The Corn King of Clinton County

He claims to not have been sired, but sown: from a volunteer kernel in the field where he grew and formed cozy in an ear until an old farm hand spotted the bulge of his limbs and husked him into being.

He was raised by those who owned the farm, but was never really theirs. That’s why they fought all the time. That’s why, at 15 human years, he ran away and started a life in the city.

He learned the city’s weaknesses and power, became a part of each for awhile. But he’ll let you know that corn is a prairie grass, resilient; so is he. He mastered the city he says, but the dirt there was all the wrong kind.

So he came back to the farm, not to the people but to his corn. He roams it night and day, chasing deer and crow lest his family be harmed.

The farmer and his wife say the boy just came back to shame them. The boy states this as further proof they’re clearly not his kind.
 

Death Fossilizes Love

Death fossilizes love.

Turns it to stone,
perfect or a little broken,
holds it forever and
once again discovered
lets you see it from all angles

or just the ones that aren't buried.

Part life, part mountain,
mostly on a shelf now but
some days in your pocket,
the weight of it comforting you
           despite your fears of losing it,
           carrying it around like that.

You won't.
 

And the Mother Shares with the Child an Invaluable Truth

She sat on the edge of my bed, took a long draw then looked for a place to ash her cigarette. She stood up, ran into the dresser hard, cursed, sat back down. She brushed my damp bangs with nicotine fingers, didn’t turn on the light when I asked. She leaned forward, bracing herself with both forearms. She licked my tears, her breath smoke and mint.

She was beautiful.

She took a drag and crushed with pointed toe the cherry that fell to the floor.
She placed the butt gently on the bedside table, the one with the light I wanted on. She took my chin in her fingers and traced my lips and my nose with her thumb.

She said: Honey, if you can wake up from it, it’s not a nightmare.
 

Savior

(Some things you should know first: My mother’s first husband died in a car crash. The doctor was my mother’s first husband’s brother, my step uncle I guess? My mother called him in the middle of the night. No, I don’t know why my parents didn’t take me to the hospital. Maybe the uncle was closer. My mom was a drunk and my dad was the jealous type so it couldn’t have been easy to call him. Mom said there was a blizzard, but I don’t know how that plays into the story. Dad said I was gone for about ten minutes but I’m sure it seemed longer than it really was. I don’t know that ten minutes is even survivable. Adrenaline, right in the heart. The uncle guy was so freaked out he put the first attempt straight through me and into the mattress. The second one worked though. Obviously. No, I never met the uncle. After that I mean. No, I don’t remember. I have a little scar though, right in the middle of my chest.)

When I was two weeks old, I died of pneumonia.

Like any savior, I was resurrected.
 

Supergirl

The trip was too long.

Long enough that eventually homesickness gave way to the feeling she was home already, when she wasn’t; long enough to believe in the friendships formed there even though within a few weeks of leaving she never spoke to anyone there again.

The trip was too long.

Long enough so that calls home became an obligation, and made her irritable.

It was work that brought her over. Maybe it was work ethic - application in the face of separation, or something like that - that kicked in. But it seemed so glamorous, of course Geneva seemed glamorous: Dinner out every evening in a quaint or chic café, drinking fancy French wine that someone else paid for in the company of intellectuals, or so it seemed; the way they smoked, the way they held their cigarettes; the timbre of their voices surely discussing art and death in a language should could not understand.

So that when the trip was finished and she did come home (really) bringing with her a belief that she had made an impression and formed bonds in the wake of a promise that she would return, she felt – well, briefly – that she had more in common with those she’d left behind in Geneva than those she returned home to, and considered (rather seriously and even morbidly for awhile) that there was someplace else she belonged.

After so long in a hotel she resented having to make her own bed. She resented eating in and, for a week or so, found no charm at all in a home-cooked meal.

Her colleagues in Switzerland said “Super,” all the time. “Super” as “Yes”. “Super” as “Cool”. “Super” in a such a way as to become a sort of soundtrack of Geneva, not unlike the synthetic tones of slot machines forming the score of Las Vegas.

One Sunday morning they drove her to the country where they took a tram up to a mountain top and ate brunch outside together in the cold. At the time it seemed so intimate – not at all like locals, obligated with entertaining her, taking her to an obvious tourist attraction they themselves would otherwise avoid. Still, the setting was beautiful, you can’t deny it, and that particular Swiss catch phrase caught a song in her head, a pop song from college called “Supergirl”. “Supergirl”: For the balance of the trip it played over and over in her head. It made her feel happy and young.

When she first came home she dug out the record and played “Supergirl” again and again, trying to quench an ache or maybe trying to make it act up. Because home in a suburb of the American Midwest, the idea of missing Geneva felt romantic.

But when her second round of letters went unanswered, and eventually her foolish third, home started to feel like home again, the place she was actually missed.

Now if by chance she hears that song she doesn’t think of Switzerland at all. It conjures up a more personified vision: “Supergirl”, heroine, possessor of unexpected strength and the ability to avert disaster.
 

Things I Lost, and Miss

A fringed buckskin jacket made for a young cowboy who certainly wasn’t young anymore when I bought it at a thrift store in Fort Collins, Colorado. For twenty years that jacket was a sort of trademark. I recklessly left it in a hotel room in Moscow and I actually called after, trying to get it back again. I’ve tried several times
to replace it, but I’ve only ever failed.

The rock I found at Horseshoe Canyon, a perfect so-called Apache Tear. It was the kind of rock you’d buy in a souvenir shop but I found it, seemingly shining in the sand though really it wasn’t shiny, just smooth, and soft in my hand the way a hard thing like stone can be if it’s smooth enough. I carried it everywhere for four or five years, once leaving it on a restaurant table and calling back later: “Did you happen to find a little rock?” and the disappointed-sounding hostess saying, “Yes, I have it.” So that’s not when I lost it. I lost it and something else at a punk rock show in Denver, but mostly I miss the rock.

A pair of sunglasses that fit my face just right, made me feel pretty and which flew into the Gulf of Mexico when a pelican on the dock bit my ass. It didn’t hurt, but I started. I have a clear recollection of my glasses sinking into the water, and my temptation to dive in after them; my acknowledgment of the futility, and my fear it wasn’t really futile but that I was just too scared or vain to jump in.

My first car, a red pick-up truck, from Alamagordo, New Mexico. I had worked all summer at a camp near there, saved up my money, turned sixteen in August and bought the truck to take me home. It blew two tires and a radiator on the way, costing me everything I had left. I don’t miss that truck. I miss believing that a thing could make me happy or set me free.
 

Chicago #5


Fed crumbs to the sparrows at a sidewalk cafe. They were confident birds, coming so close, fooling me into thinking I could touch them (I tried) or have one perch on my shoulder (none did).

One little bird had a crippled leg dragging out beside it like a twig or dead grass. I aimed toward it but it was too slow to the crumbs, and afraid when I threw them too close. There was nothing I could do.

I wish I never saw it.
 

Dead Dog on the Highway

The previous time I saw a dead dog on the highway was in Detroit. It was a pit mix, black and white, huge and bloated up like a cow. I drove past it for each of the several days I was there. It left me pitying the city.

Tonight when I saw the dog in the road, I wasn't sure it was dead. When I pulled over I hoped it might be alive. I put my hand on its neck and I felt something like a pulse, but it was just a death gurgle.

A second car pulled over. It was the man who had hit it; he’d doubled back and turned around. We heaved the dog onto the shoulder and he asked me to call the police. I did. “It was a black dog,” he said, “and this stretch of road is so dark.” I confirmed those truths. I commended him for stopping.

We killed time with nicer dog stories, his about the Springer he had had for fifteen years. “We got her for my daughter on her tenth birthday.” His loss seemed fresh but in subsequent conversation I learned his daughter’s twenty-ninth birthday was a week ago.

I would stay until the cop showed up cause it didn’t seem right to leave the man there alone. He was a kindly, stoic Minnesotan, not the type to cry. At least not in front of a stranger.

I left when the cop got there, somewhat surprised he came at all. He apologized for taking awhile, and handled the carcass in a manner that acknowledged its death in a way the man and I couldn’t; we'd stroked it as if it were alive. "Such a beautiful dog," the man had said.

The cop took the collar off. Someone was going to get a terrible call.

The dog was a lab mix, grayed and old. I tell myself it was taking its last old-dog run. I thanked it for dying, sparing us the grief of trying to save it.
 

The Good Soldier

It’s funny how war can haunt a man.

He saw women and children die or dead but the only time he cried was when a dog stepped on a landmine and was blown to bits. The dog might have saved him but that wasn’t what struck him at the time or even still and the dog didn’t make him homesick. It was just he really liked dogs.

He made it home.

He's had women, and children. But he won’t have a dog.

That’s what war took away from him.
 

It Was Nothing


He stood right there. Me in the shade, him in the sun pretending not to see me. Maybe he didn't see me. It was closer than we'd been in years, years. Can I say it was nice? It was nice, just standing there like that. Anyhow. That's it. I better get back to work now. Anyhow, that's all there was to it.

Really, it was nothing.
 

Allergies, You Know

I'm not listening for his steps,
or waiting for his letter,
or hoping to run into him
or going to the places where
I think that that could happen,

or changing up my memories
to paint a sweeter picture
or saving small mementos
from the time we were together

and if I did I wouldn't look at them
or trace them with my fingers
and that shirt he left behind
with his scent still on the fabric

well I cut that into rags.

And if I happen quite by accident
to leave it on the night stand
I don't hold it to my face
for any other reason than

allergies you know.
 

Minneapolis #133

Weather is a constant companion. It knows everyone who has ever lived. It has stroked and assaulted your heroes. It has been intimate with your lover. It will never leave you. It will never spare you. It fills you, always, forgiving you the curses you make against it.

Weather is moody; I try to be tender. I invite it inside, offer up some tea. But Weather knows it's being patronized despite my best attempts. It whispers, I can enter without invitation; your gesture is insincere.

I just want to understand you! I shout, and nearly weep.

Is it not enough to feel me? Weather asks.
 

Minneapolis #132

(New Years Eve, 2010)

I have lived, and lived with you.
I was there in the beginning
           through the middle
and now here at the very end but still

I don’t really know you.

I don’t know what to make of you
or how you’ll be remembered.
I’ve nothing to say to you except
           good-bye.

I meant to write a eulogy,
say something sweet and
special but really the highlight
was your seeming lack of
           lowlights.

For this, I am utterly grateful.
 

Minneapolis #131

(The First Snow)

This is our indigenous weather.
In Minnesota, we are meant
to see our water.

Summer is a fluke.
Spring is a transient,
            just passing through.
Autumn is adulterous,
            giving us something to love
            but never loyalty.

Winter is authentic,
showing us all of itself
            and soon,
daring us to love it.

I do, I do.
 

The Night Before Thanksgiving (2010)

The restaurant was busy so we decided to sit and eat at the bar. The bar wasn’t busy but the bartender was, solo and mixing up the drinks for that full restaurant.

The bar was empty but a couple came in and sat beside us. The way the bar is angled made it feel less like they were next to us than it might have otherwise. They were a little loud and smelled like cigarettes. They called the bartender, Sue, by name and she brought them ice teas – two glasses each. She asked if they were going to eat but the man said they were too broke. “Let me bring you some bread,” Sue said.

We wondered if we should just buy them dinner, but sometimes such decisions don’t come so easy.

The man told a story of how ten years ago today, the woman he is with broke off their engagement. “But we’re still together!” he chimed. Sue refilled the ice teas. He went on: “I was on drugs. I went to rehab that night at Riverside. But she stayed with me.” Sue filled the ice teas again. The couple ate their bread.

Our food came. I was grateful for the angled bar. I tried not to look at the couple over my shoulder. They asked Sue to refill their ice tea. Sometimes not looking doesn’t come so easy.

The man said to me, “You sure can eat!”

Here’s my opening. I said, “Can we buy you dessert?”

He looked a little indignant. “No,” he said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, well happy holidays.” I went back to my meal.

Then the man says, “Well maybe a little ice cream.” Sue, quiet and observant through this conversation, brings more ice tea. The man says, “Sue knows what I like.”

I crane toward the woman. “How about you?”

“No thanks,” she said.

The man said to Sue, “Then make mine a double.”

He eats his sundae. We finish our meal. I’m grateful for the angled bar. Sue refills ice tea.

The couple gets up to leave. The man thanks us. “Happy holidays!” we say. Breadcrumbs and spent lemons litter the bar. The man says to Sue, “Too broke! I’ll tip you next time.”

“That would be nice for a change,” Sue says.

On my summer trip I handed a five to a homeless man with out thought, but neglected to tip the hotel maid.
 

October 22

Gold yellow red that
    crash on retina
    bloom in brain
    die in camera.
Just look:
Like a play played slow;
just breathe, like gaseous wine,
    something old and red
    from Northern France
    aged in wood and
    penetrating you, today
    and again tomorrow.
    Penetrating you,
    with a hint of pain so that
    its leaving does
    not make you grieve.

Could there be a place on earth
more beautiful than this or
a moment in time?
Could there anyone on earth
more worthy than you of love?
 

Artist in Residence

I wasn’t always like this.

I was young like you. I was a poet, an artist. I carried a sketchbook. I read about Matisse trading sketches for wine.

I ended up trading something else.

But things come around. How about I draw you a picture on this napkin and you can buy me a whiskey sour?

Great. Maybe we can trade a couple more.
 

Dear Dr. Frankenstein

Should I become part
of a mad scientist’s plot
to build a being
out of pieces and bits,

please don’t let it be
my knees
because they are weak
and ache all the time;

don’t let it be
my hips
lest the pops and cracks
betray the hidden monster

or my shoulders
lest the creature is
intended to be hunched.

Don’t use my heart,
it’s always been feeble
and subject to breaking;
a monster of all people
needs a strong one.

Use my skin,
it’s loose
with plenty extra
or my brain
if you don’t mind
your Frankenstein
opinionated and
thinking too much.

But please most of all
do not conjure my soul.
My life has been full;

I’m tired.
 

Dead Mouse in the Birdseed Barrel

First let me say, I’ve no propensity for dead things.

It must have seemed like a windfall, like the lottery: Shelter from the cold and a seemingly never-ending supply of exceptionally delicious food: Sunflower seeds, cracked corn. I wonder if the mouse ever came to realize – too late of course - there was nothing to drink inside the bin.

The mouse feasted. He feasted until he was fat – he was notably fat when I found him. He feasted so that the level of seed in the bin was notably dropped by his gluttony. Thus escape – to source water, solve loneliness, or share with others his bounty – required a particularly strong leap; a particularly strong leap from a particularly fat mouse.

Was it weeks or days or hours? Did it occur to him to starve himself free? Or did he die as he only dreamed he might, old, with his gullet, for once in his life, full?
 

Corsage

Her first was an orchid,
pale yellow, with netting.
He pinned it to her gown
with trembling fingers.
It was as close as
a man had ever
been to her breast.

Later that night,
closer still.

Her last was on her
one-hundredth birthday,
made of carnations
and baby’s breath.
She has grown used to
strangers touching
her, even there.

Now it’s her fingers
trembling
as she strokes
rubbery petals,
recalling a night
eighty-four years
before.
 

A Good Spell with a Bad Witch

She was a notorious bitch and a barfly too so none of us girls could understand why he would bow to her, serve her, why he loved her like he did. He said, “I love everything that’s wrong with her,” which left us all with something profound, and nothing.

His mother called her the devil. He said, “The devil's just an angel,” which left the devout woman with little left to say. When we called her a witch he would picture Glenda from the Wizard of Oz, speaking in riddles that make dreams come true.

Even after she broke his heart, he spoke of her with immense affection, so grateful to her for setting him free.
 

Mountains, Streams

There are friends like minerals,
firm to stand on or
            in our bones,
            growing us,
            weakening us if
            they leach away.

And there are friends like
a cool drink of water on
            a hot day,
            quenching us
            or even keeping us alive,

but only briefly;

passing through us,
evaporating,
replaced.

It's alright.
 

Marilyn Envy

I miss the days when a full-figured woman was typically considered beautiful, though I try to think about the former alienation of naturally skinny girls, thinking, “This is their time.”

I miss the times when being five feet tall was charming, though I consider the girls who hunched their way through our school years and hope they or at least their daughters are proud now, standing tall.

I miss the times when scandals were covered up, and we were still able to believe in heroes.
 

Populist Beauty

Clapton sang about
her Long Blonde Hair
as if that were enough;

as if we were supposed
to know,
from this
alone,

that she was very beautiful.

I was brunette.
I was fifteen.
 

When Clouds Pass

I blew a kiss at the moon and
made the moon promise to
deliver it to you when the
clouds are all gone and
the sun has set and

these miles between us
are nothing more than
celestial hours,
passed.

That twinge on
           your cheek?
                      It's not the
                                 cold.
 

Why Girls are Bad at Math

The odds against your being born are astronomical and yet, here you are. The earth crawls with life, the odds against which are nearly infinite, as are the odds against the fact of the very earth itself.

The odds against us meeting, enduring, are nearly incalculable, yet we meet, we endure, we sire more life to live in this universe which, left to figures, should not exist all.

The odds against love are phenomenal and yet we breathe it as casually as air, oblivious to the numbers.
 

Window/Door

He said to me with the most
ridiculous attempt at sincerity
(and no originality at all):
Eyes are the window to the soul.

What he meant was:
Your pussy is the door
to another dinner like this one.

It was a really nice restaurant.
 

The Bamboo Forest

It was supposed to be heaven. But they were late for to the airport and arrived rushed and sweating and if only they’d checked cause the flight was delayed. Who should have called, her or him? The strategy to save their hunger for the plane rather than spend money on overpriced airport fare was poorly thought, since there haven’t been viable meals in coach for years, and they paid five dollars for a box of crackers and potato chips. So it was before they even landed that a sense of dissatisfaction set in; that, and being taken.

Sometimes an argument isn’t made with words. Sometimes it’s posture, or hands, the way fingers migrate to assure even a paper’s width of space between his and hers. They turn in their seats, trying to sleep in the noise and the chill with growling bellies and clammy armpits, meticulous in their unwillingness to touch, more deliberate than in the avoidance of a stranger.

But it’s still early when they land, and the sun is bright and the wind is blowing, “Trade Winds” they overhear on the shuttle to the hotel, which sounds romantic and reminds them why they’re here; why the saved for this, and that dreams do come true.

It’s still light, early enough to see that the view from their “ocean view” room is mostly of another enormous tower but yes, there is a sliver of sea. The window opens two and a half inches, just enough to blow their near-empty plastic cups from the desk, spilling small remnants of iced mocha coffee (double the price of home) onto the pale berber carpet, leaving yet another stain there.

The restaurant is too festive and they are too tired, though they try. They drink expensive fruity drinks - well, him one then back to beer - and order sixteen dollar nachos that come with pineapple and ham. “Tomorrow,” they say, still awkward with each other as they return to their sea-sliver view.

She wakes early and notes the crowd on beach already at 6:30am. Anticipating the warmth of the sun, she dresses quietly in her swimsuit, looks in the mirror, then covers up, pulling the robe tight around her throat and telling herself this is only because it’s always chilly by the water.

She keeps her robe on in the chaise she paid to sit in, thankful she brought a little money down with her. By 8:30am she is starving, and forced to remove the robe to use it as a “placeholder” cause she doesn’t want to have to pay for the chair a second time. She heads up to the room where her husband is dressed and furious, no idea where she’d been. She’d forgotten to leave a note, or deliberately neglected leaving one, depending. She calms him, in reality glad to be off a beach peopled by the slim, fit and young. They decide on breakfast away from the hotel, after last night’s seventy-five dollar tab (plus tip) for more or less nothing.

Hawaii seems even less glamorous away from the hotel, where tired streets remind them of the part of town they grew up in at home, but don’t go to anymore. They find a Denny’s. Breakfast is thirty dollars and takes nearly an hour. She is thinking about the money last night and now today, the costs she was budgeting for the trip – meals, tours, souvenirs – already failing to work out as planned. $150.00 dollars (with chair), she’s picturing the big screen TV with surround sound they’d been looking into, breaking that cost down into Hawaiian days.

The sun is hot but the breeze is cold. Not breeze, wind. It’s windy to the point of sand lodging in your teeth if you smile. The sign in the lobby has rental cars starting at $25.99 per day (based on three, with a nearly equivalent amount of taxes and fees involved, but of course the sign doesn’t say that). They rent a car (though the clerk pushed the jeep) for $45.99 for one day (plus fees and taxes) and buy a $6.95 map. On the road they soon learn the cost of Hawaiian gas. But climbing the coast road she could, in fits, forget the prices and the way he talked to her this morning when she had just lost track of time – it was an accident – and really one based in benevolence since, she said, she was trying to be nice, letting him sleep in; she could, in fits, forget how she felt in her bathing suit.

The road bends again and they are suddenly in a forest – just like that, a blink, no sign of rocks or sea. There’s a place to pull out and other cars parked there (mostly jeeps); it’s free. They joke that at least something in Hawaii is. There are three young people smoking marijuana in the parking lot (or so it seems). Her footwear is wrong for the trail but she stays quiet about this. The air smells good, like a certain kind of perfume and she suddenly understands why they call certain scents “green” - she always thought green meant grassy, but this is different, fresh and wet. The woods are loud with birds that surely must look exotic but somehow can only be heard, not seen.

Then she remembers: The chaise, the robe. She forgot all about it. The chaise is one thing, but the robe! They’ll probably charge them sixty dollars; how will she explain that on the bill? She is trying to keep herself from crying.

Her husband reads aloud a little plaque about how bamboo is really a grass. So she was right about that smell after all.

He reads aloud how the bamboo forest responds to adversity with a determined ability to renew itself.

He looks at his teary wife, takes her hand, kisses it.
 

The Writer

Everything good happened to him.

I’m not saying he didn’t have talent. He did. You can’t take that away from him.

He’s not the kind of guy you can picture going through those channels, the ones it takes to win a grant, or get his book published, or his script read by big name studio people. No, those acts seem...structured, and he’s so nonchalant, nonchalant in a way that that lets you believe that everything that happens for him is lucky and accidental, reinforcing the idea that he is a good man and that good things just come to him whether or not he is and whether or not that’s how it happened.

He owns his house and a cabin and a farm somewhere. But not a washer or a dryer.

“Every neighborhood needs a Laundromat,” he tells me, “Speaks to the nature of the people there; young or transient or settled in and stubborn, unable to fix something broken. I get my best material there”

But I know it’s the maid who does the wash.

The Maid

She takes his soiled things home to her apartment because the machines are cheaper there. She puts the extra quarters into her little girl’s piggy bank, whispering to her baby how she’s going to go to college and grateful for the extra two hours she can spend with her as his clothes spin and dry.

My Angel My Angel Do You Know You’re My Angel

We didn't know you would turn out so beautiful. We would have loved you anyway of course and we might even have called you beautiful because to us you would be. We do. You are. But really, you are beautiful. You just turned out so beautiful.
 

The Barefoot Kind

I would ski down your ribs and sled across your belly. But you are not a mountain, and I don't like the cold.

I would dive into your hip and surf your outer thigh. But you are not an ocean, and my balance is questionable.

I'd sow seeds along your jaw and turn them into your throat. But you are not earth, and nothing I have planted in you has ever grown.

I would scale you, probing your crevices, pulling myself onto you, higher. But you are not stone. And I am not comfortable with heights.

I would see by you, melt by you. But you are not the sun, and I am not light.

I would run you sweetly between my toes, wiggling them then standing still, remembering how the feeling felt. But you are not grass. And I am not the barefoot kind.
 

Father's Day

He left the boy’s mother when the boy was four and thought when the boy was a man he’d understand, but no. His own flesh and blood, nothing but venom. He likes to think he has another son somewhere. As a man, it’s possible. He always drinks in the same bar, waiting to be found.
 

Dream Analysis

“To dream that you are walking up a flight of stairs indicates that you are achieving a higher level of understanding. To dream that you are descending a flight of stairs signifies you will face many difficulties.”

I pretend I remember ascending.

Liability

You are the yellow spotted peel on the hard marble floor. I shift my weight onto you; I crash and wind up broken but it is me who feels ashamed – having fallen in front of everyone – so I pick myself up again, telling myself: No one gets hurt the way I did.

 

I Feel Shame, Knowing Shame

She was thrilled; she was cheering. She was 45, maybe 50. The stadium camera turned to her and she jumped up and down, arms overhead, fists pumping. She was smiling, really joyful. She looked up and saw herself on the scoreboard. Quickly, reflexively, she touched the underside of her arms. She folded her arms then, lost her smile. Then smiled again, shyly, watching herself wait for the camera to turn away.

Resurrection

It’s not that I was dead just too long untouched until you took my hand.
 

Secret Messages Etched in Stone

I thought I had bad luck but then I realized he was being cruel. Wasn’t my luck that was bad, it was my judgment. I’m not so wise, I didn’t catch on right away or even right after. And that’s not why it ended.

And I’ll confess to you here there wasn’t only one of them. X, Y, Z: All the same. I had a thing for cruel men. I gave them what they never should have asked me for; I gave them what they would have taken anyway. Z stole something. Y broke something. X left something behind and just when I got used to it, he took it back.

Now all these years later he still sends me secret messages. He tucks them into places he knows only I will find them. They say: It was all your fault.
 

I Dreamed of You

I dreamed of you.

I pretend that you can feel this. I pretend that you dreamed of me too, that I have conjured you, that I will hear from you soon/now before I shame myself writing to you again, saying:

I dreamed of you.
 

Lifespan

It will take all of my life to break these boots in. It will take all of my life for that oak to grow. It will take all of my life to know if you lied when you said I will love you forever.
 

Beautiful Woman Dines Alone at a Crowded Cafe

I noticed her at first because she was very beautiful. She was alone. I watched her at her table. I watched her when she ordered, and I watched her when her food arrived. She seemed happy.

Crowded cafe, a couple asked if they could share the table, a four-top. The woman said yes, and the couple politely angled their seats away from her while they waited for their meal. The three chatted a bit, but not readily.

The woman finished quickly, and left.
 

Devil/Angel

It’s easy to be a devil: Just strip down bare and indulge your senses. Add tridents and fire for atmosphere and be certain to rush, or better yet rush others.

It’s hard to be an angel: White is not my color and wings are just impossible. Restraint is clumsy. Clouds, ridiculous.

Kindness, unnatural.

 

Nobody

This isn’t the first time I looked at a picture of someone else and thought it was me or looked at a picture of myself and thought it was someone else. It happens in mirrors too, not in my own bathroom of course but sometimes in a restaurant, a mirror across the room and me wondering who that woman is and why she looks so tired.

It's a feminine question: A compliment-fishing, celebrity-inspired, pseudo-secret pop quiz; if you're a woman you've probably asked a man. I ask him: So who do I look like?

He tells me: Nobody.
 

Between my vantage point and the sun waterways burn like jewels, blinding me. I seek them, lakes and rivers. I want them but am relieved when they disappear, when land rules and nothing shines or hurts my eyes. Leaving today is like that, with something I crave to forget but too that which I know I will miss; what I miss now and missed even before I left it, knowing the pain was coming. He broke my heart. I never thought he would, not ever. And the walls I love best are haunted and time passes within them in a specific way that makes it hard to take, or makes me feel like I’m taking it over and over.  

It feels good to leave, or will. But right now there is a vague mourning of another he, a he who has not broken my heart, not yet. And while he will and I know this there is some part of me that wants to suck up every single second with him before it happens. I am terrified of dying young, but terrified of outliving him.  

Infection rattles my chest and I imagine the sun will cure me with the same dedication that this rarefied air is likely to make me worse. Worse, and better, blinded and all the while thinking that what is right here in front of me is more beautiful than even tightly closed eyes can remember. Survival is the ultimate victory. So it’s not that I’ve either lived or I’ve won.   

I want to suck up every single second. He will break my heart but he hasn’t yet. I return more anxious than I depart.  

But that one, him, he came out of nowhere. I loved an invention and like all machinations it broke down. It’s the contrast see, the difference. It is sun shining until it hurts. It takes something of you with it, next time you will see less. Oh, but this time, this time.

Little Thing

There is a possession I treasure most of all. It does not feel like a possession. It feels like I am possessed; like I am owned. It feels like cohabitation, like free will, like choice. It doesn’t feel bought, even if it is. It is my most prized possession. It is him, it is her, it breathes, it loves or I think it does, I say it does. I say it loves me.    

It sits beside me. It sleeps. It sleeps beside me. It doesn’t listen. I own it. I found it. I bought it. I could destroy it if I wanted to. Someday I will. I fear it. I fear it terribly, miserably; discipline is reversed. It owns me. I call it. I say its response is voluntary, I have evidence because response is not universal, only consistent.  

Eyes, eyes, million mile eyes – they belong to me. I have seen them sink, float. I own it. I pay for it. I could kill and it will make me do this.   

We will both die, at least for awhile.

The ice is off the lake. It happened outside my dreams. I had dreamed so vividly the ice was gone that for weeks I’d been shocked by the sight of it.  

I was not shocked to see it missing.  

I do not want the leaves to come. Soon I will see leaves instead of sky. But the wish that this might last forever is one certain not to come true.  

I wish to dream of leafless branches, of buds and bark, this eternal spring.

At Arm’s Length

There was something that needed to be done: A door unlocked, a neighbor’s garage and a worker needing access... you’d agreed to help, and thus find yourself up a bit earlier than usual on a Sunday morning. It’s warm, warmer than it should be perhaps but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel good, because it does. Your eye makes note of light’s angle, you could never be fooled into thinking that an autumn day was a summer one. But it’s that kind of air, tinged with an August hint of decay. There are leaves on the ground, but not many. There are leaves turning, mostly yellow so far, but not many of those, either.  

You take your bike to the coffee shop three blocks away. It’s busy there. There are tables outside in what may have once been a garage, or loading dock. It’s shaded, that part of the building, but frontless, outdoors. Each outside table has one or two people plus a dog. You pat a willing one on your way inside, a bristly pup named Buster Brown.  

Inside are rich colors and lots of sun. You order a large cappuccino and a raspberry scone and maybe it surprises you just a little bit that the fellow serving you is so pleasant, even kind. I mean, he’s working on a Sunday morning, at a coffee shop – kind of hipster coffee shop, and it would be natural it seems for him to provide a bit of attitude to you, however subtle. But he doesn’t. And he’s patient with you when you ask about sugar, a lid. And he’s patient with you when forgetfully leave your scone on the counter, peaceably walking up behind you with your white waxed bag, handing it over, neither discipline nor humor in his eyes.  

You walk back out through the dogs. Buster Brown is preoccupied with some fuzzy poodle-mix so you don’t pet him this time.  It’s a bit of a strange choice, but you decide to sit on a high curb along the alley adjacent to the frame shop parking lot. It’s a perfect height for sitting, and the tall quiet guy at the frame store – you think his name is Neil – has planted a garden in the elevated flower boxes between the lot and sidewalk. Or rather, he’s planted a farm: You eat crumbly scone and with your eye you pick the tomatoes, the peppers, the eggplant, the chives. You consider how your own tomato plants have ceased to produce since the sun crossed over into the southern sky, and consider without worry the green fruit on your own vines, wondering if they’ll ever come around.  

