A YEAR’S POEMS THROUGH CHRISTMAS COMMON PLACE NO. 15 | WINTER 2020
The year ends with gathering poems to have a look. I could have waited for possible additions, but Christmas presented itself. What appears here overlaps some previous issues. I’ve omitted a handful and revised some others, but this is a reasonable account of poems written over the last 12 months. The cover photo, taken in mid-November, is of the 30ml CafÊ in Melbourne suggested by Joy Low.
POEMS THROUGH CHRISTMAS 2019
Three life-of-Jesus poems
They mark time
Like a breeze? Or nothing, air still, his finger raised, I thought? Silent despite rippled silk, its color hard to place, eyes averted in the moment. After, I was ravenous, and later swollen and sick.
Life drained, that trope, false though when I consider how in the midst of it a narrow view, naked and showering, gave “stake my professional life on it” resonance to what arrived later: you. (I use this specific, familiar form despite gathered misunderstandings, the herd of second and fourth opinions, slivers hanging in mid-horizon that remind me, prompt bits of this and what transpired.)
He has these dreams, he tells me. In one, travelers gather around us, their words portents; another, a calming hand extends, points west, insistent. He stores things. We leave at night. A moon. The baby’s quiet. She seemed not to notice. Or if noticing, not caring. Enters rustling, glides over tile or dirt, never speaks. Thoughts take root anyway. We must flee, I tell her. He won’t also must be said.
Women who never have kids are ageless, my friend asserted. Having them takes a toll. Is it true, I wondered? In my wife’s parish, fecundity is like a wave at some services. They mark time, the kids, from the outset. I could write cruelly here about dogs and cats as substitutes, childhoods extended, accessories like Rina’s wolfhound, Irish setter, her laughing as she told me they were her grandmother’s. She had two kids, lost her beauty but gained her standing as their mother. Nothing is lost, the Taoists remarked. Kids bore her beauty.
From the Polish
Look away!
Panoply of forms—she shifts, another writes in Polish. Shifts, is thin and thick, a race, a truce with love, a truce with them, student days coming to an end. Hope seeps into texts. Desire mixes with contempt. Men.
Returning to a theme, love disrupted, diminished—dust obscuring what was there, love that finds its source, loses it, flees or is fled from, frees or stays fixed to remnants of it.
What Polish words describe how women are in bed? Who is this, before a wall, floor held despite their gaze? One wafts, I think; this other’s gravity turns off and on. My hand, each finger blurs, balled up and taken in, metronome, a coming tune: too much, too much. Form foregone, only rode it out. Horses roll, the Polish rider unruffled sits, some distance from authority, wanting (well, not him). Saddle sore come Monday, one confides. Heft rolled her close to death. The Polish rider looks away. Whose gravity, then? We must rewrite things to account, theorize when there’s no proof, touch the root, the spot, roof or seat, fount, spout. These are not Romantic words. Form follows function as night betrays the day.
Look away! Look away! Love trails behind me unwanted. Not even our dead friend compensates for injured pride. Walking back, regrets circle as aftermath, arrhythmic. Three seconds, the dancer said, between was and will. At night, bare feet touch the wooden floor. Dreams extend footfalls; acid makes the longest afternoon— you may scoff; she didn’t. A line forms In my memory, a scene’s laid down materially– what I supposed as spirit chemistry, silver in light, orchestral effects: narrow cleft, moaning as a line forms; scraped raw sometimes or healing, a phantom or an exile. (We speak now, set one of two, while set two’s estranged and mute.) Lacking a spark Walking home, I felt relieved of obligations, the stir missing that desire brought. From a distance your face, hair and clothing both works of art, a pencil clenched then removed— particles lacking a spark reminded me how it starts with words, so hard to refuse.
