STRANGERSONG

I'm writing poetry again and dreaming about Dante Alighieri.

(In my head, he has a certain someone's sovereign mouth, with an elegant gap and glassy dark eyes.)

Last Monday: I was waiting for the bus at four A.M. on my last morning in Pittsburgh. Streets were cold and mostly empty. Dawn's unlucky--full of dead starlight. Hannah and I were sitting in the bus shelter. Too early to speak but a goodbye was imminent so I tried to use our last minutes well. It's strange how a city is its own entity. The best thing about talking to Hannah is I never have to worry if I'm making sense. She understands the suggestions in things, she knows that ambiguities are seams. While being understood is not the same as making sense, I am comforted. I looked at the sleeping buildings in which a few scattered windows were still lit. My mind scrambled to make a pattern out of the randomness, a constellation or key. None came. It's strange how you can think you know a city, and even come to think you own it somehow. I've only been here a week but now Pittsburgh's something else. Before it was just a name. Now it's a place I went once, when I was eighteen, to see a friend and it was cold. . .

There was almost no one on the airport bus. It made me feel like a nighthawk. How silent and spare is the city bus at Four in the Pittsburgh A.M. How sad and rare. I toyed with the idea of living the rest of my life in verse. The ways in which an old, romantic form could rearrange my modern heart. Something an ex-lover once said about form poems: that they were closest to real life, that you can only work inside the constraints you're given. That despite our best efforts, no one gets to live in free verse.

Still deliberating on whether or not a poem is a livable space. If there is light and corners and blankets to stay warm. There's a wooden house in Pittsburgh that is graffitied with Chinese poetry. Known simply as "House Poem." So maybe. Just maybe....Still wondering about my professor's offhand comment that fact and fiction come from the same etymological root, which does not denote real/unreal but merely "a construction." A Factory.

While on the bus, I thought about the night that C told me I was a passenger in my own life. That's been weighing heavily on me ever since. Sitting on a quiet bus in a gray town, I wondered if it could be true. I'm almost positive it's not, but I can see where he'd get that idea. I guess I can forgive him for it. The truth is I like being a stranger to things.

Lathe biōsas.