A Conversation

“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Hungry?”
“Not really.”
“How are you?”
“Eh.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just... I don’t know... I can’t... uhgg!”
“I hear you.”

A Warm Bundle

She is a warm bundle on my chest,
her breaths heaving and audible in the dark,
her arms hanging limply
then tightening, spazzing, flailing,
her tiny hands batting at my chest:
she is trying to fall asleep.

Do we know what it means to
be in the moment?
To find ourselves in the picking up
of others?

After all it was the ninth inning of
the World Series when she cried out,
when I crept into her world
to sooth her transition from waking life
to dreamland. If you think about it,
most of us still have trouble falling asleep
on our own, hence, the TV, cocktails,
our tossing & turning, tightening & unwinding.

The thoughts that pass through our minds at bedtime.

It is only when I focus on releasing
the tension in my own limbs,
on my own inhale and exhale,
that she finally gives in,
gives up, sighs a great big
baby sigh, her limbs going limp,
her body letting go into slumber.
By then the game is over,
and she and I have have edged
a little closer to the championship.

Ethics

It is wrong to clip one's nails on the subway. And yet, I saw a man doing so the other day. I believe, with Socrates, that if one truly knows the right course of action, one will inevitably choose said right course. The hard part is the knowing. If only this man had known that it is wrong to clip one's nails on the subway!

Strange Boy

Strange boy, he was. In the yard he sat staring at the large evergreen tree that towered in the corner of the yard. The tree bloomed over the yard like a yawning mouth. Many times, he had climbed the tree’s sticky, sappy limbs. The limbs were rather thin for such a tall tree. The pine cones and pine needles littered the shaded bed below. He stared. It was a concentrated gaze through which the boy endeavored. Endeavored to be. There was the tree, yes, he could see, and there was the boy, yes, himself he knew. But were there two? The boy was thirteen years old is all. Yet already it seemed to him there were not two but one. That he was the tree when he looked at the tree. So he stared. Trying to keep it in mind. In mind. In his strange mind the tree bloomed over the yard casting shadows in which he sat staring at the tree with his strange mind.

Attention

What more is there than this curious
Faculty of ours to rest our awareness
On or in or with something, so that the whole
Of our being is immersed in that other,
So that, in fact, there is no separation between I
And, for example, a grecian urn,
Or a gathering storm cloud out my window?
The measure of a man is in the quality
Of his attention, which begs the question then of
This varying quality, that is, what is the unit of measurement
Of attention, one of depth or completeness or raptness?
What is it about attention, which on the surface seems plain
Enough, almost black & white, meaning, your attention is
Either with me or not, an either-or situation, that upon closer
Analysis, indeed, reveals itself to be more complex?
Herein lies the amplitude and frequency that gauge
The way one, as is said, focuses
Or concentrates or places one’s awareness,
And, in this way, creates meaning out of perpetual emptiness.

So then let us look long and hard and again at the urn
With its timeless scene of the precipice of love,
Its unheard melodies of the piper, its never-fading beauty of the maiden,
And let us rest therein, embodying Keat’s paradoxes,
Never lifting our gaze, not to breath nor to quench
A parched tongue, for to look upon the scene of immortal seduction
Is enough, yes, to merely look upon beauty is enough.
Certainly for this particular shard of attention,
Stretched out over countless poems and days, knowing the limits
Which everywhere make human our efforts at eternity.
Every song lifted from these lips ventures only so far, enchants
Only so long amongst us mere mortals, until, at last, the spell of my art
Is broken, and we remember the rain battering at the window,
And when in this instant we leave our frozen lovers
In their ancient grasses, all is lost again, undone again,
Unborn again as it was and ever shall be in the beginning.

Sunshine

The weather turns and the way we hold our faces shifts.
If I called life a parade of moods, would that suffice?
Perhaps the numbers—the scores, the accounts, the taxes—
are keeping us too tight, too inward and false.
Perhaps the weather doesn't surprise us enough.
Why else would we build our worlds so small and fearfully?

It’s the wind through the leaves
and the speckled shadows on the concrete sidewalk
that turn all ideas loose into a playpen of our own making.
What I’m saying is when the weeklong rains finally disperse,
leaving the city basking in its verve and sunshine,
something of the communal does seep into our day,
reintroducing itself as that famed Something Greater
than ourselves...

Meanwhile, birdsong is greater than myself,
in fact, I’d like to say everything is always greater than myself,
but it’s more complicated, or less simple, than that.