About form The Berlin Review arrives, a famous local poet’s featured, his photo, poems. I heard him speak about form. Plagiarism in the Times, a friend mentioned, though not named. He sued a plagiarist, lost. Poems are also stolen. Ambition and vanity, self-delusion, fantasy, lying, thieving, laziness, revenge, obsession, madness— the poet’s talk was pieces of his text as anecdotes, like musicians who perform from memory, turn their heads toward others, daring themselves to forget, get lost, omit, risk a matter of degree. Like him His Irish head, Kentucky bred, speaks anecdotally— it could be a film, I think. The waitress is slow with drinks. Mussels, drenched in aioli, concede to my restrictions sort of. (I eat around it.) Like him, I become a wraith, thinning out the girth of age. I write for a handful I tried to read these poems and got nowhere. Who chose them? Diderot flew by, propelled by hard work, it’s said. Careful not to go to press, handing manuscripts around. Coffee with Rameau’s son, eccentric in his account, written out. I write for a handful. You might be one, Melbourne, LA, Saint Charles, Fairfield, Singapore: comrades looking at their screens, except Christine in Brooklyn. She prints them out, marks them up.
Pass through Bay trees leaning close to oaks: contagion spreads, is handed around. Blame comes in the mail, descends, heavy and opaque. Mice scamper. Wool’s spun. And cries edge close to coming, pass through terrains of hope, abandon. A long trek, the path fainter, no word, even dreams vacant. Two poems from nature Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck. Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows. Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me. The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter grey. Two corners away, more rain, though it had stopped when I left. With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home. Write about nature: many here before me. Anything to add? On the bridge, grey hues. We drove angularly west. Sun broke through amid redwoods. An incline needing first gear. A view, narrow Tomales. A left turn, barely a road I parked alongside. We walked. Humans now, talking paving, fire, taxes, volunteers, then eating. We left early. As we climbed, a bird spoke up. It smells like Norway, I said.
Enlightenment Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Birds mating seasonally, their differences, revived an old narrative: all things unfolding from a source. Finches retold Darwin this story. Surfacing as sensed, nature seemed to be given them and then unfathomably stretched out. Minds took it in, hearts quickened, hands set it down reflexively, hoping for enlightenment. Walked or tramped, then wrote while others sketched or dug to coax it into consciousness. Ikkyü’s coda (Version 2) We went angularly west. The bridge, grey hues, and later into shade, redwoods briefly alight above us. Ascended in low gear, Tomales glanced, narrow where it starts. Descended, more trail than road, found the house, earnest talk: winter’s rain and fall’s smoke, the weight of all that fell on us. Left early, climbed. A bird spoke up. “Smells like Norway.” The scent, damp woods close to the sea. Ikkyü’s coda, another bird. Ours warbled territorially, not so much woken as aware. A banner In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue. She glances from man to man in search of bona fides. Who will bring her a future to justify the effort? Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign.
It’s my topic Orlando. (It’s my topic, time compressed so the shape shifts at lovemaking’s illusive pace, partnering with the air.) There is no great house, only a blanket-covered sofa. (Another brought the man out, but his essence was slower, if essence derives from thrown, not from theories or speeches.) Breasts are a giveaway—hers are hers, but each orifice has its story and its fetish, stage directions for handling, all in play and no witness to spoil the fun, sister. (Running with feathers, laughing.) A Yiddish word In a dream, a room aside (a country house, three salons)— “I’m a grandmother,” she said, turning. Noted her marriage, though long, was stale. (The word used was Yiddish, I thought. Not sure.) “I see,” I said. She went on: “I love you. I want to fuck.” “I see,” I said again, now that desire, reviving after an absence, saw beauty rising to its gaze. Bresson says the emotions take the simplest forms. I thought of your tremors, how you came longer than seemed possible. You think all this is foregone or pointless, and I’m unsure myself how to add it up, yet among my memories it’s there like Vesuvius or Aphrodite, to slap the most obvious label on the can that holds the film.
