Out

Late nights in a pandemic winter, the piano stands like a steadfast altar, ready when you are to return to it, it does not admonish your absence, does not raise an eyebrow at your failed worship. You sit awkwardly, stumble across the keys and apologize to your previous versions who did this much better, in all your talk of self improvement it's hard to find yourself having walked so steadily backward. I play until the whisky dilutes my ear canals and everything is fuzzy. I sleep soundly, but wake early and already in a sea of unease. 

They say a great storm is coming, say New York will be covered in snow, but are we not already under the weather, are we not already 6 feet into the earth, how will this be any different? 

Tomorrow, January will be over. Tomorrow I'll be ready to breathe, I swear, just make it till tomorrow and we'll try this again. 

No one wrote great poetry at ease.

And Still

(Tell people to leave you alone long enough and eventually they're going to listen. 

Be careful what you wish for
When the storm lies in wait)

Dark

Oh, January has not let go yet, has not lost its fierce grip just because its end is near. When I last expect it, here it comes, digging its claws into my unsuspecting softness, tearing out ugly insides I barely knew I contained, dark clouds and bleeding envy mixed me heavy eyelids and petty silence. I turn up the sun lamp, turn up the music, turn off the phone and try to bury myself in work instead of winter, but oy how much harder it is to live than die. Bukowski yells poetry at me like a lifeline, throws wine in my face and I know it's a dream but I'll take it, is this what our parents hoped for us when we were born? 

I know, I know this is January, I know this is a world on fire and one day we will come crawling out of these burrows, I know New York will wait for us, I know good things are yet to come and if you counted your blessings well and truly today they would overwhelm you, it's just that you lose your arithmetic when the darkness comes. 

They say the storm is coming tomorrow, say it will bury us. 

You can do anything for 60 seconds, a trainer yells in my ear. 

I wonder what she knows about 60 days and hold my breath until it's over.

Sunshine

(I don't know what to tell you. It is the Eve of your Day, so no, I do not think you should be crying. 

But we are all crying, constantly, lately, it doesn't end, there's no rest to be had, if we are all crying all the time perhaps it doesn't matter if you are now, tonight, on the Eve of your Day, perhaps it doesn't mean what you fear it means. He says he knows the day will be good by the first wave he catches, sometimes life is as simple as moments, the calendar says January is almost over and I think you are still alive, aren't you still alive? 

You can dry your tears but you don't have to. 

After all, the waves will wet your cheeks, too.)

Chinaski

When the poetry knocks, you don't ignore it, she says. Write it now and get to the work later. 

I spend another lone, steamy January night with my foot burning on the radiator, wondering what the point of all this inertia could possibly be in a life that will be over so soon, but then Bukowski wanders into my conscious stream and takes a piss in the water, what can I do but stop for a chat. They say the snow is coming but Hank only ever lived in Los Angeles, he doesn't care about weather reports. The empty apartment across the streets still has the lights on. The empty apartment on 6th street still has my name on it, but I have yet to do anything about it. 

My skin still has your name on it but you have yet to do anything about it.

My days and nights twist themselves around the second I let them out of my sight. I wake late in the mornings and paint on a fresh coat of lipstick as the video call rings, feign consciousness before it actually catches up, there is no good way to tell them my ideal hours are after everyone is asleep. He moves into an airstream near the beach and you wonder what you really are doing with your Pandemic January. Hank says it's all nonsense, but you are not yet ready to give up on magic twilight glimmers. It is a new year, after all, no matter how hard it tries to emulate the last. 

You go to bed at last. Dream strange dreams of easier days. 

Wonder if it will all make sense in the morning.

Ease

You read more poetry, it reminds you how the waves of your language prefer to fall, how the sharp edges of prescribed language do little to soothe your beating heart, to make sense of the world. I sit in the car waiting for the street sweeper, and it's New York civility at its kindest, this coordinated effort of parallel parking in tandem when at last the great machine has passed. There's a rhythm to this city that will not be shaken out of its foundation, we are still here. I miss everything, but longing is just another word for love, and so I will endure. 

I return to the apartment and lose track of my path but it is only temporary, everything is only temporary and the thing that matters is you find your way back. There is work to be done and I am here to do it. There is poetry left to write and I'll be damned if I'm not here to write it. Trust the process, 

now that it is here.

