For We Must Know Why We Walk Softly

After the storm, which weathercasters never tired of calling fall-out from Hurricane Godfried, the whole
city seemed derived from remnants of what was left over from ancient Rome. Thick, full scale branches
obscured the roads. Powerlines were strewn like spaghetti. Parked foreign cars appeared at the end of walkways
crushed from the weight of their own payments. It seemed, to the honest, most storm-fearing observer,
a wreckage willed by what they were too bored to make homely.

For three twenty-four hour periods, not even the cell lines were accessible. National Guardsmen were called
in by the Governor. Every lamed intersection found its triage--lean, white men in fatigues, the seriousness
of the hour glued to their faces, inched clotted traffic toward and past them, into a general malfunction that
held more than enough sleep behind their eyelids.

A number of unnatural events had been noted. Not recorded, jotted out in the open. Where the panicked and
exhausted and disgruntled could argue and discuss just exactly the best way to illustrate them. In the span
of a half-hour, the temperature and air pressure registered epic shifts. Winds that chased them indoors
welcomed them with jacket weather. Instant Fall scents released a premature return from nostalgia. And what's
more, all manner of fowl had relapsed. A brevity in the sky gone South.

Battery and candle. Doubleteam heating ceremonies, beneath covers. While above and outside the throb
of emergency busyness, chainsaws, days linked by coffee, brought civilization out of the mouth, of nature, into
the tamed, shared lap again. Still, some couldn't manage to resist not taking it.

Nearly one hundred blown transformers crossed the River Fixed, spit sparks, caught water, touched dead land,
found power, brought it back with life in the gun against the gondolier's threat's wishes, lazy, then locked, electric
and around their unsupported appreciation cleaved the continuous dark from humble, unspoken borders, one
guy and girl and another, each of them persons, who had no reason to follow the sun anyone, since they could
continue to see in each other's faces, talking. The Dark and the Ice welcomed the Warm and the Light. They were heaven.

Despite those rows of saplings downtown, which crinkled without gratitude's permission.

Correspondence Abandon

Last Friday a headline and a black & white photograph caught my eye--something in the Times about the return of "Lennie." Without further inspection, I folded the section into my bag and carried it around all day, carried it home later that night, went to bed, and in the morning, when I had a few minutes and a steaming hot cup of coffee, I remembered with pleasure what I had waiting for me. Lennie. Lennie Bruce. An article in the times would give me just enough (but not too much) to ponder.

But the article was about Leonard Bernstein. I had it all wrong, the wrong Lennie. There must be a word for this condition--when all your Lennies are wrong, when all your Thursdays are Tuesdays.

Since then, things have seemed mostly out of whack. Playing football with H., I feigned a tackle and he flipped the ball right into my tooth and then dove on the ground. My jokes, too, have landed on the ground. Explaining the intention behind them leads to headlocks, toothaches, mud. It gets as ugly as four fish in an olfactory. So, too, the Jets lost . . . and Lehman Brothers.

Finally, today, a correspondence.

You use the word suicide in a poem and all morning I'm thinking about it. The word, a theory. Peculiar. Then I pick up that same Times, the one that betrayed me, and see David Foster Wallace's mug. A suicide.

And this is supposed to make me feel better?

September Principles

It's a lame failure of language but a bitter enrichment of the self--or what priggish pundits call "the lateral
movements of the head through the world"--to accept the suicide watch without a darling.

The important refutation is that she's often there, despite your lack of attention. Stunt double to a disappearance
of understanding.

But what could it mean--to understand--if the literal mechanics of the word aren't parsed?

What's fascinating is how busy, bristling with concurrent lives, it makes believe. First I'd have you notice, have
you take responsibility for, what's not there or apparent (not quite the same thing): any presence or
concept of Beneath. (ps--an interesting commital of sense in itself, mostly out of sound, a semantic blur.
Like a light drinker three scotches into speech, "Be neat.") But nothing is. Syllogistically two-parted,
in stead of a silent third. The Under in the act of standing. Or a brave, clumsy, largely unconscious attempt
to sculpt everything unaugmented by analysis and intention to welcome the frightening, exposed life
of the erect. A frosty reversal of poles: the charmed head beneath its kingdom.

But then again, how else can a suitor manage to ignore his heart, so steadfastly the opposite of
his affections?

Not Unlike Greek Tragedy

Before he'd left her apartment, he'd made the miraculous difference. Without her in the room but in the
shower, bent, mutated the accident his elbow had created, a potted spider plant burst like a first-rate
liar on the floor.