In other words, the gardener of this West 12th St. greenspace,
a cheerful old woman in a blue plaid shirt and baseball cap,
with whom I have discussed the tricks of teaching kids math,
is part of this larger portal that I’m trying to get at,
the one through which we sometimes choose to pass,
more easily on a sunny day

and easiest in that moment when the weather shifts,
revealing the blue sky and a kaleidoscope of shadow
and light dances before our eyes,
phenomena forever passing itself off as self.

Seven Ways to Synchronize

A wink from a stranger is one way
to bring my breath and thought back into a kind of focus
that might better be characterized
as a kind of acceptance of chaos, a letting go
into a place where the frames fall off all the paintings
and even my fictions digress into endless outward spirals.

The page is always too deep,
the history always right over those trees.

There are other ways such as a sneeze
or an orgasm or a good long drink or a point in conversation where
my interlocutor and I are on the same proverbial page
of the vast and immeasurable text that we seem to be both reading
and writing, and in that moment, we really care who says what next
and why—and how!

Look, somewhere along the line, you accept
that the song on the radio is one you love,
one you know all the lyrics to, one that is going to work on you
and your recollection for the next few minutes no matter what.

“You said watch my head about it.”

It’s the Chariot, baby, it’s the Chariot, it’s the Chariot
of Now. And while one way in is a wink,
and another is hard word or constant prayer or meditation,
yet another is just giving up and moving on, meaning,
when the singer himself forgets the lyrics, you realize
that there is still something to say,
still the rhythm to keep.

Cohabitation Suite (Three Poems)

I. Living Together

My girlfriend and I live together in one small room.
She went in the kitchen for a brief moment,
And sitting at my desk, I thought to myself,
How nice to be alone!

Then she came back in,
And I felt odd, like I had done something wrong,
Cheated on her in some way with the wrong thought.
But instead of confessing, I said,
“Honey, can you get me a glass of water?”

And back she went into the kitchen.



II. T.P.

My girlfriend and I moved in together,
so now there are all the little things
Like how one places the toilet paper roll
on the toilet paper holder to discuss.
Or how exactly and to what degree
she is going to cuddle with me in bed.
How much of her weight will she
ever-so-slightly shift onto me?
And how much of my weight on her?

So the toilet paper was again rolling out
from underneath this morning,
And I can’t stand it that way,
how it spills all over the floor,
How it makes us look like barbarians:
t.p. must roll out from over the top!
So I talked to her about it this morning,
and I think everything went swimmingly.
We saw eye to eye on this crucial issue,
and certainly this bodes well.
I imagine all will continue to go
as smoothly when the baby arrives.


III. My Girlfriend Struggles With Her Key At The Door

She is back from yoga, her key in the door,
And I hear her jiggling it, back and forth,
In and out—the damn key doesn’t fit quite right—
And I sit here thinking, Should I get up and open
The door for her? I wait. The jiggling continues. I wait
Another moment, listening to the struggle. In the end, I wait it out,
Saying to myself, Now is my chance to finish the line I’m working on.

Scattered Thoughts Are The Best You Can Do

for Chögyam Trungpa and Czeslaw Milosz


The quietest day in some time.
An old bawdy joke is seeking to be remembered by me.
Gray, misty with moisture.
No car alarms, only the hint of a siren—
Far off, growing closer now, Dopplering by.
No grand system of symbols
Within which to work, that is to say,
My crucifixions look nothing like what you might remember.
Yet, I cannot bear another silent moment.
Still, I cannot endure another mad poem.
Is it true, what Milosz implied when he said,
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
But, Czeslaw, there is nothing to be done,
No one to be saved,
No one in need of salvation.
The throat will be slit whether I cry out
Or not, and the wrong man will be arrested,
A forgotten joke on his lips at execution time.
So I leave here and return
At eighteen hundred hours
To report again the goings-on of consciousness.
At one hundred and eight thousand hours.
Ha!—that’s an important number in some circles.
School is being let out on South Third.
The kids are crazed with spring.
Well, the whole of it is a sack of potatoes.
Some edible, some rotten.
I narrate, breathe, narrate, expire.
And you’re right, Chögyam, the goal of poetry very well may be
To exasperate everyone so that we die laughing.
Which reminds me of a joke.

Birthing Classes at the Local YMCA

Soon enough
when the bellies empty
the twenty of us will become
thirty,

a biological phenomenon
nearly indescribable
without resorting to the usual
empty adjectives:

Wild, crazy, surreal
perhaps uncanny
though obviously nothing other than
natural.

