So Loss

I have some bad news, she writes, the hour late in the homeland and isn't that so often when we choose to rest? It's been a long day, it's been a long life, let me lie for just a while and see you again in the morning. We pray for mornings, we pray for heavens because everything else seems to incurably painful. He died at peace, with mom by his side. I call my father (assuring myself that since he is alive now, he always will be, it's a ruse, and this is fine). 

The heat still doesn't work in my apartment. I hear the super running up and down the stairs but cannot get myself to stick my head out, this head full of prayers now, I sleep with triple layers it's nothing the North didn't put in my pacifier decades ago, what does it matter. These words only serve to remind you that you will die, one day you will die and there is nothing you can do about it. Lessons about fragility are heavy-handed in the moment, best let the darkness sink in for a bit before attempting to craft it into art, why do we craft things into art anyway, should we not spend our days

just holding hands?

Greens

The vacation days melt in a tizzy, you’d mourn their passing if it wasn’t for all the riches they bring. Your two dearest friends book trips to cross the ocean and you think you have never been so lucky. The day rains but you putter around a kitchen, stroll along a quiet hamlet street, there are two seats left at the bar and the bartender remembers your stories of a year ago, this is what it is to build a name and grow your roots. Tomorrow you return to the shoebox on 6th street but it is your shoebox on 6th street and that makes every difference in the world. I dreamed about you again last night but it is different now, I know it’s not really you. Another year approaches and I know, somehow, that I will be better now than ever before, that I will take this crumpled twist of burned debris and mold it into something new. When I was younger I knew I wasn’t quite like the others and perhaps it scared me then but 

Do you know? 

I am not scared of anything anymore. 

Once you have walked through the fire and back, the coals are only ever palettes for the paint. 

Giving

The day is designed for strained conversations and rethinking all of that from which you came; instead I spend the day thinking of all to which I do not wish to go. This life is complicated, and sad, and full of longing, and really we are all just trying to do the best we can. People I love across the ocean find tickets to traverse an entire pandemic, somehow a little sprout of hope grows through the thickets of despondency. I turn the out of office message on my computer and close the lid, letting a morning of kitchen puttering clean out the torrents in my mind. With the cobwebs swept away, all that remains is emptiness and you think 

Is this why I’ve kept it so messy in here? 

It’s hard to see the great darkness 

when it is so close 

When it is so real

When it turns out it is 

All you have left in the 

Silence. 

Unwritten

The evenings end in strange angles of words, in quiet, dark country hamlet streets and a creeping feeling of peace at the edge of my fingertips, this is what repose will do. Your alarm clock rears up for one last hullabaloo (you always hated this word, but sometimes there is no other), and you know if you just make it to the end of this sundown there is a deep breath and hours of words for the taking, so close you can taste it on the tip of your tongue, it's all snowflakes in rainbow colors. 

The windows are thick with frost. You sleep under 15 blankets like a reverse Princess and the Pea. The sun rises over the Hudson River. How many years have you been coming here now? The children grow under your nose. You age, you can feel how you age. There is something magical around the corner, there is another spring around the corner, you know the only way to get to fireworks is to stay alive long enough for them to be ready you are
ready. 

One more day till deep breath. 

I am ready. 

Upstate

I don't know why it will not come. Under pressure, in a time crunch, in a strange house with other voices pushing at your timeline, I do not know why it will not
come. 

The only thing that works during pain is poetry. I think of long country roads in frost, think of how desolate a barren tree, I make worlds out of words where none existed before, I forget time, this is how it will
come, I

learn and relearn the same lessons so many times, after
a lifetime of screaming I am not sure
what it will take for me to 

here
[sic]

.

On Writing

The thing about it, of course, is that you need all the time in the world. You need to pore over old prose, collect hidden meanings from unended sentences, string together dreams like a mad detective, always a little too close to the case, never in a rush to see what else is out there, never tired or world-weary or in need of a good nap. 

The stories will not come out under pressure, will not appreciate the ticking of a kitchen egg timer underneath your shirt will not
come when call and only
barely when coaxed you
stare at blank pages and hobbled post-its and think

There is an entire
world there 

waiting

but it will
make sure you
earned its
trust 

before opening the door.

Born and Raised

Early mornings on First avenue are strange aliens scenes of the east village, wide streets empty, a quiet peace to the November sunshine. I pick her up from the train and we sail through an empty Holland tunnel, only to get lost on the New Jersey turnpike in the next breath. Philadelphia appears like a little spaceship on the foliaged horizon, by now I know the last of the way and everything isn’t as fraught anymore in the greetings. 