Witching Hour

By eleven, I'm starting the third shift of the day. Now, when the city rests, when the clients are all asleep and the demands of the day are at ease, the edges of the white page seem softer, somehow, more curious than demanding. You think perhaps you are tired, but it's January in a pandemic, so you're always tired anyway, and you're always thinking you feel some strange way, it's all become white noise by now. 

You miss poetry,
when things are quiet around you. 

A post-it on your computer says Trust the process. 

The thing is post-its are the process, do you see the joke? Do you see the great cosmic humor in it all? Your walls are a mess of post-its, your insides are a mess of notes and ideas and lines of poetry that curl themselves along dusty corners this hour speaks to you because it is as messy as you are and thus as peaceful. 

The ice clinks in your bourbon like a cliché, but the thing about clichés is if they ain't broke don't fix 'em and lord knows you have enough broken bones inside yourself to mend as it is. Sometimes gifts arrive misshapen and crinkled.  

Open them anyways. 

Trust me. (They are the process.)

Through This Year

They say the vaccine doesn't work on this new variant, she says, and you wish she didn't. Basically we could be back at square one. 

Another apartment in the building across the street is empty. How many rooms stand abandoned now, how much of New York City is really still breathing? When we are let out of our caverns, what will remain? A few lone yellow cabs crawl down Second Avenue in the icy rain. January was always a month for pause. I miss the river. I miss who I was. I have built a hundred people under my skin since that person, but none of them fit quite right. It's the city that's all wrong. 

I used to think when this was over we would all run right out into the world again, dancing and reclaiming the time we'd lost. I'm starting to think now we will unearth slowly, step blinking into the light, cautious at sudden noises. I think we will test the ground underneath us like ice on a lake in March, won't trust the air we breathe until a new generation is born behind us, oblivious to the plague which passed before their first memories were built. 

We will never be oblivious. We will forever be a hundred people under our skin who endured a plague, a year that wasn't, we will forever have been knocked off our feet by a wind we could never have seen coming. 

I miss the ground under my feet. And I don't know when I could reasonably find it again. 

But maybe it's just January. Maybe it's just that the ice is above me, not below. 

And in January it is thick as all hell.

Dark Before

How many hours do you while away, staring into distant imaginings, painting futures in bright palettes while forgetting the slog of a path that needs walking in front of you? Count down the minutes remaining of quarantine, but how much of a difference will it really make? This small plot of land inside the old tenement is all you've seen for months. Why do we try to build brighter futures when all we really want is something unexpected to come from outside and blow our plans out of the water? 

There, I said it. 

I'm building entire castles in the sky,
but it's really only for how spectacular they'll look
as fireworks.

Re:sult

The phone dings while I am still deep in sleep, still deep in misremembering my circumstances, it's hard to gauge whether this creak in my bones was always here or if I am dying, but of course we are always dying, that's not this pandemic's doing. Lab results are in to tell me it's all in my head, I wander the apartment in a daze for a few hours before falling asleep limbs akimbo in a chair. When I wake, the air is clearer, and the lesson is this: what a mess we let our heads make of our lives. He tells me of the ghosts in his closet, and I try to weigh them against a feather and see if the ice will hold to step on. 

I've misread ice, before, you know, and I still feel the cold if I am not careful.

Still wonder if I made it out without drowning, at all. 

Degrees

No fever, you write, how are things on your end? They report back with undecipherable ailments, we scour our bodies for signs of decay but after a year such as this, they are too easy to find. I cover six miles in a fog and think this must be a good sign but the rest of the day I spend reclined. He drives in from outer boroughs to bring thoughtfulness, and you wish you did not have to count the feet between you so carefully. The Center for Disease Control speaks for you now, but perhaps not forever, and you wonder what things will look like, then. 

Everything starts soft. 

The trick is not to let it become hard. 

You aren't so broken you cannot be fixed. 