The vein Let it be said, material explanations for it all— even I suppose the vein of silver that flashed, a kiss releasing it, as I thought watching it, though It proved that I alone saw it. Sometimes I doubt it myself, but then less doubt than utility takes hold of truth: it explained not much and the laws held up that govern things, even here. And yet I saw what I saw. Heads turned License, I said, thinking how Heian aristocrats loved according to their tastes, not locked in pairs. We sat angled, sometimes eye to eye, that close to her, in mind writing this— our heads turned, voice quiet but the consonants set off, an accent she remarked on. I wrote when she was away. She brought back calligraphy, a poem I propped up, seen every morning from my bed. The last character is mine, the mountain they climbed to view. They fall back Laughing on the street, passersby amused too by it, how she waves a bit, among men, the dance work lunch imposes if not alone with her thoughts, eyes fixed inwardly, reptile of a machine for sidewalk striding—they fall back, daren’t catch her gaze, its rays. But now it’s turned off, with the boys, out.
Intruders Warmer days, insects, a bee briefly between blind and glass, released, the latches set so it wouldn’t raise. I didn’t set them thus. Another’s fears, I guess: intruders, ladders. Of what am I now afraid? I could ask what will kill me, but spring has other questions. Out walking It’s hard enough transmuting what for example a glimpse apprehends in moments, how gait animates, receding, how a distance collapses as the mind plays out its thoughts, remembering the color of skin, the form of shoulders. Out walking, half rain, passing— my diminished reflection, seen, not seen, a tapped shoulder, greeting, warm and brief. Lost it, I think, but nothing is lost. Energy, mass: how they talk, now ballooned, now shrunk again, I could wrap myself, crimson, but I lack her majesty. In my mind, it’s revolving in a sage’s open hand, yet hate rains (her refrain). Who dares detract her, my empress? Meanwhile, meanwhile, just a tap to ease the day. Wrote a book in two pages based on it.
Wedding notes A groom’s cake, ten pounds of lamb: wedding collides with Easter. We text to commiserate, she in a hotel lobby looking for a place to think. Calvino’s letters, my phone has them “in case all else fails.” When the cabin lights go dim I read what he had to say decades ago, pertinent often, despite everyone being dead, because writing is writing and editors’ advice holds up, the good ones.
For Simone “I am the King of Bread,” said while waving a baguette, draws an appreciative chortle from young Simone, forgetting how her brother thumped her, cries rising from the next room, not one to suffer in silence, Simone. I predict great things.
Reverie And she married her old man. At the concert, came to mind, sun lighting a house, steep hill rising behind it, birds sang as he played Liszt, his left hand crossing the right one, upper notes plinking, a Yamaha lacking resonance, a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager falling in, the sun lower, slicing the audience, I put on my dark glasses, I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing. Orange tinge Wandering, waiting, a sign glitters in, but its color cautions. A legion of men, aging, smiling, disbelief flickering, forms of self-doubt trickling like piss on the floor, unmade, these lately sung, low they fall, to ground grovel who were certain as rubbers in wallets, you never know. Indistinct, a kind of haze stings the skin, eyes narrowing, arms instinctively held up, head wobbling, an orange tinge as one by one down. She counts. Re: Yeats Politics in the sense of named mars the eternities that cause the muses to descend. They detach their songs from dates, and even lampshades, I read, are suspect. If a politician, despite her passing fame, fades to oblivion in the afterlife, the muses think it tragic that a poem led her to expire twice.
Seeing is just Just girls when I began blindly, a boy among boys. Is each not memorable who gave something of herself? For what was given up when she allied herself with me? Women laughing, holding on, yet sadness grew, tyrants eclipsed us, stole our thoughts to throw them in our faces. What was given up? Lies, she might say, posed as truths. I don’t know, truly. I saw, but seeing is just seeing. Knowing is more than that, remembering how it was. Sometimes I think I see her or wish to be seen as now, anew, unimpeded. Handed round From a distance, you, and later, your trace. I read a word just now, samsara, traveling through. Ghosts, I said. I’d been one. Below, the Buddhist dead were innocent of tempting. In the sports club, flesh briefly said those things only it can say. Pain gets handed round, sepsis here and endings elsewhere, deaths of hope and would-be issue. Marks apparent In my heart little has changed. How much else, marks apparent, slippage, a journey scattered seaward, foam below where two friends make their homage, another hand held, yet gone as going goes, circling back— she trembles like a cello still. Far away it must seem to her and folly too that distance says, while to my senses proximate.