We go to bed late, the neighborhood quiet, the dogs nervous. It feels like all those trips of our youth, weekends of sweatpants and hair braiding, the comforts of unconditional relationships years in the making, and I think some things need time. 

Maybe more things than we realize. 

Ghost Coffee

The coffeshop buzzes with late afternoon freelance energy, manic Macintosh laptops oozing busy and important. The three older Jewish gentlemen are unfussed by this self-importance, arranging themselves in a tight corner and instantly demanding every attention through their vivid conversation. Do you know why they call in Manhattan? he asks his friends and in the same breath exclaims Wrong! They orate at each other, trivia from hours of poring over the truths of the world. Coffee arrives, and the old hippie in the corner pulls out an orange presciption pill bottle. It's cinnamon, he heaves at his companions, I put it on everything. I put it on tuna, did you ever put it on tuna, Ira? Ira looks at him with an implied eye roll. Putting cinnamon on tuna is like putting ketchup on ice cream, he ends the conversation and carries on speaking about the stars on the American flag. 

We look at each other across the laptop screens. No one will believe us, we mouth at each other, knowing exactly what the other means. This is why we live in New York. The men go on to talk of growing up in West Bronx, of Brooklyn accents and how the Torah comes full circle like a magic trick, and you think, the world is still out here, we are still out here, everything has changed and yet the magic of human beings has not. 

Ira gets up from his chair, makes an abrupt and important exit. The bar returns to its unencumbered buzz, I return to the myriad of tasks on my to do list. 

Pocket the gift for later.

Bootleg

The bill doesn’t add up, you remember whiskey shots and unknown friends along the sticky bar, everything smells of cigarettes and a time before polish. You revel in everything, taking deep gulps of a life so different from what you have all been offered in this your Golden age. The night grows late, you know you are meant to write the pages, do the work, go to bed on time and namaste into the mat but here is an anodyne better than medicine. 

You want to tell him all about it, know just how well your banter would fit along the bar, see how everything would make sense between the two of you but that was in the Before times and nothing is now as it was. 

You go to bed in a sweltering apartment, ask your super to turn it down but he’s busy washing your car to make up for his own inadequacies, we are all working through whatever we arrived with it’s a ruse, the journey is never over. 

You walk into the unknown with hope, at last

and it is all you could have asked for, now. 

On a Preposition

The morning after a big deadline is like the sea afte a great storm. It seems impossible for it to be so still. My to do list is scatterlings and orphanages, the apartment is at once freezing and rising in steam, New York is a ridiculous place to put your heart but we all do what we can with the cards we were dealt. 

I take a slow, short run along the river, legs stiff with disuse, the air cold now and the leaves clinging to one last desperate plea for attention. I take pictures dutifully, amassing them on my phone like relics of each season. Here it was fall, here it was spring. The nights are so dark now, I lie awake thinking how there is never enough time for all the things you want to do. 

The days are long but the life is short, is that what they say? It'll all be over soon. 

I return to the word processor, my to do list screaming from a corner, abandoned. You've made it work before. Why wouldn't you be able to pull another miracle from that hat you carry, really?

By the Way

There is a space that can only arrive in silence, can only arrive when you have closed the door, turned down the offers, cut yourself off from the things which serve to distract you. In this space, suddenly there is magic, and curlicued words, and all the things you thought your life was supposed to be. These moments, when they come, are so rare as to be delicacies, but so precious as to carry you on through the desert until the next oasis appears. It's a cruel fate, to dedicate your life to such suffering, such endless longing and short moments of celebration. 

But is it not a crueler fate, to have none of the fireworks, to trudge through a day in already worn footsteps, to clock in and out of a hamster wheel leading nowhere but back to the beginning? 

I dig for answers,
my hands come up with pins.

Take

An autumn bluster arrives, dark gray winds blowing the gold out of the honeylocust outside my window, I wake with the weight already in my chest. The sleep would not come last night, tidal pulls of all the world's questions appearing in the rare stillness and I was caught unawares. Are you ever caught unawares by the spectres in your silence?

The words come eventually, slowly, each one aching itself onto the page wrapped in my fears and assumptions. Is it all over now? The years beckon at me, remind me of a thousand late evenings staring into the darkness while words and smoke coiled from my open lips. I lit a cigarette recently and felt ill, is this what becomes of us. 

You vow to claw your way back. If you cannot write a sentence, write a word. If you cannot write a word, find a letter. Let it wrap itself around you until it chokes the fear from your veins, let it be the weight that sits on your chest until all that is left is stories, you know there is a little magic dust left att the bottom of this barrel and you are not giving in until it
gives
out.

Wilt

Feel the earth sink around you. 

