Retracing Our Steps to Utopia VII

. . . most people come to know only one corner of their room.
          - Rainer Maria Rilke

To know more than one corner of your room.
To see yourself as you were 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
Or as you would like to think you were.
How you adjusted the lens to correct the distortion.
To ease the passage.
We've all made that mistake.

The angles spellbinding, infectious with singsong.

The comings and goings.
The melodies familiar and unfamiliar,
mixing with the then and now,
growing fainter with each season.
The inertia left flopping around in the culvert.
You are about all that matters notwithstanding anything.

Irma Haselberger

Retracing Our Steps to Utopia VI

Ghosts of the silver screen populate your jottings:

the time-traveler as long distance runner, no longer worrying the endgame.

When to appreciate the mirror's music?
To press the reset button?
You begin scrapbooking your gazes
blue penciling ads in fashion magazines as an homage
to the mooring of starting out.
This time you will not be unhinged by reflections of your former selves -
a good thing - big and leggy and good.

Edie Campbell by Peter Lindberg

Retracing Our Steps to Utopia V

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, . . .
          - Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn Day

Your enthusiasm follows the plot of matching neckties.
I would like to have thought otherwise
but you unfold as expected
as items on a grocery list
which falls out of your pocket
as you bend into your seductions
connecting the dots between us.
The distance halved again and again and again.
The point lost among footnotes.
The letter-writer writing long letters into the night,
struck inarticulate, caught off-guard,
wandering the boulevards, up and down, restlessly.

Paolo Zerbini

Retracing Our Steps to Utopia IV

The miniaturist in you argues for further downsizing:
the shoot skewed
bottlenecked with citations from the OED
your last run-through a wrong turn
over the top
PowerPointed no less.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I've learned not to doubt much.
Not to doubt the power of the costume.
The power of the makeover.
Walking in on reservations.
The differences.
Butz, your two-year-old poodle, knows.
He's been channeling Schopenhauer on his afternoon constitutionals:

          Hi-diddle-dee-dee
          The best is yet to be. . . .

Catherine Keener in Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Retracing Our Steps to Utopia III

And now you're inventorying survival gear
as if your past lives left instructions on the answering machine
rekindling memories that years ago
provided you solace for something or other,
for what, exactly, I can't remember.
The clock's face again pokes in,
disregarding my previous comment
awash with remorse.
I'm trying to reconstitute myself as another -
another with tickets to a double-header.
Nothing better to short-circuit unhappiness.
Not unlike us, yes?
Off-hours, you choreograph untried virtues,
tweaking missteps to captivate.
I backpedal. Indifferent.
How will you write this up in the final hour? -
the final hour, when distracted by claims of melodies,
you will be assisted by members of the alphabet
selected at random from drive-bys.
You'd think by now they'd be as encumbered as you and I.

Retracing Our Steps to Utopia II

The symphonies continue to symphony,
memorializing cloud banks
that rolled in with the coffee.

Have you finished looking at the photos in the Warhol-like box?

Pedaling along the shaded streets you slow
to admire a tiny fresco
of woolgatherers.
You know they know.

The page curls, so too the rigmarole of the encounter.
A collage of texts interrupts.
With this humidity, you begin to reconsider the line drawings.
This zero tolerance thing is tough to play.

So, tell me again, who said your take was "spot on"?

Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethrope

Retracing Our Steps to Utopia I

. . . you nevertheless go on, walking towards Utopia.
          - Marguerite Young

You scripted our combinations, our permutations,
the topography of us as mother tongue
following birds and Simon and Garfunkel,
retracing our steps to Utopia.

You played the audience with your seasoned self
ordering room service with another's voice:

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

Your wings became alternative mysteries
dissected, examined, reassembled
into what we dubbed The New Next.
Or so we thought.
But then someone was shaken down, and the clock reset.

Alexi Lubomirski