Speak freely, tear down little Find your roots, your languages, the poet said, recover the mother tongues your grandmothers spoke. Like species, they’re stamped out in a feast of monoculture, pure is always the myth of retrospect. William Morris, horrified to see ancient churches the objects of meddlers, started Anti-Scrape. The world is as received, he said, every dialect as godly as the next. I stayed once at a farmhouse extended left from its origins, part a ruin, but there, marking where it began, those tilling and raising sheep, chickens, through peace and wars. When I told the taciturn farmer we were Americans, he ran inside and brought, dirt-encrusted, the bottle of red he buried against the day liberators’ sons would appear at his door. To throw Goethe Correspondence, she wrote, assumes elective affinity, to throw Goethe into this. Swedenborg quoted Scripture: as above, so below. Her letter flew in this morning and by two I’d read it thrice. She never mentioned Goethe; Walter Benjamin did that. He also a correspondent in several senses. Her letter conveyed state of mind. (As did his, of course.) In writing another, distance foreshortens the way it does in conversation, despite the one-way nature of it. We imagine receptivity. This may be better than sympathy for what gives rise to the affinity we elect.
No mystery A sketchbook view, taking in a grey streak or the way age sets in around her eyes, how her daughter is taller, a tot when I last saw her, chasing Robert’s dog. I’m older too in the same degree, lighter than I was, dressed in blue, a sweater against the cold despite the harbor’s glare. No mystery, I think, writing this out. Just my friend as she was this morning, here. Where a garden was I generalize, pointing out attraction’s perils, how its half-life takes us unaware, how desire’s uneven, how it seeps or leaches though so apparently rooted, how anger leaves soot, gravel, where a garden was, fecund with possibility. Attraction isn’t enough, I write; depth is inexplicably there. How to find it is one problem and enduring it another. In season Minions skating on an icy plane. So many violations, one more fresh gasp at his rasping sting, this thing he grew, falling. Yet how many gasps, really, blood there to be licked up once, met your match, Tinder’s real, ain’t it? Bon mots mean less and less. I crave bourgeois life, he thinks: country house, a wife and kids, a dog perhaps and nothing dead save a grouse in season or fish.
My whole life Facts open out to poetry, as they will. Wave and wave and wave and wave: what terrors, then, in the depths? Feet dangle, a phrase set loose, drifting toward a made-up abyss. A pen thrown sticks into a wall, nib and all, or penetrates the heart. Fifteen feet of grey cartilage, teeth visible in shallow water; grown men postpone their exercise. Don’t surf! (My whole life has been like this.) For years, I dreamt their dark shapes shot sideways in the rolling surf. The air is warm, not like here, black forms evident from above.
Coming is their signature In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for touch, hooks to hang categories of grasps and splays. Like Thoreau, mostly local, but a room for hotels and streets there to the right, just past those big jars of sheen, salt and sweet. How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else. Only the sound, not the scent, and how beds are like boats pitching in the waving rooms, each windowsill a jetty’s edge.
Passed along I thought earlier how pain flowed across my face. My second son had finished school. Ashland’s crowd marked the occasion. Adrift. Worse as summer wore on. September twenty-first—the date stays with me— was the nadir. Life unfolded oddly. Every theory disproven with time. Years have passed. You don’t forget how pain flowed across your face. There must be a theory of it, too, passed along like contagion, seeping into love the way autumn drains whole forests, edges of streets.
Souvenirs derived Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this (love fares badly under siege). Regret falls silently, reproach for all reproachable things we bring along, souvenirs out of love, derived from it or carried as memories. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked in excess and caught out, tapped. Life closes in, opens out. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipient. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, the day, month. Names drift. Somewhere, pianos are untuned or, tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.