Feel the soft drag of nostalgia, how it echoes inside your hollow barrels. 

See the words begin to come out: remember. 

Your words grow out of a stillness 

you cannot schedule between tasks 

on the to do list. 

Whirl

The days rush from under you, spinning in strange aches and confusing maelstroms, time becomes a figment of your abundant imagination - maybe you never had any to begin with. His face on the screen lingers, softening your panic, maybe all will not be disasters in the end. 

New York is a dream in November, even after Daylight Savings robs you of your will to go on come four pm, at least the mornings are a dream, at least the little shoebox on 6th street is a mountain of windows, you cannot be angry when you dreamed a place such as this into existence. New York continues to shine its light on you. 

You go back to the drawing board. You know there was a purpose there, waiting. You just needed breath enough to find it.

Dove

Don't trust a thin pastrymaker drifts past me in the late afternoon silence. Meditations can be so strange when you leave yourself open to the currents of the universe. The woman in the meditation room asks me to imagine dreams of a life and all I see are ink blots, all I see is a life in words, hours and hours of words, again the answer paints itself across my headlights, it's too frustrating to wear yourself thin grating against reality on a daily basis.

I spend a day with the dregs of a week, the last stinging tentacles of disease, we gather around an imaginary dinner table and speak of kisses, the tears are surprising but in the end we are hopeful about swoon. He asks What was the last kiss that felt like home? and I cannot answer it, the words will not come out, I'm keeping this one to myself, you see, I fought too hard for Home, too long, when it shows up in kisses
I keep them to myself. 

We spend an entire life
just trying to get where we're
going.

 

Cygnets

We meet on the corner of Port Authority and Disneyland, this strange maze of bright lights and destitution. We squeeze into the little five bar on 9th avenue and squeeze in next to College Bros and Suit Bros and one of those quirky older ladies who believes you are interested in hearing what she has to say. The musical is awful, Off Broadway at its most tragic, so close in geography yet so painfully far in.. well, everything else. We rush back to the village before the aftermath has even worn off, order bowlfuls of expensive wine, wash ourselves clean. In the morning, my head pounds cruelly, but I rise to the word processor and wind into the Otherworld, familiar yet achingly far away. I am lost in its magical pathways, ever trying to find my way.

But at least I am there. 

The heat rises in the little shoebox on 6th street. The bodega reopens its flower shop, celebrates with flags and music in the afternoon sun. New York is beautiful beyond measure in November and it's a lesson as worthwhile as any. 

Any truth you've ever known can be rewritten. 

There are marvels left in life yet to find.

Hold

My head is cotton, a body of limbs under water and the whole apartment swims in a sweat. Somehow, the hours are longer in fever, I write and write, unencumbered by the normal restraints of society. The silence reminds me, somehow, of all the things that ever mattered, truths crystallized by the force of illness, by the non-negotiable holding of a breath, I meditated late in the night when the pills kept me from sleeping and all I could see was tenderness, how has this pandemic wiped your touch from my memory. 

How has this pandemic wiped my memory

?

I pick up a pen again. He asks about summer but winter is here, they speak of winter but I spent the day bathed in sunshine, I dreamed this little shoebox with all the windows into existence there is no

end to what magic

I can bring into
existence.

Degree

The fever rises in me, washing across my skeleton like splashes in a hot tub, I can't tell what's the radiator steaming along the side of my leg, I forget how to breathe. The scarier tests come back negative, we've just forgotten what a regular old infection is like, was it always this immobilizing? I lie in bed and watch the stories unfurl, how does it always work like this, how does it still manage to surprise you? 

I fall asleep in the bath, later, I drift into the voids of the in betweens, everything becomes poetry in the flow. 

If the word returns to me with this illness,
I don't want it ever to pass.

Magic

The hours look differently under the word processor. There's an ease to the day, a gentle hum to the street, and somehow each sentence begets the next, painting entire worlds underneath your fingertips. 

How is it possible to have all the Answers,
to know love in your heart, 

and keep choosing the wrong paths instead?

Achieve

Two thousand, five hundred seventy-seven posts. How many manuscripts, how many stories. Nothing is easy to count in the piles at your feet, your floor is poetry by now. You start anew. Blank slate, white page, new month, new you, the human spirit was built on blissful ignorance. 

There's a magic in the untold story, in that moment just before it reaches you. You see its outstretched hand, sense its scent on the wind, feel something stirring inside you, something like hope. You remember the delirium of so many times before, the conviction that you'd gladly give up every other love, gladly set your house on fire, if only the story would remain with you and let itself be told. 

It is an illness, perhaps. 

But we're all going to die one way or another. 

I agreed long ago to let this be what kills me.