Memoriam

All weekend, the only thing I see is parking spots. The whole town out for the weekend, the whole town at the beach, I am tempted to drive the station wagon around the neighborhood and parallel park in a hundred enormous spots. The city is calm, quiet, the weather is perfect, everything is heartachingly beautiful. I sit on the hot tar roof of my 5-story tenement and try not to burn the soles of my feet while staring at the Empire State building 28 blocks north and letting my shoulders turn pink with New.

I love the city when everyone leaves. 

(It's not a metaphor. I am simple, now, uncomplicated in my old age.)

White Noise

Early mornings in the little bookstore, all is quiet but for the loud headphones of the man sitting next to me. There's a particular stillness in New York mornings, a moment before the rush begins, before the heat rises. My body aches from the long run, from the weight of the world on my shoulders but I do not mind it. 

It's nice to be reminded one has a body at all. 

The summer I turned 20, I moved to the West Coast in the warmest, longest summer in memory. Unemployed, we spent September mornings on the tram to the ocean, I'll never forget the pleasure of indulgence. So many summers since have been cold, and rainy, like grasping at straws that would not be caught. 

Like trying to fight for a love that did, in fact, not love you back. 

I try to give myself gifts of time, of space for writing and living in my own creative whorl, but I am reluctant to receive, anxious about the time lost, it's cruel. I touch the spines of the books around me, it always soothed me as a child. 

And we are all forever children, somewhere inside.

Turns

For hours I procrastinate: finding new work, washing more dishes, anything to not lace the sneakers and leave the house. But at last there is nothing left to be done. Along the river, my steps are slow, painstaking. I cross the FDR, reluctantly, and then it happens. 

The turning point. 

A familiar bounce in the step, the softest inkling of having been there before, recognizing it in joy. Lightness. I ran faster then, remembering how to have long meandering conversations along the miles, how hope builds upon itself if only it gets a foothold, how it feels to have blood coursing through you like you are alive, after months of inertia in your veins. 

I've seen this exit before, felt what it's like to drag a heavy weight up the ramp, how impossible it seems to make it out. I know the weeks and months after, when you think you are only just at the edge and could tumble back down at any moment, until enough days pass and the Darkness seems like wistful memory of your past, a scar you don't mind showing at parties. 

Being here is much like falling in love at first sight - you cannot actually be sure it's happened until speaking of it in hindsight. It's just a tickle. It's just the air reaching the bottom of your lung instead of merely the top of your throat. It's just potential along South Street, that bend between the bridges where you remember where you are. 

On the way home, Avenue B lay warm and green and inviting. I thought I love this place still like it's the first day we met, and I hadn't remembered that in a while. 

The Darkness takes so much of what you remembered. But the turning point is here now. The light will remind you,
again.

I Forget What Eight Was For

I sleep late in the mornings now, without explanation, I wake refreshed, without the panic deep in my spine, it defies explanation. The heat abates, the city turns into a dreamy spring, I went for a long run through the projects and felt my body try to remember itself after months of being invisible to itself. 

It's been a long, cold lonely winter. Two years of it, in fact. We've lost so much. 

Perhaps now is time to gather the rosebud still within our reach.

Your Plane Right on Time

Days and nights twist around themselves; I sleep deliciously late in the mornings and my mind races at night. The season's first heat wave heaves itself onto the streets, we are all cold showers on the hour, late night at backyard bars in Brooklyn, long brunches in air conditioned spaces: everything smells like summer. 

I go to sleep too late on Sunday, the weekend a revelry in my pocket, a reminder of times before the Great Depression. Maraschino cherries, plans of Mexico, instructions on how to have a big birthday, convertible top down with the Manhattan skyline straight ahead; the shoebox sags under the weight of the weather.

The AC unit in the little bedroom on 6th street attempts a hero's journey. 

You're starting to think maybe you could, too.

Downpour

(New York returns to you like breath,
like open windowed poetry when you should be working, like
that particular way the street smells after a surprise rainstorm and
late night movie shoots on your old block in the numbered
avenues, you
think sometimes you ought to run away but
nowhere else returns to you like breath
what I really mean is like
home.)