Back to the coffee shop to throw your paper cup and bag away, and there are a new batch of dogs, strange and total replacement, these all larger ones – a red Vizsla, a golden Labrador, a black and tan Airedale.  

When you woke this morning and managed to actually keep going once the neighbor’s door was opened (resisting the urge to just return to bed) you had a vision of all the things you’d complete today  - lawn mowing, bill paying, dish washing and a household sweep, all before your softball game this afternoon.

But this soft air, this time of year each warm day is duly named The Last One and so is loved accordingly; each day is the one that always says no to you, surprising you by saying yes. So you take it up.  

You weave the four or five blocks to the lake, taking your time, looking at the houses and the trees. There is an old tiny woman sitting in a lawn chair in a patch of sun, an orange cat splayed across her chest. They each look to be sleeping, but you see her hand moving, slowly, tiny, loving strokes. You pass a dog you know named Lady, wiry with ice-blue eyes, and you wince riding passed a favorite, giant elm that you know will soon come down, the orange mark of disease blazed across it like a scarlet letter. It’s been a bad year for the elms.  

In Minnesota, you live beneath the trees. They are not the prehistoric trees of the Northwest. No, these trees are your peers, or friends of your parents. They are so subtle and integral that it’s nearly hard to even consider them, the dappled shade such a standard comfort, like one’s own skin. Maybe that’s why the lakes are so stunning, this lake, blue and open and offering some perspective.  

The streets to here were empty but the lake itself is active. There is a parade of walkers and dogs on the inside path closest to shore. The water is glistening, and a breeze from the north finds you adjacent to choppy water, which ducks ride with no mind and windsurfers slice with hunger and some glee. The outer path isn’t exactly thick with bikes but there are plenty of them, a few helmeted racers; a few helmeted children with training wheels, their parents walking beside them on the grass just off the path’s shoulder; most riders just tooling, a pair of riders shouting a conversation that you hear in a snippet as they pass: “And then he left on Friday for... ”but they are too far for you to learn where “he” left to, or if he maybe left for good.

It makes you feel applied to ride fast. You call it exercise. You join the path, pedaling for all you’re worth, keeping pace with no one but rather setting your own. You pass serious and casual roller bladers. You keep your head down, pumping, even though it’s tempting to look around, especially at girls and mansions. You are flying. There is nothing to stop you. Now the bird sanctuary is on your right, and the Peace Garden is behind you. You decide to do another lake, keep going. You take the branch of trail that veers north, stopping for no one, though it’s natural for the cars to yield you right of way where the path cuts across the lake road.  

The next lake is bigger, more open, fewer trees along the shore. There are sailboats on the lake, all white sails and this isn’t the first time you think about what it would be like to have a little boat like that, riding over just as you’re doing now, taking it out on a morning just like this one. There are already people playing volleyball on the sand courts beside the water. There are already motorcycles lining up along the lake’s southwest edge, their riders spreading blankets out beside them, sitting on the grass with legs outstretched, leaning back on elbows and tilting chins toward the sun, white bits of light from the water dancing on them.

You’re still pumping. It’s hot, suddenly it seems too hot, too tropical for October. But you feel you are accomplishing something. You head north to yet another lake, this one with waving shoreline and great houses and then yes, ah, some shade, trees again. You’re some miles away but you already feel it – the home stretch. You pull up some, coming fully upright near the dog park and slowing to watch a bulldog chase some leggy thing twice its height, which then turns, causing the bulldog to brake abruptly, panting. It shakes it head and spit flies backlit in filtered sun.  

Heading home along the western shore of the first lake you are fully tooling. You take your hands off the bars and place them on your hips. This lake seems cooler somehow, the breeze coming off the water, and you stop just before your usual turn up the hill home to step into the water. It’s still warm, or warm enough, it feels wet but not cold exactly; it feels good. You walk in up to your thighs and its little debate before you just dive in, coming up again some ten yards from shore, looking around you, feeling good, great even, great and lucky before swimming back in and sitting in the grass, now your own head tilted back, now white bits of light bouncing off the water onto you. Your eyes are closed.  

It is a grunt and wet clomp that pulls you from your sense of touch back into your other senses: It is the sound of a dog prancing along the shore, wet like you are. You watch the dog pause the shake and don’t even realize how this inspires you: You shake too, your own great head throwing water, and you pick up the bike and pedal home, distracted now admittedly, remembering already even though the experience is still happening, thinking about how sweet its been even though it still is. You make note of squirrels crossing your path and even one you catch walking, walking slowly, which seems like spying somehow since squirrels tend to be so busy and so fast. You’re trying to stay in it, but here comes your alley and you’re home now, thinking about what comes next: Writing it down.




 

The Funeral

The mom didn’t want to buy the whole overdose thing though it was more than clear to the rest of us. She preferred accident, mishap...even murder. She kept looking at us like we did this. And it’s true, we did this. But only to ourselves.

There were six of us there well maybe four at any given time since we’d sneak away to smoke. The color of our leather wasn’t enough to make us appropriate. Might have been drunk too.

It’s true, we did this. We all did then. Seven there that day including the dead one, down some from last time since one or two disappeared and another starting talking.

Only to ourselves: He had a kid we never knew about. We all hugged the kid and it stood there stiff little soldier at the tomb and that’s just what it was I suppose. I sobered up after that but only for a while. Was lonely without my friends.

Friends: I’d lose them and replace them and stopped going to the funerals until my own which of course I didn’t have a choice about. Five of them, younger, huddled around the grave not shivering this time cause of summer but dressed like all the others, black leather reeking of sweat and tobacco.





Some Things Can Be Returned

I gave a lover something precious but when I didn’t love him anymore I wanted it back.  

Like the seasons he changed: From something new, to something soft; from something striking and volatile to something: Cold.  

So like a tree I cut him down. I did not use an axe but rather something else. Severed from his base, branches broken, vulnerable, where any part of him might be reached:  I took it back.





A Favor

(I am scared of dying young but I’m scared of living longer than you.)  

Do this for me: Take it slow. Do this for me: Suffer. Suffer terribly. Suffer hard.  

Suffer miserably, so that I will be able to let you go.





One Basket

I am waiting for you to resurrect. I am waiting for you to return to me. And when you do I will appreciate you more this time. I will believe you: All those times you told me you were holy and asked me to bend. I will forgive you for those times I bent and for how hard you tried to break me.  

I am waiting for you to resurrect. I am waiting for you to return to me. And when you do at last I will allow myself to love you. I will not be afraid to love you because you will never die. Those times you left me abandoned and treated me so badly that I was forced to abandon you; all those cruel words and all those other women: At last I will confess. I will confess that you were right when you told me to forgive you. I will confess that you were right when you told me not to go. I will confess that you were right when you said that you were the best thing that ever happened to me and that without you I was nothing, nothing at all.  

Now I devote myself. And after all those attempts to seduce and to please you you will be satisfied with something so simple as foiled chocolate or colored eggs. You will be my savior and I will be your subject and you will not be the subject of every conversation, every conversation that I have with therapist or friend.
                                 
In the South, leaves are dropping as the old you dies. Up here buds are breaking, buds are bursting and I:  

I am finally coming back together again.



 

Nothing Lasts Forever

(I am scared of dying young but I’m scared of living longer than you.)  

I’m trying hard not to miss you.  Here you are, right beside me, right here in front of me.
 
But of course you will not be here forever.  So I’m trying hard not to miss you.

How to Say You’re Sorry

If you are apologizing to someone and you don’t even know what you are apologizing for... yet the situation, let’s say it’s love because that’s a pretty one, though it may be you are only seeking peace, or avoiding something worse, like escalation; or even just saying it (“I’m sorry”) to seem bigger – no, not to seem bigger, but to be bigger, though this motivation may well play into one of the previously listed categories like peace, or defense, or even love - if you are saying you are sorry for any reason (short of being patronizing, or with the sheer intent to anger, irritate or perturb) always pretend you know what you are apologizing for, even if you don’t. As such, never frame your apology with, “I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for...”, either before or after the “I’m sorry” or “I apologize”. And additionally, just as it is unwise that shouting a phrase like “Stop crying,” will actually have any positive effect in obtaining that goal, an apology should never be shouted, or yelled, or spit out, or even mumbled. Also, try not to begin any apology with, “Okay then,” “Look,” or “Fine.” If you must, for the sake of rhythm or diction, use a phrase of entry before your actual apology, try, “Please,” or if seeking language less...passionate, yet still heartfelt-sounding, you might try something like, “Gee,” as in: “Gee, I’m sorry.” Or, if still greater impact is sought, try the addition of “So”: “Gee {Please}, I am so sorry.”  “Very” can be added as well for still further emphasis: “Please, I am so very sorry.”  

Of note: The post-amble “Please forgive me,” tends to amplify the seeming sincerity of any apology. Utilize this phrase at your discretion where emphasis is desired and/or forgiveness truly sought.     

But: Never post-amble your apology with the phrase, “Can’t we just forget it?” or the similarly flavored, “Let’s just forget this.” Please note that to call into question whether any phrase, statement, event or action is forgettable versus memorable serves only to trigger the very act of memory, stimulating and enlarging it to the point of making any phrase, statement, event or action which one seeks to be forgotten (either long or short term) to be in fact remembered eternally, and increasing geometrically the likelihood of the phrase, statement, event or action which one has requested be forgotten in fact be recalled – and in many cases, embellished upon – by the recipient of said request, typically at the point of worst possible advantage to the requester. Please note further the eternal nature of this act of disadvantageous recollection by the recipient of said request, and thus let it serve as motivation to avoid the use of such phrases and requests except where the intent of such usage is to in fact bring about eventual negative confrontation.  

Lastly, if you are doing something to make someone feel better, please know not to mention that is why you are doing it. Telling someone you are doing something to make them feel better – or worse, telling them are you only doing something to make them feel better – well, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make them feel better.  

And apologizing to someone’s friend or rather telling someone’s friend you’re sorry for what you did to them, well I have to say that’s pretty chicken shit. And being pretty chicken shit tends to negate the chance for reconciliation. (Unless of course one is absolutely completely in love in which case even a qualified or half-ass chicken shit apology seems, in the eyes of love, somehow humble or even charming. In which case the points made here previous generally do not apply. At least not in present tense.)

But we’re not in love. We’re family. We’re goddamn fucking family.





Birthday #44

I’m working on the day before my birthday. Shooting a film in college lecture hall, and the director is being a real shit. He starts in on me in the morning and I know it’s going to be one of those days. I keep away. I bide my time.  

I tell a joke and the director tells everyone: Stop laughing. I was the last one leave that night, washing our dirty prop dishes in a filthy public bathroom. I wanted to hang a sign: It was this way when I got here. I wanted to hang a sign: The puke in the next sink isn’t mine. But no one comes in anyway.  

There was candy leftover on the craft table and I gave it to some little boys who were, quite oddly, roaming the halls that night. I exit the filthy bathroom and enter the vacant hallway which is now filled with crushed and smeared chocolate.
  
I couldn’t leave it. Or rather, I couldn’t leave it all. On my hands and knees on the filthy floor, trying to clean it up. Filthy. Dirty. A man walks by and shoots me a filthy dirty look. On my hands and knees, I’m thinking: This is not my mess.  

But this is my mess. And I bring it home with me. Crushed by unexpected pain from unexpected sources, collaborators and little boys.

I thought I was being benevolent.  

So my birthday rides in on tears, which I finally let go around midnight.  

And while my birthday may not have been singly notable, it is notable in that it was not the day before it. Relief is my gift, and can anyone argue that relief, if you think about it, is really the sweetest gift of all?





Secret History

He is a secret and he is history. And because he is history the secret seems more grand than it might. And because he is secret the history seems more sweet than it really was.  

It began as torque: All power and my pulse raced. It gained speed, short of breath, it came: To victory. 

The crash was inevitable. I have scars you can’t see. You have scars, your flesh topographical. I run my tongue along the terrain of the valley where they put you back together again and the mountains formed from upheaval of your bones. Your country was inhabited yes but it is I who conquered you. It is you who colonized me, setting up permanently in my most remote of places, dominating me, dominating me still while I plan a revolt built of cryptic messages and intermittent contact I treasure a little too much.  

I answer to the crown, you, across the sea. And me, subject: To the smallest of affections. You called it a waste and it’s true after all this time you are still the last one who ever traveled there. So I want to like you more than I ever really did. And because it is secret and because it is history it seems that at last, I do.





Needs

It was a socioeconomic relationship. She was always working. She was lonely. He was never working, always broke.   

They were off and on for years. Years.    

She kept on going back to him. He kept coming back to her. She was bored. He needed something.  

But eventually his failures made him unattractive. And she stopped loaning him money, which made her unattractive to him.  

The story doesn’t end but is rather, simply, forgotten.  





A Note to the Southern Hemisphere, December 21

Today I give you all I have, every speck of warmth and daylight. Tomorrow, you will be satisfied from this, and we will begin to share. We will share until I have taken everything, and I feel compelled to return it, the sun, back to you, thinking it is the least I can do...  

Tomorrow I will already be taller, richer. It will be slight but I hope I do not fail to notice this. Tomorrow I will already be growing until I am big enough to give to you.

 

Dance

They beat the drum for war and we dance to it. They take the spoils of war and buy us a little gift with it. He profits, yes but what of it? We all do. We hear the drums. And we dance.

And when all this plays out we will have our new slaves. The newest here, willing to work for the least. When they have nothing for long enough they will settle for the smallest scraps. So make certain that, for long enough, they have nothing.

Dance to the drums and then dance to the violins. You have to work your way up to here. You are lucky to clean such a nice house, and that I am such a benevolent queen. Look, you’re in America now, where the best of yours is equal to the very worst of ours. You are far from the best and thus something even lower, where ten thousand of you could not equal one of us. No, ten thousand might equate with a single dirty house here. So you, just look how lucky you are with a chance to clean it up.

We dance to drums. We dance to violins. This is our right, because everyone else is deaf, or not listening.

We dance to drums, we dance to violins. We dance to the fiddle while we burn.

 

Plans

She had plans. She was going to take him to Burma. She would take pictures and he would write. Her father would finance the expedition. She had plans. They would make a book together. She would take photographs and he would write poetry. This would happen in the south of France. The book could be about anything, potted plants or cafes, because they were so creative that the subject didn’t matter. They would go romantic places. They would go ordinary places and turn them romantic. They noticed every little thing. They really saw.

She had plans. She would be his agent. Beautiful women would all crave him but she would not be threatened because she and him, they were one. He belonged to her and walking down the streets of Cairo or of Paris together they’d turn heads. Even in her daydreams she was concerned that this was because he was prettier than she, but even in her daydreams she knew it was neurosis, that no one thought so; that she was just as pretty and they turned heads because they shined.

She had plans. She would start by renting him an apartment, then buy him a little house. She didn’t want to move in together because that was simply too conventional, and he needed a space in which to write. She preferred to think of her and him as distinctly individual, and voluntarily united precisely by that.

He had plans: To gain the quantity of stamps upon his passport that would impress the next woman or girl. He had plans to write great sonnets. It took beauty to know beauty and he was beautiful. He would write beautiful poems. He knew this even before she told him so.

He had plans: Not to ask for the laptop he wanted, but to hint. She had money – or her father did – and she was willing to give it up easily, a function of her being spoiled he thought. He was frugal and lazy and thought of her as an opportunity.

She had plans: To learn his heart and to work her way in. He stood crying in the center of the street in Cabarete, worried she had seen him with that teenage girl and as a result had left him there. He cried for being such a fool, getting caught and throwing things away. She knew nothing of the tryst and only loved him more for his tears, mistaking them for overwhelming joy.

She was a rebel and told him to explore other women, believing in an adage she’d read on sentimental mugs and posters about loving something and setting it free. She told told him to explore other women fully believing he never would; believing she was already perfect for him – he had confessed as much to her their very first night together, a whisper exhaled post-climax in her ear but she pretended she did not hear him, not wanting him to know that she knew he was conquered. She was perfect for him and there was something about him that made her feel perfect.

From the Dominican they flew back to Melbourne, and when she went to Surfers’ Paradise to meet her father he stayed in the city alone and began sleeping with another girl, this one a little older than the last one but still young. He liked how he felt more powerful than the girl. He liked how the girl made him feel more powerful than her and how the idea of breaking her heart made him feel like man.

After six days with her father she returned to the city and knew right away it was over. She could tell by the way he delayed their reunion – even though it was just by an afternoon – and so at that evening’s rendezvous she folded her hands on the bar, sitting very straight, facing forward instead of facing him. She was flippant, ordering pints and only making eye contact with him when the glasses arrived, lifting hers, smiling, and saying Here’s to our last beer together.

He was enraged. What he had wanted was to have a secret, and even that she had denied him. In truth she knew nothing of his new little girl, but if she had she would have been more offended by his choice of partner than of the affair itself. In truth what she would have resented is how his choice of woman was so dramatically different than she, and was so dramatically different in the most painfully revealing sorts of ways. But really her own doubts had sprung up in Surfers’ Paradise, and believing she had heard same on the phone in his voice she didn’t want things to linger. She had plans.

He was furious. In an instant he knew he cared nothing for the girl. And was certain that he hated her, and was certain he would stay with the girl just to spite her, aware of her preoccupation with her small breasts and her age and he would love the girl to spite her, because he hated her, hated her, hated her.

And it is in the same bar that they see each other next, not four years later and he with a child more than three. When she learns this she laughs – she doesn’t smile, she just laughs – and with that laugh and with her looking so distinctly single still...and he with his fat son and his wife – who had just cut off all her once-blonde hair...with this his own daydreams of this moment have turned instantly to venom. And with her head flung back like that he wants nothing more than to crush her quaking throat.

But instead he feigns commitment and departs as soon as possible, surprising his wife with his early return and yelling at her for nothing, then just as abruptly taking her into his arms, holding her tight, and crying for second time in his adult life.

The Driving Range

I don’t know why my father couldn’t hold a job cause he always seemed to be working. There were some months of treasuring Thursdays, his day off at the hotel and a few hours with him after school. Sometimes we’d eat out on Thursdays, but my dad said he was always eating out. He liked my mother’s cooking.

But he left the hotel and we moved again, this time to Columbus, Ohio. We were coming from down south, I brought with me an accent certain to get me ridiculed. I tried to hide it.

I grew up in apartments. Sometimes they were courtyard types, sometimes bigger buildings. We had a dog and that meant we were held to a certain standard of living. Blame the dog. We were generally relegated to some outskirt, our particular building or complex bordering: A development yet to be built; a freeway; the backside of a shopping center.

But in Columbus, there was the Driving Range. We called it The Golf Course, and my mother and I both felt very proud. It wasn’t open much, and I’d crawl under the fence like a million kids before me – mostly older – whose trail of wrappers and broken glass felt not like blight but like treasure. The Golf Course was magical, elegant. I’d find things there. I’d find balls and I’d put them in box beneath my bed. I found a broken ball that was something new entirely, something amazing and mysterious and long. Once I found a twenty dollar bill. Twenty dollars.

The Golf Course was mine. It was my kingdom. I’d take the teasing at school so long as I got to hurry home and rule the grass and dirt. There were broken vines in the fence that felt like serpents. There was an old broom I’d ride like a horse, knowing no one was watching me. I’d bring the dog, he was a horse too, a wild one I tried to catch mounted upon my broom. I’d catch him too.

I was only there once when the place was actually open. My father took me, we bought a bucket of balls or maybe it’s called renting them and I watched while he went from happy to frustrated to downright defeated, swinging at those stupid balls. It was as if they were people, telling him what he couldn’t do, and him proving them right. I didn’t try, it didn’t look like fun, but then he didn’t let me either.

Walking home he told me: Stay away from that place.

I did, too.

We moved to Lexington a few weeks later.

I Think of You as Heaven

You clipped my wings. You clipped my wings, you brought me home. I used to love the world. I used to love the world but I love you even more. I want to be with you. I want to be like you: Soft. This is where you are/this is where I want to be. You are so soft. Love clipped my wings.

Do I love him because he is mine or is he mine because I love him?

I think of you as heaven. I grieve for you in tides. Love clipped my wings and it takes so long to make it home walking/running. Once I would have flown but a heavy heart is not so easily lifted. A heavy heart is not so easily lifted and my feathers have been cut.

These days, no moon but I know for certain that the moon will come back. These days, no you, less faith and so much more gravity.

(I grieve in tides.)

I think of you as heaven. If I am very very good you are where I go when I die. Running/walking/wingless, like a moth to the moon in search of you. Running/wingless/walking, if this kills me.

Lives for Love

He lives for love. Part of her admires this.

He left her standing at the curb outside The Blake Hotel in London having told her to fetch her own cab; he didn’t love her any more. She supposed the ending had been coming but still it seemed so sudden, her with her bags at her feet and the smell of grapefruit soap still on her skin; their dinner at Nobo still repeating on her. She half expected to him to show up at her gate, weeping. It had happened like that before in Guatemala. They had both been very tired.

She hates to think the issue was his allowance. She had wanted him to feel free, to be with her of volition rather than pure usefulness. She had wanted him to feel manly. She knows she’s better off but shivers to think of his return to Brazil wooing the other woman with her money. She’d known there was one. She hadn’t really cared. For now she doesn’t cry but sleeps so hard on the plane that they have to wake her up when it lands.

Perhaps there is some consolation in the fact that the other woman is the one he married. They are dining in Sao Paolo when he tells her this, she there on some business, his email address unchanged. Readying for tonight, she had prepared herself as if to sleep with him, but seeing him there is no urge to, none at all. He seems awkward in the sort of place they had once seemed to live in. He gushes over rather poor Brazilian sushi, telling her: I haven’t had it in years. She orders high-end red wine, his favorite, even though it clearly does not go with the meal. Italian wines are over-priced in this country. He drinks four fifths of the bottle.

He protests but she insists on having her driver drop him home. It’s a fairly long ride and he is drunk. His English has become choppy. I have three children, he tells her, please come up to meet them. Her driver waits for her. She climbs four flights of stairs.

It is the chaos of the apartment that strikes her more than the tiny scale of it, or the heat. He had always required such order, a trait he had blamed on his astrological sign but indulged rather seriously with perfectly efficient packing and the wiping up of sweaty beverage rings from the surface of glass or glass-covered tabletops in some of the world’s finest hotels. Two damp girls sit before a television and do not move when they walk in. A little boy is asleep, sprawled out on the floor. The wife looks at her and smiles, nodding, yells at the husband in Portuguese too fast to comprehend, then turns to her again, looking briefly into her eyes before casting them down like a servant. The wife is quite young and thus is pretty. The husband tells the wife: She is my business associate. This is business. He taps the girls and points, telling them to say hello. They wave and turn back to the set. He wakes the little boy who cries and hides his face before being handed back to his mother.

He walks her downstairs, where her car is waiting. He opens the door and she hands him all the money on her, a few hundred dollars. This is just how this started, she thinks to herself. He puts his thumb on her chin and turns her face toward him, a gesture she only now remembers. He moves to kiss her. She lets him then says good-bye.

She has her driver circle the block so she can watch him. She has seen this precise, particular strut of his before, then too through a car window when she left New York City a day before him. Then too she had handed him something and watched him unguarded as she drove away.

Minneapolis #127

Did I fall in love with it because it is mine? Or did I make it mine because I fell in love?

It’s not that I’m like the others so much as I love how others are; every inch, every leaf and living beneath the trees: Shelter inherent, weather terrible. Is it really so wonderful or am I just in love? There is no place or thing that is universally desired yet here I am, transplanted and taking root. And taking something else, more, and taking it with me when I go.

I told him too, I encouraged him. He said: You people there. You’re all so prideful. He was right, in my case it was true and I’m not the only one. Do we know some secret? There is no universal truth. Maybe it’s just that we found each other, settled here.

Have you stood in air so far below freezing and have you heard in dense air the voice of far away? Have you huddled inside when it was dark before dinner and felt grateful for it, for the dark, freeing you from spiritual obligations the day seems to carry? Have you seen the northern lights? Have you praised the lack of insects only to become frightened by this and have you seen the sun go down over water, ten o’clock at night?

Have you lived beneath trees, not giants, just normal ones, about the age you’d be at your death if you could live forever.

Minneapolis #126

The wind bangs the window and sounds like jets, like travel, like motion like oceans. Like aches. Wind is crying, hysterical. I ask it what is wrong but it can’t hear me over the noise of itself. I tell it: Air feels no pain. I tell it: When you are still, it will end.

Wind stalls briefly, just long enough to hear. It says: The greatest pain is infliction. Look what I’ve done to leaves. The greatest pain is collusion. I carry something bitter with me and tomorrow you will shiver.

I say: There is no pain in apathy. Do you even try to stop yourself?

Wind says: This is different than addiction. It’s damnation. I want to stop but I cannot. I am borne of the war of temperature. I am borne of the war between light and dark. I inflict, hapless as a soldier.

I tell wind: You are too hard on yourself. Certainly you have brought relief too. I have seen you fan fires yes leaving little but bones but it is you too that brings the water; that brings rain. You have eased me during heat waves. I have begged for you. I have longed for you in such a way that I have used machines as your substitute like some form of environmental masturbation, me doing for myself what you do for me, or trying to. I know that this is sorry but I have missed you just that badly. I have wanted what you and only you could deliver to me. You and no one else.

Wind says: The greatest pain is to inflict. Look what I’ve done to you. Your pain would well be my greatest mistake if it weren’t for your longing. Because your still wanting me after all I’ve done to you, well. I can’t tell if you’re kind or pathetic.

I tell Wind: When you feel mournful for the pain you’ve caused it makes me love you all the more. Knowing I am your great mistake makes me feel almost good. I like that you must look upon me. I like being kind. There is both charity and vengence is me. I’m being good but I still get my way.

Wind bangs against the house. Its pause was only briefly. It lost me somewhere between Kindness and Nothing.

Wind lost me somewhere. It doesn’t pay attention. It left me somewhere between. Kindness. Nothing.

The King

When he was young gay men would always pester him, and this left him a bit uptight about that. Looking at him now it may be hard to recognize that he was once really beautiful, absolutely beautiful, the kind of beautiful that people break rules for; the kind of beautiful that lets a person get away with murder.

But he wasn’t bad, and he wasn’t lazy. I won’t say he wasn’t conceded, I remember him peering at himself in the mirror for what seemed like hours at a time and once beside the pool he made an eagle out of band-aids and taped it to his chest, burning it in, or rather, shading it onto him. He was the kind of guy who could get away with something like that. He was the kind of beautiful that people called Kind. He was the kind of great-looking that people called Deep, and Creative, and a thousand other attributes that people apply to the most handsome among us when really they are merely usual, typical and of generally average intelligence.

But he actually was pretty nice, and while not particularly deep or creative that I know about, he was smart, too. He had the chance to get smart – teachers of both genders fussed over him, charmed – he had the chance to get smart and I guess he took it.

He had fun with it all, the eagle on the chest for example and the attention of many, many girls. But he fell in love young, and married her, and they are still together even after all these years. He’s not beautiful now, why, scarcely even average but he was beautiful then. He could have had anyone.

The people who knew him before still think of him as he was. Now he’s bald and sort of fat but less fat than he has been because of the heart attack - he quit smoking after that, is careful what he eats. The whole town is looking out for him, he can’t sneak a heater in the alley or order up some bacon without someone being on him. I wouldn’t know where to find the resentment you’d expect, his life the storied one, successful and staying put, still here, still nice, still married. No longer beautiful but no one who knew him then seems to notice. The skinny guy in who runs the diner, he’s looking better than The King at this point for sure, has a prettier wife, thicker hair, was beaten up in high school but never by him. The King doesn’t get his breakfast for free but the guy at the diner tends to bring it to him personally, saying hello and asking after the missus. The King always smiles, turning in the booth and ignoring his hot breakfast to meet eyes and shake hands, usually asking how business is – unless business is slow on a particular morning, in which case he asks about something else. He’s just the kind of person you like to be next to, hard to say what that’s about. It’s like he’s still beautiful even though he isn’t. It’s like he’s famous even though he isn’t.

So he can’t sneak a heater in the alley or a Slim Jim or order bacon without someone in this town getting on his case. That heart attack happened pretty young and they all want him to live. Talk to anyone in this town over age forty-five and mention it. They are all terrified of their King dying.

Title IX

She is a girl, not a woman: It is hard for you to remember this. It is hard for her to remember this too, and sometimes each of you forgets. She is accomplished and she makes her own decisions. She has fame, and she handles it but there is a part of her that wants a white horse as much as victory; that wants a kiss or flirtation more than the vibes and propositions that have become commonplace. Propositions: That’s how you remember. She’s just a girl. You protect her. You try to.

She is a woman, not a girl: She devours girls, she can’t play with them anymore. She devours only some women, which makes her their equal. She is well aware of this. She devours boys, sets her sights on men. She is competitive. Gender goes away. Wisdom stays, skills propel. She’s still learning. She is a woman. She wants to lead. She wants to win.

He’s a boy, not a man: He does not respect her. He mocks her. He does this because he can still beat her. He beats her too. He thinks it is because she’s a girl.

He’s a man, not a boy: He also beats her, but he knows it is because she is young. His own daughter, nearly her age, dreams of white horses and here she is, this one, with time she will defeat him and he knows this. Part of him wants this to happen. He has a daughter of his own.

The Perfect Stroke

You were god right then: There was the ball, a bloodless soulless thing with not an ounce of pity for mankind. So you smythed it. You damned it, you beat it, you made it do your bidding. There was one thing you sought to do right then and you absolutely did it. You smacked that little bastard and when you did you were perfect, you existed in perfection, and that bloodless, soulless ball that had mocked and disrespected you, well, you gave it the whack to atone for all its sins; the whack to atone for the sins of all balls against all men, defying them, demeaning them, making them feel weak and small. But you were god right then. You were god and wrought justice in a single perfect stroke, the kind of stroke that is downright religious. The kind of stroke that makes you a better man. You give the caddy something extra, buy a little something for the wife, just because: Because you are the master, and there’s duty in that. Driving home you hand a twenty to the guy with a sign by the freeway ramp. You even hand him the jacket you didn’t need today after all, the weather was gorgeous, and it was just sitting on the seat beside you. Had you worn it today you wouldn’t have been able to part with it because you’d think of it as lucky; you’d be thinking of it now as the jacket you had worn then, when magic happened. But you didn’t even need that jacket, you did it on your own...on your own with these lucky shoes and shirt and a club you’ll never part with now. So you hand off your jacket and some money to sad-looking fellow not with guilt but with generosity. You feel the difference driving home. Balls have been conquered, man can have new dignity. You were a god, and that makes you a better man.

Of Hell and Heaven


When she first started at the nursing home she hated the old people. She went in with the intent to taunt them. They called her an aid but she had no skills really; she called herself a janitor. Now she can remember the first old man that melted her, and why. She thought he was a letch when he asked her to come closer, she stood with her arms folded some feet away, inching. He closed his eyes and breathed in. He said Of all the things to miss what I really miss is cigarettes. She said Well I couldn’t live without mine and he said You call this living?