Had she heard the ceramic scrape? The counter letting go. The faux-cedar crack of the lower cabinet
struck first?

No. She was too lost in the slick pleasure of apricot body wash. The collision of pitches the vase found
as it bumbled linoleum into explosion.

He had approximately, or maybe roughly, five minutes. The memorized Rolodex of habits went leafing. Legs,
shaved? Odd-numbered days. Today: the second. Shampoo, the hair? Once every four. Just yesterday. Towel
dry. Step on scale. But maybe avoidance. And then the baby-sluffs of bare feet intending coffee, the kitchen.

Pigeon thumps. Windowledge. Sheridan Drive elongated. North shore. From carpet without the least
twitch of comedy, in the hall, the elevator would lower ease deeper past the twelfth floor. To reach his
desk at work to end the rush, he would have to catch that. With the terms of the disaster and his future of
getting yelled at, on the floor.

As instincts received them there were two choices. Leave the scene, launch the door. Or inhabit a nearby good
boyfriend: kneel to sweep, cup, trash, apologize, kiss, promise, and displace himself that many times from
his schedule. To subject himself gladly to the rhythm of a mishap. And work overtime to erase into its
whim fully.

Two of them. And that was his error. That there was crack enough in his time to open. Where they were,
divided and explicit, decisiveness was already a fantasy. In that pose she found him. In an ugly, absurd
half-crouch; like a beast of prey caught mid-bowels, too weak to fight the privacy of standing.

the loss of

spontaneous
gesture
=
the loss of
one's
heart, the ability
to love
fully

prove this
in 250
words
or less

(the beauty
of this
arithmetic
is that
any answer
even a non-answer
proves
the theory

but you
knew that
already
didn't you)

while you're
at it
can you tell me
what leaf
to bet on
in the winter
gambling
I am
just now
beginning

Sweet William

His whole life held together
by an inclusion
that neatly
bust it open
every time.

Ambassador Yenin

1/
I should like to take a bow and explain: no, this was not how I meant it. It is rather the case the children you mention
are not removed, but gone, and not returning, as you've heard, from this situation of going, but, with a
brightness unimagined, conducted calmly from the future.

2/
When faced with such simplifying forces, it is often best to apologize. And then, like ripples returning to
compose a central grace, retract more than was enriched in the gesture.

3/
My friend, I am sorry.

4/
In negative stead of our great country, there have been many naysayers; nags; rattlers on the throat;
bursting more often than not with the vitality of a summer confessional. You must trust me when I
say, my friend, they are only correct because they explain nothing. Have any of them dared to visit
the least of our villages without a camera, in the buff, so to speak? Have their foreign correspondents
even once thrown the poltergeist from preconception, protested the tendency to haunt so neatly, nefarious to
invest in the plainest happy residents of things before them? No, I doubt they have the eyes for acceptance.

5/
Poverty. Can one devise a correlate? Showroom hopelessness. They see and say what they write. This
we cannot help. Such is the curse they bring us into, and report from.

6/
Yes, much pride. I will tell you. Our vernal core, rubeberry thickets, the flux of pheasants among
grasses; what more? the knees-beneath-bedsheets effect of cloudshadows flowing over foothills. These are the spirit
of reality. Where the millwheel revolves, water brings rings to bear. An old saying. Mountain-strong, any stream, I invite you friend, out of
mind and memory of that place, to pick one. It will curl you into a stronger representative embrace. The
aim of our creed and our legistators' tempered confluence, has always been that we, people of such a land, would
in our lifeways and means of being plain, aspire to be indistinguishable
from them.

7/
Any charges, rumors without a respect for borders, are often, more than likely, distortions. But these are
men who know how to devour one mother above all others. Trust not. The tourism on them is always thinking.

8/
You have heard, I am sure, of the thousand-plus laborers sealed like close-sliding fish in a
mass ditch
in Yenlo. Or, even more popular among our enemies, of breadlines that taper from city to city. And as a
typical compliment to irresponsible, groundless conjectures, one often hears reports sprout from the
mouths of cowards--that leadership is an elite in the worst manner, massaging bought girls with champagne
before cresting blonde tresses over pillows stuffed not with sawdust, but sweetbread. We must never admit
fantasies among table manners. I hope you should agree.

9/
Of course there is a concern for credentials. Who is this who would speak, without reservation, to convince me?
In answer to that, as with any matter of small-time immediacy, I would have you, my lungs my
recipient, my comrade quiet inside the hour, open all that was given you at birth and look at me. Out of freshness
of affection and with your own friendliness, would this shared stranger deceive you, to defy cleanly?