I woke today having killed myself, having walked through an incline of boulders and desert plants and sand. In the same way that time within dreams grows instead of progresses, in the same way that the dream-choices manifest suddenly but smoothly (a parting of tall grasses revealing a ballroom) — I found myself committing suicide, having just taken pain killers. It was the right thing to do.

But the drugs weren’t working so I pleaded with my friend to help me, to stab me in the side because I was too afraid of the physical pain. He refused at first, but I fought him, and maddened, he stabbed me and disappeared.

I knew then that I had to leave, and wanted to. The earth was suddenly near and deep, and it became necessary to die watching the sky. So fatigued and dizzy, I stumbled out beneath bright trees, then into a mountainous boulder field, trying to find a high place to watch the twilight. There were large rocks I couldn’t climb or mantle. An anteater followed me, and though I tried to shoo him away, he was persistent and unafraid. A kind of monkey appeared and its small babies popped up from the sand. I was too weak to move any further and fell into the sand. The sun went behind translucent clouds and became an opalescent inscription, it careened to its setting.

Regarding dreams of death, I have only been murdered before — woke startled and afraid, expecting to be shot by someone standing over me. Today though, I woke confused but calm, with a feeling that I had done some right thing.

After writing all this, I opened a book I had never read:

Perpetual Motion

1

You go to the mountains
stretch in the light aquariums
and wait —
stillness turns in its well

2

I touch your face
of rosewood and sap

the last vanished yellow
of sunset on the mountain

the first cellular light of a flank

3

Walking up the mountain
before an avalanche
you’ll find the sandstone
of the peak tattooed with waves

The summit moves with the tide.

— Mei-Mei Berssenbrudge
from Summers Move with the Tide (1974)

When they pivot together he pulls her near, and their weight glides and shifts;

and though moments of awareness expand to cradle how the other dancers evolve the map of the floor,

it also contracts to cradle his hand lightly touching her back, and the way they thread, and the way, earlier, she said of course.

This is a woman he once loved, soon to marry a cabinet maker near San Diego:

a man twenty-five years older, whose wife died when he drifted off the road and crashed into a sleeping orchard.

What is it to wake within a car’s crushing? To the distorted and terrible silence that followed, cut by the crying of their newborn in the backseat?

A hand leads a certain familiar motion through fresh music and describes a circle. Her fingers on the back of his hand mark a partition of time.

She is the age now of his wife when she died, and you cannot deny the question: is there a world outside the griever’s grief?

Her shoulder blade leads an arc across their path into the sudden world.

He imagines a point on the edge of the lacquer cylinder briefly touching the table as it rolls from one side to the other, illustrating conchoids;

feels that loss and love deepen the same place.

Being Leif’s wing-man last night meant entertaining and laying the friend of the girl he was working on. Other nights it meant simply ducking out as his potential sex illuminated, as the night became warm and bright. But as it happened, as it always happens when I’m out with him, the girls were essentially magnetically opposed to me, and I probably did more harm than good for his chances of getting a piece of tail. When I walked up to the three of them, one of the girls exhaled from her nose a quick measure of disdain, though it also could have been the quick deflating of her brain. The girls were obliterated and not very interesting to boot, and certainly not interested in me, which is just as well (by this point in my life I am observing that I say it’s just as well with some concerning regularity). Anyway, these two other crunks sidled up to the girls and were laying it on think. One of them, perhaps the most absurd poser ever was brandishing an unlit cigar while taking pulls of budweiser. They were obviously better candidates for the girls, willing to carry the pointless conversation the girls insisted on perpetuating. And it became clear to me and Leif that to hang on these girls meant equating ourselves with the two meat-heads. We were all out on the patio behind the building, and it was really nice outside, so I slid away and saw Tiddle leaning against the wooden fence with four periwinkle mop heads draped and drying over the top, and thought, yea, this scene is more my caliber. Leif stayed with the girls, and for a while it looked like he was going to swoop the redhead he was working on from their small circle and from the bar — she kept touching his elbow in a let’s-get-out-of-here kind of way. I mostly wanted to watch Leif show up the other guys, which he did with aplomb and nice smiles. But when the girls went to get their next round of beveys, the cronies went with, and Leif stayed and looked at me and Tiddle, chilling by the mops — kind of him not to say anything about our juxtaposition. So what’s the deal, I said, looks like you have it in the bag? Ah, forget em, he said, they’re going to go home with whoever. I looked inside and saw the redhead with her hand on the back of the taller but equally idiotic of the two guys. To proceed would have meant being nothing more than a willing erection — which is not to imply a role somehow beneath him. Just tonight it is. Leif had already spent the greater portion of the day with his Carlisle girlfriend.

