Self(ish): A series of haikus to whoever you are

I’m a selfish thing—

I draw connections between

Myself and poets.

I’m a grand artist

To draw these tenuous lines,

Erase barriers.

As if I don’t know

They wrote for themselves, putting

Themselves on the page.

But I could be wrong.

I’m reaching out to you now.

You. Yes, I mean you.

Not so selfish now

To think they, like me, could put

Two selves on one page.

They did not know me,

I may never have met you,

And yet, here we are.

Novels Stay Novels

"He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete." –The Great Gatsby

***

It was just after dark and the streetlamps in the park threw pools of yellow on smooth sidewalks. A boy and a girl made their way around the path of perfect, board-game pieces of sidewalk which surrounded a small lake. They listened to the hush of the fountain placed dead in the center, the only other sound within this tiny bubble of suburbia.

She was very aware of him beside her. They walked without touching, but every so often at the edge of her mind, she had to brush away the image of his hand sweeping towards hers, taking what she was too afraid to offer up herself. She heard but did not listen to the pleasant stream of “When I was little…” and “Haven’t you ever wanted to…?” The words were all there but what mattered was that he was talking, and it was a form of sharing somewhere between chit-chat and the nervous silence of not-quite together—a silly dance performed by young teens “in like.”

She had always protested her friends’ obsession with romance which—at this age—seemed insincere, even funny. She didn’t understand that when her own time came, the privacy of her mind allowed her to dream the silly-girl things she always mocked, like an imagined Oscar win or a day of undivided attention. At that moment she was thinking of English class—of how Gatsby had thought of Daisy, of stars and flowers and kisses, of silly-girl things. She laughed a little at herself, and inwardly rolled her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from wanting all of them.

The boy stopped walking, and took a breath. They sat down on the wooden balustrade which separated the lake from the path. She waited.

It was important that she did not know what she waited for—or, exactly what she waited for. It was this image of confessions, of kisses, of closeness that she expected. She willed her blood to stop pumping so hard, and reminded herself that this was a crush only and she hated the word love when it came out of the mouths of babes. But he looked so nervous, and so sweet, and he was looking at her.

“I have to tell you something important.”

She thought of the tuning fork hitting the star, about the poetics and how Fitzgerald wanted them to hear the faint tinkling of that image, and the smell of blossoms, as they thought of kisses.

“I’m gay.”

I Am Not Your Muse

I am not the eternal muse of the one with pen in hand,

The girl—merely—not of words like stars but of bone only.

You sit beneath the wide light of empty page and

I can only watch as you sing your words like stars across it.

Everything I have is machine made by the cold line of our time

And you love the impossible pure of wind and words like stars.

Now I see you as you are—alone—beneath the impossible pure,

Dead as the poets that once sang their words like stars.

I am dancing this machine—with, against, around,

And you—you are stuck in your impossible stars.

Lux Aeterna

There is more than one world in Assisi, if you believe in these things. I see the earth as it was layered there; the slow creeping climb up through streets paved with clean stones the color of wheat, blocks of white sun on potted flowers and little alcoves of painted stories, San Francesco rising in the shadow. Assisi’s streets are charming, but it has none of the sacred which lies at the top of the hill.

The town ends at the top of the mount, giving way to the the basilica of St. Francis. There is the realm of the divine, and crossing a green lawn I feel a change happening. It is the same shudder of a thought—unfamiliar, but calm—that I am somewhere at a crossing between child and adult, only now this in-between is where a tourist becomes a pilgrim, the cynic a child of God. I am all of these things.

Inside the church it is dim, but not dark. Though it is afternoon and the sun outside is fierce, windows like gentle hands mold the light into softness. There is a soft kind of silence, too; the deep, quiet echo of a basilica is something your ears can hear, a pleasant and continuous breath. We look around at the chronicles of the saint’s life spoken over the walls, painted lovingly by dead men buried in tiny paragraphs of our books and I think, You were alive once. Did you feel this too?