Go forth and multiply
said our instructor
at the end of eight weeks
as we,

The twenty, shook hands
bid each other good luck
laughed at the inscrutable
force

That had gathered us strangers into
these tiny wooden chairs
to discuss the benefits of
nettle tea.

In Between

In between our rotten moods we find the subtle stuff,
I’d call it energetic work if that didn’t sound too fluffy,
But once you’ve signed on there is no going back, to before
When your breath did not always heave with the room but
Rather was just your breath, something you could do with
As you pleased. People are forever in between
Projects or relationships or states of mind,
But what we can’t quite figure out is how to pick
One or the other: the mood or the space just before the next mood.
It is the same distinction that exists between the self-conscious performance
And the so-called genuine article, meaning, whenever
We are unsure of what side of the Here-I-Am spectrum we’re on then
We fall into this space I’m talking about. “I just don’t know
Where to go with my work,” my friend says, “I’m between
Styles.” My whole life I’ve hunted like a rat in a maze for
The way out of the in-between, but the lines blur
Like twilight on the horizon and now it is true that I cannot be
Bothered with such pursuits because there is something here for me
After all, a kind of suspended tension that reminds me
Strongly of what Goethe was writing about when he spoke of the good old
Eternal feminine—not that we even need such grand ideas,
Really, we don’t because we all know the chaos and confusion
Of looking at an abstract painting, something scraped and splattered
And hanging on the wall in front of your eyes at the gallery,
Imbuing you with that singular sensation of the not-quite-formed
And maybe that’s the whole idea, evolution and progress notwithstanding,
Namely, to feel that reiki-like energy that gathers between flesh,
To hover therein and feel settled nonetheless,
So that all my shifting moods are me and I am nothing more
Than my shifting moods, and the invisible electricity
That flows between the fingers of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s
Masterpiece can course through me freely, making my moods,
And the spaces between them, if not always lovely, bearable.

Consummation

I want to consummate
something

not exactly what was
in my dream
but from a like landscape

Sunlight pouring
through my pores

In my mind I make the whole
into a paradise
a brief stint in the grasses
by the water

In our minds we encounter visions that elude us
by daylight

*

We were reading poetry
you and I
in my dream

or perhaps philosophy

A tattered chapbook
or that slim volume
wherein the Frenchman writes
“Man is nothing but what he makes of himself.”

You see how the great pipe-smoker
comes back to me now

But that afternoon
by the mosaics museum
is memory, not dream

sensation
the slim red-orange volume
and the open picnic basket

wine from Dixie cups
to lips

*

One cannot make a memory consummate:
It is what it was (is and will be)

This experiment involves the edge
of what’s to come
as in
I think of a playful poke to your ribs
then I playfully poke your ribs

That
minus the narration

There is a field
a breeze, a grassy patch
simple things
cross-legged and full of leisure
beneath the tree’s
shade

we sit together

chasing our flickering thoughts
discussing our opinions of contemporaries
their devices
their failures

*

You, forever with your theories
about time
and its non-existence

How is it that I can call out to you from here?

Let us consummate
in the nether regions
of these whispers
for it is possible this is all our natures desire

To the park then!
this very moment
for the sun beckons us
or so we imagine

In fact

In fact, each of us is walking down
a path made of language,
or brick-words, if you like that kind of
Gary Snyder thing. One’s world
is, in fact, the limits of one’s language.
We could, if you please, call this
one’s cosmovision, or, more plainly,
one’s view. The fact is that one’s view
is composed, alas and abstractly,
of the words which one would use
to describe one’s view. As we walk along
the path, in fact, our words change,
for example, Osiris might become
Jupiter, not that, but something like that.
In other words, there is no such thing
as not worshipping, or so says
David Foster Wallace in a book.
I am not going to beat this metaphorical
horse to its metaphorical death,
but remember that the path is tangled,
and that the best thing to do,
in fact, would be to learn a new
word each day, not because the new
would trump the former,
but because the new improves, increases,
or one might say, moves along
one’s self-awareness
of this oft referred to process.
Witness all, name nothing—
that would be ideal, but that
would be a task for
a mythical being, or a mystical being,
that is to say in other words,
for you and me, one-eyed,
flying, and, in fact, death-defying.

