39

Impossible numbers add up on my abacus. I write myself words but do not want to share them, they are mine now, some of them break me at the delicate seams, but some will make their way inside and strengthen the bones, and I cannot give them away while my core is so weak. The mouse remains, I watch him run into the stove when he sees me. The exterminator says he'll be there at dawn. 

Another year has passed, and didn't we all think we'd be somewhere better by now? Still, another year has passed, and this is where we are. Dig where you stand. One day this pain will be useful to you. I know this isn't what you had in mind, but listen to me now. 

One day you will look back on this time and see it as the time that built your muscles, that sharpened your vision. One day you will look back on this time with softness in your heart, and the storm clouds that seem so encroaching now, that sit like a weight on your chest, they will somehow come to look like wisps of cotton candy. 

You made it this far. Why not just keep going?

This year, it's as good a pep talk as any.

Fredagsbarn

The exterminator says he'll come back. Monday, 7 am. Clear out everything. I spend my mornings scouring the tiles, throwing gargantuan insects out the window, what is a life in New York if not an unending eyeroll at the great joke at our expense. I sit in the car for an hour and a half sweating, block after block of drivers in cars, running out the clock, staring into eternity. Time is only an illusion until it shows up on your skin. He buzzes in your periphery but your heart is hardened, there's a to-do list inside your eyelids and you haven't time for dead end streets pulling on your strings. 

Tomorrow a new leaf turns. 

What that means is entirely up to you.

Oceans Rising

A hurricane appears on the horizon, crying wolf at the coastline. New Yorkers remain unruffled, checking their liquor stores and leaning back. You think we haven't seen worse? The storm loses interest and veers off toward New England, tossing a few thousand buckets of water in our general direction. 

For an entire day, I do not leave the bed. I stretch long limbs to collect new books, rogue pens, switch sides to find the what little light seeps from between the storm clouds, step gingerly onto the leaning floor to refill the coffee cup. It should be a dream but it is steeped in the last words of broken hearts, convoluted by the shreds of old wounds stuck in the spokes. The day runs away, the weekend, the season, drowned in a monsoon, a pandemic, a soul too lost to ever have had hope in finding its way. Monday morning arrives. 

That's all there is to say about it.

Echo Park

Wake early, pummel through the day, everything is a list of to-dos, everything is hamster wheels you spent a life time avoiding. Late at night, warm Friday night in New York City, I run along the river and remember poetry in my veins, remember purpose in the dark silence. There's a spontaneous dance party in the amphitheater. New Yorkers will not relent. He says he's coming through the city and you wonder what it means to steal moments. 

This decade doesn't give you any moments,
you see,

so you do what you can 

with the sticky fingers

you made yourself in the fire.

Alternate Side Parking

It's funny how you fight so hard to escape some claws, and then once they are behind you, it's impossible to remember their grasp. You turn the mechanics over in your hand, watch the metal gears crumble at your touch, how did this street mean so much once? Your eyes? I move the car and the exterminator comes to seal the cracks in your armor, we take this whole life one day at a time. This morning I read a passage that tasted like magic and only later realized I had written it. Sometimes this whole life surprises us. 

Mostly it comes in fits and spurts. 

(This is the first day of my life, he says, but you think every day is the first day, really, and shouldn't you make it memorable? I read another passage, look out the window, watch a full moon rise over the Lower East Side. Think that's exactly it and call it a day. Miracles so rarely announce themselves in fireworks. You mostly know they've been there by the scent that lingers when they've left.)

Upsell

My arm aches. I have stopped looking for the mouse, he will appear if he will, I leave my fate in his hands. We drink two bottles of wine in the rambly parts of the West Village, the world may be crumbling but it never didn't need unconditional friendships. I bike home drunk, but not so drunk that I don't feel the cool air on my face, not so drunk that at every intersection I don't look up and down the avenues to feel the monuments of New York City burst in my chest. 

People have stopped asking about my writing. Poetry lies in piles around my desk, it's a fine home for any rodent if you think about it. I used to think about the immensity of life and now I only ever seem to think of its restrictions. My mother has her last visit to the hospital, they celebrate her with balloons when she goes, it's hard to wrap one's head around it. Is something coming out of this year with joy? These questions are all too scattered, these words like post-its on the floor, my nephew walks in to his kindergarten class and we are never so aware of the years passing as when the childrn grow. Best, perhaps, not to have any then. 

My arm aches. I feel the ceasefire tenuous in my limbs, the stillness vibrating like a fine wire under tension, like I must grasp this tender moment before it is too late but I am frozen still.

You know those dreams where the ghosts are chasing you, and you try to run but move nowhere, your muscles burning and your chest like a weight?

