, rather dim, is more easily let go).  And no matter how the reflection hits, unexpected, strange, (rarely beautiful, always beautiful), weather the face reflects a rare simplicity, or a twisted match of color, the seeing of it, the instant, where I am caught, at once in the world and moving through it,  by seeing myself something is changed.

Is it the separateness? inherent to observing one’s self outside of one’s self, or is it the lack of distance? being caught, open and unguarded, living.

Cradling my head in my hands, sitting down on the toilet, standing up again, looking at the mirror, again, putting my hand on the latch, the hook and eyelet, taking it off, putting water from the sink into my hair, spitting water in the basin, trying to leave,

but the mirror is on the door, the mirror is on the back of the door, and it runs the full length, it cannot be ignored on exiting, it cannot be ignored, on opening, or closing.  I will see it, and I will be trapped by it.

I will hear the voices on the other side, the continuation of all those people, laughing, carrying on.  The continuation of all I was a part of, just a moment ago.

I will want someone to come in.  To notice, and to break open the door.  Someone to pull me out, into their arms.  To come in and close the door behind them, lift me up onto the sink and put themselves between my legs.  I want them to touch my face, to be rough with it, to push back my hair, grasp it in their fists, to pull back, to face me, holding my jaw, my cheeks, my face, the bones, to use their hands to do what they can, surround the back of my skull, shake it, steady it, to look at me, get between me and the reflection, set themselves against me, anyway they can, a kiss, their hips, their arms. Place their frame entire against mine, breast to breast, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, opening the bone, the bones that meet, that match, arched convex in the center that make an empty space.  Jar me into remembering, my body. My own.

I will want someone, to come in, to replace that desolate mirror, that state of glass and air and color removed.   I do not ask.

I do not ask for it.  I do not call out.

Something fails.

By looking into my own eyes as if into another’s, something is stirred, and something else is definitively ended.

My conclusion underneath my breath, one is either alive or outside of life, one is either in the light, moving in it, or outside of it, or so I imagined, so I said underneath my breath, in the darker moments, staring at the wheel.  And I could not stop turning, shifting from one side to another, living, slowing, seeing, catching up again — this splitting up of one’s perspective, of one’s self, of one’s life.

The anger comes after turning back.  After the failed and silent arguments across rooms and city streets, trying to meet the world, to meet it, having just seen my own face.  The old violence, the unadmitted base returns, and I am again out among the men (the masses) trying with my eyes, my heart, my sex, to hold them there, accountable.  Until they admit to know, to love, to want — admit that I am there.  That they are there.

That I am, that we are, not lost.

The anger, the madness, comes after having argued their eyes with mine, trying to gain in them this weight, this certainty,

but certainty is not gained in passing glances, nor even in longer ones.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Easter and Marlboro Reds

But, this all to say, someone would come for me.   To collect me.  Someone did come.  And what pieces I had harbored, held dear –

trinkets that once marked my hope, young and bound by debris,

scattered books, torn copies of art,

versions of Da Vinci’s “girl”, photographs of

red river beds and oil,

sketches drawn in charcoal

of a woman, her head turned,

a letter on a postcard,  nailed beside the door:

man fishing, baby naked on the shore, mother painted at the river’s edge,

and all the papers,

the metal tubes of paint,

all the brushes, stained, un-kept,

and drying leaves of flowers, spindled on the window sill,

the sElyed wax of candles, streaming down the shelves,

my anchors, my guides, my lightness —

their gravity diminished

with her.

The one who came for me, whom I did not understand.

I met her in the Spinning Wheel.

Drunk.

I was drunk, often.  (Things had not gone as expected, and I never dealt well with that.)

She walked in, and I took her as new, watched her in her boots and leather jacket saddle up beside the bar, alone.  This was our first moment, I mistook her for a boy, made a real idiot of myself.  Everybody watching.  Apparently they all knew what I was getting into. I asked her what she was doing there, why she had not been there before.  I acted like I owned the place.  Somewhat true —  I had been attending faithfully, every day, coming in at dusk and staying well past close.

The bar tender, an older man, wasted by the drink, by the absence of his own life, served me for nothing.

Almost nothing.

We danced once, to a Cabaret song, I wanted it played and I wanted to dance, and he went along, taking what company he could, while the taking was good.  And there were other nights, just he and I, that I do not remember well.

It was a quiet bar, local, full of regulars and the occasional college kid.  I was not alone at first.  Nessa, who tried to stay by my side,  came with me, and we did not realize what could happen to us.  We did not care, took the place as our own from the moment we came in, trailing its inhabitants behind us.  We were fighters.  Not boxers, that’s a laugh, too small and anyway, such violence seemed obtuse.  We fought with our eyes, our sex, our anger. We looked into a stranger’s face until they saw us, and resigned to love, or want, or recognize — we held them there, accountable.