The Fort

for my nephew Carter


Let us commemorate the building of the Great Fort of Weatherly, Pennsylvania, erected in the woods on the day before Easter Sunday in the year of our Lord two-thousand and nine. (Carter, you should know that our calendar is based on the approximate date of the birth of Christ, who was born in Nazareth in 2 B.C.(E.), but that there have been and will be other ways to measure time, which itself is beyond measure.) Building forts is important, as is a. Singing rocks songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s out loud in a moving car on long or longish road trips; b. Going on long or longish nature walks during which you take your time, smell flowers, and try to learn the name of a tree or two along the way; and c. Ever so slightly embellishing your life-stories when telling them to other people so as to imbue both you and your listener with a sense of life’s greatness as well as the ultimate dignity of each human individual, yourself and your listener included. Our fort was most excellent, its thick log and central beam stretching from the ground to the V high in the tree, the smaller logs and branches leaned against the central log at appropriate angles so as to create the fort’s basic structure, twigs and leaves thrown thereupon for further shelter from the elements. We sat in the fort and told secrets and stories. Telling secrets and stories is very important; the former, because we would perish without the disclosing of our secrets, which eat at our innards like mean, slimy pond bugs; the latter, because the very space we live in is made up of stories, so to tell a story is to create space, if that makes any sense to you. (Carter, don’t let them tell you the world is made of matter, or molecules, or subatomic particles, or any of that scientific gibberish—the world is made of colors and shapes and sounds and stories, end of story.) You told me your secret, that you “ripped off” your sister in a Pokemon card trade, and I want you to know that I forgive you, and that if you ask Selah for forgiveness, I imagine she too will forgive you. I told you the story of the lonely Indian boy, who used to live in those woods, and who was unbearably lonely because his father hunted in the forest and his mother worked in the garden all day, but how the little boy, with the shaman’s help, eventually found friends first in the woodland creatures, then in the crazy creatures of his dreams (“Pollywags!”), and finally in his newborn baby sister. After we finished with the telling of secrets and stories, our fort was sacked. It was a terrific onslaught. We tried to fend off our attackers, but they were too strong for us. (Do you remember our attackers, Carter? Do you remember why we left the perfect peace of our fort?) We said that we would have liked to stay in the fort forever, to sleep there, to eat there, to live there, to tell our secrets and stories until the sun rose and set a thousand million times. But in the end, our attackers won, and our attackers were on the inside, as they always are. (All battles are inner battles, buddy.) In the end, our attackers won and we left the Great Fort of Weatherly behind because our hunger and restlessness were too much to bear, so we went back up to the house, where it was warm and where dinner was waiting.

To my fellow countrymen

Moths, battering at the source
of what appears as light,
turn, I implore you,
towards what appears as dark,
behind you, inside you, overseas,
utterly unadvertised,
in the as yet unplumbed depths
of your body’s cells, your slumbering
conscience, overseas,
there, and only there, will you find
not only your freedom
from the flickering porch lantern,
the sheer insanity of that,
but also your endless night of desire,
fulfilled and fulfilling.

Four Quotations, Four Allusions

How solid the poems appear to us. Let us go then, you and I. How firm the words, like so many stacked stones. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. Yet at the same time, mysteriously, how utterly fluid. We will arise now and go, you and me and Michelangelo. How like the hollow bones of the dead the poems sleep in my mind. Stones and bones are things with feathers, perched in my soul. What wind could blow them free. What force could wipe them clean, like a blind hand swiping at cobwebs in the dark. Let us loaf and invite our finely feathered souls. How solid they too, the souls, appear. How they draw away and then creep near. And what miles they have to go before they sleep. These infinite miles, these senses of self, how solid they both seem. Are they or are they not / that is the question this poem is posing. They being the words, the souls, the stones, the feathers and minutes and miles. All of it. There is a state of dreaminess I seek beyond here, where everything appears so solid. A place where the hard stones are revealed to be secretly stuffed with feathers. A place where the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind and through the hollow centers of banana trees. It’s fine, in summer, to visit the seashore. So let us go then, you and I, and Shakespeare too, that old chap, and let us host a grand recital and wish all the fine poems into the undulating sea.

Welterweight

Tony the neighbor used to mow our lawn with a mower that moved along on its own. He just walked behind it and steered. When he mowed, Tony did not wear a shirt. He was absolutely principled about his shirtlessness. I knew even then—I was only nine or ten—that Tony was good-looking. And I knew that he knew this, and that this self-confidence heightened his appeal. When he came in to get the lemonade from my Mom—clichéd, sure, but it was always a cold glass of that pink, gritty, I-believe-in-me! Crystal Light that she served visitors—Tony’s sexiness dominated the kitchen.

—Sure is hot, he wiped his brow.

