Strays
My biggest disappointment in childhood was knowing I would never be able to fly which was all that I was doing in dreams at least once or twice a week.
A friend in Provincetown once described someone we both knew as: he seems to process compassion as a perceived weakness and rebukes it.
Every subway that pulls out of a station in NYC plays the same three beginning notes of “Somewhere,” which, in my grandiose way seemed like something nobody else had ever thought of and so I posted said original thought on Facebook where, in less than 24 hours, Scott Frankel who wrote the music for “Grey Gardens,” commented: “You’re just finding that out?”
A friend from South America writes: I went to see him in jail. He’s added two Chinese characters on his wall in charcoal. He doesn’t know what they mean. When I ask him, he says he likes the way they look. “Every language except English looks designed,” he says. He saw angels, too. Every morning light broke off as a series of tiny illuminations that were slightly brighter than usual: effervescent. He called the light Someday.
For a long time I’ve been looking for a paragraph to include: falling in love in the time it takes to unlock a door.
None of the words for getting used to something: accustoming, etc., get to the phenomenology of getting used to something. Getting used to something should be held inside a word like petrichor—a word coined by scientists in 1964 to describe the smell of earth after rain.
For a long time, I’ve been looking for a paragraph to include: the erotic sadness of smoking in the dark.
In my last year of teaching poetry at Hunter College, my students were trying to figure out: God, the apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, the climate apocalypse, green hair.
One student told me his house is badly haunted—lovesick he called it. Every heart he thought he heard in youth broke upon arrival.
After the class worked up a frenzy around ideas for poems, I would bring them back as a group like the mustangs in the white earth end of The Misfits. Now there was a sad picture. Eli Wallach and Marilyn Monroe dancing in the only room in the world left of loneliness.
”It all counts,” I told them on the last day. Imagine you can have the other life instead of the one that chose you, when we were all alive at the same table.
“If you call out to one of the dead—all of them can hear you” line from the movie Insidious: Chapter 3”
To his son, who is suffering from nightmares, Randy Quaid in the movie Parents, says: “You can be yourself in the dark.”
*
There are times, like these, when the treachery in the world
is so pronounced that one has to overpass
language to state its course
one has to forget how one outlasts their own time
(remember singing)
on the corner of Dark and Candlelight
