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.

MATERIALS FOR A POEM

Waldeinsamkeit: the feeling of being left alone in the woods.

The everpresent Mind/Body problem--mostly the body part, and how much longing can I pour into it? Until I'm heavy, until I'm full. How the last thing I need is another displaced love. And let there be and let there be and let there be. Light, or Flight.

A necklace made out of clock-hands.

The ghosts of blind Blues bards coming to me one by one in a mournful procession. Fast-forward to the part where my sight is stripped away and I make love to a boy by playing spiderwork on his spine like a twelve-string guitar. What sixth, seventh, sacred sense. Dreaming especially of Blind Willie Johnson, whose sight was burned away when his mother threw lye into his face at the age of seven. How the fire kept on burning and followed him through the unlit corridors of his lost vision until it burned his house down in 1945. Having nowhere else to go, he lived in the burnt ruins of his house until he died two weeks later.

Learning to play Chess from the Boy Who Wouldn't Give Himself to You.

A wily professor assigns a class of fourteen awkward college students to describe a kiss in 250 words or less. And read them to each other. Awkwardness is amplified interminably.

An argument over whether or not cheating on a lover is justifiable. The question posed to me: "All right-- supposing you find yourself in the strange situation where you may or may not sleep with multiple women. What is the most important thing for you to do, in the face of these potential encounters, what is the singlemost important thing for you to do?" I hesitated. I was about to answer Be honest in everything you do when he said, "Affirm life. Whatever you do, whatever the moral implications, you can't deny life. You must-always- affirm life."

Kronos castrating his father Ouranos. The Furies are born out of the spilt blood and Aphrodite emerges from the sea, into which Ouranos' genitals had been haply tossed. The Furies and Aphrodite conceived in the same wound. How very much alike they are in their heat and fever. Such swidden creatures.

What I read aloud in class:
A kiss is the most improbable thing. Your mouth against my mouth—the strangeness of having bodies at all, the strangeness of heat turned poetry. We undress old rhythms and take up new ones. Teeth and tongue and Linden trees taking root. I search singly I I I slowly succumb to new symmetries. Everything’s a hand, everything’s a bird. There’s something of the old world in the act: Isis transforming herself into a kite and fanning breath into the broken body of Osiris. These mythologies roosting in the incorrigible fruit of our hearts. What of me that is honey, what of me that is milk. My eyes spilling pomegranate seeds. I do not have a god; I only have a gesture. And so one subsumes the other. We are animals born of stone and burdened with symbols. We come to each other mutely for the place where language ends (and stories begin) is hiding in the hollows I move to fill. The roof of your mouth a dromedary home. The hook of your hip where your secrets lie dormant. “Kiss” is too light a word for what it is. The word does not betray the warmth or violence or perpetual movement. A better word would be river. A better word would be reckoning.

All Hedonism aside, how do you argue with an appeal to affirm life?

The theory that your vocal chords are reacting even as you read silently. That your inner voice is actually speaking to itself. Says Dechant: "Speech traces are a part of all, or nearly all, thinking and probably even 'silent' reading. Jacobson found that the muscles controlling the eyes contract during imagination as though the individual were looking at the object...The muscles in the speech tract (lips, tongue, chin, larynx, throat) did in fact move during reading...Recent analysis of brain wave research indicates that when the brain decides to speak, the Broca-Wernicke area of the brain sends out the word waves a fraction of a second before the word is vocalized, telling the vocal chords, the throat and the mouth to form the words. The interesting point is that the brain sends out the word waves even if the person does not speak the word but only thinks it...The Greeks used the same word, logos, for both thinking and speech."

Lately I've been extolling the virtues of bicycling in the rain. It's an inescapable fact of my college to-and-fro, so I figured I might as reconcile myself to it. It's instinctive to think of rain as a source of discomfort. Rather you should ride about and laugh and think on Leopold Bloom's suggestion of a sky-collander that organizes all the raindrops. Also, think of how many incarnations this water has undergone just to fall on your face and bead in your hair and eyelashes. If you can't go to the sea, let the sea come to you. Of course--what with my luck being my own-- my first bike crash since I was a small child is the result of a rainslick sidewalk.

After reading my meditation on kissing to my creative writing class, there was a significant pause before my professor asked: "Does anyone in this class know what 'dromedary' means?"

Everyone shook their heads.

"Amanda, tell them what it means."

I smiled and shrugged, "It's...a camel."

IN SEARCH OF SOUND & FURY

Annie, Sydney and I decided at midnight that the only thing to do was drive three-and-a-half hours to Oxford, Mississippi, and visit William Faulkner's grave.

Lacking true navigational skills, we were intuitive seekers. Backroads and southern towns with strange names. Egypt and Verona, MS. Deer appearing in the headlights for only a moment and then passing away like phantom-creatures. A fox ran across the road, leaving me feeling young and tricky. We saw two shooting stars.

Arrived at Old Bill's grave at 2:57 AM. Since the trip was completely spontaneous, we lacked the necessary bourbon with which to grace his grave. I prayed that he might forgive us for pouring beer at his feet instead. We left him love-letters in the empty bottle.

To William Faulkner---
Godfather of soil and burning-hearts.
We drove on a whim, on a darkened dream, from Tuscaloosa, AL, to see you.
Along the way we saw wild deer, foxes, and cats.
Keeper of ghosts and green glass and the poem that is the South,
this night is for you.
AGM
April 22nd, 2009 - 2:57 AM

I cannot tell you how strange it is to stand there and know that William Faulkner is resting beneath you. Instead of flowers, people plant pens in the ground. I put my pen among them, imagining for a moment that it would take root. Blood-root. That the ink would seep down and down and down and return his words to him.

Listened to Leadbelly on the way back through Tupelo. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don't shine, tell me where did you sleep last night? I only slept ten minutes the entire night. Watched the twilight drag itself along. Black to blue, white and ecru. The yellows and pinks creeped in closer to home. The sunrise was so unreal to me it looked like a projection, like a phony backdrop. The hot orange disc of the sun was so full it seemed insincere.

Annie had not yet named her new stationwagon. I suggested Sartoris. It stuck.