September & October
The Book
In the beggining, I understood
that my body had been divided
into countless needles
immaterial
and made of pain.
It finally passed, and I found that I had become a book.
The cracked leather was ever subtly repaired on the edges,
for I was old, medieval and handwritten.
I knew the scribe's hand, the ornaments in the margins,
grand floral motifs on the first incipit letter.
But what were all these things?
I didn't know this language or its alphabet.
I only knew that they were there.
From the outside, I had no identifying marks.
Crumbling parchment held onto these things,
clasped together by three weak cords in the binding.
I was the book, but I watched from above.
It lay in my bed just as I would,
partly covered by my cotton blanket
and perfectly aligned with the walls of my room.
What do I hold? What do I say?
The Center
there's no time for this
there is no time
*
A labyrinth exists and I find myself there.
At its center I resolve that,
from now on,
I must only write my dreams,
since dreams are the world
at its most distilled,
and if I fail,
I am trapped in the center.
*
Only yesterday we spoke
at the garden monument to ether
with monstrous spigots on all four sides
and I related my love for my love–
the birder, who smiled
at the scarlet tanager
hidden by sky.
I thought of kissing her.
She told me I should have,
but I was right not to.
Now she can have both worlds,
and so can I.
All this I told you,
"Her delight is mine,"
as the garden fountain
swallowed up the rain.
I believe in my heart that I will not be understood.
Would it be better if I accepted this?
It is difficult to imagine a future
where I’ve been convinced otherwise–
I believe that someone could listen to me
but not that they will understand me.
And I will not understand them–
this is what I believe.
Is this really so terrible?
We watch each other from the outside
but love the silhouette
across the water all the same.
It may even be simpler
to love a stranger than my brother.
I would like to be listened to, I crave it.
I would like to be loved.
But what I most desire, what most escapes me,
is to be understood.
Surely the fault lies with myself,
with the strange reflexiveness required:
if I can’t confirm to myself that I’ve been understood,
then I haven’t been understood.
I have already conceded to this state.
Now it’s just a question of struggle:
will I continue to seek this understanding?
Folly, yes, but this seems to me the reason of life.
Florid. 10.18.23.
Through pale air, a tear in the horizon opened and closed.
It spread low, behind the monument, whimpering all else in its glow.
My first sight of day, bewildered, water overboiled, beans preground,
urged to compose a poem for all that had inspired me: walnuts and almonds, to start.
We must resist the impulse to describe
the feeling a walnut provokes;
but if I write an ode to G-d,
I will have consummated its power.
I drove to work an hour later
past changing leaves
when a word arrived, "florid,"
begging a poem from me.
Dream-work / Inspiration. 10.19.23.
In severe winter, I find that my gait is silent.
The air is silent too, even the wind. And slow.
A trail along the Charles flattens to concrete,
slight hills to reddish man.
It is always empty in this office park.
Sparse, pathetic landscaping dots the periphery far from where I stand,
and apartments line my left.
Gray stone and brown brick.
In the landscaping stand four stark trees
whose stakes were only removed the year before last.
A few dark, long-dead leaves remain attached.
The scene did not simply remind me of my grandmother’s death;
it was her death, now six years past.
I was not with her when she died and she had no connection with where I now stood.
So why did I feel this way? How could I sense this?
Did these trees remind me of Kafka,
who I read for the very first time in the hours after my grandmother’s death?
Or maybe I thought of my childhood visits to her apartment,
the extreme wind from Lake Michigan
touching the same nerve that I felt in this cold now?
I suspect these are both true,
but no explanation would describe the exactitude of this moment.
It was her death;
or, more specifically,
it was the moment my mother told me she had died.