—Have another glass, said my mother.

She stood at the counter, eating celery in her constant effort to “watch her weight,” her calico apron cradling her stomach. I never considered my mother overweight. Rather, she was Rubenesque, with a lonely sweet tooth and a clean-plate ethos. But the way she talked endlessly of Weight Watchers and calorie counting and clothing sizes revealed that her figure was her Achilles heel.

—Your flowers sure look nice, Helen, said Tony.

—Thank you, my mother blushed.

I was right there, pretending to do my homework, listening.

Tony was Italian, upfront. He lived on the dead-end with his parents and a whole swarm of interchangeable brothers—I never did get the count. They all worked together in the family landscaping company, the Giovano Brothers. Whenever I saw the brothers at work, I’d think about how much money they were saving the company by going without shirts. Everybody in the neighborhood hired them to mow their lawns, except where dads did the mowing themselves. My buddy Randall’s father took pride in lawn care. I remember how excited he was when he got his first leaf-blower.

—Get a load of this lift, he cried, revving the two-cycle engine, blowing dirt in my eyes.

Tony played the hardworking and charismatic bachelor. He had a motorcycle, seemed to have everything together. But he was a loner. I’d see ladies on the back of his bike, always a different girl, cruising out on a Saturday night. He’d take his dates to the pizza place where my friends and I hung out, then ride around town with them, forcing them to cling to his abs as he careened around the bends. It made sense to me that he’d conduct his dates on the bike, in all that noisy wind—I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what they’d talk about over their pizza dinners.

Around the neighborhood, Tony would joke with me, punch me on the shoulder and whatnot, but I didn’t care for his banter. I just wanted to be old enough to walk behind a mower myself.

Sometimes you have a beat on certain people, meaning, you know when they’re around and what they’re up to, and I had this beat on Tony. What I mean is I was always running into him one way or another, and half the time I felt like I’d caught him in the middle of something. Like when I came out of the bush once—I’d been fetching a basketball (the Giovanas let us use their basketball hoop)—and caught Tony smoking a joint on his back porch.

—It gets you high, son, he exhaled with effortless cool. Makes the world seem softer.

I too wanted to feel that languid and free. There was something in Tony’s way, his detachment, or rather his ability to remain unattached, that I found myself observing closely, taking notes for the future. As much as he could rub me the wrong way, Tony had figured something out—about being cool, or about being a man, I wasn’t sure—and if I didn’t exactly admire him, I did look to him for clues to an as yet unnamed mystery.

Once I turned the corner of our living room and I saw him leaning up against the wall in the hallway that led to the bedrooms of our rancher. My Mom was on the far side of him. He was drinking his lemonade, shamelessly hitting on my her.

—Must get lonely, he said, living here all alone.

—I’ve got four kids, Tony, Mom said.

—You know what I mean, Tony said.

My Mom couldn’t see me there, on account of Tony standing between us. Grass clippings clung to his slick back under the pale hallway light.

—I’m not sure I do, Mom said.

To this day, I can’t remember if she said it coyly or flatly. On the surface, my Mom was a good, reliable, Christian woman. So I tend to remember a flat tone. But when I try to re-imagine the scene, when I try to get the story straight in my own mind, I tell myself, Well, depending on her mood, I suppose she could have said it either way: coyly or flatly. Because that’s the way people really are: unpredictable, creative, capable of anything in the moment.

His back glistening, Tony took a step toward my mother. She was in her white robe. Her arms, which she had held crossed beneath her chest, fell to her sides. Tony stopped and emptied his glass of lemonade: the right elbow of his drinking arm raised higher than the glass, which was pitched nearly perpendicular to the floor above his mouth; the ice jingling down upon his upper lip and then back down to the bottom of the glass after he had finished. The extended, pleasure-filled Ahh. As Tony bent low to place his glass on the carpet, my mother said,

—Don’t put that there.

She said that curtly, raising her right eyebrow.

Tony noticed my presence behind him—he kind of had a beat on me, too—and he turned and made a comment about the day that I’d become the Household Lawnmower. As he passed me, he gave me a lighthearted knuckle jab in the kidney, and I hit him back hard in the thigh. He laughed and said,

—Got a little Rocky Marciano on our hands, don’t we?

He wrestled me to the ground, his sweat all over me. I yelled at him to get off, flailed a swing at him, missed.

—I best get back to that yard, he said, crawling off me. Call me sometime, Helen, after all, I live right across the street.