This was our only argument; to be seen, or wanted, or by both, upset the balance.

As our own balance, each separately, had been thrown.

It was the first time I had ever really committed myself to drinking.  And it is strange, as dark a time as it was, I miss it.  The darkness of it, the dim auburn light, the juke box where I stood, night after night, my leg up on the iron radiator, cigarette in my mouth, cider in my hand.  The stupid drunken pictures on the wall.  After we left it all went to shit.  Isn’t that always the way.

The first night she came in, everyone called out her name.  And I thought she was a man.  A gay man maybe who went by Josephine.  Brilliant.  She was brilliant though, as she came in, I remember silver reflecting off her ears and her hands as she saluted Jimmy, bowed her head laughing, “ Long time no see,” she said, in a husky voice, in an accent so strong, the words were almost inseparable from one another .”Howareyou?”   She saddled up to the bar, sat down and ordered a Corona.  She wore a leather jacket, jeans, black boots.  I had never seen anybody like her.  I looked at Nessa.

“What’s going on?  What’s happening?”

“I don’t know, somebody just came in.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

My fault

“There must be, in this, a sense of me?”

“Why must there, Avery, why must there?  Could you not stand it if it had nothing to do with you?  If something in the world bore no relation to either one of us, if this art, this scenery, these pages that affect you so are only as they are, and not fallible to your interpretation or your care.  I face this, girl, I face it.”

“Oh, are you so valiant?”

“I didn’t say so much.”  The same face, the woman in the garden, the mild disapproval of an unformed weed.

“There have been many such moments in my life when I thought that that was so.  That I am in fact, removed.  Apart.  Below or above, no consequence.  But that is false.  Ely, as false as believing in ones own life as being ones own.”

“Not one’s own.  God’s.”

“God’s then.  But finished just the same.  Too easy. You ignore that which reaches out to you and reach towards something promised.  You are doing this.  Supposing what is not yet done is better than what comes from you.”

“I’m going.”

“I know.  I know you are.  But you are wrong.  It is not just you and God and those unknown faces beckoning.  I am.  I must be.  Worth something.”  He said my face was paler than he could remember.  That was why he left.  He took my paleness for a sign, that this is where life was not.  A mistake.  Maybe.  But he was moving towards me when my legs gave.  I remember that.  He had shut up and started across the room when I failed to stand for the first time.  But I would not have it.  I held out my hand.  And he stopped where I fell.  He stood above me, unfaltering in his height, his breath, his motionlessness.    And pain wrecked his eyes and I knew I had done this.  Severed him from me, it was cruel, it was intentional.  An act to prove a point.  I was not to be the object of his compassion.  That was not it.  Not true.  I saw the three loves divide before me, and I would not let the fact that I was wearing thin, lessen my will.  He did not love me as I had loved him.  Perhaps never, perhaps always.  It was not in him, and I had tormented him from the moment we met, demanding that he take me as I wanted.

Not to say the joy of life does not evade me at times.  It does.  As it does everyone, despite our more saintly qualities.  I am not always thankful, though usually aware I should be.  I am rarely productive.  It seems I have spent as much time vomiting over the kitchen sink as I have typing.  As much time wanting to be with those I love as with them.  This may be a purely American trait, or maybe it is more globally present than I am aware.  I have too much time on my hands and too little real communication. I have been known to gauge the state of my psychology by the lyrics of pop songs or the happenings of state or country as they are reported to me.  I am fooled by the notion that by hearing the things that others hear, by knowing what they will know, that I share some commonality, some communion with them.  As the world pretends to have grown smaller, I pretend to have kept up.  Pretend that as I become aware of others, they must somehow be aware of me.  Delusions of grandeur.  Unavoidable.  One must look at the bright side.  What is the bright side.

At least, at least individually, we are educated as to what exists.  This must bring some consolation.  Perhaps when things find their equilibrium again, genius will arise.  Some new and calmer way of being.  The guilt that came with the chaos theory, our overwhelming presence and responsibility in the world will subside.  And we will get somewhere.   As it is, I am relegated to persevere my media endeavors, grieve over Eminem’s hardships, exalt in his grace, and know that millions of others are driving about that very instant doing the same.  “You only get one shot do not –

In any case, that is where I was, in my car not listening to anyone in particular, just driving, when I realized I could die as easily as I could live.  Not be as easily as having been.  Adam from the adama.  I, as having been created, am fragile and powerful.  Not autoxthonous.  I am afraid.  Adam and Eve discovered this, I am a little late on the uptake.  After this moment, I had to fight the urge to pull the car off the road into a tree, fight the imagining of the road unraveling beneath my wheels.  Anything is possible.