She asked him his brand and he discussed it so sincerely and sensually that she ponied up and bought a pack, half thinking it was because he made them sound so good but half knowing it was something else. She didn’t even ask him for money, she just walked in his room and gave him one. She lit the dying cancer man’s smoke - once, maybe twice a day when she was working. He died about six weeks later and would have anyway but damn the way he lit up when she came through that door; the way she rescued him.

She missed that when he was gone so she started talking to other old men, not all but some, not the prudish ones who’d frown at her shoes but the ones that would flirt with her. They would tell her she was too skinny. She liked that. She’d tell them stories of her nights in the bars and unlike your own grandfather they’d never look down on you for getting drunk or waking up with a man it took you a cup of coffee to remember. To them she wasn’t trash, she was goddess. Whatever her life was, at least she had one. They were jealous, sometimes thinking if they had it to do all over again, they’d be freer. If they had it to do all over again, they’d like to have tasted one or two like her. So she flirted. And she flirted with the fantasy that one of them would kick and leave her everything, a fortune, and then she’d be out of there. Knowing that no one with a fortune, or even anything, would be rotting here in this place.

It was different with the women. They were fussy and judgmental. They never seemed to warm up, not that she was waiting mind you. But there was one that she liked. She was pretty sure she was an old dyke. She never had a family. That makes it less pathetic when no one comes to visit. She didn’t flirt with her exactly, but she was interested. The old woman said Shoes like that make a woman feel sexy. And when the old woman said that, it was right when she needed to hear that, cause she’d just caught two of the real nurses rolling their eyes at her when they thought she wasn’t looking. Fucking bitches.

The old lady would tell her stories. Not stupid stories about how great it was to get your milk delivered or shit like that. Stories about “Active Women”. Stories about how she became a nun cause it was the only way back then for a woman like her to be “Involved”. Stories about Hawaii in the forties and fifties, how she quit the convent because she fell in love with a sailor. Nothing came of it, but she didn’t go back. She said People romanticize silk stockings but really they were terrible, they’d bunch and they’d sag. She said It’s really better now. God has given women true independence and I have lived to see it. That’s what she called the aid: An Independent Woman.

That’s one old lady that was really cool, and one old woman that made her feel damn good to be living now, and while she didn’t believe in any bible jesus mumbo jumbo, the way that old lady talked, it made her feel...well, thankful. Or happy anyway, kind of.

Her day had been bullshit. Fuck those nurses, little bitches. Fuck the bus driver, fuck the car. She was pissed, yeah. That’s why she was crying. Not sad, angry. She couldn’t help it. She was sure her mascara was smeared. Fuck mascara. So she ducked into the old lady’s room. And she was crying too.

When they’d have their little visits, the aid would sit in a chair. Sometimes the lady would sit in a chair too, sometimes just in bed. Today was a bed day. She didn’t look good.

In an act that wasn’t just unusual but was in fact, at this juncture, utterly out of character, in a way she never would have imagined she might have and in a way that made her feel nearly possessed, like it was not her, she sat on the edge of the old lady’s bed and grabbed her hand. They were both crying. She lifted the hand and hugged it under her chin and they sat just like that, quiet and wet. It didn’t seem very long but it must have been cause the sun had dropped and was beating in through the window. She was worried about getting trouble. She didn’t rush. She shifted, kind of leaned over, looked the old lady in the eye: Why on earth are you crying?

The old lady smiled, then flinched: I’m afraid that there’s no heaven.

The aid looks at her shoes, her chipped up nails, says: I’m afraid there might be.

Promise

When I was really sad you were really good to me thank you dearly I’ll never forget that and I promise if you’re ever really sad I’ll be that good to you. I’ll be there for you like you were there for me I will be just tell me I promise. You saved me I owe you I’ll be there. I promise. 

Okay then well I better get going. Get a hold of me? Well I’m really not sure. I’ll drop you a line when I get where I’m going I’ll call you or something now you take care of yourself. I promise.

The Last Day of These Old Shoes


I’d caked mud on the bottom when it was still raining. So I left them outside to dry. Still it rained. Then came sun, and nearly drought, and the dirty shoes shrank, and bleached, and filled with the web of a spider I never saw or even thought about until today when I destroyed its home, donning dirty bleached shrunken shoes to the county fair where a misstep into manure or spilled ice cream is likely. The shoes rebel in anticipation of their death, or at least their acknowledged discarding, biting my feet when once they had been so comfortable. They aren’t anymore, and so are easier to throw away.

But I don’t throw them away. Home again I peel them from my swollen feet and place them in a bag of old things marked for Charity. Charity, right, my old filthy shoes, as if someone else would want them.

I have a habit of such shoe euthanasia, I pretend I am recycling. I take my oldest shoes with me on vacation, intent on not bringing them home. In foreign hotel rooms I leave them for maid, naming my arrogance kindness and saving room in my suitcase for treasures I’ve purchased, sashes and mugs that seem significant at the time but which now see their destiny fulfilled in the same bag as my county fair shoes which will litter the shelves of a suburban second-hand store, the proceeds from which will cover half the cost of a parking meter for the parent of a child running in the Special Olympics.
 

Break My Heart Slowly

You always have something for me to help you with. It’s nearly brave of you to ask. It’s your nature I suppose in a mix of intimacy and distance, affection and malice each more amplified in your own case than mine. Me, I’m the steady one.  

You tell me your plans and expect me to bend to them. I wonder if I will. You brag to me about your position then come to me with your misery. You always have something for me to help you with.  

I wonder if I will.

If I judge you by your woman you are innocent. If I judge you by your friends, you are false. If I judge you by your actions I should hate you. If I judge you by mine, I should love you.  

I wonder if I do.  

He said, “If only I could get there then everything would be alright.”  

She, being kind, says nothing.
 

My Loyalty is to You
 

My loyalty is to you.  

If you want me to like her, I’ll like her. If you want me to hate her, I’ll hate her. My loyalty is to you.  

My loyalty is to you. If you want to keep a secret, so be it. If you want me to testify, I’ll do it. My loyalty is to you. If you seek a pardon I’ll grant it no matter what you’ve done or done to me.  

My loyalty is to you. And something else, too: I save you the last bite. I give you my last dollar even though you were only hinting and even though I need it bad as you. I’d starve to watch you prosper. If you want me to like her, I’ll like her. Someday she’ll probably be gone. My loyalty is to you.  

My need to redeem. Your need for redemption. My need to protect. Your need for protection. Protection, protection, we should have used protection. I had to make a choice.

My loyalty is to you.

Ferry to Texas

It wasn’t like my mother to say stupid things, but worldly and clever as she was she’d barely left New York City. She said, “When we get to Florida, we can take the ferry to Texas.”  

My father, who wasn’t as bright as my mother but who had served in the army overseas, laughed at her. My mother punished my father for this the entire drive south and really for quite some time after.  

My three siblings, all much older than me, made the drive along with us but didn’t stay long, migrating north at first chance to college or other business. None stayed longer than the summer.  

The house – the last house my parents would ever own but certainly not the last place they would ever live – had much foliage and a swimming pool which seemed very glamorous to me at nine years old. No one used it though, it was too hot and lizards and tiny frogs were often found dead in the chlorinated water. My dad started a new job and my mom was always sleeping. I have very little memory of her there, really only one, passed out on the bed and seemingly carefree while I curled up in the bottom of her closet weathering a storm named Fifi. My mother’s lack of worry actually served as great comfort.

We moved from the Florida house into an apartment, and from there we moved to Ohio. I remember driving through the mountains of Tennessee, my mother terrified squeezing my father’s thigh and gasping through the curves.  

I was also afraid of the mountains.

As an adult I’ve been told by my siblings that my mother was institutionalized for months down in Florida, but I have no reason to believe this. They site as evidence the manner in which my mother tortured my father for really of the rest their lives, but what do they know? I’m the one who was there.

It’s a dream not a memory but dreams can feel like that. We ride the ferry to Texas, waving back toward shore.

Stumbled Out of the Gate

I bounced around from family to family. Sophomore year it was the Holstroms. Carol Anne and I didn’t have much in common except, well, we were both really tall, and we both had very long hair. Sometimes that’s enough to group two girls together.  She was a cheerleader and I was the new girl and I’d spend the night at her house... first weekends, then school nights, then all nights. I’m not sure if this was because her parents were conscientious, or because they specifically weren’t; if it had to do more with her parents caring more than mine did, or being drunk like mine were but with a bigger house.  

I thought of the Holstroms as the perfect family: Blond and popular. Carol Anne was the youngest, and when she went off to college her parents divorced. Turns out her dad had had a long term affair with a farm wife down near Grand Junction, and once the kids were gone he left too. I never saw him again.  

Mrs. Holstrom became a realtor. I still see her, well sort of – her face on signs. She bought the best house of all in Berthoud, Colorado, a doctor’s old Victorian. She married a younger man.  

Sophomore year I lived with the Holstroms. Honestly, I don’t even remember actually being friends with Carol Anne. Maybe I was her pet, they didn’t have one. Her oldest brother Mark was in his early twenties. He dropped out of college in Colorado Springs and drove a Camero SS. He was always high and hardly spoke and I loved him.  

Brother Craig was a Senior, popular, pock-marked and athletic. He was ugly and dated the head cheerleader, a girl named Lori, beautiful but broke. Her parents owned a dive motel out along the highway, she had to clean the rooms but her looks would let her better herself.  

I can’t remember ever speaking to Lori. I can’t remember ever speaking to Craig at school. But when I stayed at his and his sister’s house, he’d call me into his room. It began with backrubs. I can’t remember how that went down, what he said or how it started, whether I walked in there or snuck in there or whether he just came to get me. I don’t remember being coaxed, and I don’t remember being stopped, or prevented, or questioned. I do remember being afraid - of getting caught and sent back home. And I remember being repulsed, his acned shoulders and dirty room and sheets and fifteen yes but I was still in the phase of rainbows and unicorns and fantasies built of kisses with no tongue.  

But he was popular, and I was nothing. He’d say Shoulders. Then later Back, then Stomach. Then Ass.  

Cock only happened one time because when he pushed my head down I knew it had gone too far. I started sleeping at home again. It wasn’t as bad as I remembered.  

I can’t remember ever speaking to Lori. I don’t remember ever talking to Craig at school. I don’t know if Carol Anne knew what was happening in the next room. I don’t know if I was being molested or aggressive or abused. I mean, no one put a gun to my head. I remember pretty little all in all but I do remember the fantasy that some sort of involvement with the popular boy could change my shit life.  

That was more than thirty years ago. Still, I’d like to hunt him down. Tell his sister. Tell his wife. But what’s the story here? Your bastard brother husband made me feel like I couldn’t say no, so I didn’t?

Mark wasn’t into the virgin types. He wasn’t into Journey either, but that’s what we did it to. He preferred Iron Maiden and Blue Oyster Cult. It started with a backrub – that must run in the family  -  then him pinning me down cause my primary response was to try to crawl away. It hurt. I thought that was a myth you know, that it hurts. Mark wasn’t into the virgin types, he liked slutty girls with experience. I thought I was giving him a present and he thought he was giving me one. He did let me stay the night – much better than the next three or four boys – but driving home the next morning he drove fast up the shoulder of the road, running over gophers on purpose; killing animals to torture me. After some protest I just slumped in my seat and listened for sorry evidence, but I didn’t cry till later. Yes he was clever that Mark and I have to give him credit. I never wanted to see him again. And I didn’t.  

Tony Baracco was twenty years old and still a senior in high school. He was number two. We left the dance and he told me Strip all sexy-like but that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I was already conditioned to acquiesce so he fucked me with my arms folded across my chest. Guess he didn’t like the virgin type either cause he said Baby you’re the driver. That shit completely mortified me. I was bawling now and whined But I’m a virgin and he said Goddamn Liar which was true of course but that’s not the point. Anyway, I didn’t have to face him much cause he left town soon after which I’m still thrilled about.  

The next one I still get a little hung up on. His name was Steve and he was vicious. To this day I pretend that’s because he was smarter than he was. I thought he was dreamy. He asked if I got a go go riding on a bicycle and I had no idea what he meant, or even what he might have meant. He only did me because I threw myself at him but at least it happened more than once. Three different times, three different nights until the last time when he threw something back at me – my clothes, out the window. I was outside already, having fallen for some story that he needed a Pepsi from the machine downstairs and up the hall. I was locked out when I got back of course, my clothes went flying. It was three in the morning and I put on those strewn clothes under the light in the dormitory parking lot, terrified that someone would see me. No one did. More terrifying though was feeling through my pockets and realizing that he hadn’t tossed out my car keys. I had to knock, and beg. They eventually came out the window.  

Fast forward a few years. Maybe Steve was smart. Maybe he was never meant to be a carpet layer, but he is, just like his father. He’s as lonely now as I was then, and in desperation one strikes up the strangest relationships. It’s like being in a foreign country and anyone who just happens to speak your language is a fast friend all of a sudden, at least until the next stop. So Steve and I hung out a couple of times one summer, sat on his dirty couch. There was no touch, but the second time he tried to apologize to me. For that night, he remembered it, said he felt bad about it all the time. So now, to this very day, I consider him a friend.  

Before the boys or Carol Anne there were horses. When I was real little I mean. I’d watch Westerns just to see them, hypothesizing their breed and offering up the technical name for their particular coloration: Mustang, Morgan, Appaloosa, Roan. I liked horse racing too, though the colors were less flashy – mostly Bay and Chestnut. I watched the Kentucky Derby and memorized the names of the every winner since the very first one, knowledge gained from the silk screening on a drinking glass my dad had brought home from somewhere.  

There was girl horse that was special, they said as good as the boys. I pretended I was her, calling myself her name, slapping my own ass and running around with the same leg always forward. I was a child. I’d gallop and whinny. It was on T.V., they ran her with the boys.  

She stumbled out of the gate and never recovered.   

Minneapolis #125

He was very old. He was bent and not tall but he looked like the kind of man who was once really strong. He limped pretty good and wore navy blue coveralls. He was probably kind of deaf too, cause when he spoke he spoke really loudly.  

She was young and pretty and her arms were full. I was thinking I should have waited to open the door for her but now I was half way to the parking lot.  

He was limping pretty good but I saw him hurry.   

“Wait miss,” he called to her. “Let me get that door for you.”    

Like Old

Go ahead tell me what you want to tell me go ahead just ask. Stop dropping hints hints hieroglyphs and all the time we waste trying to decipher them. Ask me ask me ask me because confronted with the possibility actual reality my answer will be very very different than in the fantasized memorized version of this conversation that I have with you over and over and over again in my head.

I dream I see I think I want to mention it but no no no where does that ever get me? We know you know I know we know we see we think or did we dream or worse worse worse did we make it up? Make it up, right, that’s what got us into this mess of patching up what’s broken and never ever getting a new one.  

I like old he tells me.    

Jinx

I was his mistress and he considers me bad luck. First he got caught, well sort of caught, and then he had an accident. He broke it off with me then and I made it easy because really I never had any feelings for him. That’s good luck I suppose but he doesn’t see it like that. He thinks I’m a jinx and that’s just one reason he’s scared of me. So every six months or so I get back in touch, just a cryptic little note with a cryptic sign off. I like to imagine his stomach churning just a little bit. I figure it’s my penance to his dull and loyal wife, him holding her face and kissing the top of her head, trembling at the thought of me.   

Grace

It was difficult to gauge their relation: Two couples each of whom seemed unfamiliar with the other. Each couple described where they lived and the nature of the terrain and the climate there.

The waiter, a particularly demonstrative sort of old man as easy to imagine in a boarding house as a yacht, with a thin but very upright frame, big shoulders, bad teeth and tied-back silver hair recited the daily specials with a particularly demonstrative flair, just as he had at my own table.  

A rounded, silver-haired man of similar age and difficult to imagine in any setting other than an oversized, treeless suburban one wished to begin with some small plates to share. He ordered the crab stuffed mushrooms and fried calamari.  

The waiter left the table and the four people making up the two couples all leaned in together and laughed. “Get a load of him,” the silver-haired man said, rolling his eyes and gesturing his thumb over his shoulder.    

The too thin and very plain woman who very much appeared to be his wife said, “I’ve never had calamari.”

The first course arrived and the four people making up the two couples all leaned in together, this time to pray, with a particularly demonstrative flair.  

They began eating. The silver-haired man winked as he waved the waiter over to table and asked him to again recite the specials.

Used to Love Me

In truth I don’t like wind, it makes me uncomfortable. I find myself lying in bed listening to it with my teeth clenched. I moved away from there partly because of it; because of dust in my mouth and feeling unnerved. Now here it’s as windy as it ever was there. There are thuds on the roof. There are leaves and other things that can’t hold on any longer and they are dying. Wind is killing, accidental and untimely. I think about villains, there are in truth so few of them but it only takes a single one. I think about cancer. I’ve none that I know of but it starts with a single cell. And I think of us, safe now but I see the signs that tell me you’re not so different and it’s just a matter of time until you’re no longer blown away.  

User/Hero

Are you my hero? Are you the one that rescues me from everything? Are you the one that saves me from the mundane and the lonely? Are you the one who’s sweeter? Are you the one who’s near? Are you the hero, are you the one, the one I’ve always dreamed of or will dream of for at least a dozen years? Are you a user? Do you only want me for one thing? You’re just like all the others only softer, sweeter, nearer.

Peers

Comfort is the wrong word for it, the way I am relieved to see homeless men, someone to talk to. I don’t wish it on them. But like the waiters and the bellman these are my peers. I am awkward around fellow guests at this seaside hotel who contend that you can earn it, as if you could, as if luck or nature didn’t deal a better hand, or even just the ability to deal with the same hand better. See you can’t earn anything really, you just get lucky. That’s the truth no matter how you slice it up. You just get lucky. Like me, weekending at this seaside hotel. Or like them, still being here after the rest of us have left to various cold, land-locked obligations.

Flowers

I bought flowers from an old stooped woman on the street corner. Two bunches, because she was steeply bent and it was very very hot outside. I was a traveler that day with no where to put them but I’m not much of one for flowers in any case because of how they die. He was crossing the street and I rolled the window down. I am guessing he felt the cool blast of air from the inside; he stepped closer. I handed him flowers and he smiled, sniffing them on his way to the bus stop. Green light, in my rearview I still see him, sniffing, smiling. The next bunch I handed to a woman in a parking booth. Young, pretty, maybe she was used to flowers. She held them like a princess and smiled like sunlight. She said, How did you know? And I told her: I just did.

Wealth

I gave money to a rich man. I mean, like charity. He didn’t exactly ask me for it. He just kept saying how hard things were, so I offered. Later I learned he lived in a palace. Later I learned he used the money I gave him to take a woman to dinner – a very nice dinner. I didn’t know he was rich at the time. He talked to me about art and hardship and I am a sucker for each of those things. I mailed him a couple of hundred bucks before the holidays and something else he needed.  

Now that I’ve told you this story please ridicule me for it. Reprimand me for this, and not for the ten dollars I hand a panhandler on the street. One man’s story is art when another’s truth is hardship. I am a sucker. I gave money to a rich man and he bought an actress dinner. He never really asked, I offered up.  

Sweaty heat is amplified on the subway car, so is the stench of a filthy man. He never really asked, I offered up. He looked at me like I was shit on his shoe. He said Who do you think you are?  

The best sushi places are crowded, especially on a Friday. Actress on his arm and my money in his pocket, he said to the maitre de: Don’t you know who I am?  

I’m always helping demons cause an angel never asks. I make more time for enemies, I make more enemies, too.  

And me, always with the best of intentions.

Secrets

Secrets last longer than friends do so I try not to share them. But you can lose a friend by not telling them secrets so I make things up.  Even false secrets last longer than true friends; I’ve heard them repeated from time to time. I feel bad for lying but I’ve kept my secrets longer than I ever kept a friend.  

Thank You Letter

Thank you, you don’t know what your actions have meant to me. I don’t know how to thank you I try and fail. That ride/that loan/that time I turned left in front of your car nearly killing us both but in that terrible moment between two drivers that had nearly collided I was expecting your reprimand and you only shrugged. You looked at me and shrugged. You could have hated me but. It’s been twenty years since then and I’m still grateful. On my knees grateful. I needed a break and you gave me one/taught me to give and/you, thank you, I don’t even know your name.  
 

Feeling Whole
 

Four years into marriage he had his first affair, and it was a blast, seriously. It had all the cliches, a flight attendant, his wedding ring slipped into his pocket, the dark bar, the proposition. And she rocked. She loved it. He loved it too. He wonders if sex is best sometimes when you don’t even like your partner. Like you can punish them a little bit, or just be selfish.  

No one knew.  

He wanted to tell someone, he wanted to share. He had to, he was bursting, why shit!  But there was no one. Fours years in, his first affair, and his first realization that every friend he has now is really her friend. He eyes a couple of guys at work for his secret, but that’s not happening. He doesn’t even trust them to talk about him, much less talk to them. He works with a bunch of fucks.  

So he writes about it. He writes it all down with every juicy detail. And fearing his wife or anyone else will come across it (even buried deep in a drawer or computer file, I mean, what if he was killed?) he sends it off to a men’s magazine. He doesn’t use his real name and he opens a special email account, it’s about more than it seems, I mean, a man is entitled to a little privacy.

So he mails off a sex letter with a pen name and a secret address. He feels flushed and illicit doing it, but does it just the same. See, it’s more than just a letter. It’s like a comic book and Dickens and porno all mixed together. He was on a business trip. She was a stewardess, Swedish for gods sake!  I mean, it’s his opus. It’s his big win, it’s like winning a million bucks at the poker table and not being allowed to tell anyone because they all know you’re not allowed to gamble. He mailed it off.  

And kind of forgot about it, and even kind of forgot about his secret mailbox which he does check but only from time to time and about three months after the letter which is about fourteen or fifteen weeks after the initial event so that the whole of it is starting to fade from him, there’s something from the magazine. They want to publish it, as in, like, a story. The email was sent a week earlier, and there is the offer to pay nearly two thousand dollars for the “piece”. Holy shit.  

He’s worried he’s too late, but he isn’t. The piece runs. Only he and a discreet editor know it’s him. He hopes to overhear other men talking about it – in a locker room, a bathroom, a bar – but it doesn’t ever happen. He buys his wife a nice present with the money, he feels guilty somehow, guilty but great too, and sad, cause this is just another victory he can’t tell anyone.

The magazine wants another piece, a little longer. The offer is even better. So he takes the bit of money he didn’t use to buy his wife the bracelet and tells her about a seminar, required, a privilege really, bound to lead to a little bonus at work. It’s that easy. And it’s easy for him (good hair and works out) to find the right woman when he tells her he’s writing an article for a men’s magazine about the world’s greatest sex. He goes by his pen name. He doesn’t carry a copy of the magazine.

She’s a cocktail waitress with the kind of body that melted men in 1950s and still melts a real man today. His wife is thin, sinewy, a runner. The cocktail waitress, she’s really working it too, not bursting seams but totally testing them. She stripped for him for crissakes, a wish come true, he could see her garters every time she bent over in the bar. She’s bending over now just like that for him. There were even their glasses on the table which he swept off with his forearm just like in the movies. He pulls her hair. Her tits are soft and big and real. There’s a mess for the maid to clean up, he leaves an oversized tip, feeling good.  

Now he writes a four thousand dollar a month column for a high-end men’s magazine. He takes one lover a month, sometimes two if the first one wasn’t up to snuff or if he knows or suspects he won’t be able to make it to his “seminar” the following month. No one knows except a discreet editor, well, maybe a few there now, and some great women who know him by his pen name. He’s getting a little famous in some circles. He learns there are amazing women everywhere: Omaha, Lincoln, Cedar Rapids, Sterling. He learns that women who look a little chubby in clothing tend to look the best naked – that neat, stylish women are generally too thin. He learns women can be as hungry for it as he is, that it can be as fun to give as receive and that there’s always something new to learn. He takes these values to his day job, where he is now prospering. In his head he pretends that he is a reservist, a Sex Reservist, serving one weekend a month to better the world.  

His wife is very happy, she loves it when he says she is too thin. She loves it when he buys her chocolates. Even more when he buys her gold. He’s a success at work and gentle in the bedroom, just the way she likes it.  

He thinks of himself as happily married, a leader, young-looking and athletic. Life is great. He makes almost as much off the magazine as he does at his job. He can be generous, and he’s investing. He’s missing out on some endorsements and other commercial opportunities his pen name could provide, but cover is more important to him. I mean, the truth would wreck his life.  

And the best part? He’s an artist now, a writer. It’s better than the sex, better than his neat life or anything else. I mean, the opportunity to express one’s self! It’s important. He’s moving people. He is changing lives.  

He feels whole.
 

Plane Trip #78
 

It was dark and I didn’t know quite where we were. In summer at night when the trees are full it’s more difficult to identify the pause of the lakes that make me feel like I am home, or nearly so. By chance it showed in the S-curves of a river, sometimes silver, sometimes white...just a patch, the intensity determined by the specific triangulation of moon, river and me. Delightful.  Incredible. Moonlight spells river – I’d never seen it before. It lasted about a minute. It didn’t’ happen again but I never stopped looking for it.  
 

Plane Trip #77

He was a disgusting man. I feel guilty saying so, it’s a strong word, but I mean it. Our flight was delayed and we both sat in the concourse bar, me to look for ball scores and him to drink. My eye contact with him was accidental though I am friendly by nature, but the fact that such eye contact had been made by virtue of mine flicking and by virtue of his dogged stare was sensed instantly by me to be a big mistake.  

He crossed the room and proved me right quite readily by telling me the tale of his cooler (filled with walleye) and how in Omaha (where he was presently living) they eat carp. “Only blacks and jews eat carp, “ he said to me.  

I wanted to say something right then but it’s difficult, and really, frankly, I wasn’t quite certain if his remark, as stated, was actually racist. Well, of course it is and truth is it made me nervous, he didn’t make me nervous but what he said did, nervous to find the right words to tell him what I meant to and me frightened the whole time to be countered, to be wrong in calling him out  - even though being wrong would be, in this case, a salvation.  

I left the bar and he followed me to our collective gate, chatting away. He touched my hair but quickly, asking me about the color.  

I hid in the bathroom for a while. I returned and went directly to a seat between two occupied ones. I opened my book. He asked the woman I was seated beside if she could move so he could sit next to his friend.  

I sat stiffly reading but he spoke anyway. I was disgusted, not afraid.

I picked up my bags. “Excuse me a minute.” A minute. I went back to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall, reading peacefully there for about an hour. Then I stayed out of eyeshot of the gate waiting for the call to board. I didn’t wait for my proper turn either, I butted in, ignoring the row that was being called, and panicking until the seat beside me was occupied by a nice-seeming young girl.   

The last time I saw him he was working his way down the aisle, passed me. I’m not sure if he didn’t see me, or if he purposely didn’t look. I was purposely trying not to look, but still I saw him, and as he went passed I really did feel sort of badly for no bothering to tell him good-bye.
 

Life Line

He had a short little lifeline. She was preoccupied with it. It made him more interesting than maybe he really was. She was broken when he called it off, begging him to stay in touch. And he did too, stay in touch, mostly to ask for money. And she gave it to him too, mostly without question, still preoccupied with that short little lifeline, anxiously awaiting its fruition.   
 

Just Another Little Death

She left too suddenly, he can’t get used to it. She was too young to die, too young to die like that. The notion of it just doesn’t sit with him. The world is so full of misinformation, why not this time? He thinks they’re all wrong; he talks to her anyway. At first it’s a private thing, then a public one, his rebellion and his fury in the crinkled face of all of their lies. He talks to her. He talks to her standing in line, he talks to her driving then talks to her walking once they take his drivers’ license away. He’s not crazy; she doesn’t ever answer him. But he thinks he can conjure her up if he tries hard enough; he believes he can call her forth. He doesn’t set a place for her at the table but he does cook or order in all the things she likes best. He’d know if she were really dead. He’d feel it. Isn’t that the way love is supposed to work? He doesn’t feel it at all.  

But months go by and she doesn’t come back. She doesn’t flicker a light bulb or appear behind his shoulder in a darkened mirror. She doesn’t telephone, hardly a soul does. He’s lonely. He decides that wherever she is, he wants to be there too. No one stops him from a buying a gun, it’s easy, an anonymous clerk having no knowledge or concern, a splintered group of family and friends having no time, or, time for him on his terms.

Sorry, he can’t see the bright side of this. Sorry, he’s not interested in a second chance, coming years, food, motorbikes or cinema. He’s interested in her, finding her. He smells her things in the drawer, her drawer, a drawer the sister tried to empty but he nipped that in the bud. She might come home. She might come home no matter how incredibly unlikely that may seem. Incredibly unlikely things happen all the time.  

His suicide is not one of them. Maybe they saw it coming or maybe they didn’t, but truth is it’s a relief to everyone involved.
 

A Little Victory
 

It ended badly but a year went by and she was still thinking of him. She’s the kind to stay in touch, she tried to think of happy times together but there weren’t so many of those either. She crafted her letter to sound vague and unsentimental, yet welcoming. He wrote back.  

She wanted to be there for him. She decided that friends is what they’d always been and it was sex that messed them up. Her genuine friends think it was a fling but that she went and fell in love with him.  Her year apart had been much better than his had been and on some level she feels bad about this, like it had been some duty to care for him and she’d failed. She sometimes called him “brother”.  

Over the years she does what she can for him, slips him money and doesn’t tell a soul. She wants to be, to him, the kind of person she knows she isn’t.  

Eventually his trials begin to bore her. She’s not sure why. Confrontation is in order, she picks this classic fight: “You never ask me how I am.”    

“Because you are always fine,” he tells her.  

It feels like a little victory.  
 

Dogs Playing Poker
 

Dogs are not very good at cards, and those that are truly committed to the game must cut off their tails. I mean, cut them all the way off, down to the spine, lest the tail reveal them, or their hand. Dogs are no good at bluffing. Even without their tails they can rarely hide how they feel, or even what they mean. The best players are usually those who have survived as strays – they get used to hiding their true selves; they get used to being manipulative. This translates well at the card table. Meanwhile, even the best among the dogs is no contest for a cat. Even a mid-level cat player can generally take a great dog for all its worth – cats, being cats, are used to withholding - what they are thinking, or even what they mean.  

Once a generation or so the best of the dogs convinces himself he can sit at the cat table. Once a generation the best of dogs sits down to play with the cats. And is, inevitably, taken.  
 

Minneapolis #124

They are so beautiful and sweet and even before they have begun I can’t help but think of their passing. I look at tight buds and see their petals falling. I feel soft air and read its future as something pregnant and oppressive. Conception is the delight, isn’t it? After that it’s just a matter of death and its timing: Magnolia blossoms, tulips and my flesh and our bond.   

