What I forgot
Fuck you you've obliterated them in your ignorance and I’m not sorry anymore despite all my sorries and you should never have driven anyway. You destroyed it eachtime because I pushed shift page up and did it with each piece because I couldn't believe you. Your cruelty makes me incredulous and I didn't trust my experience that you could and would do it again and I shouldn’t have asked again and again.
I can’t write anymore today not with the phantoms of dirty windows and vermouth at my sides. Not anymore since you ruined it. Since you ruined Christine and the car. I can’t recreate them, I can’t resurrect them despite it being the day before easter and the boulder will remain immobile tomorrow.
“Half an hour into a panic attack, I began calling” feels as familiar as the pianist at my Mervyn’s who always starts with Danny Boy despite being spanish or mormon I can’t tell. “I called Christine” is the beginning to the next but I don’t know it’s like trying to draw my 7th grade english teacher’s face or the backside of a nickel. Here the mutations begin between the dead and the living and theories of the wrong enter where the third remembers the second remembers the first like children born to replace siblings. “You’re wrong tonight I said I’m okay I’m tired said Christine” no this is wrong “You’re wrong or not something is wrong” I didn’t write this “clutching” I wrote later but I meant to say “clamoring” but that didn’t mean panic, not even “these clamoring hands at my vocal cords” which I never wrote, not ever.
I knew She was theory before anything. I know She was the panic attack despite Christine saying “vermouth and hockey and gin and vodka and brother” except I didn’t write vermouth first. Despite Christine saying “Hallmark and scotch” and her laughing at something far away from me and further from my touch she wasn’t wrong even without being right. It wasn’t Christine’s fault she was wrong or not knowing that she was wrong because she said “I’m okay” this time instead of “I’m tired.” Christine was tired but She was more tired because I asked if I’d woken Her up but She always said the same thing because I never heard it. The first time I don’t remember and the second time I said nothing and the third time I said the same thing as both other times. “” She said, dribbling over the “wet pillow.” I know the “overstuffed comforter” was “over stuffed comforter”, and that it was a pun one time and hesitantly witty the other.
I can’t tell you about the windows and the dirt and the over stuffed down comforter or distant lights that didn’t survive the first, much less the second despite it’s insistence. She always had this, and they were always red, always looked warm despite her cold. I don’t even know if the corpse of the forgotten phrases while I poured too much pasta into the salt will forgive me. I can’t reconstruct deciding that okra was okay to eat and “Eat and Heat” tells me nothing about the expiration of sausage. Or that the petulant and reluctant marinara ignored my urgings and exploitations and remained a film on glass and I learned that bocculism lives in tomato sauce and She didn’t have to worry anymore if it was snowing. If it was raining, She was fine, and the camera would fade to black and resolve in a hospital. But I couldn’t tell if the hysterical static within my eyes was precipitation outside my windows and under yellow or not. “Not now” She said in the first, but She “always” said it in the second. She said it again now, but not yet.
I thought of Her second, and She stood in laughter or a hat or something vertical before I called. Did I wake you I asked Her and She sniffed. I’m tired is what Christine said the first time but I didn’t ask her, and She said I was in a car accident none of the times, not even this time because She never said that. Not in words, but She did tell me that.
“If it’s raining, she’d be fine, if it’s snowing, she’ll die” I said each time, remembering the psuedochiasmus, the lack of a semicolon and not thinking I would capitalize Her despite the tense shift. I remember “the worm with claws” at “my vocal cords”, but I don’t know how he got there, I don’t remember how he was the anxiety in my chest.
She was it, She was that coiled centipede in my larynx and bronchials. Her murmurs and crumbling soft sobs at the “insistently blinking” phone, “toggling green and red” but I don’t know the order. Her, indistinguishable from other apartments turned off could see my apartment and one lamp blazing across dark distances. But She never did, not once twice or this third. I know She’s reeling, feeling across Her breasts and Her stomach wherein lies the belly button piercing forgot it was never Her. I never did know those crests mounted on her body, not anytime before the first began and this wind changes everything, the clutching twigs only wanted to brush against my window. I never said this before. “I’ve never said this before” I have.
I tried to show you the “gin and the bandaids” and the “potatoes” with thin twisted arms, clutching themselves in pale, but I only had “potatoes” before and “thinking of” them. I thought of them all the time with “my pinky finger in my mouth” or “my pinky in my teeth” which survived the third only as allusions.
She wasn’t okay Her hands were circumspect in their knobbiness their knuckles skeletal. I know She was “thinly constructed” and “roughly maintained” the second time because the first She wasn’t frightened yet of dying. This time Her ankles twisted beneath the car without accident, and this time She ran her hands down to Her hips to determine swiveling and felt Her heart to “determine mortality” which She immediately forgot and put Her hands to Her face. She stopped there this time and won’t go further if there’s a fourth.