Time since “Write what you want,” Carrie told me. Sonnets invite their writing. I nodded. Some time since I wrote one. It seemed true, bonnets abuzz with bees put me off, despite rhyme almost a thing of nature, how it flits from line to line, fecund rescuer of a random thought that slips, dips, then sits perched. Mere rhetoric, I confessed to her, more an osprey than fluttering. The fish regrets its surface nibbling, how flies wandering at dusk became a last dish, garnish on the fish’s tongue as It dies. We’ve come a distance from garden verse. As for the fish, things could hardly be worse. Who lost China? Window open, I see my friend. Turns out she’s in a rush. Goodbye. Tomatoes make a stew later, talk of two women’s ups and downs. The papers repeat a mess I read earlier on my phone. Who lost China? We traded it for Greenland, gave back the promises we saw in it, futures like so many soybean-filled hulls preemptively emptied, enterprise rolled and lit, the red glow of no. Shadow Late summer, family at the river; fear comes briefly by to taunt me with permutations of my luck. I think about my parents, lurching past disaster, steadying, a hand finding a railing, existentially. A flaming boat prompts it, too, but my son rejects the analogy, as previously he turned fear aside when I mentioned him. Like a dog poking his nose in for a snack, fear smells my brain chemistry, wiring crossed in some little way, sparks of doubt, shadow of a doubt. Doubt.
Missing her I wonder what it takes to loosen the cords that bind us to reality. In my mind, wobbling things find their way airborne like pelicans, incongruously. I want that freedom, missing her—heavens, speaking of incongruous! How gone gone can be. She is, yet she’s not. That hedgerow or those dark trees, warm as a summer night, love is close as close can be. I wonder what it takes. For my late friend Sometimes invited, endings and caught out every time, drawers spilling contents in loose order. A mind gone to its poles, his family wrote, that was gentle, even feckless when I knew it. Talking once in a car, and then his reply crossed my path last night, one poet quoting another. The sense revolutions make comes at the end, if right. The tiger’s stripes visible and the leopard’s spots magnificent, and my friend cartwheeling through time, landing at my feet, a cat’s smile, not smug but kind. Profusion Late afternoon, two birds are not crows. Earlier the heat, floral profusion, bees made for it. Night is crickets’ rhythmic din not silent as they claim.
Words for it Lapses from convention, root causes catalogued under “usual stories,” sub-indices decisive about things like sheen. Talk’s profoundly small. It’s been years. Straight and narrow’s not the trail. Sixty words, like the Inuit or is it three hundred? How many, voices raised or throttled like angels on God’s third rails, waft giving way to tongues, guttural marks in rooms used to this, their stains vivid in the waning light? Only refrains No story, she said, and yet birth and death figure, sex and love, treachery and sentiment mixed in. Cause, effect, like gravity’s anvil, all those stopwatch plots, sundial trists aptly named, how fires turn on near the beach. No story, she said, no, only refrains, stanzas of variation, themes, fugues, tropes. Nothing. None. Poetic response In my friend’s wonderful poem the god expresses impatience. His father was subtler, though, coming on as a swan or a bull, drifting golden, theatrically lit. Seed wombs, found continents: reason enough for subterfuge. They remembered him fondly, wings, horns, spangly things, and how they cleared a path for him who took their measure in long crescendo, not like those ordinary men, offspring sweet being half of him, their beauty.
Walking it back (Version 1) We docked at Entropy last night, the one remaining port. I thought how you’d let me drift, and now the whole thing’s flipping back. I can feel that heave of holes darker than wombs, their pull vague here. We have a beer, me and this friend, the kind you said I’d pick up, pirate-like, but I just like her company out here where time wound down. A beer, then a tide to ride, I suppose we’ll cross paths as time reverses, tidying up then coming, walking it back. It’s hardly natural, but then I’m sure we’ll like it, age before beauty like they said. Time’s unspooled (Version 2) We got into Entropy Friday, the last remaining port. Drifted here on the current, but now the river’s turning, pulling like a womb in heat. My friend and I share a beer, company. Time’s unspooled and now we’ll ride it back like lovers, tidying up before we come, older first, then we’re young. Innocent No need for color, blank wings like shrouds later, folded up. Summer’s gift, working the garden, sun theirs while they have it, innocent of any ending.