Yeah.

Like Glue

I declare war on the mouse. Spend hours clearing out hidden corners and lining the kitchen with traps, eliminate even the smallest crumb from every surface. But the truth is he has already won, because at every moment am I not thinking of him? With every creak in the old tenement, do I not crane my neck to find any shadow of movement along the floorboards? Ghosts will kill us when the actual monsters never could.

The neighbor upstairs and I speak about it in the stairwell, after I have interrupted her uncomfortable first date goodbyes at the front door, another pest she couldn't get rid of. We are all just trying our best to make it through another day in one piece. I went to a street in Brooklyn and heard myself say this place has changed so much since I lived here but by now it's been 12 years since I did, and did you not think the world would move on? In 16 days, it will be 15 years since I first came here. He says I guess you're a real New Yorker now, and I don't know how to tell him I've had this conversation so many times before that it can no longer hurt me. I am not, without this city, and on its streets, I am everything; you think your rule book can take that from me?

It occurs to me that I am arguing with myself. 

There was less of that when you were here. But I don't think it matters anymore. 

You're not here now. And I still am. 

Who else am I supposed to talk to?

Inside

The vacation wisdom runs off you like dirt in the shower. Except this was insight you wanted to hold on to. The heatwave boils and burns around the brick buildings, the summer wastes away underneath me. I read old stories, try to remember what New York used to be, who I used to be. It's buried deep, now, so deep, and I think I haven't dared to mourn the loss. 

These words are only placeholders. 

That's sort of the state of things
in general.

Returns.

For days I do not see the mouse. I begin to clear its ghosts from the periphery of my vision, begin to believe the hardwood floors are mine. And then there he is again, late Friday night scampering boldly across the entirety of the livingroom floor, I wake with a start. 

The week has been too quick, asking too much of the air in my lungs, plucking the strings from my tenuous connections. I park dangerously close to fire hydrants and spend the day with a slight crick in my neck. The heatwave crests in the late afternoon, a hundred and two degrees and the building smells like a curling iron left on too long. When I deliver the work I am not happy. It is never enough. You are determined to find out what could be. 

Tomorrow you move the car. Take it from there. 

Arms

The mouse refuses capture, leaves a trail of unmistakable calling cards but hides in the heat of the day, you wonder if the upstairs neighbor killed him after all. Her manicured expressions don't suit the ramshackle wood staircase between your apartments, this cramped stairwell that breathes Lower East of old, you loved it at first glance, and she jars the view. She is now on first name basis with the exterminator. You hope the neighborhood chews her up and sends her to Murray Hill in due time. It is your most scathing review. The heatwave climbs up your window, sweating against the poorly sealed panes, he writes from under a starry sky and wishes you were there but the words all blur together, the names, the wondering pairs of eyes. 

It's okay
I know someday I'm gonna be with
you

but the didn't spell out the terms
of the contract and
I don't know if I'm upholding my end of the bargain.

Clean

(I do not own the timing, the way the words choose to come out, when they are ready. The evening is late when I feel the clarity, when I know it is time. I sit down and suddenly everything makes sense, by the time I finish I never want to sleep, I want to only keep writing, I never want to leave this corner of my shoebox, where the papers pile, the post-its reign and rain, where the books build walls and they look more like shelter. It was never that I didn't want to do it, it's that it wanted to do it right. He sends the silence to cover your borough, but you fill the voids with words, with curlicue lyrics for broken songs and you know you've never felt better than in the late, still nights of ink in your veins. You open a window and find the Alphabet City night quiet, the asphalt sweating after the thunderstorm, summer still wild and alive, you, a little too.)

Vermouth

Outside the window, the sky turns black as the thunder rolls in. You haven't left the apartment all day, now it seems too late. You cancel plans to cross the boroughs, run your fingertips across someone else's question marks, dive into work instead and wonder how the twists of words may soothe what ails you. The summer disappears under your feet, the life disappears behind your eyelids, four days in the Pennsylvania woods run from your skin like a monsoon. 

There's an answer somewhere in these depths. 

I'll find it
if it so kills me.

Ist Ave

Returns are tenuous, you wonder what lessons may remain. The parkway moves like a river, you find a parking spot down the block, everything is too easy. The rain calms the city, leaves you with plenty of air to breathe. This morning I walked along the Hudson and felt a slight ache tear at me, but now I feel no regret, no longing. 

I got the presents that were mine to open. 

Now I must put them to use, lest they evaporate in my hands. 

