A repurposed wasteland appears.
The walls whitewashed.
The floors swept.
But the rooms remain empty.
Meanwhile, stories . . .
It's 1967. The Summer of Love.
You're living in a VW Bus
trout fishing in America with Richard Brautigan
drifting along like an easy creek
trying to follow the words of Carl Rogers
to become the self that you really are.
~
What is it all about?
What are you all about?
You get what you put into trout fishing in America
stepping in the water
feeling the cool drift
taking it with you.
Taking what?
The otherworldly contours of love.
The spellbinding angularities.
The waking-in-the-middle-of-the-night inconsistencies.
The ups and downs . . . the ins and outs . . . the wicked game.
Your daughter dances to Strauss's Annen Polka,
floating with the wide-eyed innocence
of a nine-year-old who has yet to glimpse
the world of the backstage.
Look at her taut sureness, the steadiness and poise,
the promise of her young movements
as they transcend choreography with a joy that,
you can only hope, will buoy her through a life
filled with huge pockets of uncertainty.
You cross over and find yourself in a choral group
performing Arvo Pärt’s The Peace.
This is good. This is really good.
The puzzle at the foot of your bed?
You try to recall the connection.
The mystery of happiness without remorse
or something like that. You’re not sure.
Here’s how it’s done, the caped magician told you
after your eighth birthday party.
Misdirection. Misdirection.
~
At 42, she faced her final storm,
and now floats, high above the seas,
guiding fellow sailors,
her last words, Goodbye, my love.
You turn the soil for a vegetable garden:
tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplant.
Rhode Island Reds appear
scratching for worms with gnarled, yellow claws.
Your grandfather is here, too, from the dead,
a stubby Philip Morris dangling from his lower lip.
He speaks to you, in Polish, about happiness.
~
K. H. Brandenburg tweaks an algorithm
for compressing audio files to birth MP3s
using Suzanne Vega's a cappella, Tom's Diner.
~
You return to a post
about a rhino poacher
who was stomped to death by an elephant
then eaten by a pride . . .
~
She checks herself out of detox
chugging rubbing alcohol and hand sanitizer
and into an ICU where a voice says
You're not going anywhere
but to a psych ward
and a 28-day program . . .
and the Monkey laughs
and rides shotgun
through late-night streets.
~
It's good that grandma's here
on this early July morning
on the beach
in her housedress
with her beach chair
and it's good that she's invited you
to sit on her lap for a while
watch your cousins in the water
and slowly wade into the day.
Looking at the lobsters in their watery cells
awaiting execution by boiling water
reminds you of David Foster Wallace
clinically depressed for most of his life
who one day stopped taking Nardil
walked out onto his back porch
threw a rope over a beam and hanged himself.
Wallace was an abusive assaultive explosive misogynistic
gifted alcoholic and drug addict.
Looking away from the lobsters
you think of Consider the Lobster
Wallace’s essay highlighting the unethical abuse of animals
in which he asks
Is it right to boil alive a sentient creature
for our gustatory pleasure?
Knowing that the so-called scream
of the lobster being boiled alive
is not its voice but air rushing out
of the holes in its shell doesn’t help . . .
nor should it.
~
You've stopped by again today
to see how your father's doing.
It's August and he's eighty-six.
He's asked for some blackberries,
so you're out here,
in the blackberry bushes,
in shirt and tie,
picking.
~
You get lost with Chet Baker
replaying the opening bars
to All Blues from The Last Great Concert
recorded two weeks before he fell
out of a window in Amsterdam . . .
because you can't stop
because it's one of the realest things you've encountered
and for a few moments . . . nothing else matters . . .
~
She breaks into her counselor's office
at the therapeutic community house
drinks a bottle of hand sanitizer
and is taken to the emergency room
where she drinks more hand sanitizer
then sneaks out of the hospital . . . wasted . . .
She's picked up by the police
taken to a homeless shelter
on Christmas Eve
then back to the community house
the day after Christmas
where she apologizes to her counselor
and the other residents
and is put on probation . . .
binging . . . purging . . .
She is given the option of treatment for bulimia . . .
She refuses
and is discharged to a cot
in a warming center
where the lights go out at 9 . . .
Next day . . . she's back on the street . . .
~
Do you believe in magic?
Of course you do.
~
March 28, 1941, a little before noon
Virginia Woolf
with hat walking stick overcoat and large heavy stone
wades into the River Ouse drowning herself.
She was an escape artist
who mapped the extraordinariness
of our interiors . . .
~
Elizabeth Bishop catches a tremendous fish.
~
It's 1960. Latin Class.
Julius Caesar divides Gaul into three parts.
Three rows over, an upperclassman, in the school uniform
imprisons you with her long legs
while Marcus Tullius Cicero addresses the Senate
with the trichotomy of his Third Oration:
How long, O Catiline, will you tax our endurance?
How long will that madness of yours escape us?
To what end will your unruly boldness hurl itself at us?
~
You fritter away time and space.
Goalposts splinter.
Your goalposts splinter.
No one believes the converse.
to open the doors of perception . . .
an aha moment.