“Are you okay I asked” but Christine said she was okay, she was tired and She didn’t answer at all in words except ones that were wet underneath her tongue. It didn’t matter this time anyway, because I only asked them both before and this time in the third and the final I didn’t ask anyway, just the empty room of nothings that responding with itself or a gesture that is the bookcase’s equivalent of a shrug. Now I’m looking gin cloudy this time with lemon or lime and tonic, thinking I can make 7-up or Fresca. “This wind changes everything” is now capitalized because the winter dead tree needs something from me and She can’t remember me calling She says. Christine said I called but only the third time and the first and She refutes them all and my phone’s been whittled away to blue and grey underneath yesterday. I can’t tell if I said to Her. She said you already told me. “I’m sorry” I said again and again and I can’t tell you about the apologies like wet leaves sticking to boots and arms. They were soggy and choked only in the second time when I said “I said I’m sorry behind tissues transparent” but I don’t think I said that everytime or ever.
If it’s windy I don’t know how She is. “If it’s windy” She should be outside in it, it doesn’t make sense for Her to be in the hospital or Her room with red coating the bed if it’s windy. Now if it’s windy then She’s outside, coating the pavement with strawberry blonde hair or walking down the street confused wondering where Her purse and hamstring went. It now says “if it’s windy,” so She could be okay. “Do you want me to come over I asked” I asked the first and third time into the phone, not knowing what else to say to a crumpled mouth. “Not now” She now said, after waiting hours. I tried to pick Her out of the barricaded windows shut against the outside streetlights and dark but She didn’t say anything I could hear from across the street. Are you okay? But I never woke Her up.
And now today after my sorries and She said things that weren’t words, She can’t remember. You woke me up I wasn’t asleep She once said only today only once and I said I’m sorry “I’m sorry” I said again so She knew I meant it and Christine said 30 year olds and Daiquiris and Birthday and Justin once said Butterfield again and again in the frozen mud and granulated snow.
I asked you today about it. You said, “I’m okay. And I can’t remember, but you’re wrong.”
Chapter the first
No one knows when or how Havalus was built. It is said among the old women running markets of exotic fruits or foreign contraptions or last year’s fashion from overseas that no one built the city. They say that the city was found, already complete, with the temples and the banks and the pennants already erect, waiting. The old women say that a woman wandered through the desolate streets with the apple carts stocked and the fountains flowing until she came to her house and settled in, cleaning and cooking for people who hadn’t arrived yet. The old women in the bazaars say that this woman was the first, and that other people came one by one, finding their courts and brothels, their families and enemies. The old women say that no one knows if these people found their old work and relationships, or if they took what was already set for them in Havalus. Some old women say that the people who didn’t couldn’t find their lives anywhere else found their lives in Havalus, already complete. Some old women say no one existed before Havalus, that there were no lives or people, only bodies wandering and eating, staring and shitting.
The old man who work as cobblers and blacksmiths, shoemakers and coopers will tell you that it took twenty years to make Havalus, and that it was their lives that built the city, not the other way around.
Eastern European
The rain's been cold and reluctant with snow
and the drainpipe percolates unintelligibly along
with cascades and trickles
long after the sky is dry and
I need a town with lonesome rails
and an apartment with windowpanes
made from transparent tin.
Going elsewhere (this is an ekphrasis I had to do on the below picture that turned out better than I thought it would. THAT IS ALL)
There is more to this picture than the obvious, I suppose. Yes, there’s the man standing by the rail on the port side, hand to his mouth like he should be smoking a cigarette and slouching. He’s old, hair thinning beside his heavy glasses, and he has to wrap himself in a dark sweater and thick khaki’s to keep the sea spray from seeping into his flesh. I wonder about him. Is he sick or just worried about something, about his wife who’s no where to be seen and may not exist? Maybe he’s just regretting too much vinegar with his fish, or he hates the sea, this boat. Always hated it. It’s possible he could be having the best time he’s had since the long ago poker nights with the lads in his tavern in Glasgow, if only he could forget about losing that bar to mortgages and angry women.
Or, more generally, there’s more to say about this picture than the center, more to the subject than the unnoticed ecstasy in the middle. There’s something to be said about everyone on this steel ship, surrounded by grey water that looks less forgiving than the steel podium where the captain or some other man of confidence rests his arm, looking out toward land or sea. As I circumnavigate the picture, I take my eyes from person to person, captured in this moment where it seems no one, except the subject, is happy.