Marked on the skin Winter counts, time marked on the skin, in dreams, times awake at four to the strikes a hammer makes, a spring of sorts that sings distantly. Winter counts, the streaks of chalk white that passion leaves, the human sounds, ends after starts, the beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone. Winter counts, stirring, ordinary time slowing minutely. A beach wet with foam then bleak, littered, windswept. Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.
Melbourne poem A layer of white, crimson amid galleries your arms make. Eyes curved, gesture for the wings like Kabuki, a lip’s point, provocation. At the restaurant the maitre d’s tattoos overflowed formality; yours float and drift. A walk loosens the grip of things. Buildings tell time as we pass. The new ones will, you’ll find, future provisional, their stories your own, but my small chapter.
Unknowingly We shift, it seems, from versions of a theme, astrological leaps made unknowingly. Features vary the way terrain is verdant and then tauter, but beneath it blood floods minds, words pour on the page or across tables. One won’t speak, another does. One said she’d be replaced. Who’d do so? A coincidence isn’t interchange. You are you, I say again, and she is she is she. What we call borders Everyone we carry, every last scent, how grass feels, a bird alight, regarding us: what we call borders, headspace, eyes in our skulls, how we breathe in, how we’re taken or take, sex too a border passed, why we couple, make others who then take their leave, issue who once were us. Vast expanses, east, west, tracks laid, rivers bridged, dreamt, dammed, nature held under, subjugated, then back in heat, Kali to our demons. Borders then like paper shacks. Birds aflame, grass brown, how we breathe unclear. We carry until we can’t.
Count the cards Quid pro quo is to say something is handed back and forth, a game that pays us to keep up. Narrative is accumulation, social capital for some not others—you know which when it’s revealed. Loss floats above the bed; I feel anxious. “Nothing’s lost,” the oracle asserts. Count the cards, tote up hours, then let go. Empty may also be proscribed, lest two minutes fill it. Bred in Adrift in a way, although the house reforms itself for winter. Bourgeois life must be bred in, I think, the way aristocracy too rises from graves. Fancy dresses must be worn and lines continued. They flow down, blood tinged, ‘til exhaustion does them in. Across a pasture, a horse— life on many acres. A fence the deer stand beyond, roses unmolested, only color until spring returns.
Dark as the gown The year dwindles, light shrinks to points, the sky briefly red. Gray, cold, the motifs I dread, loss a bone buried, waiting always, the dog’s return slow if ever, whistling or wishing, holding treats in two fingers the way it’s said they like. Dark as the gown thrown, the moon hidden, she’s oblivious, manuscript unbracketed. The bone denied then taken in, all manner of mixing permitted as it’s her, her whim, her century. What can be said Set aside what can be, I tell myself. Time also clears things away: pain that errors bring; the chronic fog of regrets sometimes flooding in. What can be said of experience beyond living it? What can’t? What should? What art results? Gauguin is now condemned whose colors found subjects, whose diary’s reflective. Time lies in this respect, condemning as if it knows and always knew. Relic A year flew by, he told me. Three years of hell, I said. I carried home a talisman, It weighs a lot. Against black its color works. I hadn’t thought these texts would land on it. They strike me as ephemeral; here they sit, mottos of their era. If unearthed eons later, epic banality painstakingly revealed will reward some scholar’s work. Who is this and why?
Happenstance Nature is whatever we light on, despite the history of place. I dreamt two nights ago of a kiss arising from talk. In the dream, I felt the stir. I only knew her by name, yet things moved along. In the dream, I weighed the pluses and minuses love brings with it. This is a sign of life, not precisely wisdom but knowledge only gained by happenstance or fate, mixed with design, we think. Ha ha—as if. Nature is all lips. Bring her forward Domesticity borrowed, neither friendship nor marriage, a knowing in a deeper sense, surface and talk mixed. When it comes apart, knowing ends. Adrift on time again we come a distance, far enough to get our knowing back, every word we said or wrote, every sense we once invoked. It is a voluntary thing, I tell myself. Ten years now almost for one and the other comes and goes. The gods orchestrate the scenes: hotels with their red-stained sheets, houses with art and cats, motifs of wooden floors, dark walls, terraces, ships. They bring her forward, nod foreknowing, yet act surprised when each small marriage comes undone. In disarray How like rain it is. Green shades toward sleep. Thickets where gates were, dying forests, and yet birds sustain themselves. Crows loud when I fetched the undelivered newspaper fleshy with Christmas, the way holidays are declared, beds left in disarray. They liked it then, being fucked, the way it conjured up something else.