Down, outside and to the northeast of the church, are steps. The great walls of the church hide us from the sun, and I look down these steps and can’t shake the image of Orpheus and Eurydice, those pagan lovers forever climbing up and up. I expect, as I walk down to the crypt, to find Hades at the bottom, but I am wrong.

There is nothing of hell in the tomb of St. Francis. It is dark, and stony, and its beauty is an ache. The walls are colorful frescoes made and remade to look untouched by the thousand years that separates their time and ours, or perhaps—if you believe—preserved only by grace like the fresh face of a long-dead saint. The pilgrims in this tomb do not reject miracles. They place pictures of children, of animals, of wishes and regrets at the feet of God and the crypt of Francis, where his bones rest in a solid column of stone, circled by a halo of vigil candles. People kneel, pray, and weep, but their pain is not unsettling. Instead, I start to grasp a feeling which never seemed to touch me. I recall from some obscure bible lesson the phrase meaningful suffering, only now, it means something.

Climbing back up from the crypt of St. Francis I skirt the whitewashed brick, settling arms and elbows on the wall that overlooks the west, and all of Umbria. There is no other place like Umbria in the sun. Light touches the red earthen roofs of houses, the tops of dark cypresses and bright poppies, the gold and green fields where they curve up blue hills and into a wide sky: light like holy fire, light like the hand of God.

***

Between

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”—Alan Watts

A young man in his green uniform slumps down at the bench of a bus stop on 4^th street. He is not used to the hardness of wood that is well-formed and factory-made. There are places made of soft, wet earth in the wilds of an ancient country that the young man has spent the last eight months laying on, and with a new kind of repulsive nostalgia the young man half wishes to feel it again. In the face of the townhouses lined up prettily in front of him he feels as if that place might again become something reported on the six o’clock news, and not something he had breathed, had built up and destroyed utterly.

                He recalls a day in the jungle when the sun set over Tra Bong and it was not the fire of napalm but of a gold sun hitting green water, a heaven in purgatory. The air was hot and smelled like mud and behind and in front of him the boys of his platoon were singing Dean Martin, and he hummed along, Non dimenticar, non dimenticar…

                When his mother and father arrange a party for his homecoming, the fireworks fall over Lake Matakwa like VC rockets on China Beach. His kid brother Pete is there, the ghost of a laughing marine who has fled the world in a helicopter. His girlfriend Donna is the Vietnamese mother who looks over the skeleton of a burned hut and does not see a war, but an apocalypse where the horsemen are VC and GI both, working in perfect tandem.

They all belong in between death and life, even the ones who come home. As he sits on the bench, the soldier believes he has known both better than he ever wished to know.

The Absinthe Man's Sonnet

The absinthe man has learned to hold

His glass just so; the fountain pen to hang

About his fingers like the sugar-drip of gold

And green. He listens as the wormwood-woman sings

A song of long ago; the sunrise of a day

When fair and far-born fairies came, west

Across the world, until an evening they bore away

Their songs from human ears, the last great test

Of man—to listen to them still, and learn their fire

Like old Prometheus—to hear the lie

Of history and turn away, to fight and never tire

Of unraveling the gift a wormwood-woman gives, by

And by the spirits of elixirs fall upon

And fade a cube of stars: the absinthe man writes on.

[Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva]

Naming Hurricanes

My dear, the sun is out;

Let’s you and I become a storm

And with our fingers push them all about

The sea, those creatures of the deep which form

A dizzy dream until it is our wont to sleep.

The stars have crowned your head, your

Eyes are winking clouds below your brow,

The moon. Four windy arms will smooth the shore,

East, West, North, South: A bed of sand—until we laugh and blow

Our tiny lighthouse candles out.

And, crashing there, we sigh

And grow still; until—until

In our death we share a living breath, and as we die

This hurricane is you and I.