Archives

Tell me about it, he says, and you rifle through the photo albums to send an accurate description, realizing too late what date the folders carry. Here are the chapters you don't want to see, here are the chapters you normally skip so quickly past. I don't recognize my face in these images, don't recognize the person she thought she was. How entire swaths of your memory have been erased, just to survive. You try to sidestep the chasms in conversation, try to change the subject. We've lost so much time, how can we afford to let any more run between our fingers. He skips quickly past a few folders of his own, and you realize this is the thing. 

None of us are shiny and new, any more. 

If you inherit a country in ruins,
how much do you really think you can make it shine again?

46

Four years passed in a slow tear at your flesh. How different we were then; we didn't know how bad it could be, how bad it could become, but a weight settled in my chest that day that did not let up until just a few hours ago, when new oaths were sworn, new faces were set into our official offices. I cried when they repeated the words. I cried when they spoke, when they walked, I cried at every nail hammered into the coffin of what was. Four years. Before so many things. 

You take your time, my love, in getting through this life. You always did. You speak fast but move slow, because your moves are deliberate. I do not step back once I have at last stepped forward. I have this place on a post-it. I have your name on a post-it, I have everything planned on a post-it I am
not ready. 

But though times moves slowly, it moves forward. I will be ready. 

You better be too.

Signs of Spring

 I found a penny on the ground today. 

Well, two. I found two pennies. The first one I didn’t pick up — I was running, it felt silly, was it even heads up and I couldn’t be bothered to stop. I thought the pennies have been missing for so long. Was it people who spread luck all along? And when they retreated into their homes they took it all with them, held on to it tight, and left none for the world. 

The second one I passed, I stopped and turned around. It was the middle of a sprint, my heart racing, my breath shouting, I saw the smudged head of Abraham Lincoln and picked it up. Put it in the lining of my running pants. They’ve seen me through some dark miles, these pants, how many New York winter days have they brought me home? 

I walked around the apartment again today. Last night, sneaking outside its corners, looking at its dark windows and painting my outline inside it. When the January sun hangs low it still sets those windows on fire and I can feel it on my cheeks. 

Everything is coming now. 

I could use the extra luck. 

Suds (II)

I turned the screens off. Put them away in drawers and distant rooms. Tried to remember how to read a book, how to focus without being force fed, how to dream without being told the colors of the palette. By mid morning, the ants were already crawling through my belly. By lunch,  they'd taken over my lungs, forced fast and shallow breaths out of the small hollow that remained in my chest. I tried to be curious instead of afraid, to think all this lies waiting while I fill the silence with insipid fluff. Put on rubber gloves and started on the dishes instead, tried to breathe, tried to ground myself to anything that existed and finally thought, nevermind, have at it, have at me, do what you will. 

I expected a fire and got a flood. 

Because in front of my eyes, beyond dish bubbles and dirty plates, the story came together. It told itself in my voice, twisted and curled around aching hearts and poorly covered bruises, tied itself to paintings and dreams and roots and ideas, made clear to me how it wanted to enter the world and that I must be the one to do it. 

If I cried into the sink it was only for relief. If I stopped in my tracks and stared increduously into the immense space around me it was only for gratitude. I said I would write the story when I knew it and now I knew it. I said there's a magic to creation that I cannot believe until I see it and now I believe it again. 

I sat down at the word processor shortly after, no longer concerned with dishes or hours or any of the ants that crawled in me before. I once was lost but sometimes you find yourself by looking for something else. 

Perhaps it wasn't really something else. 

The word processor burns and hums and warms. The flood is here.

Let's begin.

Juli, Augusti

The coffee from the French press tastes like cigarettes. Coffee does that sometimes. I remember nights smoking in the kitchen window in Gothenburg, that yellow kitchen I swore I'd whitewash but which I instead leaned into and everything looked like the 70s. That kitchen in the wooden apartment building near the sea, just down the hill from where my parents met and fell in love and lived together, it was the first time I felt I had something that tied me to my history. They were here, now I was here. 

I moved into that apartment after my first stint in New York, signed a lease sight unseen, a friend going in my stead and confirming it wasn't a disaster. The truth is it was wonderful. But just like you cannot make yourself love someone who looks good on paper, I couldn't love the apartment when my heart was already so firmly planted elsewhere. I unpacked every last item in that apartment resentfully, feeling the weight of each damn plate chain me to a place I could only think of in terms of what it was not. It was not loud streets; it was not untapped potential; it was not where I finally felt like I made sense for the first time in my life. 

