UNIQUE FORMS OF CONTINUITY IN SPACE


1899. Henry Bliss, real estate man,
steps off a streetcar and is promptly hit
by a taxicab. Is promptly crowned
Premier Holy Martyr of the Road.
The first man killed by an automobile
in the New World.

111 years later. My fate rubs elbows
with the ghost of Mr. Bliss. I did not
think of Ford or Gatsby or Ferlinghetti.
Strangely I thought of music,

that some overwhelming orchestration
would take reign,
that we would flirt past the other car
like jazz notes swallowed
by city poets.

Instead we hit like steel-breasted bulls.
A sound rose up—No it was not a train No
it was not a storm Quite simply it was
the sound
of two-ton bodies
hurtling inexorably
toward
one another.

1909. The Futurists insisted
that a motorcar was more beautiful
than the Victory of Samothrace.
That we are all reeling birds, yes.
A raven painted Model-T black.

Clouds in the car. Clouds in the chest.
Mushroom balloons blooming
at 100 miles per hour, loosing smoke
like a wineskin, striking my heart dumb,
burning a sickle into my right arm.

All those blinking lights on the dash. Like so many eyes watching.

Something brutal, something lived through.
I climbed out of the crushed shell
of that movable self and into the crosshair
of downtown streets.

“A poem is a machine made of words.”
Said William Carlos Williams

A poem knows there must be blood in ore.

-----

I was in a car crash last week. Though my wounds are minor, my thoughts have not recovered from the big noise. It seems impossible that I could be driving along, thoughts meandering, about small things, and then suddenly be spun into violent Erlebnisse. The accident report reads 99, can't say which of us ran the redlight. It is hard to talk with insurance agents over the phone. They want all the details of my claim. Among the things I don't say to them: I am scared of cars now they look like monsters and roads look like lifelines; so many people keep saying "The important thing is you are still here" I do not know what to make of it what an unthinkable sentiment (the alternative ineffable) and yet the politeness strikes me absurd-absurd; the powdery smoke that filled my car was like gray snow; my father did not answer when I called him from the wreckage and that wrecked me further; I am ashamed that I could not show some humanity to the other driver that I just knelt on the sidewalk and cried like a child.

Something in this trauma seems distinctly American--but of course, it isn't. O how my Song of the Open Road is perhaps forever blighted. I have been riding my bicycle to school, fighting nervous breakdowns and feeling ridiculous. Though my only conspicuous scar is a shiny pink crescent on my forearm, I feel marked. Every traffic light bears a green beacon, though East Egg remains far off.

Car crashes are so common that they almost seem meaningless. The worst kind of death: accidental, could've-happened-to-anybody. We do not like to think our undoings will be arbitrary. That this life, lived so long, could be so succinctly seared shut. As it stands, the car is dead and I'm alive. Can't say fairer than that.

I attended a reading by the poet Paul Guest a few days after the wreck. I was not especially acquainted with his work. In fact, I'd only ever read one of his poems. In high school a friend showed me "The Resurrection of the Body and Ruin of the World" and I was moved in a pristine way. While that poem stayed with me, I hadn't read anything else. I certainly hadn't known the poet was quadriplegic until someone mentioned it offhandedly just before I entered the lecture hall.

His reading was beautiful. He read from what looked like a Kindle, using his mouth to direct some makeshift stylus across the screen. At one point, he lurched forward and pecked at the screen with his nose. Like the most charming bird ever. I left the reading enamored and a little haunted. I can't accurately express how it felt to ride my bike home when it was a bicycle accident that paralyzed that brilliant poet. That the night air felt charged and eerie and yes, sadly lucky. I do not mean to romanticize misfortune--be it mine or someone else's. I am always feeling sad and lucky. But Paul Guest ranks high in the list of strangers I have loved almost. His words are well-lit, vital. Days after and still I feel gifted.

When he signed my book, he asked if I was a writer. I always get shy at this question. Unsure whether I have earned the title or if I'm still fumbling around in the literary gutter. When I told him I was just an undergraduate, he said, "Oh, so you still have time!" And that was impossibly reassuring.

