Still trying to figure out how to thank you.

Reading in discomfort, aching, bottled up, I envy Rilke’s fervor. The voice of God is closed to me, and the voices of the angels, and yet– I still have the youthful dead, calling out to me across the water, the dumb joy of animals and the blushing of trees in the twilight.

The voice of God, he says, is nestled in the ear of my neighbor. The maple leaves of his word are rising up through the bathwaters of my brother’s house. And at night the unbeveled cross around your neck hits my chest softly, tossing the street light against my lashes. It pleases me to look upon, but no, I do not want it.

I am content to let the wind blow over my teeth, and let the gutter water run through my eyes.

Because my birthday is on Tuesday and Christmas is soon, I am being indulgent and updating my Amazon wishlist, hint hint.

Trying to understand why I have such trouble with meter.

I read Shakespeare like a conversation, and so I act it well, but the practice of scansion leaves me mortified. Sitting in room full of people who couldn’t tell you why Gertrude is a role worth playing, I look like an idiot. The lines I’ve written that were anything other than free verse have mostly been an accident, when I was writing with my tongue instead of my eyes.

Perhaps it’s the way I learned to read, or the way I speak– as soon as I start thinking it seems as though every syllable is stressed and I can’t handle it.

At a Lynda Barry lecture the other night, she mentioned that she never liked Emily Dickinson until much later, when she began memorizing those poems to the tunes of pop songs. Every day on the radio the meter seemed to fit.

I don’t know. Sometimes I think my poetic sensibility is a mess, and mediocre post-modernity is all I’m good for. If I cannot tell if a sonnet is even a sonnet, if I cannot master old forms, how can I explore new ones with good conscience? Sometimes I think these previous sentences are stupid, an excuse, a way of letting myself off the hook of my own need to put words close to other words to keep myself together.

the beginning of an exercise, in hopes that it will force me to string more words together for any reason.

Once, in the village of Meninas, there lived a boy. He had dark hair and a mirror name, he had a long stride and a heart like an aviary. One day, walking along the river, he paused in a shadow, and there he met a girl. Her eyes were full and heavy, like her lips, and when he looked at her he tasted honey. He sat with her in the dark place under a large tree all day. He returned that night to his house of many brothers, and he was quiet, for he was so full of joy he could not speak. Among the clattering of plates and the yelling of boys, no one noticed. That night, his mind raced too quickly to dream, passing them as a horse whipped through the forest.

petit frère, petit, petit, les yeux, qu'est-ce que–

I still can’t quite, yet. Making a mess of things. And so instead tonight I have returned to painting.

some heavy shit has been happening, still figuring out how I want to write about it. it seems that family troubles are the most inescapable.

need to get to sleep, work in the morning, a few quick placeholders for myself, to remind me of things I wanted to write about:

G. Stein; the dark red line; Rilke at the gate; Clark Street and late-night driving;there are two black vests hanging on the hall-pegs of my heart.

He kissed the birthmark near my pelvic bone.

“Who else has seen this?” He looked me in the eyes.

“No one,” I said quietly, shaking my head. I thought about my mother and the baths of my infancy, but I knew this wasn’t what he meant.

He became very serious, like a child. The dawn light reached his face through the curtains– how many times did I see him this way? Each, each a different devastation.

“I have only ever been with one other,” he said. Struggling to keep his native words above the flood, they were turning foreign in his tanned mouth. The way he said other made no allowances– we were the only, the human, the living. No one else could have made themselves understood. I was fifteen, it was true.

His belt buckle hit the carpet. 

The song stuck in my head understood disappointment. It warned me, it warned me not to burst into flames when he parked at the stop sign near my childhood home and walked me the rest of the way. 

For a moment, I knew that some day I would be in a hammock, sobbing, and that when I tried to throw away the shirt I wore that night it would take me years. I let myself forget. Forget, forget, forget.

I am not waking up on a floor in New Orleans. I am not sliding my bike across the gravel of his driveway. I am not sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool. I am not breaking everybody’s brothers’ hearts.

I will spend $15 on dud drugs and drive 900 miles away and perhaps one day I will see you again, and perhaps you will be happy, elsewhere, or perhaps one day someone will call me on the telephone, and I will know that what you said to me in that red room was true.

There must be something in the water, something in the stars, some curse come crashing down around me– each way I look another pair of arms I would embrace is struggling under the weight of some misfortune. It’s enough to make think I should avoid you, all the ones I love, to keep you from being sighted by this storm, ripped up by roots and tossed across the sky.

Eras ago, someone asked me, is there anyone you’d kill for, anyone you’d draw blood to protect? Of course, I said, my brother.

And now, knife drawn, I have no enemy to turn to. 

   I’m sitting on the bus going south and I’m looking at the women outside. There are so many of them, women. We are about to pass my old apartment. I am tired. Teenaged Mexican girls are holding their younger brothers’ hands, crossing in the middle of the street. Their eyes look familiar. There are scarecrow white women, a layer of powder tucked into expensive boots. There are girls who hide their eyes behind their hair.
   I remember, years ago, a cigarette in the middle of the night.

   I stared at her photograph before I walked out the door. I couldn’t see her face, just that body and the tiled wall. I couldn’t imagine the face I saw on the school bus each morning, I couldn’t imagine that face and that body in the same room. Her face looked tired, pretty yet petty and uninvested. But her body, those breasts, hyper-saturated, shower-wet, her body was full of electricity I wanted.
   I thought to myself: we will meet mid-way between our houses. We will be the only figures in the street. We will light our cigarettes, and when for the first time she takes it from her lips I will kiss her, I will pull the smoke from her mouth.
   We stood there in silence. In the streetlight I could see the makeup on her face and I thought, how can I kiss her if she won’t show me her skin? Her arms looked thin, I wondered if she was cold. I wanted her, but I didn’t want to try. I felt underdressed, I felt awkward, my cigarette was almost done and what could I do but say good night. We may have hugged, all bony shoulders, joints clacking against each other, flesh tucked back, I don’t remember. I best recall her small fingers, casting in the night air, and the wish to keep them warm.