It was not New York. 

I had many happy years in that apartment, many happy times in that town, it gave me so many things I hadn't known to ask for in the scattered ruins that was my person before I moved in. But on the day that I sent in my notice, the day I declared I would move out because the time had come for me to go home, to return to my planet in the strange grids of Manhattan, was still one of the happiest days of my life. 

New York, I've given up a lot to be with you, have dragged myself through your muck when there were greener pastures to be had. But your coffee tastes better, my scattered ruins stretch and nestle more comfortably in your arms, on your worst days (and we've seen a few of those lately, haven't we?) you are still my greatest dreams come true. It's only hard on paper. 

Loving you is the easiest thing I've done. 

Habit

The headphones become a ritual, become a commute, these four walls have held me for so many months now, can you believe it? Been everything: office, bar, theater, full of faces strange and familiar when I normally don't so much as let lovers in the door. It's almost been a year, and what have we learned?

A year ago I loved you. A year ago I carved the same footsteps into the ground as years before. A year ago I knew not how precious the things we take for granted. My feelings for this town have not changed. Grown, maybe, painted themselves in richer nuances, but not changed. I miss being outside, although I easily forget. The world has been reduced to this house, that path along the river, and so many bridges. 

I always loved a good bridge. 

The new year lies ahead of us now, promising still much toil, playing already its cards of chaos and confusion, but make no mistake. I am already carving my footsteps into new terrain, I take nothing for granted. Make no mistake, everything is different. 

Let it be.

Screen

Move from small digital square to medium digital square, pull the curtains when the sun gets too bright but catch yourself, nothing is more important and spend a moment staring straight into its light: this is the gift. Move to larger squareto stretch your muscles, rest your brain, return to medium sized square and write some more, it is neverending and I haven't left my house in days. You are putting in the time. It feels right. Long for deep breaths along the river, squeeze them into your planner, force the other things out. Make room. Your mother sends you apartment listings, we were always suckers for a good move, restless, rootless the lot of us, always itching to go, delighting in the unopened doors, the unmapped terrain. Today I read a passage about the American West that nearly knocked the breath from me, I wrote five post-its in the blink of an eye reminding me the passages I have yet to tell. Nature will do that, even when you only just imagine it. 

I did take a break from the squares, though, I didn't forget. I opened an old book and let myself get lost for a moment, and do you know time moves slower inside a book, somehow. You are allowed a wider reprieve. When you come out, you can feel it. 

She asks if I would drive her dog 2,000 miles into the desert. Says she wants the dog there when they elope. I scratch my tingling skin. 

Try to pretend I wouldn't consider.

Bones

Time is a gift. They tell you in your youth, you do not listen. You tell them as yours begins to wane, they try to live more fully in your honor but it is a ruse. We cannot care for time the way we wish we could, it is a gift of gods, an Elysian mirage, there is no making the most of something that cannot even show you its face. 

No the gift of time is only worth its weight in what, in fact, it does give. The gift is presence. Is a moment longer with your hand in mine, is the feeling of eons and seconds being one and the same at the view from the mountaintop. The gift wrapped in two hours is actually the permission to spend them writing, to know that is all I must do.

A story wrote itself in front of me this morning, while I was trying to endure that which only steals time from me. How many times must you swat an idea away before its persistence wins you over? I would count the times if it didn't seem an antithesis to the point I'm trying to make. Perhaps persistence is the gift, too. 

I make another post-it note with the story, pin it to quickly diminishing free space on my wall, a tapestry of post-its, a manifestation of persistence, a visualization of time itself. Here I have sat, and created, here I have lived. It has not been enough, it never will be, time is not the gift my dear but what we made of it, and if you look back I think you'll find it was
Everything.

FriYay

The country hangs in a balance upside down. You don't know how to hold on except to walk these same streets up and down, cross at the usual corner, see the usual sights. We look through old pictures and try to remember the world in April, but it is impossible to recall how otherworldly the world, impossible to feel again that which blossomed in ice. 