There’s a woman in the lower left hand corner crowned in black hair that blends into the back ground, making her hair’s boundary invisible. She, other than the center couple, is the only one who appears to be enjoying herself. She not smiling, not quite, but there’s a certain gentleness to her level mouth, as though she’s just enjoying, quietly. The birds, those gulls that cry as they glide on invisible currants, don’t distract her. She follows one for a moment, switches to another, and doesn’t think. She doesn’t imagine them tearing at the food, she doesn’t think that the approaching beach is full of glass or that the pebbles are particularly sharp right off the jetty. She doesn’t think about the ice cream people on the beach will be eating despite the chill, she doesn’t think about the young man with his book open, also watching the gulls. She just sits, her chin on her sweatered elbow and lets the boat drift towards land.
Behind her is a man with a confused and annoyed expression beneath his knitted cap, looking beyond her, clearly unsettled. He holds his cane in his hand, maybe a bit afraid of what the haphazard boat might do his bones. Like all old men on outings, he’s well dressed, his tie matching his vest, and his jacket dark against his shoulders. He hasn’t been this far out from Edinburgh in his entire life, and frankly, he thought that now was starting a bit late. But, he’s a proud man, and his tie is straight and neat, and Cecily told him he had to come out to see her, that this was important. He didn’t necessarily mind crossing the sea to see his newborn grandson; it was a small price to pay to catch youth in his fading years. But the waves were stronger than he remembered, and these new people, this new generation, he just couldn’t understand their fierceness, their need to be first in line. He didn’t understand why they didn’t move for him, or why his pace was so infuriating to them. He was worried that when he got off the boat, he would be lost, and he was worried that despite his neatly buttoned vest that ran a direct line to his tie, that he would need help. And he was worried that no one would give it to him.
He doesn’t look at anyone, and is no one else does either, except the center two, something I suppose that gives more power to their interlaced fingers and his arm across her side. The captain, all certainty and arrogance, doesn’t look at his passengers any more than the old man who looks like he should be smoking looks at the dark haired woman watching the gulls. Not even the attractive youth in white who looks like a more blue-collar version of JFK is watching for girls. His eyes, like most of the passengers’ eyes, are on the beach, on the destination. He, too, looks worried. There is something waiting for him there, unknown and unimportant to everyone else on the boat. Like everyone else, he’s waiting for something between the grey sky and the grey sea.
It’s only the couple in the middle that no one sees but us who stays within the boundaries of the photograph. His face hidden beneath his dark curls and the shadow of his cheek line, he leans his kiss into her forehead. With her eyes closed in heart breaking joy, leans back without smile and loves him. I can think of nothing more beautiful than these two lovers, entwined and invisible among the crowd, forgetting the ship, the beach, two so close they’re acting as one with no thoughts under the sky, caught in an old photograph at the very moment that they could be no more present in the moment.
Everyone else got off the boat. The old man made it to Cecily without any problems and met his grandson. He decided to stay with them, and only returned to Edinburgh in a casket. The man who looked like JFK didn’t remember the trip at all, and never told anyone about it once a week had passed. The old man with the glasses who looked like he should be smoking never got on a ship again, and told his wife repeatedly of the ‘hellish journey,’ and she smiled and continued crocheting while he drank scotch and thought of poker. The women with the ethereal hair continued on with life, but never forgot the boat ride, and whenever possible, took a break from her publishing job and rode the ship roundtrip. She never got off when the boat landed across the straight, and simply sat, watching the gulls until the boat returned her to her original soil again. The couple, however, is still there, always will be there. Her hair will always be blonde and full, and his head will always be buried in her hair, and they will always be in love, long after everyone else has died and been born.
Recruitment
Without demure,
Jack Prelutsky produced
a thin cigarette
and slid it to Billy
"Don't worry, they're communal."
She didn't tell me he hit her before I went to the second hand store
Twisting now beside a
stranger's chair and I
swear that CD skipped
or maybe is
but I don't know this
music or this empty shop
and I don't know why I bought
this it's hideous and purple
The bag it came in
rumples easily in my hand
and they're speaking
Spanish which I speak and ignore
and they ask Peyote? and acid
which they've given up
since the wake and I
mutter downcast until they leave
They're out of ribbons
I didn't ask for
but the bob haired girl apologizes
wrapping purple in purple
and tied in hideous purple like
tattoos on bruises and the CD just keeps
stuttering for or four or fore
I don't know which but I hate its insistence
Debit Visa 9683 $54.32 yes
for Clare who broke
and Thomas with flowers postmortem
or post at the least
and I leave the store
with my hand in purple
