#1

–  It’s like we’re always talking past one another

–  What’s that? You cut out for a second

–  Cute. Quips are a self-defense mechanism

–  The best defense is a good offense. Fuck off. Did that one get past you?

–  Why are you being this way?

–  Question with a question. Who are you, Socrates?

–  Are you?

–  Touche

–  Socrates wasn’t French

–  Neither was the last time we kissed

–  I’ll miss mornings like this the most of all

 

#2

– What do you think of it?

–  Of it? Of what?

–  You know … it

–  Oh, gotcha. Yeah, good. I guess

–  Kind of different, right?

–  Kind of

–  Is that all you have to say?

–  No. Also I’m beginning to develop a migraine

–  Are you a frequent sufferer?

–  More and more, lately

–  You never ask me anything about myself, I’ve noticed. Why is that?

–  I think probably because I’m too busy answering

–

–  Ok, I’ll bite. Do you believe in ghosts?

–  That’s it? That’s what you came up with?

–  It’s a legit question

–  I believe voices frequently continue to whisper in rooms long after the rooms are empty

–  Oh my god. How I love you

–

 

#3

–  Some believe God is everywhere, in everything

–  Sure. Stands to reason. As good a conception as any other, I suppose

–  In every grain of sand

–  Right

–  In every molecule and atom

–  Seriously, I got it

–  Do you believe in God?

–  Well, it seems far-fetched. But then so do centaurs

–  Centaurs were myths

–  So the monotheists would have you believe

–  When I was a kid I somehow conflated an image of God with that of Grand Papa from The Munsters. It was on TV a lot when I was young. In syndication

–  Is that the one with the hand that comes out of the music box?

–  No. It really has been a comfort to me over the years. Instead of a supreme deity who looks fitted for the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel, mine is some goofy, harmless old geezer in pancake makeup puttering around in a basement laboratory somewhere. And he’s in black-and-white, which helps too

–  Most conceptions of God seem to come in black-and-white

–  Yeah. And in syndication

–  The metaphors write themselves, people

 

#4

–  He could be the end of The Republic as we know it

–  As if it was going so gangbusters before he came along

–  Aren’t you even a little worried?

–  Most definitely. It’s my defining characteristic

–  I mean about the future of our country. The fate of the free world. I’m talking about the greater good, the large view, humanity as a whole.

–  Oh. Well about all that I’m reasonably indifferent

 

#5

–  You’re impossible!

–  You are!

–  We could go round and round like this forever

–  What? We’re just getting started

–  Then why am I so tired?!

 

#6

–  I didn’t mean it

–  Ok

–  Talk to me

–  Please, I don’t want to. Not right now

–  Why not?

–  I just … I just need to be silent for awhile, alright?

–  Alright, yes, I get that. I hear you. But it’s like you won’t even accept what I’m saying or give it any credence. I said something I didn’t even mean and you took it wrong and now it’s turned into this thing. You’re just pouting and I’m trying to communicate and instead we’re just sitting here when we should be talking it through. But we’re not because you refuse to, and even though I apologized you’re still making it this huge issue and refusing to see my side of it or even admit that maybe, just maybe, you’re to blame too

–  Ok. Fine

–  But then I know you never think you’re to blame for anything. You never do anything wrong

–  Ok, stop

–  Must be nice, being beyond reproach 24/7

–  Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok …

 

#7

–  Tolstoy said happiness writes white. It doesn’t show up on the page

 

 

 

 

 

 

–  He was a smart guy, that Tolstoy

 

#8

–  Most communication is deeper than words can touch

–  The human in me totally agrees, even if the writer in me dies a little when I hear stuff like that

–  You’ll live. Both parts

–  Come here

 

 

Twice tonight
I woke up in love,
And when it happened
A third time,
I got out of bed.

The roof amurmur
With soft, wet words,
At the oriel window I hovered,
Looking down onto the huddled world

Swooning under snowfall.
Six-folded flakes dropped through
Cherished light, winter’s radium,
The contemplative corona of a violet sun,

Elf maples with their petitioner heads bowed,
Crystals caught in their lavender lashes, periwinkle
Locks trailing under petticoats of snow.
In the courtyard, the spikes of the wrought-iron fence

Gleamed sallow at their enameled black tips,
Gilded clues as to our absent moon’s whereabouts.
Unfold into the sweep of the gothic town,
Unfurl the silent passages of streets

That shine beneath the ghost lungs of street lamps,
A dark Cadillac shuttles in its solitary creep
And vanishes up some nocturnal boulevard.
The cornices of the old buildings downtown,

The dovecotes and the cupola of the cathedral
Prop the tent of the sky, the chimney stacks pluming,
Slabs of smoke, marbled vapor, the half-hewn ribbons
Of floating sculptures suspended in the night air,

And against the burgundy backdrop the clock tower,
The grand, gnarled stalk of the clock tower,
Lording like the Tree of Knowledge, shawled
In vestments of blue flame, cupping its circumspect eye.

