FOR NOW, FOR NOW

THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN MY ABSENCE:

Houses I Have Come to Possess: 1. It's a quaint little cottage. What am I doing? Paying rent, washing dishes and (simply and impossibly) growing up? Thinking perhaps this burgeoning-adult-thing is all a great big sham.

Idols I Have Met: 2. Daniel Johnston and Eugene Hutz.

Grand Escapes I Have Managed: 3. Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee. Currently writing from Madison, Wisconsin.

People I Have Kissed: 5. The most recent of whom I have become extraordinarily attached to in a short period of time. This is self-defeating, I know, as he leaves for San Francisco in one week. Leaving: the most stubborn of themes. Being left: I guess I'm good at it. A boy who worries what poem he will leave behind.

Parents I Have Reunited With: 1. But not in the way you would think. It has been five months since I last spoke to my mother. My possible-father, too, has remained something of an enigma. But I recently received an email from an almost-parent. Which is to say, the man I mistakenly believed my whole life to be my father--up until a year ago when I discovered he was not. Our communication is strange, given the 18-year misunderstanding of our roles. He owns a pecan orchard and works on an oil rig. I find comfort in his words but do not know what to call him. Somewhere between father and ghost. A reimagined myth.

Things I Did Not Realize I Loved: Perhaps Innumerable, Recalculating Everyday. The Midwest. Herman Melville. Drawing compasses on the bodies of sweet-mouthed boys. Big black dogs. Driving on the interstate. Explaining the American South to Others. Aural letters in which a best friend reads Le Petit Prince aloud to me. Kale. Antonio Saura. Writing poetry to Django Reinhardt. Dancing silly to Thelonious Monk. Pineapple curry. Cold showers. Looking up famous writers in the yellow pages and writing letters to them, without knowing if they are they. Lists as opposed to lengthy ruminations--how they function like memories. Bison, as they are the fleshy incarnation of my newfound obsession with Minotaurs. The word ambergris.

RECENT DISCOVERIES

Found antique stereoscopes. $55 each. I am selling my clothes so that I can buy them.

Went to church with Annie for Easter. Despite my hangup on deities, I like the ritual of Episcopal churches. Swinging that lantern of incense all about. My eyes started watering uncontrollably. I'm sure everyone thought I was having a religious experience.

The bad news is that my friends accidentally stood me up at the theatre. The good news is I discovered how much I really enjoy going to the movies by myself.

I've been out walking. I don't do too much talking these days.

Recently visited my high school for the first time since graduation. It turns you can go home again. It's just that the new ghosts have rearranged everything in tiny, frustrating ways. The ceilings seemed lower, the walls closer, the familiar objects moved just an inch to the left or right of where my memory housed it. A maddeningly tidy sort of displacement. I who have had too many homes to return to. The whole visit made me feel strange and serious. Strangeness of people being not at all how you remember them. And then, exactly as you remember them. A best friend come back, dressed all in black and stern.

I get really ridiculous about seeing former teachers. I wish I had it in me to be one of them.

Sitting between two boys on the ride home, oh I have two boys to tell me just how sardonic I am.

Last night we played a hide-and-seek game of sardines at the Gorgas library. Clues include: "dark, crowded, humming," "two reds spell a square," "issuing forth," and "a room without light." Found Annie crouched beneath a basement staircase, Justin hidden behind two red chairs in a corner, Joe in a glass study room with the lights off. I was hiding in plain sight in the periodicals room, reading poetry.

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.