Oh Home

A car pulls out ahead on 7th street, a spot around the block in just a few minutes. The east village simmers around me, how small avenue B looks, like a movie set after the rain. Four flights up, the little apartment remains, the plants survive. I revel in returning home, in having a home. Jet lagged, I stay up, letting my fingers get pruny with New York City, with 16 years of love under our belt. 

I do not sleep. 

This is why we get along.

Gawain

Traverse an airport newer than your post-pandemic sensibilities, all slick and clean and sparkling whites. Arrive at the gate earlier than ever, how you love a small town. New York beckons at the other end of an airplane, home beckons at the other end of all you had planned, sometimes the best part of going away is coming home, and the gift is not lost on you. 

The adventure has decided not to be over

So neither,
then,
are you.

Set

Halfway down Center street, the message comes in. Bags packed in the trunk, New York clothes back on. Your flight has been canceled. Nothing to do but to turn around, bring all the travel jitters to the full moon and try to settle in. Time passes differently in the country. You said you wanted a few more days, she writes. The full moon speaks to you across the valley, says the country has not forgotten you even when you have left it behind. Says you have places left to go. Places left to come home to. 

Says there's miles left in this tank,
and new lights to show the way.

Eclipse

I step out onto the back deck, dreaming of stars but expecting the full moon to drown the all out. Yet they appear one by one, like pin pricks or secrets across the night sky, a blanket spread across my field of vision. In the east, a murky, blood red orb hangs low above the mountain ridge: a full moon eclipsed by our own shadow. I sit for an hour watching its orange haze, wondering at what this means, another quiet message from a moon when I’ve been pleading for stars, there is a purpose there. 

No stars fall from the sky while the opportunity exists. 

The air is heavy with lilac and bird cherry, the spring stream rushing out any noise but the cicadas and a lone coyote in the distance. After an hour, the slightest sliver of light beams back from the east and drowns out the haze around it. Stars become clearer, gravitating toward the light, the velvet might deep again and the cloud cover of the next valley bouncing back its urban brightness. I stare at the new moon, mesmerized, bare feet cold in the desert chill. 

You never gave up looking. 

Maybe it’s just time to turn your eyes toward something new. 

9 800 Feet

The morning is already bright and mild but the roads are empty when I head out. Trying to find paths not directly climbing the mountain, I am still out of breath before I've even started. Altitude strangles the oxygen in your lungs, turns your legs to lead. I keep trying. At the edge of the little town, I upend on a forest trail, climbing over snow mounds and turning off the music to listen to birdsong and wood peckers. 

The mountain air whispers something. It's finally starting to become clear just what. 

Skin-walker

Late at night, we drive out into the wilderness. Park the car at the empty lot and walk the last few feet to the canyon's edge. It is absolutely, entirely, and completely quiet, the kind of quiet that makes your ears ring. Even the wind has died down. We make jokes about living dead, but at the ridge of the canyon, it is hard to be scared, anymore. A full moon bathes the eons in light, every fold in stark relief against the night, red rock outlining itself against snow and evergreen trees. 

Not a single star falls while we stand there, staring at the sky. No matter. I've learned wishes come true in
more ways than one.

Canyon

Standing at the majesty of nature is the closest I get to religion, he says, after hours on the freeway discussing how they left God behind. The mountainside around us dives into a deep canyon at our feet, rivers of red rock making waves out of eons, mountain ranges in the distance stretch all the way to the sea. I lose my breath to the altitude, or perhaps to the insignificance of my small body in the vastness of everything. I am comforted by my negligible existence. At the edge of the rim, my insides tingle: fear and fearlessness spiral through my body. 

The entirety of life's questions in one duality.  

We return to basecamp, flushed with the things we'd seen, and return to our words. How many years have we spent together, silently weaving our stories together, loudly carrying each other forward. It's been a long, cold, lonely winter. 

 Something tells me I'm ready to thaw. 

Dixie National Forest

Drive up winding roads, the mountainside ragged from wildfire and winter. We reach 11,000 feet and my breath falls short in my lungs. He writes temptations into the ether, I don't know where to put it. A light ache remains, but it doesn't know where to go either, everything is a strange state of suspended disbelief. We arrive at the little ski town by dusk, emptied for the season but still with the scent of chlorinated pools and firewood in the halls. 