We meet again in a new year, the puppy grown and the Christmas tree still up, twelve years in the making and this family still weaves itself into new decades, still sits firm in the West Village streets where it first spired. 

The year seems impossible ahead, but that doesn't change anything. 

It will still arrive. It will still pass through you. 

Might you not as well pass through it
in return?

Lunch

The country burns, bits of the most perfect document flying through the air in embers, alternating exasperations of we didn't see it coming with this was exactly what we were to expect. An afternoon gets derailed, a year gets derailed, so few days in and already we wonder if we have anything left to lose. The space you manifested into existence teases you at the edge of your vision, how hard it is to know the right steps to take when the entire world has turned into a mind field. I go for long runs along the river and try to work out the knots in my defense. They refuse to soften. 

There is one chance left to make this right.
There is one life left to prove it to yourself. 

Just a quick nap,
my dear,
you'll see the way ahead.

Knob Creek

Walk long steps to the river, big beats in your ears and fresh air in your lungs, a whole year without dancing in your legs, you move like your knee caps are fireworks. Walk past the apartment that calls your name, blow it a kiss, I haven't told you yet but I'm gonna be with you, peel off outer layers in mild January weather, do you remember freezing on a Brooklyn New Year's corner years ago? No, me neither, I don't get cold anymore. 

I write the words expected of me, I pair together the appropriate moves of a person who knows what they're doing, but do you want to know a secret? None of that shit matters. They are only a means to an end, and the end is inevitable anyways because we will all die one day.

What matters are words, are dreams and art and poetry, are the colorful curlicues of what it is to be human that refuse to charge properly for their gifts, do you know if I was penniless I'd still live with my head in the clouds, the evidence is here with the mist on my eyebrows don't step to me without better counter arguments than that. I was set on fire by the great beat and I was sculpted once in the sweet poetry and I can try this suit on for size all you like it still isn't going to fit my run-on sentences and I know New York looks quiet now, looks dark in the night but I have been here a long time and let me tell you

New York is always on fire
somewhere.

Wake

The place appears on the screen like I dreamed it into existence. High ceilings, wide windows, opening to a scene I've seen for days, months, years. I know those windows by heart from the outside, know those floors from my dreams. A note on my desk lists the address. One day. The agent walks around the narrow corners, sunlight flooding his every step, as he talks of countertops, and I don't hear a word. I see windows in the kitchen overlooking East Village rooftops and think this year comes bearing gifts. I spend the night lying in bed with my eyes open, heart racing. I know it's too soon, I know I'm not ready. 

I know there are more polished edges I wish I could show you when you come. But nevermind. 

I will be here, when you are ready. 

What I'm trying to say is. 

Please get ready. 

Responsible

Returning to New York City after an absence is forever an anodyne, is forever a slight jolt in your chest and a reflexive smile you cannot conceal. We rolled into Inwood in late afternoon sunlight, a thousand rolling hills of Connecticut behind us and a trunk full of deep breaths. She said I cannot wait to be home, and when we rolled across the cobble stoned streets of the West Village she squealed that this is what she meant. I left her and made my way east, scouring the streets for elusive parking spots and finding one, like magic, just a block from my stoop. 

The next day is cold, wet, quiet. I make my way to the river and run further, faster, than I have in ages, staring at toppling buildings, silent bridges, half a millenium of dreams compounded, shredded, repaved, remodeled, built anew. Fail, fail again, fail better. The new year brings nothing you did not already carry with you, do not forget that. It only gives you the opportunity to see it differently, to fold it at other angles, to present another draft. 

This is not a failure this is not a lack of miracle. The essence of life is to become who you already are, and recognize it. 

Is to learn how to tell the story so it sounds like you had imagined it in your dreams.

Start

 A new year arrives. No sweet whispers in dark bedrooms after the fireworks die down, no excessive sparkle in your rose colored eyes as the ball drops: we all enter this year with clear eyes and low bars, rational, and alive. Still, a small glimmer remains, the very spark of humanity, the quiet voice that will not leave us alone: hope. 

Perhaps this year will be magic. Perhaps this year will give us opportunity to grow, to smile, to breathe easy. There is a chance yet. 

Perhaps this year will be good. It begins now. 

Make it sparkle. I know you can.