Shea showed up with three friends and immediately began to harass us for being such idiots. He said to Leif, seeing that he had given up on the redhead, I knew you would crash and burn — get back in there, tiger — that guy’s got nothing on you, laughing his loud head off. Shea turned to me and said, with an almost endearing Brooklyn accent, how you doin’. Shea and I hugged. It was nice to see him. Hey, does your shirt say ‘HEAD’? he asked. I looked down and saw that my jacket was covering the T and half the R of what should have read, in big white block letters across the chest of my blue shirt, ‘HEART’. I opened the jacket and read aloud and slowly, accentuating the T. You should have kept it covered up, Phil, I was about ready to buy you a drink! Shea bought me a drink anyway, halfway expecting, most likely, that some head might be in his future, or that he might convince me or enlighten me to the reality that I’m gay, and that I’d brave that homosexual world with his seasoned prick in my hand. One of Shea’s friends showed up with a grab bag of gifts that he won which included sparklers, lip-shaped band-aides, weird kinds of chewing gum, and two wooden cooking spoons — all presented in an empty pink four-pack that once carried readymade cosmopolitans. I didn’t ask what he did to win this cornucopia of delight, but immediately grabbed a sparkler, and someone smoking flicked his lighter and got me going. Soon enough a ring of eight drunkards, including several people I hadn’t met yet, were writing and drawing with their sparklers, or just holding them in the same hand that held their drink. And it was bright between us all for a few moments, and we could see each other’s faces becoming orange and warm and inviting.

Yesterday your voice came over the unwired space between us
and met (after bouncing from rectangles in towers
as fast as tiny light between leaves) my simple ears
and there sitting before the Hirshhorn’s panorama
of gray buildings and the graying sky and white steam rising:
the arc of your attention met me: an uncertain voice at first
becoming more familiar: it is a voice
I’m learning: a voice being carried as I am gone
and not carried as I am gone

My memory of you thus generates as something that is and is not

How much more are you with me
as we are apart: as traveling far is returning:
as one distance closes other same distances appear as endless fractals
frozen but evolving

I hear so easily but briefly the music of your hair which is the smooth song
of dark water: the rivulets given and received by the aplomb composing wind: it is
the loyal night absorbing the heat of a day:
a note held and released
becoming diffuse and inaudible

In indecision you bought masking tape
and tarps for the floor         decided the color
would come easily but later: a breaking
of ice cubes from the tray. The ceiling
at some point would seem different than the walls
in an important way:         the past

forming an edge with what could be         or the past
being indelible like a scar         like the tape
of his voice on the machine. The walls
for sure would not take any color
so we dressed the room for the ceiling
put records and plants in the study         broke

down the futon and moved his volkswagen windshield from breakage.
Carrying the last of it all I moved past
you standing in the doorway looking to the ceiling
saying we need to do the edge with tape
sure I said but what about the color?
And I must have said something wrong because your eyes began to well

your fingers reached to touch the wall
and in your face anxiety was breaking
into hues of impossible colors
like the faded chipping of the house’s past.
I was so naïve in putting down the tape
and saying we don’t have to paint the ceiling

as if that were the real issue all along:         the ceiling
which seemed more near now than the walls.
You said no we should put up the tape
and work from there         sometimes I feel like breaking
in this place that is not enough mine in the midst of his past
and the pasts that I have lived         the color

She sends a picture of them before the ruins, and the sudden scent
of Cumberland Island and an earthy desolation ascends, and time folds.