Strung

Wind down country roads toward the river, thick, majestic river to which all roads lead, there’s a mountain pass near Cairo (pronounced care-o, if you know) where you shoot straight out of the foliage into an endless panorama that you could not have expected. I meander into the small hudson valley town just before the community pool closes, sign in on the printed register, swim a lap in the pool to let the 90 degree heat evaporate, summer is endless if you let it.

Just remember these truths are hard won.

Keep them, even when the steam has turned to mist in the sky beyond. 

Turns

Another day ends, you are no longer so exhausted that your eyes slip off the pages you try to read. You have finished three books thus far, the first one feels a lifetime ago on a cold morning porch with a cup of coffee although you think, if you try hard enough, it was only yesterday. I write a laundry item list of things I have discovered, as though fearful I will forget them when I drive out of these woods. 

The truth is I’ve only discovered that which I already knew. 

It seems cruel for life to require so much time and money for us to only ever rediscover. Our therapists may disagree. I spend an hour watching the bullfrog disappear and reappear in the sludge. Later, my skin will stretch taut at surprise sunburn. I haven’t looked in a mirror in days. I turn off the scratchy radio just to test out silence. Who am I against a void? What remains when your flawed coping mechanisms are pulled from under you? 

I make another fire. Take another walk. Stare at the way sunlight trickles in through a deciduous forest. The heavy cotton inside my skull begins to subside. I write another poem. 

This one has a line I quite like in it. 

Retreat

By day three, I have stopped bringing a swimsuit to the jetty. There is no one there to care if I wear one or not. An emerald green frog sits half submerged in the sludge near the reeds,waiting for lunch. The dragonflies are delirious with sunlight. I count freckles on my shoulder in an exercise of patience. 

The boom box in the cabin only finds one station on the FM band, country music with just a hint of static. A dragonfly gets caught in the spiderweb on the jetty ladder. You know you shouldn’t interfere but you cannot help it. The water smells like mulch on your skin. 

I forget my phone and do not miss it. 

Defense

There is no wi-fi. The phone buoys one bar across the treetops, I do not bring the laptops out of their bags for two days. Bury myself in typewritten sheets of poetry. To write again after a hiatus, they say, is an exercise in faith. I write new poems, hopeful strings of words lost in the woods. Intermittently, the old boom box finds a scratchy country station. It speaks of community colleges, fireworks outlets, repeats melodies of carefree summers and heartbreak in local dive bars. You wonder if country singers live with their head in the clouds, or if New Yorkers live with theirs in the ground. 

In the book you read, a young girl drowns just off a Red Hook pier. 

You carry on swimming in the forest pond and there's a word for this kind of water in your home language that can never be translated. The word contains the likeliness that there is no bottom, that woodland spirits may drag you under, that the silence of a forest is a warning cry and you dive in anyway. When you married another tongue, you relinquished your unconditional faith in the magic of language, everything became open for investigation. Words became only words. 

You became determined to spend your life recapturing the intangible magic. Becoming the woodland creature come to take your readers' imagination away. You wonder if the witches they used to burn at the stakes weren't simply women who had discovered something beyond tragic gray doldrums of being some man's property. He writes to call you pretty and you think he doesn't know the half of what fire lies below. 

I stir a stick through the embers, wait for the last to die down before leaving the pit, mosquitoes delirious with warm flesh in the August twilight. 

It occurs to me I thought I was dying
when really I was only lost,
when really I had only tied myself to the stake
and refused to light a match.

Table Rock

Arrive in the late afternoon, Pennsylvania like a postcard of future foliage tours to come and the cashier at Wegmans decrying updated CDC guidelines. The host shows me round the cabin and explains how great the gun laws, you just walk right in and get your gun, but the lake is yours and the woods are yours and the silence, blissfully, is yours, so you just nod. When he leaves, you walk to the jetty and take all your clothes off, dive off the spider webbed ladder into quiet waters and when you come back up it’s as if you’ve forgotten everything that came before. 

I do not pretend to come to the woods without intention, do not pretend vacation is a break without a goal. But today I spent half an hour staring at a fire, twirling marshmallows on a stick and marveling how age lets you wait a little longer, turn those white puffs around slower as they swell until they reach that perfect golden crackle, instead of setting them on fire and pretending you like em real crisp. 

Some things have changed, some things have gotten better. You’d do well to remember that, when the embers die down and all that’s left to keep you company

is a mind running full speed 

on empty. 

Little Island

You do not have the words before they come to you
They are not yours to demand out of
nothing

Today I closed and wrapped and tied
neatly with a bow, let
his soft silence be the last
sounds on my lips, see
the sun set across the Hudson,
know
that tomorrow the road lies open ahead
and everything that appears
in its wake 

is mine.