Plane Trip #76
 

I hadn’t looked in awhile and it was night when we left, but still the darkness shocked me, or shocked me just a bit, can’t say what I expected but it’s pleasant, the dark is, even pretty, pretty yes, there’s more to see than just blackness and really it isn’t black anyway it’s blue, deep blue, even this late and even this high up and I have no idea why, why blue. There are cities, or towns, signs of human beings living in this particular historical age, yellow lights the mark of them, all lined up or following a contour of earth invisible in the dark. Life spreads out. It’s populous here, not really, not really much at all and driving this would be nowhere to be sure; the distance between things and clearly tiny places but for all that I look south/east/west and everywhere in all directions there are signs of us.  

There are stars too, clustered differently or rather not clustered at all, little pinpoints, white, I imagine shooting stars along the horizon or really I’m just pretending, pretending I see them, while certain lights on the ground are blinking, flashing, specifically calling to us, meant for us, calling or maybe just telling us something.  Lights tell us up here of tall and dangerous towers but from this seat the idea is laughable, we are that much higher, closer to stars than to the tippy tops of towers, closer to mountains which offer no warning and have no lights at all. In the dark only turbulent air tells their story, or reveals their position like terrible soldiers crouching with bad intent.  

As much as night surprised me I do remember taking off, I remember looking at places more or less familiar maybe not recognizing that particular plaza or mall but knowing in general whereabouts it must be. I remember looking at the vacant shapes of frozen lakes, not seeing where they are but where the people aren’t, where lights don’t exist and in those moments close the ground I was looking at my city thinking It’s too big; thinking It’s too big and I am too small within it and somehow I felt more or less perfectly random, like the life I know is random and where I lead it is random because there is so much everywhere and what is the reason after all that I am where I am, why here? And in all seriousness I had to look away.  

And now, same night, maybe even the same hour of it as time and I each migrate west and I look at city lights or rather more like towns and it’s clear to me how tiny it all is, how connected, and that even though I am away from home it still exists, it is right there behind me and with enough time I could walk it, like nothing could keep me from it and nothing could matter more or fit better than it does, all these lives but there’s one that’s mine.  

I can’t be certain if those shapes below me are snowfields or low clouds. I can’t be sure where I am, well, only most generally, en route, somewhere between X and Z. I can’t even be sure I’ll make it back, can’t take it for granted that I will even survive these mundane travels and while statistical truths should negate the need for faith at all, still that’s how I comfort myself, not with odds or facts or evidence but with pure emotion, the kind that lets me believe that you make me invincible, or at very least inseparable, always headed home.   
 

Birthday #43


“I produce commercial photography.”  

That’s what I tell a person who asks me what I do for a living. Not so many follow up by asking me what that means, but I’ll tell you: It means I find places and people necessary to set-up a fake situation that, when photographed, looks somehow or relatively real and natural. Or supernatural. They do it in the movies all the time, they build a scenario to the point where you know where an imaginary being lives, how they’d act, the places they go. They build say a space city that you accept as authentic – sure, that’s a space city, one probably exists somewhere and that’s just what it would look like I bet.  

So, picture a single-frame of a movie, and you have a commercial photograph. Only the goal is rather different for the photograph, a more sinister goal if you bother to consider it...the goal of the photograph is to sell you something. Commercials too, but I don’t work on those. I make the advertising pictures you see in magazines, no I don’t take the pictures. I just bring the elements together. See that new Lexus did not just pull up into that barren desert at just that moment, the windows aren’t usually black and hey take a look at the license plate, or the lack of one. That party where the beer is causing all that fun didn’t happen. We faked it. That chemistry between that willowy brunette and sculpted, ultra cool fella? Well, he’s gay, and she didn’t speak a word of English. I created it. I set the situation up and someone with tech skills and better taste than me shot the picture after approving the various elements – this girl, that place, those pants for sure, we love them – and now you believe it. Or at least, you don’t question it. Maybe, if we did it right, you feel good or bad when you look at, depending. And the fact that you’re looking at it says we did our job. I did my job. You stopped there.  

So, I produce commercial photography. On January 7, 2007, the gods of irony saw to it that I spend my very own real, actual birthday setting up fake birthdays. The template was an office party. Only our office was hipper than yours. And co-workers there cared more about their buddy’s birthday than most people do their own kids – we had streamers, banners, balloons, a hula theme complete with skirts, tikis and coconut punch bowls. Oh yeah, and those co-workers and their buddies? All fabulously good looking. And, incidentally, unable to work more than ten minutes without demanding a drink of sparkling water. Through a straw. Don’t mess up those perfect lips.  

I turned 43 that day. I’d cut my own hair a day before and people had the nerve to tell me I “ruined” it. But that’s only after I pointed out my handiwork – handiwork I was personally very fond of. What I mean is, I cut a foot off my hair and no one noticed. I figured it would be like that. I also figured it would be like this: After faking birthdays all day long, replete with elaborate cakes, candles, and chorus after chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” (I do good work – the singing adds authenticity and I tell you it takes some do-it-yourself Enthusiasm to keep a crew engaged and in key for ten straight hours), my own cake would come, and the chorus would turn to me. It was sweet and well-intended, but by day’s end, seriously, who wants to hear it? And since I wasn’t producing my real birthday, someone else was. And that someone else didn’t have my experience or timing...candles weren’t lit, we all stood around waiting, suddenly no one had a match...okay, maybe I’m making it sound worse than it was, but truly, it was awkward. Me standing there with cheer and surprise on my face, not wanting to disappoint, and all the while the clock ticking, the one that pushes us into overtime, big expenses, and problems... So hurray the cake was lit and covered with baseball player figurines – a distinctly nice touch – and one last hoarse round of Happy Birthday, me still singing loudest. And I blow out the candles and spend my wish hoping to get out of there on time, out of the space we were using cause each fifteen minutes beyond six o’clock is going to run an extra couple of grand, no matter how nice I am to anyone, and no matter that it’s my birthday.  

So maybe I rain on the parade by not having a piece of cake but instead doing what I can to pack us out of there – but by the same token, I didn’t keep anyone else from enjoying a piece of cake, and sure enough, people did, while the Birthday Boss packed and swept and hustled. But my birthday wish came true. We were out of there in the nick of time.  

Let me add here that I was working out of town, as in, not in the town I live in.  

But I was working “local”, they call it, meaning I was basically “pretending” I lived there, paying my own expenses for the trip, an investment in my overall earnings. It had its pros and cons. I stayed in an admittedly funky yet strangely comfortable motor hotel located on one of those gigantic LA intersections, seemed like twenty lanes converging, yet, there were often people walking on the sidewalk – not scary people really, but it kept me from opening my street-level window (or rather, kept me from sleeping with my window open) so my little room – devoid of any artwork whatsoever, which may fall into the pro category, or may not – was kind of hot. The pool in the courtyard was empty and had yellow security tape – KEEP OUT – around it, but the little wooden booths nearby reminded me of travels in South America. I thought of the motel as having a certain European sort of feel, but truth is I never – and I mean, not once – encountered another guest.  I was keeping work hours – out at 6am, back sometime between 9 and midnight and never heading back out again. I struck up a sort of comraderie with the desk clerks – three of them, one in the evenings, one in the mornings, and one that was sort of a floater I guess, he the only male, and, in his 40s, considerably younger than the two women I’d encounter.  

It was the man who was at the desk when I decided to cut my hair. It was late, well, maybe 10pm, late for a drugstore. I asked if one was around. “What do you need?,” the desk clerk asked in hoarse rasp.  

“Scissors,” I said.

 He opened a drawer. He had an accent. “What size? What for?”  

“To cut my hair with,” I said.

“What?What? You can’t cut your own hair.” I told him I’d gotten the same story all day at work, but that indeed I could, and that I would like to. “There’s a place right across the street,” he said, pointing to the darkened Supercuts across six lanes, “Wait until morning.”

“I don’t want to have someone else cut my hair, I like to cut my own hair, I just need scissors,” I told him.

“Cutting your own hair at ten o’clock at night is a crisis, not a hair cut. I will not give you scissors. You are having a crisis. Wait until morning.” And he closed the drawer and turned away.

Back in my room, I found blunt-tipped kiddie scissors in my travel kit, and did the deed. Like I said before, I like it. And funny, the desk clerk – there still or again in the morning – was the only person that actually noticed: “You did it. You cut your hair. I admit it now, it looks good.”

So the clerk noticed. And liked it, as did my three paid assistants, they liked it too (once prompted that a change had taken place). Frankly I didn’t give a shit that anyone said I “ruined” it – that’s LA for you, not the bluntness, but the hierarchy of long locks over a more punkish do.  

Anyway, I’m not really a local.  

I was spending my birthday working out of town. I made a birthday plan with a friend, a good friend, but in my bones I knew it couldn’t happen. I knew the job would own me, and local or posing local or whatever, dinner plans had been made for me. Dinner plans with the bosses. I was to spend my birthday night holding my exhaustion in, nodding and listening and smiling, with the clients.  

Wait. I like the clients. And the photographer who planned the dinner was careful, brazenly arranging people at the table in an effort to keep the “creative” folk (throw me recklessly into this group) at one end, and the “business” folk  at the other. I was tired. My throat was sore. To my left a group became very engaged in talk about real estate investments, then investments more generally. It’s not my topic. Across and two my right the matter was Politics – often a preferred topic when sitting at the “creative” end of the table. But not tonight. The launch point was a particular retail entity known for unfair business practices and low prices – a particular retail entity that these “creatives” happen to do the advertising for. So it was me against the world, countering the argument that “poor people have no choice” with my own observation that “there is always a choice.”    

I could use this forum here to highlight to you the pertinence and brilliance of my particular counters and viewpoints, because surely the pertinence and brilliance of my debating is what led to my client saying, “Well that’s just a typical, rich white liberal talking.”  

When struck in that manner, it is very tempting to brag about one’s own economic humility – in my own case, the truth is I grew up poorer than anyone at the table. I grew up poorer than my friends from big families who think they grew up poor. My clan jumped from apartment to apartment – the kind of apartments that allowed dogs – running from creditors. I went to twelve schools in twelve years. I’d have two maybe three shirts and one maybe two pairs of pants, and I’d rotate them, never wearing the same combination two days in a row. This is not metaphor, it’s my truth. True too is the fact that I never felt poor, not once, and never even really thought about it.

I had a scholarship to a state college but couldn’t keep my grades up, so after the first year I worked full time and went to school full time. I didn’t like school as much as I liked having a job, but I got by. I wasn’t a star, but I made it.  

Like most producers, I just fell into it. Or, put another way, I just got lucky. After college I worked in a record store. We sold concert tickets. The concert promoter offered me a part-time gig driving him around on show days. I was responsible. He liked me. Gave me chances. I made good. Burned out on concerts and did a few commercials, same sort of work. Switched to photography cause it was more in line with my art degree, thought I’d learn more about taking pictures. And I did learn more about that, and about what I wanted, and what I didn’t want. Stuck to producing. Still conflicted about it.  Selling soap when I should be helping children. I tell myself I do what I can. I give money, volunteer sometimes. I never shop at Walmart.  

It is neither elegant nor wise to brag about one’s poverty, and it is certainly not humble to point out one’s humility. I fell into that trap for a second, thinking I was defending myself. But I caught myself, and I stopped. I regained my composure and smiled and nodded quietly, listening a little easier than talking had been, my sore throat aching and me suddenly completely exhausted, visualizing the long drive back to my motor hotel and thinking to myself But it’s my birthday, it’s my birthday, it’s my birthday.
 

Plane Trip #75

There is a super old man sitting next to me, they brought him on in a wheelchair so I'm holding in my pee, don't want to climb over and don't think he can get up. I followed him down the jetway and the man who was with him (who's now sitting further back) was being so brusque and nasty to him, I felt awful.

So I was kind of glad when the old man was seated next to me. He couldn't open his mixed nuts, so I helped. Or his pretzels, so I opened those too. I liked helping. He was struggling with his cookie too so I leaned over again to open the package and he just barked at me: I GOT IT. I GOT IT. Which made me feel stupid for helping him so informally and worse made me feel stupid for kind of wanting to help, to feel useful, like maybe I was using the guy to feel like a hero or something.

But every time I helped I thought to myself how I just love when someone helps me, helps me put my bag up or helps me get it down or even when the flight attendant brings me water - help is rare and it makes me feel warm and nice and that's part of why I try to give it back, because to me it feels good. And actually as I was helping the old guy I was thinking that it will be okay to be that old someday, flying on a plane, people will help. It will be okay to be old cause people are basically good natured and when my hands are knotted up and don't work so well anymore or when I move more slowly or typical things seem heavy it's going to be alright cause there are people like me, or like the really nice flight attendant on this flight who, when he asked the old man if he'd like a salad or a sandwich and the old man said, "Yes, sounds delicious," came back to the old man a minute later and said (rather slowly and loudly) to him, "I am so sorry, I am just so forgetful, did you say you want the warm Ruben sandwich? Or the cold lettuce salad?" (Knowing of course that the old man would want the sandwich, the match of lettuce, garbanzo beans, fork and quaking hands really no match at all, and thus with his query so politely framed offering the old man both dignity and an ideal outcome). I mean to say I was feeling good. Hopeful and helpful. 

But now I'm just feeling like a busy body, or self-righteous, like that woman on a flight a few years ago who was "rescuing children from Haiti" and wearing a tee-shirt that said so, "HAITIAN CHILD RESCUE 2004" or something like that; I remember how awkward I felt because she was doing a good deed, yes, but seemed so egotistical about it, and racist too, saying how the "natives" thought a cleft palette meant the little girl she had in her arms was "cursed by the devil", and how they, in their ignorance, left her to die.  But meanwhile she had a needy baby in her arms, and what did I have? A computer? Some hipster jacket? So who am I to feel condemnation when the "rescue worker" is at least doing SOMETHING, and me, just watching, critical... 

Anyhow, I'm now avoiding eye contact with the old man, lest he have to look upon this shitty do-goodie brat that serves only to demean, to remind him how old he really is but ha ha ha the joke's on her, she'll be just like me someday, old and rickety, and she can see then how it feels to have some righteous little punk open your peanuts like you're some goddamn baby or maybe ha ha ha the joke's on her anyway, cause she probably won't live as long as I have anyhow, what with her Pepsi, cookies and butter.

Perhaps my most generous acts are invisible ones: Not drinking even though I'm thirsty and not getting up to pee even though I have to. Perhaps acts are ONLY generous when they are invisible.

I concentrate on that for a while, distracting myself from my bursting bladder.
 

Minneapolis #122

Along the Canadian border in November and flocks of birds fly north. I’ve been warned of pending catastrophe. I keep checking locks but some things won’t be kept out. There are mice in the kitchen and I fear what they leave. There are mice in the rafters and at night I dream them winged, flying north, terrifying as birds. Outside it pours, just a matter of time until the basement floods. The roof will cave in, I stake out the middle floor, checking locks and yelling at the top of my lungs, only in part trying to scare away the vermin.
 

Minneapolis #121


It smells like snow. It is not snowing. It is just cold.  

Maybe I’ve had it wrong. Maybe snow smells like cold and it’s easy to mistake.

Maybe it’s just been too long, my summer-and-warm-autumn nose perplexed by the usual scents of winter, which is either here or coming, depending upon whether your particular orientation declares Winter by calendar, temperature, snow or length of day. Thursday I was coatless with the top down on the car. Saturday the empty garden hose was frozen like a stone snake. That isn’t to say it won’t warm up again because it will. The question becomes whether it will come within months, or days; whether it comes when I am still like I am right now, or whether it will come once I have changed.
 

Dining with Millionaires


When you were dining with millionaires you didn’t realize that that was just another way of serving them. They let you sail their boats and ski with their daughters, but you were serving them then, too. You may own the café now but you’re still bussing tables. And taking their orders it only just occurs to you then the dynamic that is playing out here. And of all the things a man in your situation might think, the one that occurs to you is: Stay useful.

Minneapolis #120

Was it enough that I grieved for the little bird?

I spotted it on the ground in my own backyard. It moved along the patio, burrowing into fallen leaves. Its feathers were puffed, it looked juvenile but there are no baby sparrows in November. It let me get too close. It breathed too hard. I thought about a box, about something to keep the bird warm. I had some place I needed to go to.  I reached toward it and it flew, just a little. I told myself it was alright. I figured it probably wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do. I go inside, hoping it will fly away, or somehow disappear. I step back out and its on the ground again. It digs along the base of the fence, to no avail. There is no place for it to go. I think about the cats I’ve chased out of the yard. I pretend the bird is preening. I think about a squirrel I once saw out the window, sprawled in the dirt beneath the maple tree. I banged on the window, it didn’t move. I thought it was dead. I was afraid it was dead. I went outside and startled it, it had just been sleeping. Really, it was sleeping on the lawn. The squirrel was fine. I think I saw that squirrel that day so I could believe on this one that that little bird is okay. There’s really nothing to do. What comfort can I offer the bird by terrifying it? It occurs to me to kill it, but I never could. My kindness is to let it suffer. My kindness is to hope. I hope that I hope rather than pretend. Pretending is kindness too, spent mostly on myself.  

I hope it’s enough that I grieve for the little bird.  

I pretend that is.
 

Plane Trip #74

I looked out the window and thought We are desperate for rain. I’d forgotten it was winter. There is no ice and no snow. This palette is not drought but dormancy, the hibernation of growing things and fields usually hidden, or rather, dressed. Dressed in white. Today is just brown as far as I can see, call it tan perhaps, or sand. There was a time when this land was not cultivated.  

There was a time when this vantage was impossible.

Impossible: Or so it seems, ice and snow headed south. But this has happened before.  I am considering this, a particular time a particular flight the particular man I was sitting next to then. I remember his hands, baseball lover’s hands. His son played college ball. I remember.  

Then Pilot says To the left you’ll see the diamond, beautiful even in winter. Seated right, I missed it.  

What I see instead I imagine: The pilot’s hands.

Baseball lover’s hands.

Circles

After his girlfriend dumped him he found that he was suddenly and completely in love with his wife. Just like that all of the things about her that had bored and bothered him didn’t bore or bother him anymore. The wife, oblivious to the affair and in love with her husband all along, did notice the sudden wave of affection, and passion, and she reveled in it. She bloomed in the light of his adoration, and became herself more beautiful somehow, more worthy of it. She fixed herself up a bit more or more often. She threw away her favorite sweatshirt, the one she used to wear when she was sick but had taken to wearing whenever she watched t.v. They set up a date night. She started taking yoga class and switched salons, updating her hair.  

But romance can be expensive. Just take date night: There’s the dinner, cocktails, wine; an outfit or at least something new; maintaining colored hair. And of course the babysitter. Plain young thing, but it made the wife uptight whenever the husband drove her home. She wasn’t sure why.  

The husband meanwhile is oblivious to the issues of date night. He’s not the one balancing the checkbook, he’s not the one shopping for the kids, or fixing them something to eat before they go out nor is he the one placating them when they realize Mom and Dad are leaving. He just pays the babysitter, always includes a wink and a little tip. He’s the one who picks her up and drives her home. He is further oblivious to his wife’s jealously, and at first is oblivious to her anger. But the latter keeps brewing.

Date nights end. There is a new bulky sweater for the wife to watch television in. The husband finds another girlfriend. His wife is happy when he works late, hoping for more money, a little extra breathing room.   

It goes on like this for eighteen months, until the new girlfriend leaves him and he falls in love with his wife all over again.  

Squares

They spotted her husband leaving the hotel bar with another woman. They were at their ten year reunion in Concord, New Hampshire; who knows what he was doing up there? What were the odds? They hid in a deep booth rather than encounter him, and debated (rather briefly) about whether or not to tell his wife. When they arrive home, they sit their friend the wife down and tell her in detail the sorry truth: Her husband left the bar with some slut.

A series of looks flash across the wife’s face but in the end there’s little reaction. Or at least a lot less reaction than her friends expected, and not a single tear. Afterwards, the friends call each other on the phone, discussing the nature of withdrawal and shock and the symptoms of suicidal tendencies. They worry about the wife. They feel just awful for her too. They expected her to weep, maybe even to thank them - they did go out on a limb with that confession and they’d thank her if she did that for them, of course they would. But the wife doesn’t mention it again. She doesn’t call any more often or seem any less together and the friends fret her apparent denial to the point that they agree that something must done. They decide amongst themselves on a sort of intervention. They confirm amongst themselves that’s there no such thing as a perfect couple after all.

So they sit the wife down again. It’s clear to them she should leave him. It’s clear that she should want to. They describe in detail the woman in the bar: Her age, her hairstyle, what she wore. They tell her she should pack a bag. They tell her she’s still young.  

The wife listens quietly with folded hands. She says I appreciate your concern but it’s okay.  

What’s okay? Her friends cry. It’s not okay, he’s a cheat!

But really I don’t mind.  

Don’t mind? You must be kidding! Really, you don’t have to put up with this.

It’s okay, says the wife, I know about it. I do it too. 

What? Ask the friends.

And it’s strange, they came over pitying her. And left, disappointed somehow and hating her guts.

Triangles

How do you see the shape of your life? She said. She said: How do you see the shape of your life?

Answer her: Sometimes a circle, sometimes a square...

That’s not what I meant, she said.

She never understands you. Thus leading to triangles.    

Generosity #1

She is a kind-hearted woman; she didn’t want to hate him. She spun her hate to pity and she pitied him instead.  

Then she asked herself: Would I rather be pitied, or hated?  

So now she hates him again, kind hearted woman that she is.  
 

Wrong Answer

Best friend yeah, sure. But I was still pissed. She knew it too. Kept her distance for awhile. 

Then she asked me: Are you mad at me about something?  

I told her Yes and I told her why too, but I’m pretty sure it was the Yes alone that did it. 

We never spoke again.  

Movies

It was her dream to make a movie. It would be a good one too. She knew she was pretty but she didn’t know if she could act. And maybe her own story was a little bit boring really. But she could make a movie. It would be as if making the movie was reason to make a movie; like making a movie would make her boring story interesting.  

She moved out west where everyone was pretty and it was hard to find a job even waiting tables and it was impossible to live off of even if you did. No rich man scooped her away. She wound up in the sex trade. It started out okay, and she told herself it was just for awhile.  

She’s not as pretty as she once was but her story is finally interesting. But she’s lost her taste for movies, and sex and rich men that often scoop her up but never take her away.  

She lost her taste for movies and sex and everything else.

Love Letters

She wished for poems but all she got was puns and rhymes. She just needed some kind of structure in that way.  

He sent her love letters. They made her flush. She was terrified someone might read them. They were corny and poorly written. She knew what she was bad at and didn’t do it. But this one, this man, he was brave – as in: Romantic. Or, he was arrogant.

He would send her love letters and they’d make her flush. Corny, terrible love letters. Sometimes with candy or flowers. She just couldn’t imagine exposing herself in that way. And she doesn’t.  

She would never pour her heart out like that. And she didn’t.

Maybe one day she’ll burn them.

Opportunity

He got real sick and nearly died. Weeks in intensive care and me right beside him but he pulled through. We pulled through. It seemed miraculous at the time, like a miracle.  

We had a couple of good months after all that.  

But now I hate that bastard more than anything and if I’d known when we was sick what this would come to; if I had only known then how crazy lucky I’d had been if he just died; how blessed. I dream about it now - the grief, the mourning… and the life that would have come after it. I guess it could happen again, a chance like that.  

I hate to think that kind of opportunity only comes once in a lifetime.

Minneapolis #119

The first snowflakes ever fell from the sky just today. There were not so many of them but so thrilled to be arriving here, charming, dancing or just dancing around like little children in the park. Or in waves. Their joy reminds me: Don’t be afraid. Turn your face to the wind, it is not here to harm you. Wind carries a surprise, and it just can’t contain the secret; it’s Wind’s nature to hint. It whispers: Winter is coming.  Wind speaks to me like this, it knows I understand completely. And just like the wind, I can’t contain myself, either. I tell you: Winter is coming. Me and Wind, we hope you understand. How snow makes ugly things beautiful, and freezing water turns us into god.

Six Days in North Carolina

I.

I thought he liked me but there was nothing personal about it. He was in a new place and needed a friend for a little while. Over southern breakfast I knew already he would leave without so much as a goodbye. But I had the last laugh. I was never his fucking friend.  

II.

I asked the man if it is usual for snakes to swim in his water. He said No, it’s special. Having never been here before, it is my own truth that every time I stand here I see them. The next day I touch one. Later, he holds one for me, like he knew.    

III.

You are banned from the word pretty. But it’s a reflex, like how one firework elicits one vowel sound, and the subsequent one another. It really was pretty. I couldn’t help myself. Or him.  

IV.

She is terrified of spiders. I let it crawl onto my wrist and take it away. I am terrified of her. I’ve seen how she talks about people.  

V.

He is blunt and he tells me: She’s not your fucking friend. He’s not my friend either, that’s the funny part.  

VI.

No, no. You misunderstand me. I loved it there.

Hate

I don’t want to hate but can’t help it. I wake with hate in my chest. I exhale and hate makes my breath bad. I want to let it go but it keeps coming back up. I want to love. I want to pity. I try to picture kind things. But I wake from dreams of him and dreams of an axe; I curse the dream as I curse myself for remembering it. Still I hold tight to that dream axe. I lie awake and sharpen it. I smile as I swing it against his hideous neck and for a few hours after I am free from hate, the peace of revenge taken in its place.
 

Fear

I’m scared of being scared. I’m scared it makes me weak. I’m scared weakness leaves me vulnerable and  I’m scared vulnerability is dangerous: Show it and someone will strike you there. I’m scared of failing. I’m scared of losing. I’m scared of hating. I’m scared of love because love leaves a weak spot. Love is just another way to hurt me, and I’m scared of being hurt.
 

Grief

It’s been what twenty years? But in fleeting moments I can’t remember just plain forget and wonder hey why haven’t I spoken to...and I swear it’s just a second, less, but there’s the first shot bang like I forgot to call or something then the second one bang, the one when I remember that we’ll never speak again.  

Love

I hate how much I love you. It leaves me feeling vulnerable. The only way to hurt me is to hurt you. And I’m scared of being hurt. Take a look at this. Can you see why it stops me, why it moves me? Tell me is it truly beautiful or am I just in love?  

I grit my teeth to keep from biting, my hands shake in little fists. Tenderness does not come natural. I didn’t want to live forever until then.  

Wait. It’s you I want to live forever.

For Dad, My Patron Saint of Baseball

Not all of you will understand, I’ll say that to start out. It helps to be a sports fan, first off. Better yet to be a baseball fan, specifically. And though I hope this isn’t the case for you, I’m afraid you have to know some grief too, that sense of missing someone, of wanting nothing more than to talk them, and perhaps pairing with that the idea that only they can understand what you mean or what you’re feeling – but they’re gone.  

Baseball knows a long season. It starts with exhibition games in March, and starts officially in April, Spring, the nexus of eternal hope. On the first day of the official, non-exhibition baseball season, every team – no matter how unlikely such a thing may seem – every team has a chance. On paper your team may look terrific, brimming with the potential to fulfill your dreams or break your heart. On paper your team may look downright unfamiliar, yet you know going in you’re likely to fall in love with them. Or your team may look weak, or feeble or full-up terrible. But on the season’s first day, you are still believer. On the season’s first day, we’re all tied first place. Early in the year, any team can hold that place for awhile.  

Well, predictions and affections aside, I’ll fess up my team was never in first place. Not really. They lost the first game of the season. I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but my father once told me that of all the teams that missed their respective championship by one game, something like ninety percent of those teams lost the first game of the season. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the lesson stuck. Every game counts, and there are one hundred sixty-two of them.  

That’s part of what I like about baseball, the everyday-ness of it. To those that listen it is a sound more steady than rain. Ballplayers have a job just like the rest of do; they go about it every day, like working men.

I also like the green-ness of it, starting and ending again just after an equinox. It marks a period of long days, of planting and harvest, from buds trembling to falling leaves. Spring can seem so long along come autumn, especially as far north as I reside. But with this game there is a constant presence of it, I see the playing field in July and October and think of April - sometimes the one passed, more usually the next one coming. Because in ball-speak “next year” means “April”, and if your team lets you down, you’ll start thinking about it in June.  

My team had a miserable April, meaning we played badly, offering little reason for optimism, and losing a lot of games. By early May I had next April on my mind again. I was comfortable with that too, the psychoacoustics of the radio relaxing rather than thrilling, the green-ness of the season enough.  

Things turned around in June and by July we were hot like the weather. We hung close enough to the real winners that we could feel like we belonged there. By August we were thinking April again, but this time we thought about the April passed, what would have been possible if hadn’t been so lousy back then. We might be in first place, if only.  

But we never really were in first place. I was in Boston when we held that title for all of a couple of hours. It’s called a “half-game” when you sit out while another teams plays, or vice versa. We were in first by default. The “real” contender played and won, extending their reign. And my team lost, despite how very badly at that moment I didn’t want them to.  

That happened twice in September, first place by default. And I don’t mean to be dismissive of that particular thrill because it means we were in there. We were in there. We were going to get there. I think all fans knew this eventually.  

Now it’s the last day of the season and I’m at the game with my family. Math said a specific sort of sports miracle – finishing the season in first place – was possible, however unlikely. We were late in arriving to the ballpark, and the miracle mathematics were becoming fine print, illegible. My team needed to win. The first place team needed to lose. My team was losing, the first place team was winning, by a lot.  

My team does what they need to, they win. My family cheers and jumps because no matter what, we were okay. We went from bad to good. It’s a thrill and relief in one’s life experience to see that such thing is possible. We were heading to the playoffs, the post-season, and it really doesn’t matter how we got there.  

Meanwhile...the miracle does in fact occur. The ballplayers like the fans are dizzy with joy. My team finishes in first place, and in fact this is the first time all season they were firmly there.  We were in first place for one day. The right one.
 
Sure I can draw all sorts of life-lessons from this experience. I can live optimistically because I have witnessed impossibly wonderful things. I can stay young forever because I have seen that one perfect day can overwhelm a seeming eternity of less perfect or even awful ones. I can draw hope from mere survival. But in real time I hug my spouse, and I hug my nephew and he lets me even though he hates to be hugged. I hug strangers, and we slap together our upraised hands, we will remember this day forever.  

Yet there is something melancholy in being able to share this moment with strangers but being denied this delight with my father. See, I try to spell it out for you here, how it felt and why. But my dad just would have known. My team’s not his team but this game is his game. And if I trace my own breathless happiness of this exact moment, I trace it back to a herculon loveseat in Pompano Beach, Florida, my dad walking me through a Dodgers/Giants game, how he explained it all to me that day, the purr of Dodger’s announcer Vin Skully in the background (to this day my favorite sound) and my father pointing at the television and calling it – actually calling it – Ron Cey’s walk off homerun. So I knew my father was a mystic, a seer. And if he were he alive I could pick up the phone right now and he’d answer and I wouldn’t even have to say a single word for him to know exactly how I feel.