The world with a great desperation and violence becomes chaos,
becomes senseless laws and murders, becomes televised laughter,

becomes a riding mower, becomes an Escalade, becomes Sunday service,
a snake swallowing its tail, a gagging forward.

Can what is foreseen change the foreseer? Can the car sliding across ice
toward the irresistible tree be crushed only in the future?

Three children hug him, and the world is as light as their small bodies,
a butterfly painted on her cheek brushes his mouth. Earlier

an orchestra swelled and paused, eight dancers drew toward a center
and paused and listened before their attention became motion.

He lost his job after someone found nude photos on his computer,
taken and sent to him by his fourteen year old student — his wife became pregnant,

he will not be forgiven. He reads: I love you with what in me has no head or body,
lumbering without understanding myself or the love you’ve lent me.

The fear of eye contact and much more touch, the fear of
children thinking of oral sex. The reality of no god, the fear of pointlessness,

a room with no walls and no echo. At the edge of the sky he says,
crying, when will it end? And she, at the edge of the sky,

at the lip of the earth, doesn’t know what he means…
is he running from or waiting for that end

Considering the moon’s dark face dimly lit by earthshine,
the light of the ancient governors processing through the zodiac
(the light of the deliberate planets) reaches us!
They, throughout time, have been impartial to right and wrong,
as an eye is impartial to the spectrum of visible light

Considering the light we see
as reflected many times, throughout time in many forms,
we are a flash of light at every moment, wholly dependent and independent
upon that which came before — as ashes are not charcoal,
as the light we see is not the star itself

Consider the eyes of the sudden opossum
stunned in the roaring car’s headlights —
two floating eyes bending the dark night

We stare into the lit future we’ve found,
share an iridescent awakening

From across the table you see me
as the moonlight on settled snow
reflects in my memory

Ben’s voice on the phone was shaky, and when he answered fucked-up, I thought first of when Emily got pregnant, then thought that he and Alyssum broke up. Then he said Terry killed himself, man. There was a lot of silence and a wide-eyed reiteration of horror.

How quickly his suicide became a series of practical questions for everyone near him. Starting innocuously with how did you find out? leading to the more difficult how did he do it? and why? Last night and the night before was spent revisiting the notion that my mind might get around or a grasp of all this. I then had to remind myself his mind is unattainable… How can I approach the thoughts of a man that for three days after writing of his suicide would follow through? What personal death lasts for days? What desert of the mind has no day or night, or cannot differentiate the two? How can narcissism envelop someone to leave what is everything? to jump from a bridge? What mind is between bridge and rocks? Certainly his fall time was only a sliver of his intention, of the time from within a profound solitude.

The music disappeared
as the mouth of her girlfriend
already sharing her sadness
drew closer to her ear:
her lips formed something sincere and correct

she begins to see relationships and respite in terms of distances
that must be traveled, in terms of the moon’s face
journeying slowly but deliberately through the cold

It was a time of rainy nights in which one would wake to the residual damp or late droplets still making their way,

but for the most part at dawn the vapor was rising from the ground as a kind of steam, rising from the leaves and blades and shingles of things

and from cars and street signs as though the slippery film enshrouding all of down here was the thinnest factory for fog, a very simple working,

what water has not soaked into what will consume and transform and return it later is returning now, for a land farther east by tomorrow, for another visible partition of time to be to be called morning

I wonder, when I wake up as whatever dying creature I will be next, will I be able to use my body. Will my useless intentions to care for you with a reciprocating affection be transformed into useless wings: a certain appendage that on the emotional one hand does not extend from my person to yours with anything but stupid agency, and on the other physical hand, cannot send the right message, connect the correct synapses to make a twitching flight possible. Perhaps I will be comforted by ingenuity, and make new uses of my opalescent wings: a shield for rain to keep my back dry. More likely I will see that by cowering in the storm beneath crippled umbrella sections effectively pinned I have become a metaphor for failure — disgusting and painful to see, like a homeless woman lying next to a busy street-restaurant, using broken-up cardboard as a blanket for shade or cold, depending.

