Look at me! I can say the most beautiful things, but nobody knows! I have a heart and it beats beats beats but so what, so what?! I have a brain too and it throbs throbs throbs and I feed it and it reaches down into the heart and plucks it softly at first, pizzicato, and then Arco ARCO ARCO it breaks its back and makes it supple and cry and its tenuous fabric is thin and thinner and gauzelike until it contracts while part falls off and it’s solid and stolid and sturdy and here for good. That’s it! That’s my heart and it’s been that way for a while. Thanks brain says heart and brain says hey, it’s why I’m here. Wasn’t easy though… Yeah I know says the heart, and they shoot a spasmodic love signal through my spine and my skin shivers and my organs jolt in the aftershock. A tremulous heart so sturdy dying it’s bright like a star before black.
I should start by saying that I began this day by washing a pair of panties in the kitchen sink. It was a result of indecision: either I didn’t have enough money or I didn’t have enough time to go to Launderama. Maybe that’s beside the point.
Mark and I sat on my porch and watched the fire go. That said, the porch was the steps leading up to my apartment and the fire was in a garbage can. While we were confused, the tourists were excited, walking around gawking but moreso smiling at what they thought was “real New York.”
“How awesome! A trash can bonfire,” said one guy in a collared shirt, drinking an iced coffee through a straw and pointing even though his blonde companion was already looking. Everyone was already looking, before the fire started, even. Everyone was always looking at garbage cans. I only vaguely knew why.
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But on returning to the beach smiled
Sentiment to match the scenery
A love too great for the beginnings of notebooks
There is a boy dancing alone outside after school
with a freckle dotting the underside of his nose,
and cheeks too chubby to keep him out of fights.
His books and pages are always spread on the floor around him
like a blooming white and ink flower,
or floating down the stairwell and resting on the bottom floor
before he can catch them midair.
He never answers with only one word
or stops to inhale when he reads,
or puts his punctuation points where they belong.
And he never, ever, blinks when he talks to you:
“Is this the answer I think that the girl in the story wants to act as Peter Pan because she is a girl so people say she can’t and that she shows them that she can and I think that it means too that she can do whatever she wants because she doesn’t listen to other people and that’s what I think wait no I think she is proud of herself and that’s why that’s why,”
And then the most hopeful smile you have ever seen.
Today this boy stopped my reading with a tap and asked,
one hand waving, pointing towards the sky outside,
and honest tears clouding his eyes,
“Was it ever black and white?”
I tell her that she has a sick predisposition for the nearly dead, I think, because as usual we’re eating in a diner that looks like a mortuary prep room, full of the yellowing papyrus-skins of tough old matrons and veined reedy sparse everywhere husbands, some now husbands only retrospectively, and I want to know why she chooses this in a city where diners and diner-ees can be as bohemian as you’ve ever wanted them?
I can’t stomach those other places, Mimi says, and eats an entire burger nearly rare, or maybe the ketchup lake she drowned it in is what’s dripping out of the bun. Even the waiters here stumble heavily while they carry the Lunches of the Living Dead, which is exactly what’s inspirational, she says. I think it’s an inspiration to eat somewhere else, but Mimi only wants to go back to her apartment and have sex on the leather couch in the living room, which turns out all right because halfway through we fall from the couch and onto the rug. Sex on the couch is generally uncomfortable because the couch is summer sticky even in November but her boyfriend’s on the bed writing and does not want to be distracted. When he comes into the kitchen to get a glass of water I am scalding my hands at the sink and I tell him hello. It was my dad, I think, who told me the best thing to do in these situations is to be unfailingly polite, though I’m not really sure of the nature of this situation or what degree—version—of politeness is appropriate. I fumble with the faucet and splash him accidentally, but he doesn’t mind anyway because he is, I’ve been told, an interesting person.
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On Sunday we find a moth in the subway.
The dwarves have recoursed to the N for transport,
And send laden carts of earthy innards skimming rail past midnight
Amblers on midnight platforms, awaiting subterranean solutions
To their crises: location, speculation, otherwise.
The unions acknowledge built-in losses—coals
Tumbling from the loads on heaping carts, ending
Up sparkling gratis for underworlders on Canal, or
Growing gauzy wings, cast up
Just halfway—ceilingbound.
The holiday over, in a Rome deaf
to the gods of the past,
the night falling
in Cinque Terre,
our footsteps slow on the receding steps,
the milk mixing with honey in small cafés
the panini melting soft cheese in the morning,
but first, the moon must fade into the night sky
just above the frozen horizon,
how are we expected to measure distances over the water?
Franco calls down from the stairwell
as we put our bags behind the dresser
and ring our skirts out in the basin,
but the vibrant flowers over the balcony,
the green chair,
the blue folded umbrella,
none will compare to the sun spreading out over the sea’s border
like one thin diffusing cloud
none will compare to the way your hair looks when you twist it up
none will compare to the light crafts crowding the narrow streets at night
when the turf is too rough to hold it
none will compare to the delicious four course meal
the whole heads of shrimp that drip oil when you pull them apart
none will compare to the lime green tunnel
to the walk of love being a path far easier
than the walk of devotion
our hands smelled of cocoa butter
and the shower smelled of the waves
filling out your hair
The rocks cracked under the weight of the sea
and the ocean pounded—pounded against our ears
…and the night.