A yellow sofa in three variants
A borrowed staircase
A yellow sofa surfaced and traffic, especially the buses. Not the ocean of another room. Distance is relative with another body. She liked kings but there we were, there it was. Under the bathroom light, a hole. The universe is rent and warped, the odds coming to mind, weighed. How to square these two things?
Oh marriage! What is real and what isn’t? What lies between these poles, honesty and deception? Overrated, the one, and the other’s misconstrued that was mere awkwardness, the way ghosts emerge from walls and the dog is put away, yet lingers, scents, sounds too prevalent to ignore.
Congress is one word for it, desire needing a room, horizontality. Children float at the edge, a potential. Welcome them, the Church teaches. Lever in a way, forcing the issue, hounding bliss, if that word can be used, the fog of hours spent in bed, myopia. It would be better if time kept crawling or even stopped like Rockefeller’s heart. (Better for him but not better for her.) Who will clear a path? No one, I conclude. Traffic all night, I remember. “Marry me” had its symmetry. Nothing that can’t be justified by brain chemistry. Wears off. No and no, and so, no and no. A Chanel outfit in the photo. Congress, they used to call it. Ache sometimes Such gifts as I brought, gestures desired, needed, outgrown, rejected in a huff or set down like drinks forgotten on a table. Flowers in hand or naked, only the telltale sign and how it dies. Pen in hand, reading, reading. I ache sometimes of anger and neglect. How brittle stems become when moments pass, yet small bits of blue remain.
A borrowed staircase, anecdotes mingled with my own. How far we went on a fruitless errand, despite ample though belated coverage, a romp, pilfered wine. I gloss rather than copy prose, these phrases hitched together as a preface. Long runways end in wrecked and burning planes. A borrowed heaven, afterlives doubtful and we daren’t write. Names are dropped, fathers scorned. No issue. An ending. The path seems evident. Trudge another day amid stolid trees, winter coming, alone but for letters, visits, the spells broken then restored, the breaks, chasms, basins, geologic time inserted just because. Seemed evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, sunlight. Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing, then manifest, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.
In Aix Blooms incongruous, thoughts arising the way bliss too appears. I used to want it, wrote it down among early January’s desires. In Aix when I felt it everywhere, despite loneliness. Words draw. It was May, fifteen years, some months away from now. The way bliss too disappears, cold descends in life. We build our huts. Wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of it floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling.
Like buskers Paralyzed in a way. They go off to mass. “It will be sung,” she said. Laundry’s dry and folded in this material world. Songs pour from the box, season appropriate. At the funeral, Heaven was invoked, life eternal. Like here, Swedenborg noted, only it goes on and on, a telenovela of good and evil. Banality, Arendt wrote, like buskers on the train, murdering time to make a buck. A waiting game, I read, imploding as they will, which were mighty, and so, we wait, avoiding vodka, living on to reap what rattles east. Soothes envy knowing they will fall just as Marx wrote. Even the pope struggles to pay his bills. Those choirboys seduced, law suits— wives to keep them honest or at least more honorably corrupt is our answer. No Prada slippers, no monkey business. “It will be sung.” Laundry’s dry, folded. Materiality brought us here, stranded but we do our best with it. Abandoned, we embrace it, tell you what the news is. “A bumpy year” to everyone. Vodka and a chaser, the usual denials. Mass is over. Hope your husband’s better. The prince is crimson, so Wills then.
Common Place, a personal journal | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | http://complace.j2parman.com