Make our way to a campground on the other side of the mountain to find the only open restaurant in the park. I sit underneath a deer head. A sign next to it says "probably shot out of season," like a badge of honor. On the way home, we pass enormous elk in the forest glens. Who decides what a season is, anyway. 

The bedroom is dark, silent, warm. I sleep well into the morning. The air is trying to tell me something. 

I'm almost ready to listen. 

Because I've Built My Life Around You

Is that okay? he says, his voice low and soft. I take a deep breath, the air smells of sweat and cologne. I nod. Firm hands on warm skin, ache through it, talk about our lives in brief interjections, like curiosities, like nothing really exists outside this room, we only pretend it does. I emerge from the fog eventually, unsure of the events, unsure of the soft bruising along my back, sit staring at the night sky. Snow in May, I sigh, exasperated, and look for shooting stars again. Happy just to hope for something. 

The thing about night skies, though, is you can spend the hours looking for shooting stars upon which to place your prayers, but you ignore the brightest light of all. 

So I stared at the moon instead, this steady beacon, this reliable light in the darkness. How many millenia have we wondered about its rough shadows, how many nights has it lit my way home? You can look for morsels of magic all you like. 

The answer was always much more obvious than you could have asked for.

But no one can make you see the light but you. 

Renew

Because it's all in my head
"You're too sensitive,"
they said
I said, "Okay,
but let's discuss this
at the hospital" 

"Sure," I said, "let's sign on for another year."

I'm not going anywhere.

Off

By morning, the air is below freezing, dustings of frost across the budding leaves. The cattle are out, little calves jumping around their mothers in the early hours. The creek is full of runoff from the mountains, such a brief moment of life before the scorched earth arrives. I wake early with the blinds up, reveling in disorientation. Begging for the earth to tilt on its axis and shake this jumble of bones back into some semblance of order. I sat on the plane, unrecognizable to myself, and yet no stranger to the feeling. 

Late at night, I sit shivering on the lawn, returned yet again to ask for answers from the Universe. The moon so bright the stars daren't come out. 

Except just next to the moon, where the light is brightest of all, where the sky still looks blue from illumination, one star shone, so bright it would not be silenced by any power around it. I stared at it until my lips were blue, asking what it meant by its steadfast lights. 

The stars do not reveal their secrets. But they will give you the thread that you may begin to pull
yourself.

Monday Morning

May 9 and I wake to snow on the ground. The spring brook outside the window carries on, unrelenting, but it looks colder now, less hopeful. The flowering trees shiver under the dusting, but it's nothing they haven't seen before. 

I know how they feel. 

My To-do list runs long, Monday mornings like a heavy drag across your chest and you wonder what the point is. There was a time when I'd come to this country view only to write the stories of my own whims, but they feel long gone now. I look at nearby rentals and still can't make the mortgage. 

The secret evades me, time after time, year after year. I felt so close a few times, like I could smell its promises on the wind, like if I only stretched my fingers into the sunlight ahead I could touch it. But that was long ago now, lately my fingers shiver from cold, the silence is deafening. 

Questions trickle out of my chest like stolen goods. Nobody is buying. 

They turn to dust on the ground.

Silent

Nine hours of sleep, the country works its magic on tightly wound New Yorkers, the saying is quiet like the grave but perhaps it's more quiet like peace. A spring brook runs past the house, only for these few weeks when the desert is green, the sounds of swirling water, the sounds of returning life, I am mesmerized for hours watching it play. Soon it will be gone again. The chickens look at me, trying to gauge if I am a bringer of treats. 

I'm here full of questions again, myself. 

Departure

You have only a few hours to sleep, so you don't. Lie awake with the radiator pulsating, sounds of East Village Friday nights beaming through the incessant rain. In the early morning, the city is still dark, still slick, I close the door behind me and race across the Williamsburg Bridge. The tingle of travel evades me, but then the tingles of all things evade me lately. I look for light switches in the dark, look for sparks against the flint, anything to start this dead engine again. My landlord raises the rent, says I could've made it so much higher but I like you, and I wonder if there is room left in New York for struggling writers looking for magic. 

