ON HALLOWED EVENINGS, MORNINGS, DAYS.

I've made some small sojourns as of late. New Orleans and Baton Rouge and Athens. I spent a night in Picayune, where J now lives. Odd to think that he's been my best friend for five years and it was my first time meeting his father. Missing him so, I hate to admit that J's Mississippi life is so picturesque: a house hidden in the Delta, complete with a floating gazebo and a brilliant black dog. Though it was cold, we fell asleep on the roof. Star-gazing til our eyes went starry.

On the drive back, I passed an abandoned house. Full of goldenrod.

me: We all miss you. I say it aloud at least once a day.
j: I would say it, but then my father would notice I was talking to myself.
me: You mean he doesn't know?
j: I have inner dialogues all the time--your name is mentioned a lot. I meet with the committee of "who knows" and we talk. Well, they talk. I just listen.
me: Yeah...
j: Are you going to decorate yourself for all hallow's eve?
me: Yes. I am going to be a grail knight.
j: Guarding or searching for the grail?
me: Searching.
j: Ah, well. I have it.

Turned out that Perceval is not readily recognized by most. I got asked if I was the Statue of Liberty. 2010 definitely marks the strangest Halloween I've had. Woke up in P's bed, late for work and still drunk. Searched for my clothes only to realize I had nought but shining armor. How soft and how small he asked me to stay. My hand crushed against his chest. It seemed then that he was the boon I sought. A few hours later, we crossed paths at a party and he acted as if he hardly knew me. Continually I chase the False Knight. All sulks, I nursed my green grail, accepting all manner of mead from strangers.

I know better. I do. But knowing better is so much too little.

Received a long letter from Brooklyn. It was A's reply to the letter I wrote him a year-and-a-half ago, the letter he took to Spain with him. Explaining the ghost he wrestles, the ghost who until recently was him. Ghost-writing himself in trembling cursive, he told me about the brownstone tomb he haunts, the books buried in his chest like scarabs. I wonder: is the curse knowing? Or not?

Thinking now of Cypress trees. It is common knowledge that Cypress trees scoff at ghosts, especially those who write letters. Cypress trees which feed on the minerals tarrying in our emptied bodies. Whose roots crawl ever boneward.

My writing has been getting some attention lately. Which continually dumbfounds me. I read at a poetry reading in Athens, Georgia. A bearded stranger came up to me after. Kissed my hand and asked if we could make an abortion happen. Come again?

Rain has returned to the South and it's immaculate. My umbrella is a wilted black flower. No matter no matter. Water collects in my hair, alluding to all the things I can't. Everything ink washed. With a tin roof, it's hard to get out of bed. The rain keeps wandering into my dreams and vice versa. Dreamt of a house routinely carried away by water... Shared the rainy dark with my poetry teacher, crow-homeric bard that he is. He asked why I wasn't shopping a manuscript around. A manuscript? For a book.

A BOOK!

There's been less and less traffic at the music library. Undoubtedly it's just the lull before the storm of finals. Some nights, hours pass without my talking to anyone. It's those shifts that I linger in the stacks, whispering numbers to bookshelves. This my onlyest vigil.

Sunday night, everyone got drunk. L's newest project consists of filming mundane things and playing them backwards. Eggs unsizzling and falling back into their eggshells. Butter solidifying from a golden pool, spelling out words. I carved a Venus de Milo out of cheese. On film, she rose up out of the pan. Smoke her seasurf. Naturally the house smelled awful. A and T were speaking in Spanish, miming out telenovelas. I was saddened by how much of the language I have forgotten in six months. A cradled my face in his hands, saying No están perdidas. Están guardadas.

In other news, I tried to quit smoking and failed.

In other news, Peter Streckfus spoke to our class about the book he is working on--his first since winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His book in which he is his own father. In which his soul is a fish. As he read, I realized all at once that I've never dreamt of my father.