While in the levitating nimbus of heaven,
A colloquy sings between the glory of the snow-
Laden earth and the hoary snow-dancing sky,
Arias sounding in major 7ths and quarter-notes.

See the surly town run away into air,
And escape down to the riverside, where
Snowflakes pluck harp strings on the water
And tungsten epaulets ride on the funereal

Advance of the downstream current, bobbing
With hypothermic fire. Spiral deeper
Into darker night, the cropped hillsides
Dressed in roving scrub and shrub, on into

The thickets where the wood thickens
And the conifers crowd around and
Evergreen lancets prickle in the smoky
Fume of the cedars and shagbark behind

The curtains of pine. Inside jade bowers,
Clandestine councils of extinct eagles confer,
Frozen limbs for perches, sad sapphires for eyes.
A sleepless dream soars on, over the swaths

Of Federal fields in the hibernating valleys;
In the disused pastures dimmed by December’s
Death, harrows glint steel-tongued and scythe-sharp,
The splintered estates of cadaverous farms

Timeless and obsolete, stone walls banked by snow.
The fragile barns and terne sheds
Against the coal-glowing horizon like
Monuments to mourning, and farmhouse windows

Webbed in frost. The snowdrifts in the dells and vales,
The hissing kisses against the shy faces of ponds,
As white mobile mountains move across the land,
Until
The flywheel of the storm is finally staunched by

The ingot mountains to my private West.
I know a place where right now
There is no snow. Where night is vacant.
Where the hollowed sky
Is braided by constellations, and electricity
Weaves a net over the prairies and worshipful swamps.

A rustle of cotton and threads, the bed behind me stirring,
The pillow whispers, bidding me back to sleep.
And I look out again on the world
Wearing its winter fur, and know again it is not a person I love.

 

The good assassin listens
So well for his prey
That he hears it, hears
So well his prey
That he sees it,
Sees so well his prey
That he comes to know it,
To know it as he knows himself.

The best assassin knows
So well his prey
That he feels it, feels
So well his prey
That he comes to love it,
To love it as he loves himself.
And it is love

Which guides his hand,
Every steel thrust,
A stab, another stab,
Killing so well because
At last he is succeeding
In killing himself.

 

I’m that sepia-skinned kid, with his ma’ams
And his manners, the kindling’s first crackle,
The snowy figure inside the glass,
Adjunct to an earnest heart,
Wide-eyed witness with arms wide-open to the world, the
He which he was not destined to be,

The destination of which he never dreamed.
Divergent point, the maiden conscience
Before it took on freight. I am the family crest,
Fallen. Self-educated, fiercely,
What remained after the flood waters receded
And the better angels were countermanded.

All the good in him
I gamboled away, kept a kernel, a plum’s stone,
From which sprang a new garden, of edges
And angles and alien fruit,
While he remains trapped, one more hunk of statuary,
Surrounded by the harmless friends

From back then, who born in full bloom,
Commenced to dying the very next day.
On his face I see the start
Of the prude’s latent scowl, just the sort of face
I cannot trust, over-born with breeding,
Undercooked in defiance, begging for regulation,

A counterfeit of innocence. He is me,
Prepped for translation, before I conquered his visions,
Reached back across the dial,
And rescued him from contentment.
I continued becoming, becoming
Even as a star becomes, in thrall to that daily creation.

My antecedent belongs to yesterday—and he can keep it.
All nostalgia is delusion; all piety, false piety.
Reverence is the original sin.
This is today’s creature talking.

Homeopathy

 

Nothing sets my nerves on edge

Like the dulcet tones of a pan flute.

 

I am told to sit, told to breathe

And allow my mind to uncoil

While they have a go at me with

Their needles.

My pressure points.

 

Here, let go, they say.

The needle will relax you.

Man, I’ve heard that one before.

 

He saw her for the last time in one of those chain bookstores that carries stationary, journals, sketch-pads, calendars, board games, lattes, scones, and, on the third floor, books. He had returned to attend the funeral of an octogenarian uncle, whom he could have sworn had already died some years before. With Uncle Fitz finally, positively, in the ground, he was spending a couple of idle hours before heading to the airport and catching the return flight to what was now his home.

It was a panting Saturday in August, the climate ripe with the fickleness of summer storms. On the floor with all the books there stretched a gallery of floor-to-ceiling windows; through the glass to the fore the daylight poured in gray and soft and wet, while through the windows the aft sunshine blossomed in highlights of gold and green. She was on the side with the sun. By the Art section, clad in her trademark pea coat, smudgy black blouse, brown, wedge-heeled boots (hers was a wardrobe forever heedless of season). No sooner had he caught sight of her than instantly he was inculcated with the remembered sensation she always induced in her surroundings, the delicious environment she carried with her everywhere, every bit as charged as the atmospheres outside with the proposition of rain. Deeper he sank into the History section to observe unseen, free to watch her with yesterday’s eyes.