Mr. Shitty at the Ballgame

Mr. Shitty has a son who hasn’t yet followed in his footsteps and might not. I saw them together at the baseball game, front row seats of course. The son is twelve and wore team colors special but not because he got them just by asking. The son leans on the rail and watches the game without a peep. Mr. Shitty got the tickets, that’s enough. Baseball is for boys, he brought his son. But Mr. Shitty is a man and a man has things to do like read the paper right there in his front row seat and damn it would be easier if the boy didn’t keep getting up thank you but it just disturbs him for a moment and he’s back at it, business news. He brought a magazine too despite the plan to leave early, even though now the game is tied. And the son protests but Mr. Shitty whips this out: What do you care? Getting up all the time.  The son is waiting for his father to ask him Why? Why? Why? But he wouldn’t have the guts to tell him why he leans why he gets up why he doesn’t make a sound so he frowns and he follows, stomping on the forgotten magazine on his way out.  

The Best He Ever Had So Far

Fucking her was a profound experience. It was epic. It was huge. It was like burrowing into the soil and waking up on top of clouds. He had never met anyone so willing to please. He had never met anyone so willing to focus on a single sense. He would become completely lost and absolutely found. True in life, true in bed: That one worked her ass off.  

And it was great. It was powerful. Powerful medicine. He felt magical, like a magician, like he could turn her into anything. Like he could saw her in half and put her back together again. oLike he could make her disappear.

But any ride becomes dull if the trip gets too long. Or maybe you come to take the view for granted. Sure, but you know sometimes a man just wants to get laid. Simple laid. Like just lie there and take it, or, just give it to me. He started doing other women. He knew it was stupid maybe, but hey. He was a charming guy. Maybe other women are his nature.  

She tolerated the first couple of them, looking the other way once and straight up forgiving him the second time when he told her: They’re just little sprinkles. You’re my river and my hurricane. She thought maybe she could go on like this. She thought maybe it was enough to be the special one. She was confused, she wasn’t sure if she really minded or if it was that she was supposed to mind. She pictured herself as his home.  

The end wasn’t about other women.  

They were fighting. They were fighting and he knew it was because of him. She was the easy one. It made him feel mean. He managed to deliver blows disguised as a sort of benevolent critique, without a hint of anger in his voice. She was clumsy, desperate, boring.

You might wonder how she could fall for this kind of thing, how she could fall for a cheating a heel in the first place and how she could believe him when it is clearly his intent to hurt her. Some suggestions for you: Inexperienced, an alcoholic father, reverent, literal, in love.  

She never fully recovered. She became a millionaire. She dresses well. He got a girl pregnant, married, is stuck in a restaurant.  

Still they remained friends.  

And the friendship survives over the years because each has something the other one needs, or something they need to remember. Inside he believes that messing it up with her was the worst thing he ever did; that his life would be different and better if he just could have...  

Inside she figures he feels this way, and she likes to believe she is just toying with him. But...

Part of him wants to tell her. He wants to tell her he was wrong, that he was young then and scared. He wants to tell her that to this day he masturbates thinking of her, touching himself as she touched him. He wants to tell her he made a mistake, a great one and it’s hard to live with it. He wants to say he’s sorry. But he doesn’t.  

Part of her wants to scratch his eyes out. Part of her wants him to know the extent to which he wounded her, and to tell him that she hates him. But she doesn’t.  

There are lots of hints when they converse. Each of them does or chooses to remember more good parts and than bad parts. Fact is that each is the tie to what the other had and lost; that keeps them civil: Neither of them wants to lose it twice.  

So it’s funny, he was her last lover. She will never tell him this. And it’s funny, she was his last love. He may confess this to her sometime when he needs money.   
 

Rain Drowns Memory

It had been so hot, so dry that once heard I exited my bath and headed straight out into rain. Crossed deck, standing on grass not soft but wet at very least, sky unquiet I am balance, silent in it. I lift my face drops tiny stray but I manage, realized against backdrop thunder, high, brief lighting.  Remember rain of sultry Yucatan and running in it? Drenched, laughing, it was duress that made sweetness sweeter just like now. Remember rain against tin drowning any thunder sounds? That was Bethlehem, you whispered something in my ear so sincerely I couldn’t make it out and all these years after I still try to, rain louder than theory so again I let it go.   
 

Minneapolis #118

Winter was so mild or even barren that the transition into spring was noted by the calendar rather than my bones. I’d seen green grass in February and tasted soft wet air in March. On Thursday I worked in the garden. I kneeled in the dirt, although that wasn’t necessary. I moved the soil with my hands, though that wasn’t necessary either. When I have known the earth this intimately the lake’s dismissal of its winter ice lacks fanfare. I just expected it to be water, and it was.

I let you know me like no one had or will. I was reckless with you. I gave you everything but there were some things I should have kept. There is one thing I should have saved.  

But you lost it. You left on a plane, in a hotel room in New York. You left it on the telephone. You could have gone back for it. You could have gone back but you were lazy. That was your moment, now it’s gone.  

Dog Lover

It’s just that the owner was so rough on her. She decided not to say anything when the dog bit her. I mean, it was her fault anyway, the woman’s, she shouldn’t have grabbed that chicken bone of all things. So she didn’t say anything. Then after the barbeque with her hand all swelled up she didn’t want to go to the doctor. She heard they kill dogs for biting, even when it’s an accident.  

She wound up telling her man, the woman did, and he was pissed off. He wanted her to go to the hospital. NOW. She did, they went together, and when they asked her what happened she said that her own dog had bitten her, a perfect cover story: No, it wasn’t vicious, yes it was an accident. Yes, it had all its shots including recent rabies.  

An hour later she has an IV of antibiotics going into her – blood poisoning they said, moving toward her heart. By now her boyfriend is so fucking furious he calls the mean dog owner. He tells the bastard what happened: Your fucking dog bit my girl.  

The dog’s owner, rough, as we’ve stated here says: That fucking bitch is lying.  

Two hours later violence ensues. Someone drives someplace, there’s a fist fight first, then enter a metal fence post... Cops are called. At the end of the day, both men wind up in jail. She’s in the hospital, doesn’t have to deal with it.  

Her boyfriend dies in the holding tank. They called it some sort of mishap but the man did have a temper and probably just mouthed off to the wrong guy. Anyway, looking back on it, she’s still really glad she didn’t rat on that dog. She thinks about her all the time and hopes that she’s okay. 

Where It Hurts

He was crying. He said I don’t deserve this. Was he being punished? Yes. He was crying. He said I don’t deserve this. Was he being persecuted? Yes. He was crying. He said I don’t deserve this. Was he loved? He was. Does he deserve this? Yes. Or maybe that’s why he is crying.  

How He Made Her Feel

How he made her feel: Low and stupid and clumsy. And sexy sometimes. And pathetic, sometimes for feeling sexy.  

Ask her how he made her feel and she says: He gave me chills.

How he made her feel: By hurting her, insulting her. By taking things too far.

Ask her how he made her feel: To this day I still miss him.

How he made her feel: Relieved when he left, relieved and very tired.  

Ask her how he made her feel: I never did get over him.   
 

A Little Him

He said he left her because she didn’t want children. And it’s true, she didn’t. She couldn’t understand that about him, he is quite nearly an ugly man and his father and his grandfather both died of heart disease. “It’s not about genetics,” he said but to her that seemed like all it was – he wasn’t interested in children generally. He was interested in, like he’d say, “A Little Him.” He’d say: “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a little You running around, a little Me?”

She had no interest at all. No woman in her family had lived passed the age of fifty-two. And there was alcoholism, but she knew those were excuses. She already felt like she never had enough money. She already felt like she never had enough time. And she didn’t love herself in a way that made A Little Her sound at all appealing. “A Little Her.” Her own mother was drunken and cruel. She’s been trying to get away from that. She didn’t have the kind of childhood you’d exactly want to relive.  

So he left her for another woman, one that wanted to breed. And truth is, she was crushed by this, really crushed – not the how, or when, or even that it happened, but the Why, the simple Why of it all. Cause see, she thought he loved Her. She really did. But the idea of Him – even fifty percent of him – turned out to be more than the one-hundred percent of herself that she gave him. She thought he loved her. She thought he loved her. She thought he loved her. She thought he loved her. But in the end he didn’t love her half so much as himself. Cause after all, that’s who he left her for: A Little Him
 

St. Kirby

Our St. Kirby, who smiles down on us from discarded seats high above The Metrodome field; who smiles with that laugh in his eyes because he knows how funny we really are, and we are funny yes; our St. Kirby, who changed us all and made us so proud and so large...

We worried for St. Kirby, because we wanted to love him just like that forever. No, we worried for ourselves, that our own dreams of a hug for a pal our arms won’t fit around might smolder. Because the fact of St. Kirby is that you wanted him to know you. When you watched him at the plate where he was so beautiful and when you watched him in the field where he surprised you over and over you just couldn’t help but imagine the saint’s backyard – that he was shagging your flies, that he was launching your pitches and when he laughed and smiled cause he knew how hard you really tried you’d have a seat in his lawn chair next to his grill, you and the him there laughing, recalling. St. Kirby had a quality that made you want to be his friend. But better, St. Kirby had a quality that made you believe you were.  

Today we lost our friend. And that banner high up in those abandoned reaches of the metrodome, we are worried here in March it will become almost eerie. But come April we’ll be proved wrong of course, and St. Kirby will smile down on us like he has from on high, and he will be watching us, laughing at our sorrow and our joy.    
 

Desperate/Lonely/Fucked

Are you so lonely that you’d come to me as friend? Are you so lonely that you’d crack that door, even though the burden of guilt must be so great, knowing what a monster you became?  

Am I so broken that I’d take you in and are we so desperate that this fucked path may actually be our destiny?

Hope v. Irony

I.

His kidneys failed and he nearly died. Very nearly. There were two weeks in full blown intensive care, and even after that it took months. It was the worst time of their lives. But he made it. He fought so hard and they did so much and now she is in constant fear that something truly stupid like a tree or a bathtub is going to kill him.  

II.

She used to hate him for being so damn loveable now she loves him for being so damn hateful. She could have wound up with him or she could have wound up hung up. It’s when she thinks how bad things got that she feels truly blessed. His evilness set her free. She has him and god to thank for that.    

III.

He worked sixty seven years in a factory making building trusses and later drywall, retired a foreman but never got off the line. He was a beer drunk on Fridays and a rye drunk on Saturdays. He loved a bacon and egg sandwich and sometimes ate one twice a day. He died forty pounds over weight and survived prostate cancer before a massive stroke took him at eighty-one. His whole life long he smoked like a chimney.  

His son can barely sit through a movie what the way they glamorize smoking. He’s become an activist of sorts, writing letters to the paper and even getting in the face of strangers, telling them how cigarettes killed his father.  

IV.

They’d been dating for about four months when one night she overheard him on the phone with his mother. He didn’t know she could hear him. He was talking with his mother and he referred to her, the girlfriend, as “Adorable Girl.” Adorable Girl! So sweet and he was telling his mother all about her. No one could see her and he didn’t know she was listening but still she blushed. She felt all fluttery and it was that very night that she gave into him with complete abandon and let herself fall in love.  

They’d been dating not quite five months when she, hopeful fiancée, goes home with with him to meet his mother. The mother’s long divorced and he is her only son. When our couple pulls into the driveway Mother comes running, straight to the drivers’ side. She coos and fusses about her son, his girlfriend supposes this is natural and smiles despite the fact that she’d expected a hug or something like that; acknowledgement at least, really! But she smiles. She’s campaigning in a way, and drunk with love and therefore altruistic. When Mother casts her a glance, it’s from ten feet ahead looking back over her shoulder. She says, “Grab the bags will you Gail?”  

Gail grabs the bags, climbs the steps, juggles the bags a bit then opens the door. Mother and son are together in the foyer. Gail stands at the door, a bag in each hand plus a purse and a satchel and it’s only now that her desired mother-in-law stops to take a look at her. The mom straight-up inspects her, like head-to-toe. Gail just blushes and smiles. Mother pulls her hand to her chin and turns to her son. “You’re right Hon,” she says, “She really does look durable.”  

Adorable Girl. A durable girl.  

Goddamn bitch!  Fucking bastard!  But really it’s too late for Gail. She’s in love and thus only capable of being of hurt, not of leaving.         
 
V.

She got rid of the baby because he didn’t love her. After that, it was never going to work.  

She got pregnant because he didn’t love her.  And they’re still married.  

VI.

They are best friends and they are inseparable. Whenever they think of going someplace, they are thinking of the same place. And it’s not just that they laugh at each other’s jokes but they laugh at each other’s jokes before they even say them – one can just point, and the other knows exactly why and they even find their own chemistry funny, the fact of pointing and half-finished sentences. It cracks them up. They like to drink together. They double date, but surely it’s a bit tough for anyone they bring along. Friends start to call them by a single name, a combination of their two names mashed together. They toast to their new name. One points, and they both laugh hysterically.  

When you’re together all the time like that it’s hard to gauge the passing of it; like what’s a long time and what’s a short one. So it could have been a day spent differently or it could have been two weeks away, but something fell apart. It’s not the kind of thing you name or even talk about. But they had one name and such great times and now can’t come up with six words to say to each other. One of them wonders if they were ever friends at all. Only one of them.
 

Plane Trip #73

Before the door closed, the woman behind me was on the phone speaking to her friend about her friends: How one is skinny but flabby and has cottage cheese on her legs, another cut her hair and looks forty, yes she saw her but it was terrible cause she smokes. There was a list like this.  

The man besides me is empty he’s crass to the stewardess and me, “Don’t wake me,” so I keep getting up. The chick across the aisle is likely anorexic and I can’t tell if she’s a woman or a girl. She has pretty lips and bones jutting through denim. I want to ask her how she is so thin and I wonder how long she will live.  

On the right is Las Vegas. On the left is Boulder, Nevada. We flew over mountains and they were covered with snow. Next ridges of tan and brown. I wonder what it takes to live there, ridges of tan and brown and then comes red and I wonder why red rock is prettier than tan or brown but it is.  

People on this flight are really drinking. It will be morning when we land it was morning when we left and the stewardess carries water and white wine and pours more of one than another. Who is the Bloody Mary for and the other flight attendant waves her hand in a circle: Any of them.  

Thirty five minutes to California. A tailwind headed west is strange, yet it’s happening. I ask him what he’s listening to and he says Johnny Cash like to impress me but I had overheard: Johnny Cash was once some time ago. He’s listening to something else now.  

The sky is blue and you can see the moon so clear and I wonder what it looks like from the ground.  

It’s mostly all just sand and brown and I wonder what it takes to survive there.  

Birthday #42

It is my own year forty-two. I am reminded to persevere, and to try. It is my time to change things up; my time to pioneer. Don’t act up, just act. Let the number inspire. I waited for this you know.    

It comes to pass in intensive care, I hold him in my arms and admit I am far from ready to let him go. I can’t tell if he’s still fighting or if I am. It passes with him in my arms, the only time he sleeps. It passes with him in my arms, the only part I choose to remember.

This story has a happy ending, but I didn’t know it then. Perhaps it takes something that terrible to allow for this degree of joy. Perhaps relief is the greatest joy of all, and I wonder if that’s just, or pitiful.

Girlfriend

I told her to stop calling her dog “her boyfriend” even if she was kidding since no man was ever going to go near her if he thought he was going to be on the same level as a dog. I told her flat shoes make her look stumpy and I told her five pounds can make all the difference in the world between being attractive and, well, not. I told her it’s right to color her hair but if she’s going to do it she needs to go lighter, lighter’s better and older women just can’t wear dark hair. I tell her what doesn’t look good on her so she doesn’t run around like a fool. I tell her to keep that mouth shut around men, no one likes a woman acts smart and no one cares what she has to say anyhow. It takes guts to tell the truth you know, more than it takes to hear it. I tell her I am her only friend.

But I love him to very bursting of my heart, doesn’t that count for something? And how sexy can I be if I walk like a newborn calf? How sexy are bunions, I don’t want to know. I told her I don’t use a scale it’s better for my head to go by feel and she says ‘well not for your body.’ I told her my hair is brown and so was my mother’s, brown same as mine. I told her I’m not afraid of being a fool and most people say I’m quiet anyhow. I tell her not to be so sure, and I tell her she forgot about the dog

Angel Food Wasn’t It

I’ve become one of those people: I am heading back to a circumstance I know is doomed I am staying in a situation both terrible and familiar I’ve condemned so many for actions I now take for staying or not leaving or coming back for more I know something of why now how it happens you think there are choices that aren’t really there you think there are different paths but become grateful for having even one even one long and doomed right back into the heart of greatest misery because once and maybe only once a very very long time ago once and maybe only once or twice or three times or a week or month or year it doesn’t matter you find yourself marching back to the heart of your greatest misery as if it hadn’t happened at all because once or for awhile before it became what it is now – admit it – for awhile before it became what it is now once for awhile it was more or less okay. You walk right up to the knife that stabbed you in the back because you can still taste that cake it had cut Angel Food wasn’t it so light and sweet and simple.
 

Context Determines Pace and Vice Versa

It takes three days to fold the wash. It takes. Three days. To fold. The wash. It takes three days to make the bed. These are not the same three days it took to fold the wash. It takes. Three days. To make. The bed. It takes ten minutes to fall asleep and ten hours to wake back up again. I remember the second you fell out of love and the weeks I spent ignoring it. For months and months I tried still it takes years to recover something. I can hold my breath for a very long time but I’m too old now to faint from it.

Tell me is there is something you want to say before the first of us dies? Tell me.
 

Burns Bright/Burns Out

We charged the air; we wrecked it. We made stars fall and saw it happen; we made the sky come apart. The sky came apart and left a colored scar between the blue and the grey; we saw that too. We are a fortress and wine that survived the war, old and ready. We’re lucky like that. We are waves that crashed and made others fall down wet and us better than them. We are waves that entice then rob you blind. We are a machete in the hand of a child, dangerous and generous both and deciding which to show you. We are suspicious, or were then. We even hated you for a while.

We are slopes and ice and dangerous curves, we’re a reliable car that’s driven too fast. Fast, yes: It’s speed that took it all away and sent us home. Speed: It lifted us, we were even upside down and landed when others crashed, we were spotless then. We left broken ones behind. We ate yellow, we ate living things, we ate each other like no one has or would but I remember.

And we breathed. We breathed in green and blew out gold and in that currency we lost ourselves. We lost ourselves and we lost other things. We lost a life and chance to repair stars and cuts and those left in our wake until that very moment when we washed (separately) into some other’s, and we were the ones there melting, sputtering, broken. Now no one believes me.

We were too lucky. Something had to give and it did. But in the end I’d rather be your victim than be you.
 

Charleston, South Carolina

I liked the beach, that was my favorite part.

She had a headache the whole time and tried to chase it away with alcohol. Everyone did. He picks fights with the waiters and she orders another round. We’re too drunk to taste the food, but he complains about it. I leave big tips and cross the street recklessly, waiting for one of us to get clipped. Hoping for it.

They sell old slave posters in the market. Runaway: Dressed Liked a Boy. Runaway: Carrying Children. Plow For Sale, Mule For Sale. People. She’s says it so we don’t forget but I wonder who would buy such a thing. I wonder who makes them, who profits.

But For the Grace of God it says. But for the Grace of God. It happened.

I liked the beach, and I liked him too. I like when the sun comes up and when I can hear the birds wake nothing bothers me then. I wonder how it feels to wake up singing, this more mysterious than flight.

It’s harder to pretend by say the third day. No one noticed me before though they won’t now.

Goodbye Bug Island! He says with too much joy; he says with superiority, like these mosquitoes are worse than the roaches he knows so intimately.

She hates: Geese and beaver red wine the boss and the friends of her children.

The sun rose and the tide shifted and waves and I thought to myself For all time it has been just like this. I wonder if nature stirred my forefathers or if then there was just too much of it. I wonder how a man can live to own another man. I wonder of lust strong enough to continue. Living I mean living.

There were dolphins in the bay, in the bay so close to us and in a tidal pool I touched an anemone and it pulled as if to swallow me. I touched an anemone and it felt like a cactus, a specific one I felt one day in Southern California. I remember those spines precisely, but here, an animal.

He said The bugs were horrible! Horrible! There were dolphins in the bay and light was speaking to the water kind words, romantic ones. I think of this and scratch my bitten chin.

She hates: The waiter and the waitress and him and maybe me too.

Hate is a very strong word.
 

Minneapolis #117

Snow gives off a specific light. You will know it has happened before you turn to the window; before you are even awake, or have opened your eyes. You believe you must be dreaming beautiful to see, this beyond silver more humble than gold. You will know it has happened before you open your eyes. You think you are dreaming but no. Snow gives off a specific light eyes closed beautiful and heaven when you open them.
 

Maria’s Cafe

The ex-patriots drink too much. I see them near the water at sunrise, up early so maybe it’s fine to have the first beer at ten. You can spot the Americans, always a beer in hand: On the beach, on horseback. Ex-patriots wear neat shirts, the tourists are in swimsuits – that’s how to tell them apart. I am instantly local, covered up as I am.

The last night is when the band is playing. They are either good or it’s just good to hear them, under bright room lights in a little café. It is good to be able sing out loud, careless. It is good to be the native, even if the label is a false one as will be proved by tomorrow’s departure. It is good to be beside my friend, to share this, to eat this, to make noise and to listen.

He is a good singer because we can hear the sadness in his voice.

I wonder why he’s like that, living as he does in his paradise.
 

Nayarit

A humpback whale, or parts of it; its breath spouting, its steam. That was the first day, I couldn’t have realized the sight was unusual. Privileged.  

A ray, that’s what I think it was. Out there, black, triangular and spinning – spinning in leaps and fits, plunging into water, then air. Was it dying? Was it living? Was it playing? Animals play.

Later, the sun behind the waves, giant waves, giant horses tearing apart the beach with their hooves. Crashing in. The sun behind, revealing: Fish swimming inside of them. It didn’t seem possible, waves like monsters fish swallowed up but no, swimming. Animals play. Again, I couldn’t have realized then the sight was unusual. I kept looking for it again.  

Children play, sometimes too rough with a pup still smaller than my hand. In and out of the surf, milder water yes but the dog is trembling. I offer to hold it but despite its distress it prefers its own children, and cries for them. I take it against my chest, My heartbeat will calm it down. I carry it into the sun, trying to warm it. It settles yes but unhappily, in a tiny ball near the children’s things. And this concludes my own day.  

The morning that follows is tinged with destiny, or that’s my excuse for the small delays of forgotten objects or necessary refreshment, unavailable. Road trip, North along the coast. Skip three towns opting for the forth. Skip three venues opting for the forth, for breakfast. I face the street and meet some eyes, familiar and I place them. She heads to a truck and opens to door, and brings me the puppy. Yesterday’s animal. It is no longer distressed. I enjoy its musky kisses. I consider the odds, impossible. And yet, here we are. Maybe forty miles, maybe twenty hours. Time plays.

It was like that there.  

I play. It is a game of my invention, spotting a stone and chasing it, trying to get to it before the a greedy wave takes my rock forever. I win about half of the time. I am like this for hours. I win about half of the time. I win.  

I think of him now, an ordinary man lying on the beach but on his side, curled slightly, not much. Sand like bed, forearm is pillow. He is an ordinary man lying on his side, facing away from the water. He is lying on his side, listening to the waves, running his free fingers through the sand.  

Minneapolis #116

Well I haven’t seen you naked in so long. Now look at you standing there. You look good, pretty good, not as good as well before but you are just buck now aren’t you? And while you have no choice about it – none – you look pretty good. Now you don’t have any choice about it see but really it feels natural. It feels natural even though remember you’ve got no choice in the matter none or maybe this is as natural as it gets, having no choice at all.

Fires and Hurricanes

I wouldn’t do it now, but back then I was rolling in it. It made me reckless, not just with money I mean. I felt charmed, I felt golden like anything was possible and everything was mine.

Wind comes to bring something. Wind comes to discipline. Wind says Spoiled girl, you have everything but it isn’t enough.

I say It’s something I want. Not everything.

It was dangerous frankly, looking back on it.

Clever fox twisting words! I bellow from your mouth meaningless, destructive. It’s bad enough to think and worse yet to say. You try to keep me out but you’ll fail. Like fish I return to my source. You are a river polluted. I use my strength to dry you up.

Things changed. They always do, they’re always going to. I lost it and I lost you too but like I said I was reckless then.

I think happy thoughts and say them too I tell Wind. Even if they’re lies.

I did dangerous things.

Lies? Cries Wind. What is a lie? I do not know of this, I lift what tries to. I’d lift you if I could but you’re heavy. You are weighted down. With everything.

I lost it, I lost you.

Wind comes unexpected. It eats broken leaves. It takes the last breath of summer and chokes it off. This is its attempt at truth. But beware Wind, it is not to be trusted. It is never still and will leave you. It will leave you just like everyone does. Wind thinks it’s better but it isn’t.

You can yell and hammer I say. Shouting doesn’t make it true. You pretend to lead but you’re chasing. You won’t even be here tomorrow. You pretend to care but you’re ruling. Or try to. I’ve no respect for you, not here. You’re not a real problem just a little inconvenience. You can push others to harm but you yourself are harmless. You’re noisy is all. If I cause you then I can will you away just by thinking
differently. Why only today I breathed life into something positive; something selfish. I am wishing for something, not everything. That alone makes me humble and good. You’ve not blown me away, not hardly. You’ve not blown me away and you can’t. You won’t. Not hardly.

I don’t think you liked the recklessness but I think you liked the stuff.

Wind isn’t romantic though you’ll want to think so. It’s just as likely to dirty teeth or poke eyes. It teases like a child does. Wind is afraid of love.

I tell it so: Wind is afraid of love.

I think you still have some of it.

Love is my absence, I’m destined to fear it; I’m doomed to Says Wind. Love is stillness love will kill me. But I’m willing to die. I’ll cripple myself if it’s something you want.

I think I still want it back.

I say: It sounds like the quarrel is over.

Listen for me Says the Wind.
 

Minneapolis #115

It was my favorite Summer ever so I’m sorry that it’s ending. Does it suffer as it withers as do I?

He says: It is not dying; it is sleeping. Remember.

It was my favorite Summer ever so I’m sorry that it’s ending. I am not sleeping; I am dying, remember?

Does it suffer as it withers as do I?
 

Plane Trip #72

I am doing my best not to have my happiness soiled by the two women one seat over and across the aisle who keep complaining – through the stewardess – that I ought to pull down the window shade when it’s clear that I am taking in the view, my body turned toward it, looking out. Once, twice, three times now I’m asked. Three times I refuse, replying, “But I’m looking out!” The forth rebuttal had already formed in my head: “I am happy to accommodate you, but not at the expense of my own experience.”

Beneath me: The Gulf waters, who wouldn’t want to look? The patterns, the textures in the water lead me to believe I see the reflection of clouds, but there are none. Spider veins mark the surface like a drunkard’s nose; like a waitress’s ankles. You could imagine the coursing blood in those blue veins.

I cannot hear the conversation of the two women, but I cannot help but hear certain words: She, she, she. Bitch. Annoying as hell.

In the air over these blue waters I am waiting for the sun to set. I am waiting for the angle of light to change, anxious for it. I am waiting for the sun set to relieve
me of the piercing eyes against my back and shoulders. She, she, she. I am waiting for the sun set because I am looking out of the window and there is power in numbers. They number two, and they want me to stop.

Boats leave marks: I see their paths on the water’s skin and I wonder how, why.

Girls leave marks: I admired them when they first came on, I smiled behind their backs. Two adventurous travelers, two friends. I remember myself with mine. It was recent.

Girls leave marks. And I wonder: Is there really any such thing as traveling alone?
 

70 Miles

Seventy miles south of here is the county fair where I saw my first demolition derby. About seventy miles south of here is the county fair where I saw the human cannonball; he was old when he landed, but young when he was flying. Around seventy miles south of here I fed a spider monkey cheerios through a plastic tube. The way he stretched when he saw me coming; the way he held his end of the tube, waiting; the way he stared with eyes too blank to plead and how he moved and laid down after in the sun like a satisfied man - all scared me. Driving home, the sky was red with sundown. Arriving home the house was dark but I flipped a switch and seventy miles.
 

First Steps

His son took his first steps on a day he really needed him to. He’d been fighting with the mother that day, fighting about money. He’s not sure when that became his sole responsibility. He retaliates by accusing her of flirtations, and while he has no real evidence supporting this, he knows that for him at least these situations recall to him all his former lovers – each of his former lovers, he fantasizes not about the sex so much as the various destinies each one may have brought him. Belgium, Athens, Dallas, LA. With that one he’d have a Porsche and a Moto Guzzi. With another he may have been a poet, living urban and shooting up. His wife has a great ass and is nine years younger than he is. She signs her cards to him I want you and he used be very taken by this but now he thinks maybe she’s more literal than passionate, her feminine urge, the need for another one. He worries he’s merely some biological necessity, providing for, donating. Sure he feels resentment and it manifests as bitterness and everyone thinks it just because he doesn’t get to ride anymore. Everyone thinks it’s just because she doesn’t let him fuck around like he used to.

His son is walking. A little boy can’t understand the freedom that represents, just walking. And the funny thing is he’s been thinking a lot lately of just walking himself. He’s been thinking about walking, but it’s his own son walking that makes him decide to stay.
 

Some Destiny Happening You and Me

Hey you might think you’re all done with me but you’re wrong cause we still got some destiny happening you and me sure you’re going to leave me now and you might even forget about me for a little while but that won’t last cause we ain’t finished you’ll be coming back you’ll be coming back to me cause someday your drugs and your good looks will both run out and then where will you be see it hits a point when all a body wants is just a bit of comfort you’ll be looking for some comfort so you’ll be coming back to me cause you know I’ve got the money to give it so go ahead and leave me now or try to cause it’s temporary I know you’ll be back you’ll be back cause I got something you ain’t got the guts to ask for and once you’re tired you’ll learn just to sit beside me look pretty and enjoy the fucking ride.
 

The First Lie and After

It is the first lie I distinctly remember telling:

I must have been five years old. Colleen was the new girl. She and I were crawling through the hole in the fence that united our yards when Colleen got caught up. She had long brown hair tangled in the rusty wire. I think I was before her, already on my way, but maybe I was behind her. Maybe I pushed. Colleen said something like I’m stuck, I really don’t remember what she said but I remember what I did. I said: I don’t care. (That wasn’t the lie.)

My mother through an open window in an upstairs bedroom heard me. She was already suspicious of my nature due to my astrological sign. She thought I was cold. When I came in after, my mother was furious and aloof. I didn’t know what was wrong but knew something was, and kept my distance. With a clenched jaw my mother tucked me in that night. In truth I’d forgotten my crime from earlier in the day, and frankly at this point in the story I wasn’t aware it was a crime at all. My mother wouldn’t kiss me. She said I heard what you said to that little girl today. Okay, I knew what she was talking about, or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I played dumb or maybe I was right then. Me: What? What? Her: That girl got caught on the fence and you told her you didn’t care.