We would be stopped, not by me, surprisingly, at the time I had not the strength to end it, but by Josephine, whom I had not yet met, who would come home from Ireland and walk in the door, into the place I had come to call my own, where this farewell meeting, this final surrender, in which I would take part, of one person to another for no other reason than having nothing else, was taking place.  She came in, and it was finished.

She had this uncanny ability to see exactly what was going on and to call it.

She once said to me, at a time when she was particularly frustrated by my attraction to the darker, dirtier side of living, (a side she struggled her whole life to escape),

“That’s just fine.  If you want to keep on with the ugly people all your life, go for it, but you can’t expect me to keep them company with you.”

The ugly people.  It struck us both as very funny, it was true.  The ugly people.  I just couldn’t believe she said it, and in that way, so simply, without guilt.

What one does not simply say.  And she meant it in purely the aesthetic sense, no metaphors here, she spoke directly (never was one for abstraction), about two men (then a man and a boy): the bar tender at the Spinning Wheel, Jimmy, the subject of this final dialogue of longing, (the one she put an end to), and Ely, the ever present ghost himself, the boy whom she had not met, still has not, who had become then, admittedly, less (– less what?  visually stunning?).  He had become painful, painful to look at, to think of looking at.

Strange, that they had been, both the man and the boy had once been, quite beautiful.

I did not know this when I met Jimmy.  I did not know he had been anything other than what he was when I first saw him, the gaunt gray frame behind the bar, a man who looked older than his years, a man who looked starved, who looked as if he had given in to starvation, willingly.

I met him in one January, with Nessa —

Nessa and I, who were very different, and very much the same.  There is not a more particular way to say it, we ourselves did not speak as much about our circumstance, our commonality, our thread, only knew it to exist.  She was my favorite.  At the time.  The friend closest to me.  She held a frame that seemed to be rebuilding, as if having been an instrument, built of string and hollowed wood, torn apart, only to be restored.  Ribs showed, and collar bone, and at hip her pelvis, but her face had begun to let some color, some shape.  She understood things, put one and one together where I could not.  She had dreams that happened.  Sometimes her hands shook, in the mornings.  “Too much coffee, maybe”, she’d say.  She moved delicately, even when holding a cigarette or a drink.  Her legs her neck, her back, her wrists maintained the composure intended (that must have been intended) by our form, the body’s careful balance of tendon, muscle and skin.  Her posture spoke for her, each movement, precise or wounded, carried what she did not say.  She, more than anyone of us, was stronger than she appeared.

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The order of things

I have already confused rightly the order of things.

Seeing as the actuality of order may hold in its sequence some merit, or at least, be less confusing, to be practical (which I am not),  maybe it would be good to straighten out when, really, things happened.  A time line of sorts, rather, that exactly:

first Mikkal died.

Then Ely and I went to Cabaret

then he left for Russia

no, first I took him to the airport (fool), then he left

then I turned twenty one

then Nessa did

then we went out in the snow, or

first it snowed, then we went out

we went to the first bar, the nice one

then we went to the Spinning Wheel

then we met Jimmy

then he played the song

then Nessa went home

then we danced

then he came home with me

then he didn’t

then Josephine came back from Ireland.

Not true.  First I must have been born, then, little.

I climbed trees

I ran

I fell in love with a boy like me

I made him chase me.

There are shadows and then the sun and then shadows.  I move to catch their measure, shifting to keep the light and begging the shade falls into me with that same grace it falls upon the ground.  The trees, the ground, the concrete, seem to easily accept it, as does the sky easily go from dark to light and to dark again.

I wanted to go easily like this.

I am not sick at all, I used to say

(“You are not sick at all” he said, he would not come, always some reason to stay away.)  Not sick.  Not at all.

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What confusion?

An example.  Something you have been, have done, something you were, quite happily, going on — a depraved nymphet, a player in the Cabaret, Mitenka in the height of disillusionment, Stephen Deadalus most of his life — and one day you stumble upon yourself (Emma Bovary was my down fall), and whatever life you led, whatever pattern by which your past was formed and by which you operate, dissolves into the ether as the tail end of a galaxy ends, unraveling at its spiraled scattered points into the space between.  You are revealed.  You are ended.  The confusion of which I speak is what is left.

Do I speak of the loss of a sound mind, of perception, relativity, the mind’s biology disband, or is it rather the loss of the ability to believe, to have faith in harmony, the connection of things.  In the worst moments I could not distinguish between the two.  Music came apart, symphonies disseminated into solitary sounds, pared down unwillingly.  The lack of will may or may not be vital to the argument.  Ah, what argument?  There is none.  Not really.  But still, I argue, in bars, on the bus, a street corner.