My Mom pursed her lips and shook her head, found the line crude, that Tony would say such a thing in front of me. My mother considered herself quite sophisticated. At bedtime, she used to read to me from Blake’s Songs of Innocence. I’d seen her turn back a glass of wine she found unpalatable. And she was perpetually correcting my speech. Since my father had left five years prior, she was also lonely, prone to depression, and it was obvious how much she enjoyed Tony’s devil-may-care flirtations. She’d linger with him, throw a wink. When Tony paid attention to her, she was into it. Maybe she just wanted to connect. Everyone does. So when Tony showed his crudeness, his ungrammatical shirtlessness, it must’ve irked her that much more. As Tony let himself out, my frazzled Mom hustled into the bathroom.

I watched Tony mow the back yard, looking out the kitchen window, my teeth bared back to the molars.



My friend Randall could be awful selfish. He had a habit of injecting his self into the situation. Like once when we were playing Flip Card. The idea is you flip your baseball card in its plastic casing, then I flip mine: if I match your flip—say, heads-up on heads-up—then I win your card; if I don’t match your flip—tails-up on heads-up—then you win my card. Randall and I loved this game. There was something precise, almost mystical, in trying to perfect one’s wrist flip. Mystical is a fancy word, but trying to predict and then bring about your own triumphant future made the game quite a thrill. When I won, my arms and limbs tingled. Randall and I could play for hours on end.

The problem was I always beat him. Frankly, he was terrible at the game, and I was pretty damned good. I wasn’t the best. My brother was the best, but I was pretty damned good. One day I took seventeen of Randall’s cards in a row. Do the math and you find there are fantastic odds against such an outcome in a relatively random game such as Flip Card. But with Randall as my witness, I’m telling you I out-flipped him seventeen times straight and took seventeen of his cards in a stinking row. That kind of stuff blows my mind.

So what does Randall do? He complains, he blames me, as if I invented gravity.

—You’re such a fucking jerk! he yelled.

Randall talked like that, like his dad, with the foul language.

—What? I pleaded.

—Why do you have to go and win like that? he argued.

—Isn’t that the point? I said.

—I thought the fucking point was to have fun!

—I am having fun, I said.

—Well, I’m not!, he cried in a terrific pout.

—I’m sorry, I said.

—It’s like you never even think about me. You come over to my house, eat my Pop-Tarts, drink my iced-tea, play in my room, and then you think it’s okay to just go ahead and win all of my cards. You’re mean, Denis! That’s all there is to it! You never think about anybody but yourself. I don’t like you! In fact, I hate you! You are so mean, and you don’t even know it. Get out of here! Get out of here, and never come back!

He picked up his cards—including the seventeen cards I had just won, in other words, my seventeen cards—and slammed himself shut in the adjacent bathroom. He called out again,

—Leave! I don’t want you here when I get out!

So I gathered my things and let myself out. The last time Randall had kicked me out, four days prior to this incident, I had gone to the park to wander a while, to collect myself and watch myself think. But I didn’t feel like doing that this time. Sometimes watching one’s own thoughts can be harrowing, generally when the observed thoughts are what I call negative thoughts. And what with all the things Randall had just said to me, what with all that on my mind, I figured I’d just head home and watch TV. I checked my watch—if I hustled, I could catch the dénouement of Inspector Gadget.

You ever remember the very first time you thought about something? Like the first time you thought about the Electoral College? Or the first time you thought about global warming? Or the first time you thought about why birds fly in patterns? Well, walking home, I thought, for the first time, about what makes people happy. Bummed out by Randall’s crap, I tried to figure out how, when one is bummed, one gets happy. I didn’t figure it out.

Above me, birds flew in oblong ovals against a transparent grey sky. For a moment, I connected to that image, to the birds flying in the sky—I stood still, my neck bent backwards, and I was fully absorbed by the scene, do you know what I mean?—and that, not the image but the absorption, that made me happy.




At home, I heard noises coming from the hallway. The onerous grunts I’d heard once when I walked in on my older brother in the den straining to decipher some station for which we didn’t even get reception.

I walked towards the noises. Framed school pictures hanging on the walls stared me down the hallway. A mirror at the end of the hall reflected my quiet tiptoe. I heard the creak of my Mom’s bed. The grunts of a man crescendoing against my mother taking the Lord’s name in vain! Something she never did!

As I stood before the door, my conscience—that bugaboo!—told me not to open it. Do not open this door, Denis. My mind told me of the necessity of privacy. Everybody needs time alone, especially adults. I shut my eyes, trying in vain to quiet the voice. Denis, you have nothing to do with this! I took hold of the doorknob. Do not open this door!!!