LETTERS FROM NOWHERE

I convinced a boy that I had a glass eye. We lay awake until daylight, drinking gin and listening to records in his bed. He tried to introduce me to opera. I found it innavigable but sweet. When he put his arms around me, I shrugged it off as inevitable. I purred under his weight, under his charm. And I said: You do not belong to me. Because I refused to kiss him, he asked only that I put my fingers in his hair. My resistance is without sternness. I understand the petty things that bodies demand. But I'm done with those curious exertions for the time being. Put it away, comrade. I don't know what kind of girl you think I am, but I appreciate tranquility.

I have been reading the Kolyma tales. Wondering at all those ghosts that the Siberian permafrost keeps. My love of history is turning me into a collector of macabre characters. Scurvied phantoms trekking in foot-rags across hills that shine blue like sugar. It occurred to me that one does not usually recount tales of deranged and emaciated political prisoners gorging themselves on puppy meat in polite conversation. However, this occurred to me only after I had already done so. History--there's no shortage of horror.

Lacking the discipline to write seriously, I have taken to taming my body. The only stain on my bedsheets is one of ink. Meanwhile every other nineteen-year-old goes gallivanting off to reconcile their mutable wants and wet mouths. Hankering, pang, throe. I sit in my room and try to write a boy worth undressing for. Sometimes I feel the need to close myself off for ever. Why not? Why not?

Because no words will come, I am building a new body for my poem. Separate from my own, which has been playing obdurate. So far this body is just a trunk, meanly formed from chickenwire. Ribs like dulcimers, shoulders like ships. I spent the afternoon bearing skin for the bookwork. Flour, water, newspaper flesh. When finished, the skin will glisten with decoupaged poetry. Rilke too. There's a vacancy in the chest, where the heart will go. An accordion book of red tissue paper. We'll see. Flirting with exorcism. We'll see.

I ran away to New Orleans for a weekend only to run into an ex-lover. Lover being a convenient term. He belonged to the school of impassable boys I would not undress for. He and I walked along the Mississippi River and it was oddly comfortable. I almost told him about the poem I wrote about him, but thought better of it. It took a year of not speaking (coupled with the astounding coincidence of having found each other in the Crescent City) for us to forgive each other for the discrepancy between nudity and nakedness.

I wish I had something to talk about besides bodies I couldn't love. But I don't.

I fear that my entire college education will be one of kissing the wrong people and writing poems about it.

Then there's the part where I greyhound bussed to Chicago and back. Crossing through the Midwest at sundown, I saw so many magenta haystacks it almost made me want to be a realist. Almost.

My hometown has been buried in pollen for the last two weeks. The streets are colored with absurd splashes of yellow. Everywhere I arrive, someone reaches up and brushes flowers from my hair.

I am an uncouth and unreliable narrator, spitting gin fictions.

Ten times, count 'em ten times, that boy asked about my glass eye.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ON FLIGHT

Been thinking about the anthropological implications of airports. Interior scene: me sitting in terminal C13 at a layover in Charlotte, NC, an airport which is inexplicably populated by rocking-chairs and dachshunds. Yes, it's absurd. But so is the nomadic imperative. Stampede mentality. Mixed-nut subsistence. Airports are the least real places I know. Limbos. There was a moth in the terminal with me, flitting around on the carpet by my bags. I wanted to let him out. Maybe he was thinking about the big steel man-made moths outside.

All my literary prescience goes against airplanes. See also: Antoine de Saint-Exupery. See also: Icarus. Humans are the only animals that forego natural selection and demand their wings.

Called J to laugh off my nerves. I said that one day our texts would be part of the archaeological record and everyone would wonder what strange animals we were. He agreed that we were an awkward stage between neanderthals and supermen. We made new names for ourselves, improvising nonsense Latin: Pseudo avihomo. False winged man.

Arrived safely in Pittsburgh, with minimal airsickness. It's a nice city, big without being intimidating. Spent a good deal of today at the the Carnegie Library. There's a backroom in the nonfiction stacks where you can peek down into the natural history exhibits. I spied the brontosaurus skeletons. The best part was that I was surrounded by books on the Brontë Sisters . Brontësaurus--it was too good to resist.

I took a bus from the airport into Oakland. Along the way, I saw a road sign that read PITTSBURGH and to its left, an exit sign that simply read, MOON.