Perhaps if I learn first to control what has been with me since my memorable inception as human — those parts that are only sometimes involuntary, like lungs and eyes — I will find some clue or method for making use of what is currently shaming me. There are other strange organs that can be manipulated only tangentially or indirectly, as if they were dumb to suggestion, or simply minding their business, or perhaps could not let their jobs be trusted to my likes — the heart, for example, is one. So if I start there, considering eyes and lungs, considering their proprioception, it is only when they are injured that the awareness of their presence is forced upon me; or when their environment, what they are suffused in or with, changes suddenly.

I once believed I could heal myself, could pick myself up if things went poorly. I am not referring solely to inoperable appendages, for the inability to fly is of little consequence when considering how I have and have been loved, or the negative. No matter how gently I touched you, how often I encouraged your capacity to love again and freely, how often I sent you poems and photocopies of pieces that in odd ways have saved my mind in the past in hopes that they would work to save yours, how often I called in spite of the foremost thought it is already over — I was ineffective, a failed serum for the prophecy, however self-fulfilling, you shrewdly described for your loving. How often I have collapsed with tears, drove screaming on the interstate, or waited. Certainly it seems I have always been alone in the deep sense, and that no amount of companionship will assuage that rooted reality. Why do I continue to believe otherwise? Why did I believe I could heal one who did not wish to be healed? My letters, even I know, have become desperate, and to a point, pathetic. Not that I mind. But the question often arises: what would be different if you returned to me? Would I try something new? Am I hoping that by returning, what drove you away would be dissolved or perpetually ignored out of shame? Perhaps you know, though I doubt it, what can be done with this new person of mine, this body that has woken up unused to its mind. Now, whomever arrives next (and I partially hate myself for applying that necessary saving thought) will hopefully, kindly, silently, simply acknowledge my broken and unused limbs — see them as what they are, grafted remnants of a life I was unable to live.

It is because I see us as similar in regards to our embarking on and struggling in a relationship that can only be labeled as precarious, that I feel bound to you as my forerunner.  To me you are jetsam frozen in space — as in a physics problem.  The path you followed from her heaving is a trajectory, a dotted line to be inevitably traced by my soon to be thrown person.  Thus I am an iteration of you — another attempt that will fail and be discarded by this girl drifting in the psychological horse-latitudes.  And you too are an iterative product of her loving — a partition from the whole of lovers that extends backwards in time.  Take a moment with what is behind you, frozen but evolving, like a fractal:  there is Pandora, and Jeremy, and her flings, and kisses, and hands held, and fantastic crushes.

Your tactics for surviving her attention, ineluctably coupled with the knowledge that she would leave you, were no doubt similar to mine.  They involved foremost the belief that we were different, somehow not included in the list of expendables, that if we were left we would be flotsam — and there is a certain comfort in knowing you were there till the local end, knowing you were not ejected.  Separation is a romantic assumption, and the pragmatic I knows that in grand swooping ways I am not different from other lovers, that I too struggle in continually finding the best routes and words for being coupled and detached, that we are a compounding mystery, that the world is best described as a dictionary: the long, confusing, disjointed story of everything.  Other tactics have been they laying on of mouths, the coaxing of sex-glaze, the saying of names and stories of old loves, the notes for touching, the rubbing into each other, a slow disclosure of nipples, the gradual going-downs, the forgetting that one of us is roaming in place, but upside-down, the spoken consideration and acceptance in the morning of how hard this will be and the hurt it will cause, the cooking, the silent chewing, the feeling and exuding, while not speaking in audible notes, love.