I opened the door to a rank sweatiness, a glistening back, a half glass of lemonade on the bedside table.

Tony turned, held a smile over his shoulder before barking,

—Get out of here, Denis! Get!

I saw my mother’s legs up in the air, her hair splayed out against the pillow. Tony turned back towards my mother, and I charged towards his back, my fists swinging viciously, my nails digging into his skin. He defended himself, chuckling,

—Whoa, little man! Easy!

My mother yelled,

—Denis, go to the kitchen! Now!

Tony brushed me off. I was crying. My mother, covering herself in sheets, yelled at me again, and in an angry huff, I stormed back down the hallway and slunk into a kitchen chair. I heard my mother stomping down the hall after me.

—You’re never to open your mother’s door when she has company, she scolded me, Do you understand, Denis?

I dropped my head, nothing to say. Under the table, my fists were still clenched, my knuckles red.

Tony had gone outside to finish the mowing, and when my mother heard the sound of the mower’s engine catch to start up, she stormed out, screaming at him. Standing on the porch, I could hear the peaks of their terrible battle even over the deafening roar of the mower. The meanest stuff is always the loudest.

—Pig!, my mother yelled. You couldn’t even get off me when he came in!

Tony smirked devilishly, took his time with his delivery, for he knew how to ruin her:

—You. Fat. Fucking. Slut.

Fists clenched, I charged headlong. But there were no landed punches this time. Tony held me at bay by sticking his palm on my forehead and straightening his arm. My mother told me to go back inside, immediately.

—Just you and your little welterweight, Tony joked, quickly flipping to his other hand to hold me back.

He shoved me off and swaggered down the driveway, turning to give my mother that Italian fuck you, his fingers flicking forward from beneath his chin. My mother sighed, her shoulders dropping low. Perhaps she’d won the fight, but she’d lost much in the victory.

Father Giovano sent over brother Gerry to finish the mowing. Shirtless and bony, he moved back and forth across the lawn in straight, tidy lines. He was more careful than Tony had ever been maneuvering around my mother’s flower beds. As my anger ebbed, I realized I felt more awful than triumphant. I watched my mother smoke her cigarette and look out the window at lanky, awkward Gerry struggling to control that big, self-propelled mower. The roar of the engine carried through the windows. The windowscreens caught the clippings that kicked up, as the house filled with the smell of freshly cut grass. I felt the loneliness of mother and son afloat in a linoleum kitchen on a nameless Tuesday afternoon. I felt that my mother was angry with me, but at the same time that she wasn’t. Mostly, I felt confused, and that there would be more confusion to come. Yet there was nothing more to say.

I was duly punished: no TV for a week. I needed that week off from TV, not to so-called think about what I’d done, but because I had quite a bit of information to process. What goes in never comes out. I didn’t sleep well for weeks. I’d turn on my bedside radio and listen to Harry Callas call the Phillies game, but I kept imagining Tony playing second base instead of Juan Samuel. Or Tony catching a flyball in center field. Or Tony pitching, my mother at bat. But whenever I tried to actually think about what I’d seen, or what it meant, there was a gap in my mind. I could only make out the images: the tangled sheets, the grass on Tony’s back, my mother’s legs in the air.

Years later, I realized my mother was a woman first, then a mother. But delving deeper I see now how epiphanies can be misleading. How they come endlessly folded into and pitted against one another. Because when I think of the experience now, it’s not so much about my mother, or even about me and my mother, about my visceral defending of her—it’s about me and Tony. Coming to terms with how Tony could seduce and then walk away, with how he could flirt with and then cruelly denigrate my mother, meant coming to terms with how men behave, and with how sex is like tossing a pair of human animals into a boxing ring. Moreover, for me, the story is about how men have passed through my life and how I have looked to them in vain for guidance, for models. It’s about my fatherlessness, and about how I have never been able to fill that gap. And how it took me years and years to just stop trying.

The Watching

Are you watching me? because this only works
If you are watching me, closely observing me,
Not only listening but also seeing my every gesture.

Fragments of the wind collect inside us,
Creating a vortex that tears down the throne of
Exalted light upon which we try to fix our attention.

So, we suppose, we each write our own story
For ourself, even though the prospect of stardom
Is what brings us to the TV and fuels our explosions.

What I am saying is that we feel the same,
Or similarly, or else, I am an alien from outer-space,
Looking at you through the flat screen.