In my mind’s eye I saw it, in my mind’s eye I still do even if I see it differently now. But I saw it then, the long tangled hair and the scratch on her back and here is where the lie comes in: I didn’t say I don’t care – I said move your hair. Did my lie sound real because I was exasperated? Was I exasperated because of what I’d done, or because I’d been caught doing it? I was five years old. She believed me. She softened, kissed me goodnight.

This is maybe thirty-seven years ago. Colleen, I am sorry.

Other lies I told and got away with:

Of course I’ve done it before.

No, I’ve never done it before.

I’m fine.

It’s natural.

I don’t need any help.

I fell.

I like it like that.

No I don’t miss it, I don’t miss it at all.

And of course, there is the worst lie of all, the one I get away with day after day even though the one I’m telling it to is myself.

 

Her and Me Confused

When you told me I was a boring lover it messed me up for awhile. We stopped doing it then, me just giving you head because you told me this is how I can please you. Everyday it was like that and it’s funny how love will make you break down but then you went and got her pregnant and unlike me show wouldn’t get rid of your baby. So you left then coming back maybe once or twice for a treat but even that stopped. So you went for that golden ring the wife and the kids and that made your parents happy and you for awhile, believing. But you hate being a husband and you hate being a father and why didn’t anyone ever warn you or tell you the truth? Now your wife won’t go down and won’t let up but she needs you and she takes you and she plans to make an army of these, these children serving as soldiers in her war against you. And you feel so trapped you can’t breathe sometimes and even see a doctor hoping she’ll take the hint, that they all will, that she’ll let you go to see you live that she’ll let you go because she doesn’t want to kill you; that she’ll let you go because she loves you and wants you to thrive but right there is where you have her and me confused.
 

You Were There

You were there. You were there with the cathedral right outside your window almost like you owned it you were there.

You were there. You were there when you were beautiful. You were there when you were flying and she thought you must have wings and called you Angel.

You were there when you screamed Coward! from the streets you were there when you screamed so hard you broke the vessel in your eye you were there when she made a memorial of every tiny action This is the last time we’ll be in a taxi together - This is the last meal we’ll ever eat together - This is the last time that we’ll ever say goodbye.

You were there. You were there before you ran up a tab and borrowed money and left her when she needed you and said the most fucked up things. You were there before the baby died you were there before you wished for this you were there before you smoked too much and drank too and did much too little to keep it all from getting away from you.

You were there. You were there no matter how hard it is now to believe you ever were.





Misspent

I didn’t know I was pretty until I wasn’t pretty anymore. It’s only now that I’m not pretty that I can see that I once was. I can see the difference in how I’m treated.

I didn’t know I was young until I was old. When things started to fall and ache, only then could I appreciate how it felt to be careless, effortless. That was pretty, and now pretty’s gone.

I didn’t know I was stupid until I got smart. But now it’s too late to make it work for me: Careless, effortless, beautiful.





Even Less Likely Than You Are

Why didn’t you come? Just because I don’t see you doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Just because I don’t miss you doesn’t mean I don’t love you either. Where are you? What’s with all this unseasonability? Down south I smelled fertility in the air and you lack that still I know who you are by scent. The sun beat on me there like some sort of sensory pornography, my skin rose to its tingle but you are who you are. And you’re willing. That’s something.

Stop it. Stop bullying me. Stop running me over. It’s a habit yes but a habit’s still a choice and you have to make the choice to stop it now.

Are you punishing me? Have at it if you must. Perhaps being convicted is better then simply being accused. As if I were ever free anyhow.

See I’ve never really gotten over you in the sense that I’m still thinking about you, only in different ways. I’m still fantasizing about you but my fantasies are different, I picture bad things, accidents or arrest. I rather just forget you, but you didn’t leave a hole you left a lump. I keep running my fingers over it, hitting the spot that hurts. My skin rises to its tingle but you are who you are. So call me a poor flake and surely you’ll be right but I just want the truth. And pity me too cause you know already I am even less likely than you are to find it.





Minneapolis #114

No one but me knows that the birthday message flashing on the scoreboard is recognizing a dead man’s. If someone in the ballpark notices, perhaps they’ll wonder about it – not the greeting Happy Birthday J----, but the part beneath that says Wish You Were Here. Perhaps someone in the ballpark is wondering if this particular message is being shown on television. Perhaps someone wonders if the message is intended for a photograph, to be snapped now, shared later. Perhaps they’re wondering, since clearly J----- isn’t here, if he’ll ever see his message at all.

Perhaps I wonder this too. Yet still I put it up there.





Minneapolis #113

She said: I had dog named Susie that looked just like her. She died when I was in fourth grade.

So add Susie to the list of dead dogs I never knew, but did. Like my mother’s Brandy, her stillborn puppies buried in Central Park, a shoebox full of them carried on the train from Brooklyn a lifetime before I was born. There is the violent end of Georgie Dog, a wooden cross bears his name on the roadside.

The night before the morning my father died, I panicked. Lock the doors I cried, Set the alarm. But I couldn’t keep the death out.

I dreamt a song last night, I remembered it in the morning. It has no words, just:





The Shit I Did and Survived

Everyday since and again tomorrow you are inspiration to remember or forget and I can’t say. It’s unexpected places that recall unbelievable ones that I had such adventure and a lover and this life. Oh you brought me sorrow and you pitied me my sorrow which was worse than just the sorrow and brought more. I had a baby and I named it for you I had a baby and I killed it for you I want to baby you but I’ve done that before now haven’t I? And god did that backfire. You’re a thief a fraud a user a liar I must hate myself to love you still I hate myself to love you still. I hate myself. I love you still. Perhaps that’s some exaggeration or perhaps it’s just the season or those unexpected places that recall those inconceivable ones. The shit I did and survived, it’s just incredible.




Johnny, John and James

The tickets came from a scalper. But of course they were going to; it’s Fenway, on a Sunday. Right field seats, it was relatively calm or at least the local version of it, where donning his little league suit – with the specific team name and colors of the opposition – he drew no boos. He drew cheers from those calm right field seats when he was spotted waving on the Jumbotron, and high fives from them when they figured out that he was a Red Sox fan, too.

He didn’t want to leave.  

You have to understand that that’s something in life of a boy, when sixth inning boredom turns into a sense of outcome, and a want for it. He didn’t want to leave. But the game was tied some three hours passed his bedtime. It could have gone on forever.  

It could have gone forever.  

He didn’t want to leave. 





Pools

I.

I remember that day looking up at the sky and how the sky looked just like the surface of the lake back home and for just an instant I was lost. I was lost and I was upside down with no idea where I was or when. It happens sometimes nearby or far off I can’t remember where I’ve come from or where I slept and I will tell you the truth sometimes it just all boils down to whether I am with you, or not.
  
You pool around me. You said She was a cool shower on a hot day but you my love are the ocean. It worked on me back then but like the sea I nearly killed you; like the sea it was my destiny to swallow you up. You said You are perfect.  Then: You’re perfect for me. Then: It’s not you; I just get bored. And last: I swear to god you’re drowning me.  

I pool around you. You are the low spot, so of course it’s bound to happen. I want to be the ocean again but I’m reduced to this, shallow and each time you step on me there’s less. I dream of your forgiveness and I tremble in my sleep, waking the man beside me. I pool around you and if only you’d be cold for long enough to turn me into ice but no. I pool around you you’re the low spot and you tug me like the moon and reduced as I am it doesn’t mean I’m not still under the influence.  

II.

I’ve never understood a swimming pool beside the ocean, but then that which is unnatural will always attract certain kinds. I smell chemicals or salt. I dive, or I frolic. There are barstools in the pool and while I know this is ridiculous, I have to try. Cabo San Lucas, I order Tequila. Ridiculous, like waiting here in this hotel knowing full well you won’t show up.  

Lake Powell was built by flooding canyons - the guy I’m with laments this. Think of all the villages buried under water. I want to curse the water with him but I’m just stunned by this miracle in the desert.  

This pool was like that too. A miracle in the way that something you want finding its way to you always is. Or rather, you to it.  Somewhere in Mojave, I can smell the baked-on exhaust and I can see the empty highway and air is heavy and pressing in on me. Turn a key for shade, open a gate for water. Dive in. It’s warm but it’s the wetness that’s significant, that conquers grit and sand and soothes your skin. I don’t watch the sun set but I watch it get darker. Now turn the key for light.  

I was shooting pool and he told me I was using the wrong hand. That, or I was using the wrong eye.  

This pool is more valuable and lovely than I will ever be. Despite the fact that shallow things repel me, I am taken by her beauty. But pretty as she is, she’s used to better. She says No diving, no admittance. So I sweat, and I long. And I spit into the water.  

III.

This is the hardest one to get out. I mean, it’s everywhere. It’s inside me but will kill me if I let it. It’s in the air I breathe but if I breathe it in, I die. I reflect in it, I reflect on it, the repetition of its waves soothe me. The repetition of it dripping drives me nuts. I like the way it tastes but I’m told it tastes like nothing. I can taste it and when I say this he tells me I’m a snob. It used to be free and now I’m paying for it. It used to be free, now I’m paying for it every single day.  
 

Pittsburgh #1

It’s likely that you might not even notice that the bridge is named for him, and it’s possible too you might walk right on passed the statue. That spot along the river there is named for him also; I saw it printed on the map. I wonder if it is his philanthropy or prowess that lingers most, that stirs those of us who travel just to see this, just to walk across that bridge or gaze upon that bronze, sneaking in to touch it. Even in metal he commands respect, even in death. I remember him a little but I know people that he’s moved; that he changed and inspired and saw come all the way here like pilgrims to stare into his twelve foot form and young as I was I still know he was bigger than that, and he lived passed his numbers and he died saving lives and sure he was a ballplayer and a great one too but if one measures greatness in how one makes others greater I can tell you straight up he touches me, and I am one of many.

Pittsburgh and Someplace Else

In of all places, Pittsburgh: I took the incline up the hillside and I remember that day or morning after when you took me up the mountain you were trying to impress me with that romantic epic choice. Do you believe that I’d forgotten until one afternoon in Pittsburgh though the ride was so much shorter there I saw that morning after the intensity of sunshine heat and light flew off the snow. There was this great potential then that only comes with newness when so much less is yet familiar and so much less had passed between us and it wasn’t until Pittsburgh in a trolley I remember the Chinese dinner after and it’s strange that I’d forgotten when it seems I might have dreamt it all perhaps forgetting’s natural but thankfully in Pittsburgh on that commute up the mountain I remembered who I was then. And that is what I did then and you are one I’d known then and I’m shocked that I’d forgotten it was good for awhile with you.
 

Minneapolis #112

I am coexisting with black ants. Sometimes I evict one or two, banished to the oak tree out back. But they are feisty, and protest. I ask myself What makes this kitchen mine? Lack of any answer causes me to relent. Roam the counters if you wish to; seek out butter. I must admire how you work collectively. I must admire how you work, when here I am, idle. I envy you, Black Ants. I know how nice this kitchen is and what it is to be on a mission though right now I haven’t one outside of my intolerance toward you. My sleeping dreams are mundane things, battling ants and taking out the garbage. My waking dreams are fantasies where mundane things don’t require my attention. And ants live outside and you call me after all this time and that alone is an adventure.
 

Minneapolis #111

It came, it happened. There wasn’t much fanfare. Not like there should have been. It already went from warm to hot, it’s been hot - by some standards a comfortable summer but here still early spring. So, in driving or walking past it, that dark grey ice didn’t seem anticipatory, and it wasn’t enticing. It was merely and somehow in the way, something that should be finished and just like that it was. From dull grey ice to nothing there at all; from dull grey ice like a laden sponge, dank, straight on up to blue water. And the funny thing is I haven’t seen it blue. I passed the open water in the dark - not all that different really, it’s just the way the light plays. And sure it is a sweet thing, but then it’s straight up hot already this heat and leafless trees and it shouldn’t be this hot and it shouldn’t be this bare if it’s going to be this hot and it’s like one little spark will burn down the whole entire world.  

It’s like one little spark will turn that lake to dirt.
 

Sweet Dreams, Bitch

Hey Brownie, you need me and I need you so let’s get together. Hey, come here, hey, your hair’s so silky and your skin’s so soft. It’s a shame you don’t want me touching you. Hey, why not lay down with me, hey, did I tell you your breath smells just like coconuts?  Hey, don’t turn away, get over here. Get over here now. I won’t touch you just lie up against me. I could force you but I won’t, just sit still. Sit still or I’ll make you.  

I don’t know why you’re so damn unhappy.
 

Plane Trip #71

It was sixty-seven degrees when I left, sixty-seven and it isn’t even April.  Sixty seven today, yesterday, before.  It was a warm winter and now a warm spring, one that might seem too early but temperature is misleading – warm throughout the winter, warm approaching spring, but it was on its official date of arrival, on March 21, like some appointment kept Spring announced itself to me quite formally by virtue of its scent.  I opened the door that very morning and I smelled it.  I hadn’t smelled it the day before.

The plane lifts and I look to see the Minnesota river, flowing in a strange shade of green.  Open water.  I’m pretty sure it never froze.  But it is the openness of this river water flowing which contrasts the frozen pond water beside it; the pond is frozen, as it should be.  And in truth I only live a few miles away from here but I’m hit with this senseless panic, is the lake near my house frozen still?  It’s too soon.  Tell me I didn’t miss its recession.  It’s too soon.  Tell me I did not fail to notice its retreat.  It’s too soon it’s too soon it’s too soon.  Each year some landmark, some watermark of time it’s a ritual to me the day the ice gives way and sinks or lifts and flies away turning the lake back to blue; allowing me no longer to ride upon its back like a child but willing to let me inside it like a man.  

Of course it is still ice, just like that pond.  It’s a pool of still water or is beneath that frozen cap and it will strip itself down slowly like a comfortable lover and in time I’ll see it naked there and wet.  I’m just going for a few days.  I haven’t missed a thing.

I am most stricken by my homesickness the day before I leave.  I am surrounded by all most important to me and I will leave it for esoteric reasons.  This warmth I feel beside me will be absent tomorrow night by my election.  The world may end in the three days I am gone and this is what I will flash before me then.  This is the life I’ll remember.  I am most stricken by homesickness the day before I leave.  

There will be a moment sometime just before I return when I will feel plucked from that particular breast too, but that pang will be much more fleeting, and is weaker.  

The plane bumps and bangs as it ascends.  I feel the tail buck out and imagine sideways momentum.  It is a conscious mantra that turbulence doesn’t bring down me nor planes. This is just some obstruction, one you can’t see but you feel just like so many others.  This is just a distraction, some perspective on home.  This is just an interlude, not riff or refrain. Problems solved prove to be only little inconveniences.  I thought he’d die young but already it’s too late it’s too late it’s too late.
 

Good Friday

Resurrection may be coming but today I’m just plain dead.  I’m dead, deader than dirt which harbors something or can cultivate it; deader than stones which have some hope of migration.  No, today I’m just as dead as Death, and resuscitation seems impossible.

What killed me I wonder?  What got me in the end?  So many little things, what I built, what I turned into -  today, I am not merely dead but Death itself, touching beautiful things and watching them wither.  Today I am not hope but conclusion, taking things into my own hands and seeing that there is an end to it.

I remember standing at the airport and all the flights were booked.  That’s how we ended up there.  But that takes place in the future, I mean the past.  Today is a different anniversary, of trials and bitchy girls and trying so hard to get it done but having so little left to work with.
  
Meanwhile, yesterday I felt it, that tentative touch of green with things not so much starting as starting up.  And today it may be cold again and damp and white and all those things; the walk be slick and dangerous even but yesterday I felt it and truth is the next breath is inevitable.    
 

History (Abr.)

I’ve been a stone you stepped on to cross the river.  I kept you dry.¹  I’ve been the ant you stepped on just for fun.²  You focus on me with that magnifying glass³ and of course I’m going to get burned.⁴  I’ve been your mother when you needed a few bucks or something new⁵ and I was your father when you needed someone to feel proud.<sup>6

1</sup>So that makes you mighty and

²that makes you cruel. And  

³that makes you curious and

⁴that leaves me hurting and

⁵that means I love you and

⁶that’s why I let you go.
 

One Old Man Walking

He looked like a boulder on twigs and he moved like that too, like those twig legs required perfect balance to hold up that weight.  But he looked so damn happy walking along like that, meeting someone perhaps, going somewhere.  He looked so damn happy that I found myself wishing for my own twig legs, my own boulder frame.  Or to be in a place or state that allows me to forget my physicality entirely except to smile.  
 

Palm Beach Gardens

The sea turns us into a child.  The man tumbles in the surf, he let’s it push him down.  He digs in the water, runs up past me:  “Shells!” he shouts.  “The wife and kids are going to be jealous!”  I figure the wife and kids are up north somewhere.  The Florida locals think it’s too cold to get in, but he doesn’t.  I don’t.  We are a child, shouting like that and fearless.
  
The sun turns my skin to an ocean, pulling it like tides.  The heat lifts my flesh and waves move across my body.  Behind me somewhere country western is playing, I hear it pleading with me Just Remember.  I’d expect to melt down into this chaise but I’m melting upward instead, evaporating, accumulating, turning into clouds.  As clouds I block the sun and rain back into my chair.  Behind me somewhere he cheats and feels remorse.  Behind me somewhere she is tempted.
  
The grass turns the air to a story.  I sniff and read about growing things, and water resurrected.
  
My brother turns me to a sister.  I sneak a cigarette at night and whisper late into the phone.  The night turns me into a child, calling home.    
 

Plane Trip #70

The gate agent was telling people to hurry up, not block anyone.  She couldn’t take a delay for this:  “I don’t want you to give me delay.”  She even came onto the plane, slamming bins, ordering the checking of things, but we passengers were calm and united.  We did some rearranging, it worked out fine and we even shared a laugh.  She didn’t get us out in time.  

The old couple I followed onto the plane fell prey to The Gate Keeper.  They handed over their tickets and were reprimanded:  “I already called the Exit Row.  Where were you didn’t you hear me?”  The Gate Keeper was parent, principal, obnoxious.  Contagious:  I follow the old couple down the jet way and I listen:  “I told you they called us!  Now look!”

The three hour flight was late getting in of course.  I get off the plane and again I’m behind the old couple.  They’re still fighting about it:  “Next time, you listen!”  “That will never happen, you never give me the chance!” - And on, and on and on they went, jabbing not the gate agent, who deserved it, but each other.  Who, it seems, deserved it too and will get it for the rest of their life.  
 

Yeah, Maybe

He can keep your secret cause he has some himself.  Cigarettes, business deals – he has an attorney he can call.  These things make him vulnerable, and that makes him gentle, or maybe he’s always been gentle but it’s not something you’d guess, even knowing so.  I mean, he has an attorney, and he’s a big man, strong.  

Meanwhile, I’m grateful just to spend an hour or two him, like petting a wild animal though I don’t know if he was ever wild, or for that matter if he’s tame.  But he’s gentle, like a deer, so wild or not he doesn’t scare me and it’s great you know just to get close.  I pretend that I smoke so he doesn’t do it alone, and I turn my face away so he won’t see me gagging.  But he can keep your secret, even the ones you don’t tell him.  

His wife calls and he snuffs his out before he lifts the phone.  I look up as if ears are eyes, directional; I look away so it doesn’t seem like I’m listening.  There is comfort in this when of course I can hear him and of course he has to know this; there are appearances to be kept up, even if it’s disappearing.  He’s got something I need but he’s not writing a check and I don’t ask.  He’s got something I want, and if the wife hadn’t called I like to think he might have given it to me.  

After the call, he smoothes his lapel and sniffs his fingers.  It’s a casual gesture but I take it as a cue; I stand to leave.  He raises his eyebrows just a little bit a pinch, sees that I’m ready now to go.  He puts he big palms on the desk and lifts himself.  He says, “Thanks for coming by,” but somehow I hear, “See you later.” So he says, “Thanks for coming by,” and I tell him, “Yeah, maybe.”  
 

Propositions (Abr.)

I.

He was about a hundred years old and of course he caught my eye, dapper in his wheelchair and sitting at the top of the stands.  There was something else about him too, people would stop, shake his hand.  The guy in front of me says They used to call him Double Duty.  I can’t remember why.  

So of course he caught my eye, and his eye catches mine and he calls me over.  I guess he doesn’t see so well; he pulls me in tight.  He was about a hundred years old and he squeezes my thigh and whispers Baby what are you doing later?

II.

They clinched that night so everyone was wasted.  I mean, it was a celebration.  He weaves into the elevator with me and says Can I come to your room?  I laugh and say no but it’s so innocent I smile.  The door opens to my floor and he adds this:  Please.

I tell my friend later who is admittedly excited about a hero seeming so desperate and a regular woman shooting him down.  

III.

I was in town for the series and homeless men gather in the square or pan handle on my route to the ballpark.  I gave him a couple of bucks and he walks up beside me and says to me Baby let’s do something together.  

I kept getting hit on by homeless guys.  

IV.

Another elevator, I was younger then.  He was too and I didn’t know his name.  It’s his first day up in truth and I’m not sure if he’s feeling good or if it’s some kind of dare but he follows me into the elevator and says Want some company?  Rookie; I shot him down quick and he asked me too quickly, doomed now to ride ten floors with me looking pretty smug.  What I really wanted to know was does that ever work?  I’m not sure if I asked him; I think I might have and smug as I may have seemed in truth I was feeling somehow diminished and what I wanted most of all was the hell off of that ride.

For years after that I could look him in the eye and he’d look down.  For years after that I’d look him in the eye just to see that happen.  
 

Birthday #41


Personally, I liked the hotel.  It was old, I could feel it.  Victorian is the nice word for old, it was that too.  And it was strange, I’ll give you that, and a strange choice for a business trip sure the pillow was lumpy and all that but shit you have one.  Downtown, lots of folks here don’t.  Does warm weather lure Homeless men like Nothern birds, or does it merely expose them?  Bare branches this kind of climate.  In any case, they lock the lobby door at night.  

It started out bad.  

Leaving before sunrise and the night clerk is crazy.  She’s looking to pick a fight over things like valet checks or opening that door.  She tells me There are predators outside waiting for a victim.  So when this man comes up to the woman outside, a woman leaving, I open the door again to check on her.  

She’s calm about it, the woman leaving, she even touches the crazy man who’s standing too close really but Crazy he’s forgiven, she’s gentle and I respect her for that.  He’s saying I’m a gentleman I’m a gentleman I’m a gentleman.  I can’t tell you it wasn’t my intention to become involved.  Someone fainted on the plane on the flight out, I couldn’t help then so there’s this leftover mission.  I check on the woman who’s leaving, the kind one.  And calm.  She’s more calm than me when he pushes the door and stands in my space:  I’m a gentleman I’m a gentleman I’m a gentleman.  

Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between mercy and ignorance.  How do I know this crazy man is safe?  He’s not peaceful.  That’s what I should have given him.  

But the crazy clerk comes over and she’s huge and in his face and his mantra gets faster and louder but doesn’t otherwise change and I’m wondering about the strength of crazy men and what it takes to pull one down.  I back off and call the cops because clearly things are escalating but it’s over before I’m taken off hold so I hang up I’m thinking Shit I just want out of this lobby and this town.  

It gets better after that.  There’s a cake, and flowers, and a card from folks who are more or less strangers but you know the rules are different for strangers, so the effort alone is a gift.  

And I’m wondering now which part of the day I’ll best remember; which sense of it will endure because there just isn’t room in me for both versions.  
 

The Fountain

I meant to make something so beautiful that I would compel you and you’d feel me and you’d call me I would answer. But look, look what I’m stuck with, what I’m left with, what you left behind as you’ve forgotten me or maybe just let it lapse but know that I have not let go of you even when I might have wanted this. I am too old now to miss you I am too old now and doomed to long to miss seeks some reunion still and I’m too wise to think of that. So longing is how miss evolved I long for when you might be missed for hope of some reunion there are scars from wounds we can’t remember getting there are places where the scars should be but aren’t now we didn’t get away with much did we? We’d dream back then and swear that one another’s death would be felt not torturous but we were attached then you and I and swore we’d know. And then this we let each other die away and even my dearest lover can’t feel it when I stub my toe oh yes we were dreamers but then isn’t that being in love?  We stopped dreaming we stopped calling because even nightmares are compelling it’s when it turned to nothing I was already reflecting as in remembering as if there were no future I was right. It is night and I am here remembering and trying to make something beautiful so you might be compelled to call me you will feel me I would answer. Isn’t that what hope is after all but that isn’t what I call this because even then in the most romantic part I can’t separate your want from need and isn’t that what use is after all?  But I am too old to remember the grief and too old to remember why you stopped loving me or rather calling me or I you. So now I try to make something so beautiful that I would compel you to remember that you loved or rather called me then it meant something it meant something it means that I was useful once and that’s something I meant, or not. But after all this time I am still young enough to think that I could make something so damn beautiful that at least you would remember why you used to think that I could make something so damn beautiful that at least you would consider it. And isn’t that what youth is after all?
            

Loveless

I survived the gang rape that killed my sister, in our room there was more than one of them but I can’t tell you how many for that hairy ass on my face nearly smothering me very nearly and he got scared I guess and shit me and I got septic shock but my sister they just plain fucked the life out of. It was such a long time ago now but I dream it like yesterday and I swore off men and I haven’t touched one since, nor one me.

But it was group of women who held me down and shoved something up inside of me that broke me in a way I can’t be fixed. There were seven of them they called me uppity and thought I meant to steal their men. If only they knew, if only I had killed each of them, slowly, after some humiliation. I swore off women after that and I have lived in isolation, or mostly isolation since complete is fairly impossible but I’ve never met a soul I trust since that night eight years ago. Or rather, afternoon.

They said her skull was too narrow for her brain and that’s why these things happen. My dog turned on me. She nearly tore my face right off but that didn’t make it any easier to scrape and claw and twist her neck. I cried the whole time and weeks after too. They said her skull was too narrow but maybe I’m just hateful. So I turned to god.

And I prayed and hoped and I let that man love me and his son save me and Mary heal me. I poured myself into my savior in the hopes of coming clean. In the hopes of being saved, or even just spared. Spared any more of this.

But then god turned on me. The cancer could have stripped my female parts I’ve no use for them anyway, and they’re broken. Could have plundered my face who’d notice with all these scars?  Could have attacked my heart which I know can’t be repaired and which god may kiss to heal and I would bleed my sins like Jesus oh but no the cancer went and ate my bones. Ate my bones, is eating them, and it hurts more than the tongues I speak in can describe and it hurts more than rope around my ankles or my wrists and more than a bottle stuffed up my crack then broken. It hurts more than the sound of my dog’s cracking neck and worse than it felt to realize I’m lucky to suffer and worse than it felt to learn I get what I deserve. It feels worse because it’s not a notion it’s a flavor like choking on sulfur and begging for mercy but knowing that you came to god too late and ugly and broken and that even he and his mother couldn’t love you any less.
 

Minneapolis #110

A friend phoned today for the specific purpose of expressing and thus sharing elation. She was driving through the desert some 250 miles outside of Los Angeles, her childhood written in landscape. I knew what she meant by this or maybe I just knew what this meant to me.

The tears I cried were for various reasons.

Driving down the road tonight I saw a wooden cross on the shoulder of 50th Street. It read:  Georgie Dog. I knew what was felt or maybe I just knew how this felt to me. The tears I cried were for various reasons.  

It’s cold now, the wind brought it in after crashing against the walls like so many sets of giant waves. Like waves it brings an undertow.  Tomorrow I will buy flowers and will set them at a cross on 50th Street, trying to keep myself and whomever else afloat.
 

Minneapolis #109

It’s nearly four in the morning and too warm for December. The lake is wet some blocks away I convince myself I feel it. Mammals this lake does not house come up and gulp of air, grateful for it. The creek is wet some yards away I convince myself I taste it. Fish this waterway does not host leap celebrating its yielding surface.

It’s nearly four in the morning and Sheets call my name. They say Come recline in fibers here and know the continent from which we hail. Come roll in that which we surround and feel the geese who once donned very these feathers. Share with these long dead birds that sense of December water still flowing like the blood they spilled for your pleasure.

I tell Sheets and the geese:  I don’t know if I’m ready.

Ice will arrive soon enough and then water again. You think of time too presently, what you know or do not will return. What you worship now you’d curse in June. Come to sleep, silly girl, it’s four in the morning.

I surrender to the sheets and turn myself to wind, restless like that. I ask Sheets Who made you?  Who picked you?  How many fingers touched you before my own?  You have a history that I will never know. You have lineage and a past.

(Nothing is melting because nothing has yet frozen. Nothing has happened since nothing has been done. I can wait and wait for it to come to me...)  

And who’s past might you know, who’s past might you ever know?

I can wake up tomorrow and go after it.
 

December 7

It feels not like spring or fall but straight up like summer. I stand on the deck out back and yes I am wearing a sweater but it’s not the attire so much as the action, standing out here, outside, with back door cracked so I hear the music from the living room. But it’s winter and the air is tighter I hear music and not neighbors but the sounds of the expressway more than a mile away. It’s night time so there is no length of day and it could be ten or it could be midnight as it is and were the light up I’d know more certainly the flowers are dead and branches plucked it’s really fat squirrels that are the true give away not skinny like the spring and the bird feeders busy still and I’d watch them if the light were up. But it’s midnight is that my breath I see or smoke?  It feels straight up like summer not the air or green but the action and you wonder why I let it go and I’ll tell you that yes he is my enemy yes but I know him and his truth so I am doomed to pity him. For that reason alone I had to.
 

Near Disasters

I was in a fire.

My nursery school was held in an old wooden church building with swings and a slide in the yard. It was autumn, fallen leaves. The upper floor, probably just the second one, I was drawing a turkey by tracing my hand. I was specifically proud of this one. I'm not sure if I remember the smoke but I do the urging and I didn't want to leave. Second to the last one, being urged again and still down the wooden spiral stairs.

We're marched through the exit door, the building now a bonfire a triangle just like that all aflame. Swings in front, empty. Fallen leaves. A hand grabs the back of my coat, not my coat, a coat loaned from somewhere and too big, he grabs it like a scruff of neck his boots all big and rubber and his coat and he lifts me over the chain link fence. An uncle who happened to be driving by, he picked me up and took me home.

I was in a flood.

College job at a greasy spoon in a mountain tourist town, the dreaded early morning shift when no one comes or tips. The sun was shining. A man comes in, he's shouting:  "The Dam broke!  Run!"  We just stared. He moved on.

Next comes a police car. The police car turns things serious. Dreaded early morning shift there's hardly anyone around. Two customers, they pay and leave. Me and the cook standing out front when water comes trickling down the street.

It starts like that:  A trickle. Like someone up the road is washing a car. But quick the water gets broader and then sticks come washing down and for just a moment I panic wondering if there's time to move my car, my favorite thing at the time and parked there on the street. I move it.

I drive up the hill behind Main Street and from just above my workplace I watch it go down. The water turns to herds of Buffalo, big and brown and furious. It trashes everything, buries it all, I was glad I moved my car and wondering if I should be terrified. I mean, I wasn't watching a movie. Six or seven people died, I saw one bob by or just the sleeping bag they never knew what hit them nor me precisely what I saw.

