You dream of airplanes and confusing flights. The seats don't attach right. When you wake, it is late and cold, a dreary gray across the world and you take your morning walk in silence. Something new appears in your blood stream, just the slightest step up, you gulp it down like air after drowning. When you call it a lifesaver,
it takes you a minute to realize you mean it.
I wake early, have time to think it's too early, before the sweet zing of the moment dawns on me: midsummer. For a brief moment, everything is deep breaths and flowing rivers inside your veins. You book a ticket and for the first time in years, you remember what it is to look forward to something. You had forgotten about hope for so long. Flowers begin to grow behind your ears, inside your fingertips, little sparkles bloom behind your eyelids, you were dead in the gutter, drowning in darkness, for so long there was nothing but bottom and now there is dawn, now there is sunshine in zenith, my legs are not steady yet, do not trust the ground underneath their feet, but oh,
just the chance to walk.
You have great veins, he says, and of all the compliments you could look for in life, this hasn't been on top of your list. He fills vial after vial, and you wish you could sleep for days. Perhaps it's the weather. You walk home as the rain abates, considering hope. It has felt out of reach for a long times, but suddenly there's a tingle in your fingertips. You decide to reach a little further. The alternate side parking dance picks up again, but quieter than usual, how many car have left the city for summer pasture already? You lose your inclination to work, sit instead one Avenue B watching the day unfold. hope.
There was a time when all you did was write poetry, was create worlds out of nothing. You haven't dreamed in ages.
Maybe health is how you give yourself love.
Full moon rising over the East River, a day of swelter in the books. June still brings a breath in the evenings, you enjoy every last moment of it. Driving back from the upstate was nothing short of restorative, all rolling green hills and early summer blooms. A parking spot appeared around the corner, New York whispers its welcomes in riddles, I found two four-leaf-clovers in the upstate without even looking.
I'm not trying to interpret it.
Later, at the Monday bar on a Tuesday, delve through layers that resent unfolding, wonder at the steps you've taken to get there. You look happy, he says. You realize you've started smiling again.
They say the electricity bills will be high this summer.
You sleep with the window open.
It begins to rain. After a weekend of forecasted storm, it arrives only when lazy Sunday has turned to evening on the porch. We sit reading to the sound of it plittering down on the leaves, as the frogs and birds grow silent in the distance. The groundhog is tucked away. I meander over work, the ease of the country like a cloak over my heart, I do not fret, because there is no fret. Tomorrow calls for returns, but the fireflies around the porch lights beg to differ, we are all fools in love.
I wish there was a pithy lesson here, a wise word with which to tie together this message, but I have none to offer. Gas is $5 a gallon and the nation falls apart, but the fireflies around the porch lights beg to differ.
The rain abates. You think poetry is what happens when you let the stillness speak, instead.
The upstate is its own kind of quiet, a heavy, still quiet where nothing has moved fast since ever. I drive the Taconic up, all rolling hills and lush greens and I smile despite myself: summer. Sit in the sunniest room, trying desperately to care about deliverables, but the Sun beams across the river, but the twilight twinkles beyond the woods, how could we possibly care about anything but four leaf clovers and walking barefoot in the grass.
For years we have been coming here. I cannot calculate that magnitude.
Escape is just as much how we live our lives.
The bar is familiar but feels too far, you live in the alphabet avenues now. Midnight arrives too soon, the world falls apart, she says I wish I knew you were at the bottom but the point is your tears do not help me at the bottom of the well and I am well aware. Let’s look at birthday homes instead.
June is beautiful, mild, sunny in the mornings and the corners just where you need it, June lies ahead ripe with potential. She says let’s pick a safe word, then disappears into anecdotes of how they fail.
I’ll stick to the sunshine,
if you don’t mind.
The morning is cool, cloudy, I walk along the river looking for four-leaf clovers or absolution and finding neither, only the bottom of a coffee cup. It seems a fair enough win. Spend the afternoon in deja-vus, have I not stumbled over this sentence before? and stare out open windows. What point is there in work, when one could dance, and live instead? Summer lies before us like a promise, like redemption.
A story fell off my lips the other day while I was busy thinking on other things. That's how they like to appear, stories, they prefer to surprise you when your back is turned, like to tickle you when you think there's nothing left at the bottom of your creative well and find a giggle in your chest.
The Universe will have its way with you like that. All you can do is be here when it calls you.
My parents send a snuggly selfie. Forty-seven years since their snowy wedding day, how young they were, how impossible to imagine the future upon which they were about to embark. An entire life lies behind them: emigrating across the ocean, South Pacific hut nights, four floors of state of the art production studio, a bankruptcy from which no one could recover, seven continents underneath their feet, late summer night bike rides back from the old office, I just have to save the world then I'll come home, I promise then I'll come home. Forty-seven years later and not one of us knows what home is.
I heard your new songs today. I have forgotten to listen, lately, have forgotten your adopted accent and the spaces into which I inserted my own aches, I am all spaces myself, but you go on speaking. He says I heard Like a Rolling Stone as though for the first time, and all I can say is You know it's not a happy song, right? Anyone already on the tarmac refuses to see the writing on the wall.
This is the rule.
He says I am tired, but I have much left to do, and you know it's his journey alone to make. We die, unsatisfied: this is what it is to be human.
I had so much left to do.
June arrives with its usual daggers. You try to learn the lessons before you bleed. But maybe bleeding is how we know
we are alive.