I do not think of you often or at all while with her, and for that sanity I am grateful to mind.  But while apart, which is how she and I are most often, the tiny bird of revolving questions flies into my brain, in its small beak is that picture of you and her.  I know that if I revisit this letter, let it live in regenerating forms, I will alter my mind, and our breaking-up will be inevitably self-fulfilling.  There is a personal danger to me as I write you, acknowledging thus, my seemingly indelible thoughts of departure and failure. But there exists, also, the hope that by writing I may undermine my fear and drown it by throwing words at it.  It is true, though, that I am my fear, as well as hope, as well as loving and failure.  So by attempting to drown what I do not wish to experience, I suffocate myself.  I see my own person beneath me scrambling.  I see you as well.  Let me hold you, let me hold my rabid, foaming fear.  Let you both ravage and tear at me until exhaustion, knowing that the me you wish to shred is you and you — knowing it is after the clasp, the desperate flailing, the retaliation, the wailing into pillows, the beating of chairs with chairs — after these that what is so necessary occurs with ease:  the calm collapse, the felt movements of eyelids and chest, the world moving in and out of a mouth.

gabe’s aunt died: and over the phone the dilated displacement continued with the terror of idleness, of being locked by highways or the serious lack of reciprocation: I remember my uncle my father’s young brother: when we all returned to the funeral home for a distant relative’s visitation we thought mostly of him and his sudden collapse and the slow mourning trailing: our memory was surely housed because we opened it, traveled into a larger room, returned to a nightmarish landscape at day: what has frightened and shook me can be seen differently here: the haunting trees becoming brittle and pathetic at light: but somehow full of that memory of the mare: terror does not empty completely: there is not enough light to blow it away: dilute the shadows (and why should we destroy these absences of light that we share) Leaving (for the walk home a massive cloud stretched the southern horizon like a frozen wave leaning intently on the city lights: absorbing the manmade definition we’ve been living within: what doesn’t permit the darkening of the mind: what beauty comes from letting go of our adopted fears of night and the thoughts therein) after what could have been hours the moon hadn’t moved

Ideas are some of the worst things…

We’ve had writing and civilization for thousands of years now– one would think by this point there would be one religion or athiesm; one would think there would be no more war at this point; one would think that poverty would be long gone… but it’s still all around us. What does that say about the world, and all of our ideals, and all of our wonderful hearts?

 

I, 1

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs, and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shreik
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind–
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

by Ranier Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

I remember how excited my mom would be after my parent teacher conference, and how she would call all of her friends and boast about how far ahead of the other children in my class I was. This never stopped until I got a little bit older, and in high school…

After this point in her speaking a shift occurs in which her reading voice becomes a voice that is more informal and conversational. Perhaps her essay did not continue from this point, or perhaps she only wrote notes to begin with— I don’t know. But my feeling is that she was reading until here, until she began to recount a hard conversation in which her mother confronted her about slacking on her homework. Whether or not she was reading at all is an irrelevant question in regard to what I am attempting to illuminate here; which was, in our conversation, a shift in tone, intention, pace, and thrust. And so to say that her voice becomes just more informal, doesn’t really do justice to what happened as we were talking that day, and to what can still be heard in the recording. What does do justice to our conversation is considering first the human courage required to speak openly. And that the shift heard in her speaking is a moving from the voice that passively comments, to a voice that is actively seeking. A voice that, to the best of its ability, seeks to remember, to approach understanding with another person, and to be considered valuable.

When Kayla is speaking here it is for the purpose of actively finding communion with her experiences, her mother, and even me, a single other human who, like all of us, has experiences, may perhaps understand, and will hopefully listen with attention and sincerity.

An important aspect of doing something you believe in is not having an escape plan, and just trusting and forcing yourself to go forward and not turning back… you couldn’t be serious in any other way

At track time 3:53 I ask the inaudible question, how would you raise your children?

At track time 6:00 I ask the somewhat audible question, how do you teach that?