I was in a hurricane.

We lived in Florida then I was still a little girl. My mom was drunk and didn't care but I hid in the closet. Or maybe I wasn't hiding because in truth I really liked it in there. I listened to the storm. I saw the after: Swimming pools filled with branches and baby coconuts which sink and frogs that died and clog the pool drains.

I was in an accident.

It was a tough left and I never saw it coming. I didn't think to be as concerned about myself as I was the car, or the date I had later that night and how I was going to get to it. I stood there shaking and wondering what it takes to get a rental and I didn't put it together the next day when I couldn't turn my neck.

I was in an accident.

The horse spooked and reared up and fell over onto me. I was lucid through the experience I still taste every moment I was thinking was considering how I thought such a thing would kill you. I grab the hoof and turn my head and don't even mind the hair the hoof pulls out since I am lucid and I know that it could have crushed my head.

I was in an accident.

I was on a ladder and the ladder broke. It was a rickety thing and the rung popped out and my leg got caught and my knee bent back and I nearly kicked myself in the face with my own tangled foot. But I just kept about things, and later when I fainted and my leg was all swollen up someone asked me what had happened and I swear I couldn't remember.

I was in a movie.

It was just a bit part, and even small as it was and wordless too there was something in my acting. I came off false and looked ridiculous. My friend said: There's too much of you in there.

I was in California. Mexico. Switzerland.

I was in love.
 

Mr. Shitty #2

Mr. Shitty wants to know if I make love or fuck. He’d be funny if it weren’t for his swollen red hands. He’d be funny if he were novel but he isn’t. Mr. Shitty just might have me thrown out. He could do this -  

We’re in a booth and the tabletop is pushed too close to my side. I sit there speechless leaving him to wonder if only for a second whether he’s thinking or talking out loud. I take his confusion in my mouth and suck it hard like candy. When it turns to something else I spit it out onto the floor. He’d be funny if his puffy fingers burst like boiled hotdogs. I’d squeeze out of this booth and leave him there to bleed.

I knew Mr. Shitty when he was a boy. He kept telling me I wanted something that I really didn’t and even though I told him this he gave it to me anyway.   
 

Minneapolis #108

It was snowing when I woke up the classic kind heavy and slow like a globe so enchanting I was lost lost inside the clusters for a time I forgot about the charming neighbor who chatted me up for awhile because after all he wanted to store a car in my garage. And if you keep you eyes upon them it’s like dancing though not spinning still it’s dancing or maybe the way that dancing makes you feel if you’re happy to be doing it I guess it really doesn’t look like dancing much at all. And if you keep your eyes upon them you forget about the strangers fully six of them who called because they wanted something from you you can’t help yourself you help them and there’s just that in return. But does any of that matter when you didn’t hear the forecast so the flakes not only classic ones they’re also a surprise and sure it snowed a little last week too but that looked more like shaving cream and didn’t cover grass blades up that poked on through like whiskers no this snow is what’s imagined when you say It’s snowing here. You forget about your errands or the things you need to do or worse the things you need to finish because almost isn’t done. And you wonder what it tastes like if the snowflakes are some antidote from errands chores and neighbors close your eyes and open mouth. But still beneath the covers you’re just watching through the window and that adds in to the snow globe thing you want to taste and feel them hey maybe it can cure you though you’re not sure what you’re sick of so you dress it takes an hour and you don’t know where that time went now the zenith is still white grey pale horizon has turned blue. And suddenly the flakes are gone the flakes are finished falling and it happened as you stood there yes indeed there was a moment and sure the flakes were smaller then but still you saw it ending then and still you it ending then and still you saw it gone. You’ve done this with the pendulum you’ve seen it stop its swinging just in time to wind the clock again without missing a minute and you hear the tocks the flakes have stopped while you just stood there watching it can happen to the weather it can happen to the neighbors I wonder what it tasted like when it was in the air.  
 

Minneapolis #107

I have a squirrel feeder out back a wooden box with a window and a little flap of lid over the top and most squirrels just throw the top back and feast but this one is demure. This squirrel is downright delicate and it takes the corn out a kernel at a time and closes the lid each time as politely as lady sneaking olive pits into a spoon. I’m watching and it continues on like this never hurried or impatient or reckless or rude or even messy no this squirrel is tidy, look at it, perched there like it’s modeling for a postage stamp and careful even graceful, graceful yes none of the other squirrels are this way. And I’m thinking to myself that if I were a squirrel I could not manage to linger in this opportunity no I couldn’t be that comfortable and certainly not that dainty hell I’m not that dainty as a human nor as comfortable nor patient so as a squirrel please I could never be that, well, pretty sitting there like that so it occurs to me then that this squirrel makes, as a squirrel, a better squirrel than I would as a squirrel which leads me to thinking what kind of person that squirrel might be so poised and sure and pretty and who the hell does that squirrel think it is does it think it’s better than the other squirrels arrogant little bastard thinks it’s better than me it’s better than me a squirrel, a squirrel!  All still and calm and graceful-like and shit I may not be so poised and pretty no but whose yard is it you’re sitting in bitch it’s my yard, this is my house that’s my corn I put in that feeder with my money and my thumbs you ungrateful little bastard. And being bigger than a squirrel I chase that bastard away.
 

Cold Front

It’s cold and crisp and clear and dry. He wants something he doesn’t have. She has something she doesn’t want. He is trying to decide what sweater to wear. He doesn’t want to do the work. She dreamt last night of taping empty boxes shut; she tells him this. He pictures her dream and is intrigued by the boxes, light as a feather, containing a treasure. In his mind’s eye, he looks for a blade with which to open them. She is standing in front of a closet, the door is open.

She needs to choose.  
 

Cleveland #6

After all these years of wishing to be invisible you’d think I’d feel okay when it finally came to pass. But no, I view my seeming invisibility with the same sort of distress that I had previously viewed attention:  The impetus is negative and I am somehow inadequate. So while the ability to move through does have certain perks attached, I feel the lack of notice like a sort of put-down. Used to be that I’d meet a glance and reflexively swipe across my nose it must be running cast my own eyes down. Now I look up and into and search and it’s like I haven’t any face at all.

I thought there’d be some comfort in that.

I’m not sure when I turned from a Miss to a Ma’am. I dine at a favorite restaurant where they used to call me “Princessa” and now cannot remember me from the day before. I think I’d gone three full days without really talking to anyone at all. This is where I am.

Where he is, I remember him. He tends bar at the Marriott. The context is consistent, and he has become some frame of reference here, a face I see in

Cleveland. This is where I am:  A hotel bar in Cleveland. And given what I told you about where I have been, can you imagine how it feels to be remembered?  

Simply recognized. It had been fourteen months. And it doesn’t feel like a parlor trick and it feels like only yesterday and he asks me today about the project from those months ago and yes, it’s still in progress.

And I wonder if he saw me somewhere else would he place me?  No. He is the bartender I recognize and I am the lady in the bar. And they used to call me Princess and you used to call me Miss and subtle bold invisible it doesn’t matter how you see it because there’s one single way that I do.
 

Mr. Shitty

I have a name for him. He the tassel shoed man beside me on the plane, or behind me in a line. He is any of them, all of them. I call him Mr. Shitty. Mr. Shitty is indignant. He is indignant because you should know who he is and what he is responsible for. He can make or break you, beware. He expects you not to cheer at sporting events, nor express political views unless they are the same as his.

Mr. Shitty is inconvenienced. He is inconvenienced because you are in his way. You are in front of him, or behind him making noise. You have taken the seat that he in his position is entitled to. Mr. Shitty voices his disapproval by waving a hand and making you disappear. If he wants something from you he snap his fingers. It is in your best interest to listen up.

This Mr. Shitty pushes his way in front of me. I ask him if they are boarding and he says:  Don’t worry. I doubt they’ll leave without you. I follow him onto the airplane.
    
The stewardess flirts with Mr. Shitty. She laughs when she’s supposed to and touches his arm. All their arms. I want to push a dollar into her cleveage. She is working and I respect this and there should be some reward other than mere relief but then that’s something a collection of dollars can’t buy.
    
That Mr. Shitty is talking about women. His voice is loud and it booms from the table behind mine at the outdoor café where I am dining alone. He tells his companion how he nearly left his wife and children over the sex. His voice is loud and in this sense he is telling everyone:  I don’t understand a guy being that ‘in love’. Not even wanting to look at these things? and he gestures toward a pair of women walking down the street. Every once in while, there is relief from his booming monolog when he pauses, telling his companion Get a load of that thing. He once had a female friend, he says. They’d go to breakfast, or the theater. She was truly interesting. But in the end, getting laid is a lot more interesting.
    
Mr. Shitty used to hate me. He hated me until he realized that others didn’t so there might be something to gain from me though he can’t imagine what it could be. He pats my shoulder, or worse, the top of my head. I should pant and take his newspaper in my mouth and chew it up into little pieces.
    
Mr. Shitty was a boy once and I knew him then. He said You could be pretty if you’d just put a little make-up on but that didn’t really seem to matter to him when he was drunk. He’d throw his arm across my shoulder, or worse.  
 

Minneapolis #104

I saw what I believe to be the last moth of the season. It attached itself to my bedroom window, and I wonder if it knows. There are flowers on the vine still but berries on the trees and the pattern of their consumption by birds tells me the fruit near the end of a branch is sweetest. One could be fooled:  The coolness in the air feels as if breeze has touched spring’s lingering snow piles. But there is no snow yet, and there are flowers on the vine. And the events of the past week weigh on me it is autumn, the weight of the week assures me yes, it is fall, and I will know spring not by the nature of familiar coolness in the air nor the absence of this weight so much as a shift in it, from burden to memory.

Minneapolis #103

I’m worried he resents me for loving him too much. He doesn’t say this of course, I see it in his eyes. Not always, but sometimes. He might feel trapped by how I love him, how it keeps him my prisoner especially when I refuse to let him leave. The look in his eyes, I kiss him over and over but I fear he merely submits. And now, curled up beside me, I want him to know. I want him to know how much I love him, and I want him not to resent me for it.  

I wonder what it feels like, being loved like that.
 

Minneapolis #99

On the bus ride there I noticed this little boy looked just like a friend who had died. I knew what Chris was going to say before he said it, his friend really and the boy looked just like him. JUST like him. Moved that way too. The boy was thrilled, the bus to the Fair, and we could couldn’t help but stare at him, he impetus for small memories, for nearness. For hope, Chris says It is him, and he has another chance.

Chances: A lamb hours old, and the right to touch it. A calf minutes old, tiny hooves on the earth for the first time, womb to bedding, wobbly legs, a miracle, the act, our timing.  

Rain.

West: A fiery sunset.

South: A rainbow. I wish there were another word for it. I had to point it out to him.

It was a perfect day
(they all are).  

It was a lovely day
(I woke up).  

Wait: I saw things and did things today that made me feel
(happy).
 

Minneapolis #95

It is White Sky Season. Late summer and all this water in the air. Not gray like pending rain, not blue like I think it should be. The sky is white. Not white like clouds, clouds consume the shadows; white skies make them. The sky is white, there are shadows, it’s a season, it’s a pattern. It will leave and it will come again. The sunrise is yellow, not orange or gold. White sky season sees the yellow sunrise sky, the light feeling like something lunar, like the light of an eclipse. Yellow sunset tricks you into thinking weather is coming in. Yellow sky sunset makes you think of a tornado, the light just before or after it, even if you’ve never seen one. White Sky Season skies are not the cloudy skies of Autumn. These late summer skies take the color away, depleting it, setting up the pending Autumn to seem that much more spectacular. There is water in the air and it turns the sky to white. It is flat like paper and there are no clouds nor tool great enough to draw upon it. There is not much to draw from it, rain is not born here this is camouflage, like a fawn or a bug. It is not what you think it is it is not what it appears to be except white, there’s truth in that.  

I know a man like the white sky, deceitful. I know a woman like the white sky, recurring.  I know a child like the white sky, hiding.  I know the white sky like a neighbor, lingering.  I know the white sky like a mirror, some let down.  I know the season as a season, to be relied upon and there is some value in that even where love is absent.  
 

Minneapolis #94

Don’t give me that. Don’t give me that you’re the one that wanted to come back here. You’re the who wanted...

What are you giving me that for? I don’t want it. Why do you have to bring that here, now. Get rid of it. I don’t want to look at it. Don’t look at me like that. This was your idea. What do you want me to do about it now? I hate when you look at me that way.  

Come here. Come here. Please. Please just come here. Come here. Come here, please you know I love you. Come here. Come here.

Ah, then fuck you then.  
 

Plane Trip #69

The light on the asphalt when I was coming in and there was no moon and there were no stars and it was hard to remember there was no snow, it wasn’t a salty lot in frigid air, but summer. Hard to remember.  

There were crystals on the window, ice. Dim light struck them and they sparkled. Ice looked like spider webs, starlight like sun.  

We all got lucky I guess. I needed a cab. I had to go back to the hotel for my bags. I had to make it to the airport. No cabs but the one he jumped in. I watched, and waved despite myself and the situation. Cab pulls over anyway, asks where I’m going and him if he’ll share. He said yes.  

I paid his trip in full; it was along the way. Taxi waits while I run inside, takes me on to the airport. And me so grateful, small graces avenge small gloom safe and timely and fortunate and knowing it and now, this.
 

July 2

I ride my bike and barely bother to pedal it. I just coast. It’s a holiday weekend and the city is nearly abandoned. As others depart, I just
remain and the place changes, different things pronounced.  

Like the conversational tones of two kayakers tooling down the creek, barely bothering to paddle. I heard them from so far away. We exchange greetings as they pass me in something like a whisper.  

And that shabby little house, I could say I’ve never seen it before but in fact I just never noticed. Two blocks down and one over a woman is walking a husky. The woman is very old, and a husky seems like such a young person’s dog. I feel too conspicuous to follow her.

Occasionally a bottle rocket crackles, and a little boy squeals, or a man. You should have seen him jumping up and down, that kind of joy from a boy of say seven as his teenage brother lights fireworks in the yard. His mother sends to me a smile that feels like an apology. Maybe she is sorry for the recklessness of her sons. Maybe she is sorry for our age and our gender, caution rather than glee even if we don’t act on it.  

There is a neighborhood dog that is my favorite, oversized head and seemingly sawed off at the knees. This dog is always running, its legs so short stiff but it’s never moving faster than the dull man or dull woman who walks it, walking slowly, made interesting to me only by this unexpected choice. I don’t know where the dog lives, but I always feel like I’m looking for it.  

Today would have been my father’s birthday. Or maybe it still is.   
 

Outside of Orlando

I thought the little town was so quaint. Until:

1. The woman in the antique store ripped me off.

2. I learned that “Moon Cricket” was a racist term after leaving the Moon Cricket Café.

3. The local history museum filled its storefront window with a collection of minstrel-inspired packaging labels.  

I thought the little town was so quaint.  Until:  1, 2, 3.


How to Tell It’s Over #2

1. You used to look at their photograph and swoon.

2. You look at their photograph and cringe and wonder what it was you ever saw there.

3. Their photograph triggers something more like nothing.

4. It takes a moment – the slightest wisp of a single second – to remember who they are at all.

5. Things become sentimental and void of any real emotion.

6. There’s a weird faraway pride, like hearing someone from your old high school just won the Nobel Prize.

7. The fantasizing stops too.

8. Or, the fantasizing changes, from something sexual/romantic to something almost vengeful.

9. You have visions of acknowledgment that you were right and they were wrong.

10. You have visions of acknowledgment that they lost the best thing that ever happened to them.

11. They say it’s over, and you believe them.

12. You say it’s over, and don’t care whether they believe you or not.

13. What was it we were discussing here?

14. Oh, then yes, definitely.

15. It’s done.
 

Minneapolis #83

I don’t know if that thing is going to budge at this point. You let it go too long. You shouldn’t have. Now look at it. What a mess. Maybe if you help me, maybe if we both try. We can push – be careful.  It’s slippery too, don’t want to get hurt. Wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself. Man, that thing is rigid. It’s going to be tough.  

I think it might have been sitting too long. I don’t know if you can fix it. Rust makes things fragile, so are we. It is sinking into the mud and now it’s stuck. I don’t know that you can pull it out again. I hope that mud is deep enough that you don’t have to look at it sitting there. I hate rust, the way it feels and sounds. I just want that thing out of here.  

Maybe if we both try, maybe if we both push. But be careful, it’s heavy. Brace yourself or it will break your back.  

Man, it might just be finished. It really might be. I mean, I am not convinced you can do anything with it at this point. Maybe if we go slower. Maybe if we go faster. I just don’t know what to tell you. It’s really bogged down, I’m serious here.  

Maybe you can make something out of it. Maybe you can turn it into something. There’re parts. Maybe you can use them.

Guess you can just leave it. I mean, doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. Just let it sit. Maybe something will give, or dry up. Maybe someone will give you a hand. I don’t think you can do this by yourself and I’m in no position to help you.  

I mean, you can try. I’m just not convinced. Look at it. It’s a mess. How long did you leave it go?  

Maybe if we both push.

Maybe if we both try.  

Do you think we can fix it?  

I don’t know if we can fix it.  


 

Minneapolis #78

Is it that you’ve taken something away from me? Or that you allowed me to have it for a little while?

---

This house holds a secret, I can tell. I ask it nicely. I stroke it with a broom. It utters only this: I am not haunted, but you are.  

The broom says: How lucky you are! Your imaginary friend has come to life. How lucky you are with a chance to know someone you’ve always dreamed of.

And the floor pipes in: I feel your soul against my wood. I let you be naked before me. This is a gift I offer you. It’s your lucky day.   

I tell them: You make me feel indebted for what I’ve given you; you make me feel indebted for what I let you do to me.

The cigarettes on the table cry: We cannot stop ourselves from tempting you for some reason.

I tell the cigarettes: The very thought of you makes me sick sometimes, but the truth of our interaction makes me light.  If only I could forget this and stop coming back to you. You are terrible for me. Our every engagement kills me afterward. Our every encounter steals seven minutes from the final hours of my life.  

The cigarettes debate: You can see us surrender too. You suck on us like that. You suck and we feel your soul move through us no matter how passive we remain. We pollute you as a way of getting even. We need to harm you to protect ourselves. We feel your soul and your lips and the space between your fingers and we never asked for any of this. There are others we want much more than we want you. Frankly, something for us is missing. You make a lousy wife. You’re too old to bear a child.  

I tell the cigarettes: It is your attachment to traditionalism that precludes me. You take too much for granted, focusing on what is absent instead of the beauty which is there; you focus on what is missing when the blinders of your perfectionism prevent you from seeing what you need is right there next to you. You are filthy but still I love everything that is wrong with you.

And to me, say the cigarettes: Focus on what’s missing? This is just another way that we are like-minded. It is you who wants more than you have. It is you who is unsatisfied. It is you who expects this to be healthy somehow when it can’t be, or at least isn’t.   

Something is missing? Chimes the broom on my behalf. Just the fact that it’s usually there doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Perhaps you are mourning pretense. Perhaps you are mourning dishonesty, or if not the lies themselves, the part of you or her that doesn’t really want to know the entire truth.  
We can embrace that which exists, we can modify it sometimes.  We can reject that which exists, we can even deny it sometimes. And we can hold onto our fantasies forever, our plans, our details that preclude possibility in just the way that you are precluding her.

Such an outburst from a broom humbles a cigarette, but still their magic exists and I am drawn. I am searching for a match when Cigarettes tell me: You have no choice. Destiny has accounted for your free will already.  

The house says: I am not haunted, but you are.  

---

I am on my knees, where my shins crave wood but merciful rugs sit still and keep quiet. I am on my knees and the heels of my hands trying not to think of just yesterday here or Kansas now at seventy miles an hour. I clear my throat so that there’s no mistake in what House or Broom or Tobacco might be hearing. I tell House and Broom and Cigarette and Floor: I can change you or leave you empty. I can burn you down or walk away. I can fuck or die inside of you. I can replace you, I can flood you. I can end this, now. I know you’ve heard this all before, but this time I am serious. Ask yourself what you expect me to put up with. Ask yourself if you are better for my having been there. Ask for my forgiveness when you find I am still here, waiting for you , loving you despite your follies. Do not make a single sound. I will interpret your silence to mean exactly what I need it to, and you should be thankful for this.

Tell me: Is that you’ve taken something away from me? Or that you allowed me to have it for a little while?  

And: When might I have it back again?

Minneapolis #77

The sky is blue, summer blue, without mist. The birds are singing, songbirds, singing like it is summer and all around is the sound of running water. This is the sound of the melting ice and snow. I listen to birdsongs and I listen to surrender but I do not; I tell this day, out loud: You are a goddamn liar.  

You masquerade as Spring but I know better; it is February in Minnesota. You are seeking to mislead me. You do not offer reprise but rather pure deception. You withhold important details that have impact on me. You will only make it worse. Soon all of this will freeze again. I can already hear you laughing at me, holding your sides as I slip and fall on the ice.  

The day just ignores me, but I cannot ignore it. Yes, I’ve been seduced. The snow reminds me of some eyes, the whites of them so flawless and more dazzling than any color. The sky reminds me of some eyes, the water of wet breath and kisses I’ve only yet imagined. The music of living things reminds that the day itself won’t speak to me, and I wonder if this because I’ve offended it, or because I’ve called its bluff.  

And I think if a day could be so dishonest – even if well intended – and if I could be so foolish – even if the myth is joyful; if a Day can be so dishonest and I can be so foolish, then how vulnerable am I really?  

How vulnerable am I really, and what of me and you?     

 

Big Pine Key

I’ve seen it happen: A child walking on a ledge or playing on the monkey bars is told to be careful, then falls, as if the suggestion of failure is enough. Cartoon characters dance on air or float like feathers until they are reminded they are unable to, and then come crashing down.  

I am in the midst of joyful experience. I am floating on air, I am playing at the shore. I am nine years old. And it occurs to me: Be careful. It occurs to me I could come crashing down. It happens just like that.  

So maybe this is how falling feels, maybe this is how danger does. Or maybe this is how it feels to climb down under one’s own power, to step safely back on the ground realizing that flying was a myth, and that the time of belief in its very possibility is all over.   

Death Valley #1

What can I tell you about this hotel, or the two meals at that restaurant? What can I tell you about so much conversation, with him or with myself?  

I can tell you that these rocks never spoke to me, even though I begged them to. I can tell you there was no silence at all for all this noise inside of me, the tortured souls of settlers looking for an easier way and the brays of ten thousand mules worn and beaten into the basalt.  

I can tell you that certain native people knew to stay away, and that avoidance is often a fine technique for making something sacred. And how I long to practice this on you but am unable to.  

Greater Las Vegas #1

There was no food to be found in Death Valley after nine, and I was really hungry. So I drive right on into Vegas. Everything was booked up, the Martin Luther King holiday apparently which, inside my being, sits pretty much diametrically opposed to the city I was in. I wind up in a fancy hotel, an expensive room but not a nice one, like a woman who wears heavy make-up waking up in it the next morning. There is just too much loss in the room, too many intimate things sold out or paid for, too many hopes dashed or hopes that were false and too fragile.  

Something happens, and tired as I am I can’t sleep at all. I walk around, very late or very early, so obviously ill-fitting and maybe even obviously grateful for this. I’m feeling isolated and misplaced. Las Vegas infects me, not like a drug but like a toxin. I’m burning and I want something to open up the skin and suck the feeling out. But it doesn’t happen.  

Leaving Vegas, off to the desert. Here the grief is balanced by nature’s grace, but I am too wound up to find it. So nature, being graceful, finds me.

And the best moment comes as the day itself is ending. He finally stopped talking. And I walk almost far enough away from the car not the hear the music blaring inside it. And I walk far enough away from the car not to have its lights drown out the stars, which come to me like rescue; which shine without gold or intention, and make not so much sound as even a sigh or a heartbeat.  

Minneapolis #74

It feels good to be susceptible after all this time being immune. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fight it.  Something entered me like a virus, and all the drugs in the world won’t cure this. No, relief requires time.  

There is green grass in my backyard as the year turns over in Minnesota. Even the snow has surrendered. Snow, beloved ally, I should follow your lead. But surrender does not come natural to me.  

I try sabotage instead.  

I wear a sweater I do not need, this in the hope of being reminded.This in the hope of being alright.  But my mind’s a blank when it isn’t racing, and though so recently I believed I’d up and left this planet, the universe has shrunken to my city and my room. The scent of Mars is overwhelmed by the weight of a telephone in my hand. The way the surface gave beneath my feet made me faithful then, but now I just wait for a call.  

Relief requires time.  

It’s warm here. Sweater finds purpose, I walk in the thick dark without a coat. I was hoping for an incident, but the warm, wet air is enough. I pander to my vanity: Happy is pretty, unbearable is just that, and I know it.  

I coax myself to lighten up.

***

Magic does not work across this great a distance. You thought it was a spell, but it’s a charm.  I’m prepared to walk away but that’s the one thing I’ll take with me: Happy/pretty, feeling light enough to soar; or just to leap, higher than I’d ever dreamt, free at last however briefly from all of this gravity.  


 

Setting Irrelevant

A friend of mine was sad. Well, not a friend really. This person. This person I know, he was sad. Something  trying had happened - trying, maybe tragic, and yes, there was irony. There always is.

This friend of mine was sad. Wait: Not a friend exactly . This person. This person I know was sad.

This person I know, he had to make a tough decision. And I thought: Whenever we are forced to make a tough decision, it is lesson for us to know to judge others less.

And this person I know, he heard that lesson. He didn't judge me for being completely unable to help him.


 

Baltimore #3

I am in the process of becoming familiar - familiar with, and familiar to.

The former is acceptable in the way that learning always is. It is the latter that is unsettling me. I am fairly addicted to my own anonymity. I fantasize about invisibility - not for what I'd do, but for what I wouldn't have to. Socializing does not come naturally to me, and like dancing, I like it best when I fail to consider that I'm doing it at all.

I discuss God with a stranger in a bar in Baltimore one night. It is the sort of experience that feels amplified - even tiny sounds are starling when borne of seeming silence. I don't know if this moment is charmed, or cursed, or just some sort of slip up.

I forget myself.

Conversation with a different stranger in a bar the subsequent night, I can't tell if the man is just friendly, or if in fact I'm being hit on. I'm ashamed of my suspicion. I'm ashamed of my naiveté. One of these two are correct.

I forget what we talked about.

I consider that joy can in fact become familiar; I consider how comfort surely has. I consider that reality often exceeds my dreams, and unlike dancing, life is best when I am conscious of living it. At least one might hope for some interesting story.

At best one might hope to begin to make a friend.


 

Baltimore #2

My luggage was lost on the way to Baltimore, and by the next morning still hadn't arrived. I get up early, put on the same clothes as yesterday, and see what I can do about things.

I'd never been to Baltimore. I've always wanted to go to Baltimore. And now I am here. I am here, I'll see a ballgame, and better yet a best friend is coming soon to meet me. She'll be in this afternoon. So I'm up early, seeing what can be done.

The drug store opens at eight, so I head there first. I've never walked these streets. I have to keep from skipping. I pick up: Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant and barrettes. My head and armpits seem to be taken care of.

Next I'm off to a downtown shopping mall, seeking underwear, socks and a shirt of some kind. The mall is near the harbor. I've never seen the harbor before.

It starts to rain. I'm walking toward the harbor which I've never seen before, and the mist takes on some form. A shower starts lightly, and I'm feeling utterly romantic, that same sort of romance that is taking a bubble bath alone by candlelight.  I'm smiling. I'm walking in Baltimore rain, my first time. My best friend is coming here and tonight we're going to a baseball game. I'm giddy.

And it starts to pour. The rain is coming down in sheets, I'm smiling and taking it in. I am that steeped in color, the moment and the romance, the anticipation and the glee and wait!  I have no luggage. I'm out here right now because my luggage is lost. I'm full of myself and now soaking wet and wearing the only clothes in my possession. And it's pretty warm outside, or at least it seemed so at first, but now I am soaking wet in the only clothes in my possession on some downtown street corner shivering in front of a downtown mall door, taking in the fact now that the place won't open for nearly an hour.

So I take my ridiculous happy self back to the hotel, where I brush my teeth, blow dry my pants, and laugh out loud at my sopping reflection.


 

Baltimore #1

I've been lucky when it comes to cab drivers. I can still recall a man in Chicago who had lead a life so charmed that I found an excuse to pat his shiny head, hoping his fortune might rub off on me. I remember a man in New Zealand who told me Petra was the most amazing place on this earth, thus reiterating the belief of the charmed man in Chicago.

In Baltimore I met a man who had been a photojournalist in Russia. He articulated poetically about the nature of Art, and I felt a thrill greater than I might have having heard an obscure and favorite song coming through the radio. I resisted the urge to consider, "What is this man doing driving a cab?" because to do so is demeaning to all these amazing men I've encountered; because to do so is demeaning to this man before me now.

But this cab driver does not dismiss this thought, voicing a notion that paints himself as so much less than he is. Because I can see this man is an artist, and I tell him so; because how often is it in this life that another person actually takes you exactly where you want to go? 

Somewhere Outside of St. Louis

Today I found nine four-leaf clovers. Yes nine. Nine real ones. I found the first eight in what felt like an instant. I was enjoying the view and looked down at my feet. There was one, I saw it from standing height. Then another. And another and five more after that over an area of about fifteen yards.

I was thrilled by my discovery. Thrilled by my luck. No one seemed as impressed by this phenomenon as I was. But it didn't matter. I found an old magazine in the van and pressed the wilting clovers between its pages.

A friend walked up then. "I just found eight four leaf clovers!"  And as a friend would, he shared my joy. I asked this friend if he'd seen the view, the meadow near the pond where the clovers had been found. That's what we walked there for this time, together: The View.

Of course we had to look for clovers too. He had a few false alarms but I indeed found one more true. The ninth one. The last one.

I handed it to him.

Minneapolis #55

He was a good boy, but that's not why I miss him.

This isn't why I miss him, either: He was easy. Even his death he made easy on me, the illness sudden and definitive. Sure, I had to take him in.

Someday I'd love for one of them to do it themselves - in their sleep, when they are very very old.

Still, he fell apart in an afternoon and died on the vet's table, that sterile room filled with three weeping people and one dead little dog, cute even then, I wanted to take him home again.

But I left him there, not even asking after his ashes. What I hold from those sixteen years is no match for physical matter. He was good, and he was easy, but that's not why I miss him.

Minneapolis #54

Today in Minnesota it is fully two clicks below the freezing point of water; merely two clicks below the freezing point of water. Tiny pale deep birds with breasts of faded dawn - these small things too know the theory of weather relativity. Little creatures, old dungarees with blushing chest, they dine on last season's blood colored fruit just outside my window.

Small muted blue chased away by larger, lighter ones. Do jays migrate?  I can't recall having seen one recently, nor early. It is early, still February, scarcely past the midpoint. Thirty degrees on the bank's efficient signage, blinking time (early too), blinking temperature, so early.

I am driving with a friend. "All she wants is for me to happy."