She was standing beside a man; their flanks grazed thoughtlessly, their hands idly brushed against one other. Her dancing dark eyes; brandy-wine hair spread over the crescent pinna of light brown ears; slender hands like a sculptor, carving absent-minded figures in the space around her. She remained the only person he had ever seen who possessed a true aura, a peculiar property that drew all light to her and made her to shine. She possessed this aura the way certain artists can possess a color, the way Picasso or Miles Davis own their various kinds of blue. He used to often comment on this quality to friends—“it’s like she’s cut from stained glass” “she glows like she came out of an old black-and-white movie ” “she is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen”—and they would politely oblige him—“yeah, yeah, she’s cute”—but soon enough their eyes would just roll, since when the subject was her his talk rarely showed signs of proportion. That, of course, had been long time ago. He was seeing her now for the first time in years and he remembered sensing back then, at the formerly most recent sighting—instinct’s consolatory premonition—that it was not to be the last time, that at some point he would lay eyes on her again. Now here was the proof, standing not quite fifty feet away, smiling still her smile like a wild flower blooming, tracing a nail over the cover of a coffee-table book on The Impressionists: lily pads, an emerald canal, chartreuse clouds in a lavender sky, parasols and white gowns pinned under her fine finger. He assumed the man with her was her husband; some time ago he’d been informed that she had married, and had never received word of any divorce. And it hadn’t been for a lack of listening.

Bittersweet intuition told him that this time was indeed to be his last. So he commanded his eyes to record all he could of her in these closing moments, every move, every expression, to absorb every last glimpse left to him as she maneuvered deftly down the aisles, past Gardening, past Food and Cooking, past Women’s Health. How she moved like one in good graces with gravity; how she held her chin so erect her head tilted far back; how her face darkened at the slope of her jaw, turning a burnished copper in the swoop of her throat. How she kept one hand tucked in her coat pocket, like a commandant.

The husband, however, kept getting in the way. A tall, stiff man with loutish eyes, a nose that in profile looked at least once broken, a cretin’s chin with one of those ridiculous cavernous clefts, hands that hung like an orangutan’s mitts from his shirt sleeves, the knuckles embossed with coarse black hairs. A boorish way of walking, more like a stomp. But they moved together, the two of them, in an easy and natural orbit, despite his clumsiness, in spite of her grace, conjoined in a complementary continuation like that cheap conjuror’s trinket with the two metal hoops looped together, the link between them invisible to the uninitiated’s eye.

Already he was losing her—she and her Golem were moving from bow to stern, navigating the third floor’s cluttered geometry, and were making for the staircase. He trailed them, passing Judaica and World Religions, passing Metaphysical Studies and proceeding onwards to Recovery, keeping tight to the wall so as to spare everyone involved any embarrassment if he were detected. Her heel was on the first step…then the third…then down to the fifth…she was disappearing forever down the stairs, and now only her shoulders and head were visible, framed in a gap between two balusters. He was overcome with the urge for some dramatic farewell, the sentimentalist gesture that in regards to her had always been his weakness. His hand rose to meet his mouth, touching lips to palm, and he blew a kiss her way, an ethereal wish with butterfly wings that flapped on a hopeless if heartfelt breeze.

And, as though she felt the shadow of the winged figment flit across her face, her eyes suddenly lifted—and she was looking directly at him. Catching him there, with his lips puckered, bent like a crooked Cupid in a fountain. This then was also her last ever image of him; likely she had made the first-floor café before any recognition on her part dawned.

Like the importunate drunk who can never get enough he staggered to the row of windows to position himself among the bargain tables and look down onto the parking lot in hopes of stealing just one more vision. The lot was now lathed in sunshine, people everywhere down there, milling atop the steaming asphalt, jerking umbrellas closed, toting brimming shopping bags and magnum-sized Mocha Chinos, mothers with children in hand and fathers with more children riding their shoulders, all wayfaring strangers on their own layovers between deaths. But no her. He waited several minutes, then several minutes more, but she and her craven companion never emerged, having perhaps slipped out some side exit.

Above the her-less land the rain had departed, but in the distance there still issued ominous rumbles of thunder and nefarious nimbus masses in the sky to the west still threatened storms. Only after another toll of thunder had died away did he become aware that there was music playing in the store. A vaguely familiar cluster of notes and arc of melody, a song that he knew he knew, though he couldn’t immediately place it, not from the slight snatch he was hearing. Because no sooner had he registered its existence than the song was over, its final chord fading out. Later, he would surely recall it. Maybe it was a song he hated, or maybe it was one he used to love. Later he would remember, and decide. But for now it was past, the music all over, he had missed it.