It came to me that a river is flowing
somewhere inside the ocean, a crystal
muscle of water flexing under
the salt; and in it, trapped for centuries,
fish from a purer stream are living
in their old ways, fresh and strong.

It came to me as I was breathing,
one in a crowd of people waiting
inside a convention listening to speeches
that whispered something hidden in language
to save us. I felt that Amazon tug
for a minute, before the salt came back.

from Listening Deep – Penmaen Press, 1984

…Things that make sense to me are peace, and equality, and freedom from oppression such as segregation and racism, freedom from beauty, freedom from hunger and from bullies, and freedom from other people’s ideas… Mostly I just want people to get out of everybody’s business in a meaningless way, and get into everybody’s business in a meaningful way…

Some of my questions recorded on this dynamic mic are nearly inaudible, so I have transcribed them below. But a new condenser mic has just been gifted to me, and it should solve some of my recording problems…

at track time 1:43 I ask: What does make sense to you?

at track time 3:33 I ask: Are there ever times in which you experience that freedom from beauty, or freedom from segregation… are there ever times when that is manifest?

Sorry about Sassy’s meowing.

Our first audio post on Commonweath is from an interview with Anna Murphy in which she talks about her moving to the US from the UK, and subsequent lessons learned about living alone and her relation to place, family, friends, and the time. She also reminds us: there’s not really a place that you belong, you just go with life…

As I look back on this tremendous year and look forward into our future, I know that StoryCorps speaks to a real and lasting need. What happens in each interview bears out our motto —that listening is an act of love— and reveals the great poetry and wisdom present all around us in the lives of everyday people.

What-up big P you say
I say hello as I am taking off my coat and scarf
looking at the painted pillows on the wall
the jars of piss and sand bottled and sealed
with a dated label with location and importance if any

On the mantel the orchid has bloomed
five red bodies of petals with yellow tips

and the ivy
nyctotroping from the outside wall of the house
has burrowed and clambered through the fusebox
emerged in the living room
now with several arms of leaves straining
to greet anyone coming through the door

Maybe Russell was drunk because he didn’t say much he just guided and pointed.  I didn’t go in his room but I imagined Lauren there in the morning walking to his bed to wake him up before their installation class (passing the room in which Craig would be sleeping with a motorized fan whirring and teetering four inches from his face).

I imagine her walking towards his room and watching him sleep, laughing at his big hair bunched up on the folded pillow.  Maybe he’s snoring, maybe he’s naked and Dr. Gonzo is licking his stomach.  How does she wake him: she stands there, knocks on the door frame, notices his ankle, she sits on the edge of the bed and touches his face, playfully pinches his nose.  She says it’s funny, he doesn’t go to sleep until six or seven, and when she arrives at nine he’s reluctant to move at all, and she has to coax him out of bed.

In the living room there is a print of the Academe of Athens above the mantle:  Craig looks up from his bowl yea, that’s Plato and Sophocles in the middle and Galileo in the corner with the globe.  It’s Aristotle I say Sophocles was a playwright Galileo wasn’t even alive then.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything but Craig was leaning against the wall, high as fuck.  Lauren was looking for something she probably lost, and Russell was soldering a five-iron that he bent into a Z into a light fixture.  A cook from my last restaurant job just walked in and asked if anyone could break a fifty for the cab what up Filthy, I ain’t gonna ask you.

At this point I am alone in a way — aware of a certain incongruence, of the terror that this living delivers while in neutral, the terror of idleness — I’ve been standing here in a stupid tangential way, and doing those things that have long become habitual, like observing, and heart-beating, and breathing.  But in that same, dull, sometimes unconscious way, I just feel deflated.  I’m thinking, face-flying backwards, at what point did I make the choice that lead to this point, or what are those combinations of choices?  What the hell are these people doing, and what else should anyone be doing?  Something ordinary or not?  Something counter-something?  Is that even possible?  Or how long is it that I have to stay here?