"You must be a huge disappointment to her," I reply.


 

Minneapolis #51

What is the nature of a friend?  Tonight I smoke at a bar with a relative stranger, known only in a particular context, this for years. Here real interaction is replaced by sheer endurance; I find there is equivalent value in both the exchange of time and thought, and the fact of survival without either. In this way, a familiar face becomes a dear friend, or, a friend dear enough. I kiss her check in greeting, and again to say goodbye.

Meanwhile, my own life is papered with echoes. I call out in this voice, and it is this voice that comes back to me. I take this sound as proof that you have heard me, too.

Mexico City #3

Today is the vacation day of my working vacation. I should have taken it on the front end. I should have detected my own warning signal when last night I carefully laid out my clothes for the two days subsequent then quite carefully and thoroughly packed absolutely everything else away. My actions are a physical symptom of homesickness. There are other symptoms too: Clock watching, Disassociation, Mild Anticipatory Dread. Inadvertently yet helplessly, I squander my day in the city. Clockwatching: 36 hours to departure. Disassociation: Failure to take in present magnificence. Mild Anticipatory Dread: I am unmotivated despite great reward for small effort.

But still I walk around. I walk around and breathe and try to stay involved, though my greatest involvement is not with my setting, but with my own sense of longing. And I wonder, is longing time squandered?  With it, have I wasted precious time?  I try to engage in the scene, rather than turning it consciously into memory even though I am still there. I mean, still here.

Today I long, tomorrow I travel. Let me take it all with me, this day and this longing. Let me pack it up like a souvenir.

I brought you back appreciation.


 

Hawaii #1

He couldn't quite be mistaken for a beached whale, but surely for something that has crawled out from the sea, or washed upon it. The large, hairy, middle-aged man lie on his back in that spot where the waves have broken and spread upon the shore like down. He curls and wriggles with such innocent joy, a man a dog a child, shoulder and hip heights rising, crashing, arms waving in the air, or flapping in the sand, fleeting angels. His bliss is intoxicating, water, air and sand. Intoxicating as to heighten my own appreciation of it: Of water, of sand, of air.

This man has become my own memory. He has waited his whole life for this moment. I wait for such a moment as well, when I am so oblivious, when I am dog and whale and water.

Minneapolis #36

A homeless man asked me for a light. I handed him my matchbook, told him to keep it. The matches were from The Ivy in Beverly Hills. Perhaps you know the place. Perhaps you are very wealthy, or very famous, in which case you might have been there yourself.

A homeless man asked me for a light. I handed him my matchbook, told him to keep it.


 

Minneapolis #34

The house was yellow, the sun was low, the was tree perfectly placed.

Shadows of the leaves from the varying distances of the branches changed the shadow's focus and texture. In the peak along the roofline sharp outlines of twigs and leaves, crisp black. Then bouquets of deeper gray, then mere dappling - all of these at once, diverse as the air on this last day of summer, too the last day before fall.

But this is not enough to counteract a little spat in the grocery store. So I do not mention it and do not point it out.

We drive home in silence.


 

Colorado #3

My father is not buried in Estes Park, Colorado; he's buried somewhere in New York. But I had his name carved on the stone beside my mother's - the body is not relevant. And neither is a marker. I admit it is a memorial to me every bit as much as my father.

I have come to this grave to spread the ashes of a dog, a dog chosen by my mother and hers for a time, hers and his; then just his, then mine. The dog lived with me for six years, but was never really my own. She was and still is my parents' dog. Even after she had outlived them. Even after she is gone.

The ashes are likely a conglomerate of various sad Minnesota dogs having died a certain day, but I name them for one particular dog as I name a tombstone for my father. None of this is a physical matter.

Or maybe something is, a physical matter. My stomach churns and my tears, so rare, will not listen, will not stop. "It's hard to go back," my friend has warned, "You're different now. You've changed."

And it is hard, it's so hard, harder than I ever imagined. But it's not because I've changed - it's hard because I haven't.

The ash is a heavy package in my hand, weighty and gray and less like ash than like sand. I poke a hole in the bag that contains them. They spill out in a line and I write with it, having just the perfect amount of material inside to complete my drawing of a peace sign. On the grave I draw a peace sign, since peace is what I wish for.

Don't worry Friend, your luck change, will change for the better, it's certain.

Don't worry Friend, your luck will change. But I urge you not to wait for it.


 

Colorado #2

I saw a lot of wildlife on my way up the mountain, mostly elk, so picturesque wading through the rocky river. Surely cliche, and striking in this manner. It's great to see elk, I'm watching them, plenty as I'm driving along. It does occur to me that wildlife is just that, it's wild, it's life, and that it's curious that we, their observers, should apply a hierarchy to nature.

I'm thinking that, in reality, an elk isn't any cooler than a squirrel.

It's just that one is more common than another. This another hierarchy.

I share my train of thought with my girlfriend, a mountain local, who tells me that here, a squirrel is in fact more rare than an elk, and that she personally would be more struck by seeing one, a squirrel. "Elk aren't any cooler," she tells me, "Just bigger."  And she sums it up this way: "People like big."

People like big. I'm thinking about this, and thinking about us, two tiny women in my rental car.

People like big. I add this to my list of unsolvable problems.

Minneapolis #32

Do you know the sound of children in the schoolyard?  This is the sound on the bus that takes us to the Fair. It is the sound of sparrows in the trees before the rain. On the bus is this sound, one octave lower than the schoolyard, two octaves lower than the birds.

Behind me a man is generous with his daughter. He explains the nature of a bus, how it usually pulls up along the curbs, picking people up, dropping people off. "Your grandmother never owned a car," he tells her, "She used to ride the bus downtown everyday."  The bus we ride is a shuttle. The sound is the voice of the this generous man, the sound is the breath of his curious girl. The sound is the thrill of children in a schoolyard. Only, one octave lower.

I did not know that a candy bar could be fried, but I now know people will wait in line to try one. I did not know that the sun could shine so convincingly while the rain could fall down this hard. From my vantage point in the treetops, riding in an open tram car, I really don't mind at all. It is too romantic for me to be concerned with being soaked, or maybe it's romantic because of this. From so high up, I can't hear the rain landing, can barely hear the rain at all. It's just a hiss, then we land and hear the patter, punctuated by the slap of running feet on puddled walkways.

Trees work to hold back the rain until they themselves become saturated. I wonder if a tree most enjoys protecting me, or dumping lumpy water on my head. I give up the tree. Mostly lovers it seems are walking, shoulders back, through the storm. These pairs make eye contact with other ones, celebrating their union of youth at any age. The more timid or chilled now huddle in doorways, merchants located indoors are celebrating their good fortune. The rain ends and more people than before are carrying things, bags of taffy or jerky, or a space-age floor duster peeking florescently above a plastic bag.

Farm kids curl up in the hay of the cattle barn, which smells almost shockingly sweet. I envy how they must have experienced the rain, against the warmth of a docile beast in clean straw. The drumming water on the ancient roof is enemy fire. The comfort here makes them bulletproof.

The sun is down. The lights are on, dim and bright all at once, unlike a ball field and much more like Christmas. The innocence is down too, at least a degree, the romance now fading into something sultry, more like lust. I imagine more salty things are sold now, less sweet. I think of fried candy bars, how they must be both. A clever angle it seems, a flavor to balance night and day. I do not try one.

The bus ride back is a more subdued one. One seat contains two giant stuffed animals, cheap and opulent both. Riding behind the toys is a Winner. I'm a winner too I think, nearly dry now, and full, and just at that point of atmospheric re-entry that allows me to remember where I've parked the car.


 

Minneapolis #27

I was sitting on the stone steps in my backyard when a tiny slug popped out right next to me. I mean, I watched it, caught it in the act. A tiny thing, a half to three-quarters of an inch long, depending on the particular arc of its movement. At first I mistook the slug for a worm, and I was feeling pretty lucky to be witnessing the actual Emergence of a worm - I'd never seen that before. But exposure complete, the contracting/expanding form proved to be just a minute little slug, a snail without a shell. I felt pretty lucky still, having never really seen a slug's travels before, either.

He came out of a crack and then migrated some centimeters across the flagstone. He was rather isolated and seemingly out of context. I saw an ant walk right across him. Twice. Well, maybe it was two different ants, each walking across my friendly slug at two different instances, but I think you know what I mean. I expected the ants to attack the slug, but it didn't happen. The ants just kept going, ignoring it. I wasn't ignoring it. I was fascinated, and, additionally, worried - worried that the slug was too exposed, was naked out there on the rock. When I lost him momentarily underneath a curled up leaf, I got up to find a flat one. I got up and grabbed a flat leaf so that I could move the slug to safer ground, into the mulch along the fence bottom.

It only took a second. Flat leaf in hand, I sat back down in the exact same spot, and moved the curled-up leaf aside. Beneath it was the slug. Dead.

I don't have any real conclusions about the last moments in the life of a slug, except to say they were active moments, were cute in fact, and that death came on, as it always, always does, unexpectedly. At least, it seems, for its witness.

Minneapolis #17

Everyone is complaining about the weather. The sky is gray and breaks no promises, it rains. It is April. The air is soft.

I let the water touch my skin, reminding me how it feels to sweat, sweat some weeks away. The water on my face, my hands, I pretend to sweat. I pretend to have exerted, and with this to have been purified. I pretend.

Were I the sky I'd cry these sad tears, that I could be so lovely and still so unappreciated. Were I the sky I'd cry these happy tears, that one person, even one, should understand my intentions.


 

Minneapolis #16

The sun shone for two days and Thursday's new deep snow has receded from the walk. Dover cliffs reveal greening grass beneath them. Greening grass, a theme here in the North, wet matted grass yes,  but look: See it stretching?  See it stirring, inhaling, blinking its eyes?  Grass not green but greening, some steps toward the color in a color hard to here to describe. It is greening, just as freezing air is warming, warmer today at the precise temperature it was some months ago, or some hours. This same cold air is warmer, this same dead grass is greener, Spring is knocking, demanding the door be opened by whomever holds the key. Spring will not be turned away, it will linger til you answer.

Spring touches me today with premonition fingers, fingers as certain and as real as my own. Spring is imminent today, imminence as real as your shoulder. Grass is greening, snow receding, Spring's premonition fingers.

My premonition fingers, your imminent shoulder, did you feel me there this morning, something like the Spring? 

Cleveland #3 and Cleveland #2

The hotel bar stretched across the hotel lobby in such a way

that when crossing the hotel lobby one was forced to walk through the hotel bar. When I did - both, walked through the lobby thereby walking through the bar - two old men waved to me a way that made me feel like I should know them. They weren't waving per se, they were waving me over. I obliged, two old men with flag pins, red noses, urging me to join them. So I did.

During the next several hours, I learned they were each retired, had each worked in the grocery business, had been friends for fifty years. One had been married for forty-five, the other was widowed, but in love again. They lived nearby, they knew the bartender, another old man, old friend. Turns out each had a daughter I reminded them of. So I was not jealous when they flirted with the waitress.

One of the men was in a wheelchair, he was the one in love again, or rather, "Anew - it's something completely different this time."  The other man kept leaning across the table, brushing my hair out of my eyes.

And for maybe the very first time since his death, a few hours past when I did not miss my father.  

***

A sushi bar is a great place to dine alone, since the nature of the seating makes one inconspicuous, and is perfectly placed for either interaction or comfortable distance, since you're not really looking directly at anyone (except maybe the sushi chef, from whom you're separated by a large glass case), and yet may be physically next to someone, so if you'd like to interact, well, an excuse to do so is as simple as "Can you please pass the soy sauce?"

I ate sushi in Cleveland, not fearing the geography (some friends won't eat seafood in places not adjacent to the sea, but I am of Fed-Ex culture, and thus do not subscribe), and longing for that particular sort of interaction - a greeting for the chef, my back to the rest of the room, eavesdropping continually and, in this case, speaking fairly little. And behold the joy that is Cleveland, since I discovered (after having devoured my meal) that I forgot my wallet at the hotel, and told my waiter I was walking back to get it ("I'll just be ten or fifteen minutes") without any issue at all.

Leaving the restaurant, a homeless man handed me the local homeless newspaper, and sought a donation for same. "I'd love to take the paper," I told him, "But, quite literally, I have no money on me, not a cent. I forgot my wallet at my hotel, I haven't even paid for my meal, I was just walking back to get it. But tell you what?  Will you be here a while, on this block?  Hand me the paper and I'll hit you on my way back." 

"That's nice," he said, "But you can just have the paper."

About thirty feet past the homeless guy, a shiny business man and his happy happy date approached me. The business man said, "Hey, I'll give you a dollar for one cigarette."

"That's no problem," I replied. While digging one out for him, he added, "Well, I'll give you two dollars for two." 

"I'll give you two cigarettes," I said, "But you have to give my two bucks to that man standing there," and I pointed to the homeless guy.

"That's so sweet," the happy date-girl said, "So thoughtful."  And I lit her smoke while the businessman walked over to my homeless friend with my donation, upped a few bucks, I'm sure on her behalf.

When I returned to pay my sushi bill, the homeless man was no where to be seen. I hoped he was off getting something to eat, or drink, or whatever might make him happy.

I was happy myself. I might have been humming when I strolled into the hotel lobby bar… 


 

Cleveland #1

When going to parties alone, or to a bar or a show alone for that matter, I had this tendency to check my watch a lot - to check my watch, look around (an excuse to peruse the room), frown, scowl. No one goes to a party alone. I feigned no difference. I was merely waiting for someone who hadn't arrived - whom in truth I hadn't yet met (and if fact was quite unlikely to), and thus I'd no idea when or if they'd arrive. Yes, I was faking it. I went to a party alone and spent an undue amount of time checking my watch, pretending I was waiting for someone. Because I was brave enough to go to a party alone, but not brave enough to confess to this.

My watch broke a few months ago and I just stopped wearing one. Me, whose only tan line is the one on my wrist where my watch always sits. I can check the time on public clocks, or catch a glimpse of others' wrists. Or, I can always ask.

The first time I went to party alone after giving up my watch, there was some panic, then adjustment. In truth I was addicted to the watch. I shouldn't even notice its absence. Heck, I'm at a party. But I look at that extra-white vacancy on my arm, I'm like a reformed alcoholic offered up a drink. I'm forlorn staring at the white spot. I don't stay at the party very long.

The second time I went to a party alone after giving up my watch, I pretended only upon entering to be looking for someone in particular. I was aloof for just a few minutes. Then I started talking to strangers. With my watch to protect me, this hadn't seemed an option. It was like I was married to the thing, it possessed me, I came with it, no flirting about with others. Without it, I felt empowered and divorced. I felt naked. I felt sexy.

Okay, I confess. My watch didn't really break a few months ago. I just saw the bulbous blue thing loitering there and I simply threw it away. Really. I left it in a hotel garbage pail in Los Angeles. I haven't missed it since.

In fact, I'm thinking about ditching all my mirrors. It's a more challenging task. So many mirrors are built right in.

Minneapolis #8

Autumn bears the perfect scent. It is one you know, the scent of red leaves, of yellow ones. The wind is a gypsy. It stirs the leaves, it tells me my fortune: Soon your fingers will be cold, soon your breath will tell you the shape of your own lungs. Meanwhile, there is this: The scent of red leaves, of yellow ones.

This Fall air is powerful. I take it in deeply, let it rest upon my tongue.

Tell that gypsy I am fearless.


 

Minneapolis #5

The ice is not off the lake yet, but every day I check it.  I wait for it, some magnificent omen, nature's lucky number.  Perhaps even today I will walk down there and see water.  It rains and rains, the ice gray and unhappy now.  I wish to limit the role of the rain; I want the ice to break rather than sink.  

I will dunk a cold toe in and know the truth.


 

Minneapolis #2

It snows again here, these flakes all Minnesota, so many different sizes now and light beyond belief.  In the air so cold and packed so tight, they can barely fall.  They sink slowly into night like a dense feather bed, I almost hear them sigh and stretch before they stop, aloft, asleep.  

I put on big boots and wake them up.  They are quickly alert and scatter on the walk, an inch of snow so airy even the bottom layer jumps.  The snow loves to be free, it averts me. Slick gloves pack slick powder into worthless balls which rebel, disintegrating before I even throw them.  These flakes are spirited, they gather in my hands and on my shoulders, they wish to be carried, carried before they fall again tonight, like from the sky but not so long this time..
Air so thick toward the ground it's like they parachute down, the descent so slow, the view incredible.

These flakes are all Minnesota, so many different sizes.  I relate best to the smallest ones, hellions they are.  I try to catch the smallest ones, pretend they are my children, tiny spirits sent from heaven, from heaven down to me.  They act up, they act out, avoiding mother's grasp.  I pretend to be more strict with them than I really am.  I hold the shovel to scare them, but I don't wish them to obey. I wish to watch them rejoice and rebel, that's why I hold the shovel, to taunt them and egg them on.  I always wished for wild children.  Tonight for a while, I have them.  

I pretend, before they land and fuse, thus rejoining their real mother.  But even then, they whisper to each other, they say, "We are lucky to have so young an aunt."  And the air's so dense I hear them, I don't tell them, "Go back to sleep," but I don't move, either.  I want to overhear.  This way, I know they love me.  And I know their love is true.

Tonight, in my own feather bed, I watch them through the window.  And instead of sheep I count them, my baby flakes, and I fall asleep blessing every single one of them.

Los Angeles #3

I spent election night 2000 at a hockey game in Los Angeles. We watched as the vote tallies were posted on the arena's giant animated scoreboard. My friend and I were rooting for both a particular candidate and a particular team, and with this fell into a superstitious pact. We assigned a candidate to each side, and so found ourselves exceptionally and emotionally invested in the outcome of the game.

Our candidate of choice was represented by the LA Kings, who came back against the Phoenix Coyotes in third period. But game went into overtime, and ultimately ended in a tie.

Just like…

(I have rarely felt so wise, or so powerful.)

Minneapolis #1

I've been seeing a therapist about once a week. Each time, I park in a flat lot next to her building. It's a drop-your-keys-and-get-a-ticket kind of set-up, and given that's it's a weekly ritual for me more-or-less, I've developed a sort of relationship with the parking attendant there. I do not know his name and he does not know mine. It was around week three when he stopped asking how long I'd be, cause he already knew: I'd be about an hour. He always put my car in one of the best spaces - right up front, never boxed-in - and a few times, when I had to wait while he helped other people or moved some other cars around, on these days, he didn't even charge me. He'd just hand me the key and say thanks, not even a wink, though we both knew when this happened that we'd shared some little secret.

My therapist lost the lease on her office and moved to a new one about eight blocks away. I saw her there for the first time today. And leaving the new space, I'm thinking maybe it's time to quit therapy for a while. Digging in my purse for the key, taking the stairs to the ramp and climbing wordlessly into my car, it occurs to me that maybe it's just not helping anymore.

Paris #1

Picture this: A medieval painting of the Passion Play hanging low on the wall. In the first panel, far left, a naked Christ is tied to a stake. His pale body is slumped and riddled with one thousand bleeding wounds, each like a tiny, seeping mouth. A sinister figure holds a cat-o-nine-tails. He smiles. He's done the whipping.

In the center frame Christ is nailed to the cross. His hands and feet are bleeding, bleeding. A small rigid crowd stands beneath him, looking up.

Every figure here seems helpless.

In the final panel, all the way to the right, Christ the figure is dead.

Mary holds the body in her arms, the wounds are broad and gaping but do not bleed. The painting is medieval, hanging low on the wall. The wall is in the Cluny, Paris's museum of medieval art. There are many such paintings there. But this one is hanging especially low.

Picture now an American girl, a little girl, blonde, likely around nine.

She's not alone of course but it seems like it kind of, her mother twenty feet behind her. Our painting of the Passion Play is low on the wall, at perfect nine-year-old blonde girl viewing height. Maybe this is why her quick museum-bored gait ends, she stops dead at the painting. I watch her, I am mesmerized by how she is mesmerized. Cause she is, she's stopped dead.

She is glued to the painting.

The mother comes up behind the girl, Girl feels beside her for Mother's hand without looking away, her eyes are set, they will not move. Her hand a pink butterfly, feeling for then alighting on her mother's hand. The girl is nearly breathless. Right hand safe inside her mother's left, Girl raises her own left hand, points to Frame 3: "Isn't she scared to touch him?" - she's referring to the body, the body of Christ, how Mary cradles the body in her arms. "He's dead," is what the mother says, she's not sure what to say here. "I know," replies the girl, "Isn't she scared to touch him?"

"No," is all the mother finds.

Girl points to Frame 1: "Isn't he strong?  Can't he get away?"

"It's the Passion Play," Mom here replies, as if this explains a thing.

She's a patient mother pretty much, I admire her inherently for having her daughter here, here today, at the Cluny museum in Paris. This fact works for me on many levels. But I wonder if the mother, shocked in her own way but unlike her child, I'm wondering if she's questioning that distance from faith, if the mother's own mother is calling now in her ear, "Send her to catholic school!  She needs to be baptized!" - this my own speculation of course, my speculation of guilt. Or is it just the mother's surprise that takes her words away, surely the woman who brings her child here, here to this place, she'd have something wise to say. But there's not much talking going on.

There's a slight tug of hands, Mom turns to move on. But Girl, she's still there. There's one frame left to address. The girl touches the painting, left hand's now the butterfly, tracing Christ in the center panel, she gets to too, touch the painting I mean, the gesture is so innocent and shocking that the butterfly lands before net of Mother's hand pulls her back away.

"Don't touch!  You'll get in trouble!"

But it's not the scolding that knits across the girl's face, wrinkling her brows, bringing water to her eyes. The painting is exactly at her eye level. The pale crude figures, the violence drawn upon them, it is right in her face. Right in her face!  Her hand is restrained now or she'd touch it again I'm sure. "Isn't there anyone who can help him?"

The mother is upset too, but it is not the upset of her child. She just says, "No."  Now she tugs the little hand, they both turn away, and my own viewing here is over. I saw them both in the hallway maybe twenty minutes later, light and chatty like a pair of little birds.

I am chatty too, but with no one to talk to, I speak the details to myself like remembering a dream. I file the details, and report them to you here.

And I wish I knew this little girl, wish I could keep some contact with her, just so I can see if, with time, this particular incident had the greatest impact upon her mother, her, or me. Though I probably know the answer to that one already.

New York #1

I'm walking along Times Square. It's around 11:00am, really hot, kind of crowded, as is usual August in New York.

There's a construction site, big plywood fence. I'm merely strolling, smiling to myself this hot summer day. A gap in the wall, I look inside a big cement hole, so deep and so large. A worker is there, our eyes meet, just briefly, his mouth curves down, "What the hell are you smiling at?"  He says this in a mean way.

This does not change my expression, it's warm and I'm here. I barely see him at all. My view is grander. He's in his mid-forties I'd guess, mustachioed and bald, his face hardens some more and he throws me that four-fingered, under-the-chin gesture.

When he does this, I see his hand. I see his wedding ring. And a step or two passed him now, I'm thinking about his wife. I'm thinking about her, this is her whole life, "What the hell are you smiling at?"  Or, at least it was, since I imagine she doesn't smile much anymore.
 

Bobble Head Night at the Dome

Tonight was Bobble Head night at the Dome; the first of four such nights this season. A special promotion meant the first 5000 fans in attendance would receive a small, ceramic bobbley-headed doll. Tonight's commemorated 60s slugger Harmon Killabrew. Needless to say, I was very excited about this.

The gates at the ballpark usually open at 5:30. Anticipating an added crowd, I arrived around then. Walking to the stadium, it was easy to notice so many fans, grown men, primarily, walking away from the Dome with armloads of little cardboard boxes. Nearing the entrance, I saw a friend. "Run!" he yelled when he saw me, "They're almost gone!"

Still I walked, lined up, handed in my ticket. Throngs crowded at one end of the doorway. There was shouting. "They are no more," an usher was announcing, "No more, here or anywhere!"  People pushed and shoved. I actually saw one man grab another's shirt, pulling it, maneuvering around him. There was grumbling, swearing, small children cried. The special prize, a ceramic doll, became a loss to those who did not receive one.

I enjoy batting practice, it had been a while since I'd seen it. I was glad to be there early, the stadium so cool on this hot humid evening. The real Harmon Killebrew, Killebrew the man, he was there tonight. He walked across the field and those who actually stayed for the game stood and cheered.

Harmon waved.

I think about all those walking up the street with armloads of boxes. I look around the park, see people carrying totes filled with same. I listen to the whispers, complaints and laments, toys owed to each of us, cheaters and prices. Mostly, I think about the children, crying in the hallway, angry parents or absent dolls?

A few months ago, in London, I reached the airport and realized I'd neglected to mail several postcards. Penniless and cornered, I approached a stranger, an employee there, and sought their kindness: "I've no right to ask, but I do just the same, might you be willing to mail these for me?"

The woman complied, she took the cards. At that moment, I thought I'd met an angel.

None of the postcards ever arrived at their destination. And now, sitting here, I picture that woman's face, and I see her walking down these Minneapolis streets, boxes of Bobble Heads teaming in her arms.

Plane Trip #3

Budapest to Amsterdam, a short flight, an incredibly turbulent one. "Moderate" was the purser's description, but as we banged and rumbled
through a world of gray without horizon, ceiling or floor, it surely felt like more. There were the sounds that drove each of us to clutch the armrest, tightly, the quakes and dives that painted my fellows as businessmen flaunting bouncy, shiny hair. I'd have panicked, but for the laughter of the co-pilot exiting the bathroom. I'd have grabbed the hand of my neighbor, but for my want to seem so cool, the worldly traveler to whom such drama is merely inconvenient. Maybe I am that cool. Or maybe that's what cool is, the will and the practice of the absence of awe.

Having landed, I turned to the man beside me: "Nice to be on the ground, after such a bumpy flight."

Gentle and meek, his eyes were the smoke from water on a fire - wet, dark, heavy. His English was tentative, though not exactly broken, using it he said to me, "This is my first time on a plane."

Suddenly I was embarrassed, not for him, for me, I don't think I can tell you why. "Oh!" I said, and patted his shoulder, "Congratulations!" He
still clutched the console, I added then, too loudly, "Don't worry, it's not usually like this. This was a tough one! It's all downhill from here!"

Born in Hungary, raised with oppression, this was his first trip out of his country. "To learn more about computers," he's attending a seminar. Proud, he opens the guidebook. He shows me. "Here is the train station. Here, the convention center. Here is where I stay."

I wish him luck and a pleasant trip. "Amsterdam is lovely," I say. And I think about the feelings that kept me from taking this man's hand, earlier.
And I wonder: Would I have frightened him? Would I have given him comfort? He, an aviation virgin, this his first time, thus the gesture, the holding of hands, to him, usual, commonplace. And might I have there created a tradition, the taking of another's hand when truly it is or would be nice, to him, this always happens, this is how it is, a gentle, kind and honest gesture destine with him to be spread around world, since, to him, this man, this is how it happens: If the plane or flying scare you, just hold your neighbor's hand. And with him, and with this, a breaking down of barriers, acknowledgement of our own humanity, our fears and loves and deaths, this is the man who starts it now, touching comfort on a plane.

But I just held the armrest, coolly. He held his armrest tight. And now, another soul has learned this: Keep to yourself. Show no fear.

And what I have I learned? Keep to yourself. Show no fear. You yourself will never change the world.
 

Someone Trampled Me

I was only five in first grade. My parents sent me early, I'm the youngest. It's easy to understand their want to have those hours to themselves during the day. I was smart, they sent me early, smart, and I could draw. And paint, I could paint, and was probably in my second week, second week there in grade one, when I painted a giraffe so impressive it was to star on Parent's Day, an evening actually, Parent's Eve, slated for week three. It was the student teacher who deemed me Van Gogh, the brown giraffe with yellow spots, small black centers within them. A student teacher named "Miss DeNasi", we'd slip and call her "Mister Nasi", or maybe we were learning even this, not a slip but a crack, how to tease adults. Miss DeNasi was easily ruffled by this, I'd laugh when she was called "Mister", but was not so brave myself. After all, she loved my giraffe, a project over days, made better with sticks of bright green grass, a big round yellow sun. My favorite color was red, there was no red in my hero picture. I told Miss DeNasi, "I want to paint bright red feet." Miss DeNasi was mortified. "Don't do that! You'll ruin it!" But at five, a persona ready to speak and express, I added them.

Miss DeNasi could not face me the rest of the afternoon. I'd bastardized my promise, the promise of talent, real American artist talent, a giraffe had rarely looked so...real. I went home proud. Then wound up broken. My giraffe, the star of Parent's Day, apparently needed repair. So when I left that night, finished, proud and safely home, Miss DeNasi, she sought a rescue. And scissors in hand, I imagine the safety kind, she cut around the beast. The sun was gone, the grass gone. Gone the bright red feet. And in preparation for Parent's Day, Miss DeNasi trimmed then glued the giraffe, my giraffe, on blue construction paper. Giraffe poised proudly on the wall, a central spot at ideal parent-viewing height, my giraffe hung front and center. And looking up there from my own child-viewing height, this is how I learned of the creature's repair. And all I could see, and all I see now, are the wrinkles from the glue, and the sorry amputation. And even at five I couldn't understand Miss DeNasi's battle with a child, a kid my age. Could it be so offensive for me to love red? Or is it the offense of failing to listen? And, now, thirty one years later I can't understand my battle still with Miss DeNasi. And for the record, my own parents, they did not attend. And on Parent's Day, I'm pretty sure, no one else's parents were either impressed or in mind of that lovely, realistic giraffe.

 

Plane Trip #1

The girl sitting next to me must have Turrets She's squirming, yelping. She's colonized the armrest, and has her left foot tucked beneath the seat in front of me, probing my bag there. She's young, but obese, so it's hard to tell her age. Fat makes her busty. I'm guessing eleven.

Walking to my seat, I only wanted to love her. Such a hand to be dealt! At that moment, I'd slipped into her Keds: Heavy. Braced. Frizzy. Sixth
grade, I'm thinking. Another girl's first kiss. My girl's first night home without a sitter - a night spent alone, imagining, eating. I wanted to take
her hand. I want to take her pain.

But right now, it takes all my strength not to kick her. She plays with her food, stomps on my luggage. I pretend to be sleeping, using this posture to flinch, stretch, flying elbows claiming an inch of armrest as my own. Momentarily.

Sitting in front of me is a very bitchy woman. She's hit the sacred Call Button three times already to summons another Diet Coke. Three times
accommodated, she still complains: Hunger, temperature, headset charges. I think about the girl to my right, I think maybe I'm where her luck begins and ends today - working so hard not to kick her, when the lady in front of me surely just would. Afterall, airline seating is so random. And I'm certainly not the worst draw on this flight.

To the right of the fat girl sits a little sister. She looks like an angel. When our eyes meet, hers shine. She's so lovely. I find this utterly depressing.

So consider this. Four females: Me, woman #1. Bitch in front, woman #2. Beside me two girls, women of the future, one all troubles, the other,
grace. And you tell me, cause I do need to know, what is the saddest part of this story?