At the airport, a young man next to me looks at my bag and says, "Do they have particularly good eggs in New York?" An empty egg carton that doesn't fit anywhere else sticks out of an open pocket. "No," I reply. "But my parents' valley does." Illness eats at you like dry rot, quietly at first, inconscpicous, and suddenly one day you find that your entire insides have turned to mulch, have turned useless beneath your finger. The seat next to you on the flight is empty. You think,

We must find gratitude in even the smallest
of moments.

Shop Right

For a whole day, I do not work. I turn off messages and spend the morning with other writers, poring in silence over the worlds we created. I lie in bed reading, bike home from the river in surprise sunshine, spend hours caramellizing onions: in essence, I live. My aches subside, the ball of lead in my chest. I return to the whims of my imagination, forget to check the time. A voice yells my name outside the window, Manhattan is a village and I never love it more than in the little winks. 

It occurs to me that I've spent years searching for direction, but the truth is I had it all along. 

After that it's just about yelling loud enough for yourself to hear it.

Writeshop

Your country disintegrates. You arrived at the tail end of a dream, and now it is devolving into a dystopian farce of regressive forces. Hope abandons like rats on a sinking ship: last, but eventually. My arm burns from so many hours locked into a new industrial prison, this was not the freedom the poets imagined. The bodies ache from disillusionment. 

The pain is unsustainable. You know this. 

But it is hard to find escape routes
that do not look so much like parachutes
refusing to open.

(and the Floor is Lava)

There are fires
the kind that set your heart alight that
lift you across the bridges of the impossible and
bring you so close to the sun that you two are
indistinguishable

You live for this fire

But there are others
the kind
that rage across your blistering skin and
turn to ash all that which you had so
carefully
tended inside of it

You do not die by this fire

But oh,
some days it is hard to believe it.

Projections

I am caught by the whims again, she writes,
there's a strange current under the folds
whispering my name
painting the streams in mysterious colors
turning itself into stories at my
fingertips.

"I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.

I'm writing a novel."

Circadian

It's the lightning that wakes me, bright flashes through the drawn blinds, like someone flicked a flashlight in front of my face. Shortly after: thunder. Massive, unapologetic shelling. My half-sleeping mind connects dots to the ancient mythologies, to hammers and wars in the heavens, for a brief rest between assaults it makes sense. 

I wake again, later, after it's over, just before it is time to rise. Everything is quiet. I miss the immediacy of the storm. Maybe I just miss feeling anything properly, like it's not wrapped in so much brick cotton. I begin to dig through the pile of work, only to realize my head is elsewhere, circling the green buds outside the window, twirling off into the clouds, swimming at the bottom of the city's underground. 

The rain continues, noncommittal, foliage expanding before our eyes; the doves are back on the fire escape with their tender promises. A new story weaves itself into your mind, there's no turning it down. Curiosity moves you forward. 

It seems more like a gift, than anything you've seen.

[Day] One (Day)

On the way back, everything smiles. They skip into JFK Terminal One and you see no traffic until the Williamsburg bridge: a slow, sunny traverse behind an ice cream truck, staring at the city. A parking spot waits just outside the door, the trees have grown a little greener, the east village lives again. The landlord writes, asks for more money but not more than that you believe you can find it. Two mourning doves court each other on the fire escape outside your window, Sunday afternoon and they have found themselves able to love again. 

There's poetry to be found in the twists and turns of a world, there are fables to weave out of the tragedies of a life, this is not how you had planned to appear on this threshold but what if the arrival is
in fact
a gift?

Mayday

Apartments in Philadelphia are dark, we decide, all the windows shuttered to the outside world and you barely know the sun is shining. How does one endure a life in isolation? We end the night at a bar that feels like America and you wonder what other life you might be living if you weren’t so terribly in love with New York City. But then can’t that be said for anything? 

Growing older is just having to live with the choices you make. 

In my dream, we finish a marathon. I think something about still having time to realize what one is meant to do but then I remember my age and stop myself short. The dream switches and we are racing through department stores: in search of what, I don’t know. Maybe that’s another lesson. 

May arrives with just a hint of something familiar. You think perhaps you see the path again, though you’ve been deep in the woods for years. 

You start to make your way 

Back.