I wanted to ask him how he actually pens his work. But I didn't know if that would be offensive. I am always chasing after words as they race off and always fearful that I have lost them. And I still have use of my hands. I wonder how Guest arrives at his lines. With what lariat.. Lately I have been writing by hand almost exclusively. Meaning gets rangey enough on its own. Sometimes the abstraction of my latest poem is compounded by the abstraction of virtual space and and and I start to wonder what this whole luckless labor is even getting at. Paper, like skin, reassures me. The solidness of an instrument hooked in the hand, not just typing away into mechanical light--there's something to be said for that too. Not to mention the little birds' feet of ink staining the fingertips, spidering out in wales. Evidence of weight in words even if they seem aery when spoken.

Not just Spirited but Bodied.

for N

I have written about loss in the abstract, loss in the unrealized and unrequited. But I have never been struck by loss in the real before. Crazy Sorrow in the flesh. Now that I have, I do not know what to do with it. Words have become impotent, have become far too little.

I have struggled with how to describe Nathan so that strangers might know him, might know what has been lost. It is not enough to say that he was one of my oldest friends, one of the first boys I ever kissed, and one of the funniest people I've come to know. It is not enough to say that he was a little too pale, a little too thin, a little too hapless. That he drove a motorcycle to our rural high school, which made him something of a shadowy god.

I must start again.

He was the only person to ever ask me on a date. I was fourteen years old. He showed up at my house with that shock of black hair, blue eyes like planets...All lax and swaying and fluid with whatever drug was at work in him. Some kind of tranquilizor, he said. And yet he was never tranquil. In the backseat of his friend's car, I wondered if he even knew who it was that he was kissing.

An utterly predictable story: irreverent genius of a boy can't keep to his own head. Resorts to drugs and arcane books. Cuts himself. Drinks turpentine.

I was the only one who wrote to him at rehab. Nathan and I--we never quite made it to romance. Our affair was an epistolary one. He wrote beautiful letters. Joking and acute and searching. Looking now at his sixteen-year-old thoughts immortalized in hurried pencil, I find myself truly haunted.

So many myths surrounded that boy. How he would wake up in the woods. Once he even called to tell me that he'd come to, alone in a shack somewhere, surrounded by old war bonds. I imagine this scene now as I did then. He's laughing and a little disoriented, all those forgotten bills falling like snow. My voice is at the other end, unsure what to say. He had no idea how he'd arrived there.

The myth where he fucked a girl on the roof of her car. In broad daylight. In some suburban driveway. That may or may not have belonged to her parents.

I met that girl at his funeral. Turns out he'd married her.

The last time I saw Nathan, he asked me to be his girlfriend. Though there was something there-- something never directly acknowledged, something accumulating in all those knowing looks and shared humors, in that fluke of a first and only date, in all those letters sealed shut by our own tongues--I knew better than to accept. I was sixteen by this time and ill at ease with bodies. I preferred our written intrigue. I shyed away from anything that might upset the unspoken, charged subtlety which had been thus precedent. So I told him no, that it would be a bad idea for us to date. He asked if he could kiss me. This, too, I deemed a bad idea. He said, Please.

And so we kissed awkwardly for a few minutes. I watched a mimosa tree over his shoulder the entire time. Then we said goodbye. Then we said, see you around.

That was three years ago. Last week they put him in the ground. He died the day before his twenty-first birthday. His mother's eulogy: He was my blue-eyed, curly-haired boy...

I wrote him one last letter. I pressed the envelope with a seal of black wax. They buried it with him. It's all I have thought about in the following days. My words against his unfeeling breast. I keep catching myself wondering when he will write back. How what is quite possibly the most important thing I have ever written is now six feet underground.

In my last letter to Nathan, I made a promise. One day I will write a poem deserving of your myths. When I have the words, when I have the heart.

His mother approached me in the chapel. She'd found all my letters to him. She asked if I wanted them back. I said yes and thanked her profusely. Even though I knew how much hurt I was inviting in. Even though I'll read and reconstruct the whole thing until I am devastated.

The things we do to our own hearts.

I miss you, sweet-furious crow of a boy.
Your scars, and your grin, and your mettle.

