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.

ON KEEPING EVERYTHING IN STAR-ORDER

So I think the only thing left to do is to follow Tom Waits' cue and move according to the stars. It would be misguided at best, but at least it wouldn't be arbitrary. For one year I saw maps in everything. I traced the veins up and down the forearms of my friends. Treasure maps, I told them. I dreamt of benevolent globes that children could hide in.

Now I'm in the doldrums of formless-college-insubstantia. Unmappable regions. Terra incognita. Hic sunt dracones, I would've said in my previous incarnation.

So with my maps all withered, the legend all askew, I guess I'll just trust in the stars. It puts me in mythic company: First-World explorers, Underground Railroad, Tom motherfucking Waits. The stars are not man-made. So there can be no deceit in them. Right? Right.

I made a constellation projector out of paper and a touch-light. Stars as simple as pinpricks.

retrieved notes from 1 August 2008:

"Thou shalt not disregard the Irrational."

What do I mean by 'Poetry is the most important thing in the world' ? How presumptuous of me, how naive, how self-aggrandizing. But it is just this: stargazing on an empty night; a stranger called Father; cats watching; a broken typewriter; a man who lived biblically; Cepheus is the husband of Cassiopeia. There is order in that. There is light and water and poetry, the three essentials. I don't know the names of the constellations. Cait does, she took an astronomy class at a community college. I don't know their names. There, there, there are things there are no names for. Cait & I run as if there were still urgency in the deadened world of sleep, as if the sky might leave us. These short, staggered breaths, my ribs aching in time-- it's not epiphanic but it's the closest thing I've got. I lay on my back on the pavement. There's that same old dream of leaving. How far can I walk? As far as I am lonely.

Upon reentering Cait's bedroom, I go to each of the four walls. She confirms with compass in hand. I put the edges back, I give the corners back to the room of my mind. I take a black marker and write on each wall: BOREAS, NOTUS, ZEPHYRUS, EURUS.

There is order in that.

Last night, I stood with familiar-strangers/strange-familiars at a bonfire in an empty field. My ex-best friend was drunk and sullen because I'd snapped at her about something. She started apologizing, crying, wouldn't let go of me and kissed me several times on the mouth. It's the kind of scene where everyone looks hard into the fire, pretending not to see. And I couldn't think of anything to say to her. Not one thing. I just rolled my eyes up to the big grayness of something-and-nothing. I looked at her face, knew there was no chance of grace or placation. She told me she loved me, which was embarrassing. I just looked up and said: I wish the stars were visible.

Then there's the other lost friend. Sometimes I fear that Hanan will never get out of Saudi Arabia, despite our elaborate escape plans. I asked her how she felt about the stars. She said that they were beautiful, but that she still loved the moon. She told me about the last lunar eclipse that happened during Ramadan. She said: In Islam, they say it's a sign of God's wrath. But I'm not sure I believe that.

What I don't tell her is this: the Man in the Moon is not wrathful. He has absolutely no anger in him. Just whitewashed, bleached-bone sadness. He longs after something, we can't know what. Maybe it's a girl or something more celestial. But he's loathe to let go. The Man Who Navigates the Moon moves in (n)ever-increasing circles, kids himself that he's leaving, only deviates a hair's width. Still lingering despite the show of going. They say the moon's moving further and further away but everyone knows he won't go through with it. You see the sad display all the time. I've read about it in books and ex-husbands.

The Moon, I don't tell her, is no one to follow. The stars, though---maybe. Maybe.

Four: Beauty & What-is-Its

i. WRITING

I began writing for the first time in months. My work is dense and different from before. I now speak in four voices. It's my favorite thing about writing: I cant always tell where it comes from. Is it channeling, creating or both? Who are these people, where are these places tucked within me? When I walk out of my mind, the world's the same. Yet I'm carrying these others with me, my heart's cleaved into quarters. I'm the seeker Sargasso, the runaway maverick, a disfigured chinese songstress, and the Ophelia of the south. There is something of time in it. The fallacy of names. Travel by train.

ii. RAPTURE

We could not see the Perseids because of an excess of light and a blanket of clouds. It is quiet because he and I still do not know how to talk to each other. I convince myself that this silence is a comfortable one and that it is good to share silence. I am teaching myself to speak with my eyes. He looks at me and my words break. He says: Do you ever think about the Rapture? I say: I try not to. He thinks about it all the time--how beautiful it would be to be left behind in an emptied world. He invites me into his vision. There, we steal cars and sleep in museums. Plants take back the earth. We forget what it means to own things. We live according to astronomy. So long as those fiery horsemen stay out of it.

iii. LOSING

My mother is lost to me. My lover is lost to me. My friends are being scattered all across the country and I am stubbornly stoic about this thing called the future. Somewhere a door has shut inside me and I refuse to feel much of anything. I shrugged time off a long time ago. I turned eighteen and hated myself for it because it required the leaving of younger things. I eat less because I need less. Or maybe I need more and I'm ashamed. Everyday I remember something that was left in the move. It is even worse to recall these things: to lose and lose again. It's not that I am sad. There are remains to be sifted through. It's just strange to see how much you can live without. Soon I will be an ascetic.

iv. RECURRENCES

In the argument of order versus random chance, I say nothing. I have this silly little theory forming in which everything exists at the mercy of overlapping circles. Those circles are years, eras, transformation. They are little vacuums of time and space, little currents into which we get sucked. You are what you are according to what whirlpool you are swimming in. Then you are spun out into a new orbit and that is your life. However, because of gravity, it is possible to return to the old worlds. That is why life feels like one big coincidence: because everything recurs endlessly until it is tossed into the next time-mouth. Pockets of deja vu. Einstein says: "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."