I was one of those who believed life to be compromised of uncertainties.   unknowable, thought this a pretty good handle on things.  I placed great consequence on abstraction, the intent within the spaces of the words, thinking it the hiding place of meaning.  It seems now, upon reflection, I aged rather backwardly.  Raging first against a light that would not die and then living.  Maybe it was survival, this throwing up of hands.  (…) To believe in what is not.

But, certainty would find me, in its forms, rigid and obsolete, sex and eating and sweeping the floor.  Things I had ignored, mistrusted.

I was famous for dried flowers, crushed and scattered in my room, feathers from a pillow in my hair and charcoal on my hands.

When certainty did come, I was thankful for it.

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My mother and the music chapter

My mother nursed me.

She cradled me on her knees and wore her hair up and away from her face, her neck bare.  She did this, bared her neck, and I, her baby, failed.  I do not remember being hungry, but I was.  Insatiable.  Not an hour would pass and I’d be ready to go again.  Nobody slept.  How could they?  “It was no trouble” she says, my mother.  Who held me.  Who sat for hours, still, while her child, thin and eager, belly distended, starved in her arms.

I must have wanted it; to eat, to gain, to keep breathing, and make the stillness of her hands worth something.  But I couldn’t.  She tried, but it didn’t matter, I could not digest the milk.  “In one end and out the other.”  she says.  Just like that.  And one day, I was diagnosed, and her attempts came to an end.

Failure to Thrive.

Salt in the sweat.

And that was that.

This is not to sound tragic.

I am not tragic.

I laugh at stupid jokes.  I laugh.

The disease is a progressive one, it does not bear a steady decline but quickens; my childhood was salvaged, untouched.

I have been happy.  Have been content.

Innocence, ever enduring, lingers in me, but with a clarity less particular than in most

— color and detail forfeited for speed.

I will tell lies, of August, of a harvest lost, a burning field, a child conceived, when they were not.  My voice, once regained, may slip into half-truths.  I do not know the truth for certain.  Do not know certainty.  But –

I want to speak.  I want to say something.

I want to speak to what will come about after I am gone, address the questions that will be asked, give the answers now,

I want to still be there, with a clear voice, answering.

I want to tell the truth.

That my lungs collapse is pitiful and unromantic.

That when it is done, I will not be here.

And what mattered.

My voice, any of our voices?  Or, the breadth of our hands, the distance of our stride, the rhythm of our breath; our own weight, measured against the deliberate pull of biology, the drum of instinct, that all but led us into the ground.

I want to say what will not be said.

My friends, my loves, are already fading; no resilience brings them clear.

And I am here before them, counting back.

So little time.

I write to fight the disappearing into  –.

and will use whatever means I need, are given me, that they will know, they are to me, what is the reason of living.

I remember writing the paper.  Der Lindenbaum,  original picture, a simple work of art for countries sake, seeming a reminder of what has been forgotten, (the innocence of Germany, that once there was this tree)  the consequence of music beaten out by the needle and the crank (rings as they spin), and would spin forever.  My mother always said that she loved The Magic Mountain, that it was her favorite, the only book that she could really read besides a few.

I can see her sitting beside some gramophone watching black (planetary? lunar?) rings  read by a pin,  a needle that makes everything sound extraordinary and real, as if the voice is calling out from Germany, and the crackles and the jumps cannot be helped because they are from the knocking of the people at the door, who would not stop, even for that voice, even for Schubert, even for her.

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I was a girl

Many things were said and done that I cannot place.  Others are better able, seem to know more, sense, say by name.  Their minds hold landscapes, languages, and years, intact.  Taste, a face, a number, city streets, they recollect.

How?

I do not.  Lack history.  Lack sense.

Many things were said and done that I cannot place.

I was a girl.

I see her so clearly, this child, the very same who ran and loved the running.

She is there, not in memory, but weighs in my reflection.

She is present.

Impish and solitary, caught fleeting in the shadows of my eyes.  Translucent as a figure making its way down the shore.  I hardly recognize her, mistake her for a demon, rousing laughter, spite.

It is always a surprise, to see her there.  One would think she would have left by now, furious with me as with everything, and kept on, towards whatever it was that day she thought she had first seen:  a dolphin.  a life.  a glint of sun.

I don’t remember.

But I know

I was a girl.  This girl.  Who ran.

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The return

I have heard it called resilience,

and so, by definition:

transient,  lightsome,

lighthearted.

A talent.

to comeback,

restore, repair, replace;

a variability, a convalescence.

Out of

uncertainty, impermanence,

she becomes (the subject)

inconstant, changeful, unrestrained,

and therefore,

irrepressible.

volatile,

and  radiant.

A phenomenal resilience, belonging to the young, who are dying or, those who will die,

those who are promised to.

A mechanism.  A gift.

All of this, I have heard it called.

I call it forgetful.

As it is for anyone; a lapse in memory that saves.

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