THOSE WHO ARE LEAVING/THOSE WHO ARE LEFT

I. THE BOY WHO WENT TO CALIFORNIA TO FIND GOD OR NOTHINGNESS OR BOTH

J. is leaving in two days for Tassajara where he is going to be counseled in Zen Buddhism and eventually enter a monkhood. I am glad for him---and also devastated. The other day we pressed the soles of our feet together, Boku-maru style, but nothing came. I worry sometimes that I have no spirit. All I have is poetry. And while people don't mind when I say that God is poetry, they are not so keen when I insist that it works both ways. Simply put: I cannot believe I am losing my best friend to God.

II. SHORT CONVERSATIONS WITH A BOY IN SPAIN

I never get used to hearing my own name spoken. "It's a beautiful letter" is so very different than "It's a beautiful letter, Amanda." I am always moved. Sadly, gladly, impossibly.

III. PORPHYRIA'S LOVER TAKES TO THE DESERT

I kissed someone I shouldn't have. Again. Yet another person that's leaving. The themes just keep recurring, it's hysterical. Only this friend is leaving for Iraq. It's maddening because he is the kindest, funniest guy I know. I cannot imagine him stalking about in Sadr City, née Revolution City. Makes me realize I have a certain scheme for soldiers, one that is probably unfair. And skinny boys who love Robert Browning and tell the best jokes don't fit in there. Anyway. After the accidental kiss, we talked about Goya and I got upset. And he said Don't worry, I'll be all right, I've got some meanness in me. I said But I can't see it I can't see it in you at all. And he says Well I pray you never have to. I can be so mean and I hope it never touches you.

IV. BIG BROTHER BRAVES THE ALASKAN WOODS

Stumbling across bears, moose, and ptarmigans. I feel his loss least of all, maybe because he's only disappeared to the places he belongs. Like myths that go to sleep in their star-houses. He used to guard my house until I fell asleep, back when I was sixteen and living alone. I feel like he's still protecting me, just from a greater distance.

V. SWEET HOME ALABAMA CHICAGO?

And then there's the part where I may or may not be leaving. I feel the South more heavily, more acutely, more somberly than ever now that I know I very well may be leaving it behind. It's as if all the ghosts are appealing to me at once with last wishes. The river is so mud-ugly/snake-wonderful I am sure it hides hundreds of poems in its lazy ripples.

WHAT!

Mother left Amsterdam. Left her husband of three weeks. Is now living in Missouri with ex-husband twice removed. She came to Tuscaloosa for the weekend. I had lunch with her today. First time I'd seen her in six months. All my fury dissipated. It just all seems horribly sad. And awkward. I dont understand how animals such as us, with our myths of pure reason, make such messes out of what we're given. Which is to say: Life.

I went to a christmas party last night. Wore a bandit mask and drank homemade wassel. Shared a hookah with a charming boy. Says I: "Let's trade masks." He gives me his glasses. I stagger around. Seeing as he sees.

Asked my friends if I were an animal, what would I be?
Responses thus far: fox, deer, raccoon, sparrow, panther, hedgehog, crow-goose hybrid.

Hedgehog? See also: plummeting self-esteem.

Have decided to disdain in full sentences.
Shock, shock, shock.

old pictures, new questions

Most of the time, I really don't feel anything. Other times it comes from nowhere. I get so jealous of everyone who has parents that I can't stand it. And I feel miserable and self-pitying and hateful. And it's such a strange, nebulous hate--I had a mother and then I didn't. Had a father, or at least a ghost of him, and now I have a possible. All kept at such a distance.

Found this picture of my mother and I from Christmas, 1993. She looks like herself but not quite. And there I am so small. People always tell me what a sweet child I was. I worry that I'm becoming one of those mean, embittered people. I want to stay sweet but there's so much against me. How earnest how determined I am to stay sweet.

I think about calling William Alexander all the time, but I never find the words. I've got a parent that won't speak to me and an almost-parent that I can't speak to. I don't know where this leaves me. Orphan, bastard, mystery-that-everybody-knows.

Most of the time, I really don't feel anything. Other times, all my hurt blooms into hate and I want to destroy the great maternal effigies.