Behind me, I have set up a camera
To film the camera on my computer filming
Me watching my own podcast on the internet.

Burning through everything is the light
Of the stars, the light of the speed-of-light,
As is careens insanely into our pupils.

A Promise

I am unlearning the art of self-narration
Because my excessive self-consciousness destroys
Every effort of mine to love simply and straightforwardly.

I read myself into everything,
Perfectly solipsistic, I am the thing
Which shape-shifts and attacks itself with perfect hostility.

I am above all else a metaphor
For myself, forever slipping through
The gateways of perception to arrive in the moment.

For me, there is no escape from myself
As there is no way for a mother giving birth
To escape from being a mother giving birth besides just giving birth.

In this way, every moment pushes through
The aperture of me, flickering in and out of existence,
And abiding in a vast spectrum beyond my powers to conceive.

Perhaps it looks like a cone, with the big bang at
A single-pointed end, the rest extending out infinitely along three axes,
Which represent the dimensions of space, the whole cone afloat in timelessness.

Whatever my universe looks like, I am
Pledging to myself today to just let go and let be,
To trust language to take care of its own flow and evolution.

Today I bath in the baptismal waters
Of genuine abiding, seeking henceforth only the beauty
Of each precious moment as it tenses and releases, tenses and releases...

The Kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God is a state of mind,
And if I can follow the anxiety in my chest
Closely enough, faithfully enough,
I might be able to tell you what I mean.

I am most myself when I have nothing to say,
This is the paradox of the writer, the internal
Contradiction inherent in how the Kingdom of God
Exists in the way in which we relate to one another.

Take Jesus, for example, the great mamzer
From Nazareth, who, seeing divine immanence
In the force of the mustard seed or in the power
Of Mary’s yeast, cried out, “Malkhuta delaha!”

Kingdom of God! My heartbeat slows
As I talk to you, beloved reader,
As I fold you into this present moment
With my web of convergences, of causal

Synchronicities: bless us, oh Lord, that our minds
May be one with the Truth, and with one another.
Please bless me that a mind like mine be freed...
Or to take another approach, that of dharma,

And its teachers, always pointing to the here-and-now,
Wherein, they say, there is only clarity and luminosity,
No problems, no chaos. I always wonder,
But what if in the moment my father is dying?

Or my lover is breaking my heart? Or I myself
Am breaking her heart, or dying? What then,
Oh wise men, what consolation is mine?
That the Kingdom of God is a state of mind.

The Gathering

Oftentimes before I write I lie down and breath into the pores of my body. With intent concentration, I bring the energy of breath in through all the tiny holes in the skin of my toes, my calves, my thighs, my sides, my chest, my face, etc. Even my skull, I can bring the breath in through my skull, and feel my head in its all physicality, and not merely as my idea of my head. Medical science would scoff at my practice of bringing in air through my toes; nevertheless, I do it and it works. My breathing slows down, I synchronize with my heartbeat, and I begin to fall into a state of mind wherein all things are again possible. Only then do I allow my mind to explore its love of stories, only after the gathering. Perhaps on this day my mind thinks of a myth, one in which a girl—certainly a girl—of mixed heritage, perhaps the daughter of an Iranian man and his American wife, born in Queens, comes into our troubled world and sets her heart on saving each and every soul she encounters, one at a time. Using her superpower of imaginative empathy, she walks along the river park and looks into the so-called souls of every passerby. She hears their thoughts and feels their emotions, simply by observing their gait or noticing their posture or looking into their eyes. Once she has chosen her target, she follows him until the time is right, until the life experience in this chosen person has risen to its most intense peak, until all his troubled thought and suffering have come together, have accumulated, have converged on a point—only then does our young superhero make her entrance. Until that precise moment she lies in wait, breathing, watching, gathering her energies, perpetually preparing for her performance.

T.P.

My girlfriend and I moved in together,
so now there are all the little things
Like how one places the toilet paper roll
on the toilet paper holder to discuss.
Or how exactly and to what degree
she is going to cuddle with me in bed.
How much of her weight will she
ever-so-slightly shift onto me?
And how much of my weight on her?

So the toilet paper was again rolling out
from underneath this morning,
And I can’t stand it that way,
how it spills all over the floor,
How it makes us look like barbarians:
t.p. must roll out from over the top!
So I talked to her about it this morning,
and I think everything went swimmingly.
We saw eye to eye on this crucial issue,
and certainly this bodes well.
I imagine all will continue to go
so smoothly when the baby arrives.