Rhythmning*

We were always in an upscale jazz club, the kind with candles and white tablecloths, slipping one leg across the knee of the other and arranging ourselves in the seated contrapposto that was some perfect mingling of casual and composed. Down at the stage a man took the piano bench, his eyes very small and the skin around them very tired. Autumn- in- New York: the man next to us hissed the title to his date as the syllables emerged from piano strings with ghastly slowness, and in our glasses white wine swayed with the undulations of those murky chords, the smoke spiraling around the ceiling. We could not tell if the music was good or bad. We paused to sip. The pianist’s hands stretched interminably.

As we sat, nestled into deep fur coats in our minds and bracing our calves and leg bones downward against the arcs of golden heels, slowly we felt ourselves drawn out into the incredible pace of the universe, as though the piano player had been imperceptibly dimming the lights of our consciousness. We had not come for anything like this. We drank and in the next tune he picked up the tempo. The moment was swept beneath a curtain. Again our beautiful lives glinted and we chatted furiously.

What has come of those velvety days? We never worried about cheap things like money or men, we had them beneath our ruby fingertips. The man that night fulfilled some perfect destiny for us, as we gazed into his geologic meditation, his face in the light seemed to look back inside his mind, cuff links ablaze we realized he was an angel-savant. He was there to save us then. From what? Our world sparkled back at us in the thin strip of mirror that stretched across the bar. The man that night peered so deep inside himself that he found us there.

Since then neither of us has brought it up in any serious way, that when I excused myself to the washroom my companion sat stunned, the music creating its own crescendo in our forgotten souls, unearthly, dream-music, he spun us out across the top of the piano and we tumbled down its slope. It was our last night searching for that sound for he showed it to us in the form of time.

*Punctuation borrowed from the opening to Nabokov’s Lolita:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

Threat of Arson

It started in a craft supply store going that was being liquidated: my family and I were there for the sales, presumably. I had been there before, and now passed through aisles of felt posters and glittery, boxed drawing kits to pick up my possessions. Would the girl at check-out understand I wasn't stealing? I only wanted to collect the things I had stashed behind the shelves several years ago.

I found them emptied out over the bed sheet I'd used to transport them here. It was unfamiliar junk: dented hula hoops, ratty old sweaters. Why did I leave these here again? There was little to salvage, so I directed my attention towards passing customers, flitting between saleswoman and lizard brain hoarder.

Soon after my unsuccessful dispersal of the garbage, it was time to go. I collected myself in the back seat of my mother's car and received a text from a fictional best friend. Seemingly in an instant, the car was coming to a stop in an illuminated suburban landscape. All around us incandescent lanterns blazed through a warm evening. Crickets were out, and the trees lining the street were full and dark with summer leaves. My family disappeared into the house and I stepped out onto the driveway just as my friend jogged up. As he emerged the neighborhood fell into deep night.

He was blond and wore a bright blue sweatshirt, this friend. He was in a gang and had just failed to follow through with an order to kill, and so we were on the run-- from the bosses who wanted our heads as an example for all would-be non-compliants in the low and middle rungs, and from the rivals who knew our intentions to finish the job he'd so far botched. This reality felt somehow distant from me; even though as I wrung my body across the ground I could feel the stones of the sidewalk and the dew in the grass through my shirt, the danger that was so imminent also felt removed, and my experience in the setting felt more like that of an observer than a participant's.

There, behind the parked cars that cast shadows over one long strip of grass, beyond the sidewalks and sculpted shrubs, we found ourselves in a pause between houses. In the midst of this suburban landscape, we found haven in a graveyard. We crouched in the shadows cast by cement angels and listened as our pursuers surveyed the cool under-bodies of parked cars and ran off down the street. We worked our way further from the road to meet our two accomplices on the run. We had made it soon enough. Just as we greeted one another with silent nods, I saw the silhouette of a girl in her teens standing upright just a few feet away. She lit a match and from its light I recognized her as a fictional classmate. She was staring at me. I comprehended her intention.

"She's going to light us up!" I shouted. I watched as she laid a single matchstick onto a coil of gasoline-soaked twin, then turned to leave.

The fire grew instantly to the girl's height, then higher. In its glow I could see the circles of string stretching out through the entire graveyard. We were somewhere near the spiral's epicenter. Still fearing gunfire, we stayed close to the ground and worked our bodies frantically through the blaze. I extinguished small, newborn flames with my palms as I passed them, and after much labor we reached the street. There the other gang members had melted away, and in their place were two men I recognized from local religious groups.

"Who is your savior?" they asked me and my friend in the blue sweatshirt, whom I then noticed was black. I looked at my friend, but it seemed that he didn't have an answer either. Across his face I could see hints of the orange flickering in the graveyard.

"We just want to help you," they said. And as they did, several figures in various states of white robed-ness lit up large, beautiful crosses. They bore strange beads around their necks and travelled with a slow-moving white van, as if part of some demonic parade. I saw them raise torches. My friend and I were in danger, I realized. The two men wanted to help us because we weren't white.

"Let's go!" the youth group leader hissed. We followed him quickly to his house. I shielded my face like a celebrity walking out of a drug store, and at the top of the steps asked if the man's parents were OK with people like us entering. It was fine, he insisted, and let us in through the screen door.

The room inside was a kind of porch. It was small and had a fireplace and three more doors, all lined up next to each other. One by one I took the tiny beige locks on their handles between my forefinger and thumb and turned them shut.

"Andrew? Why are you shutting all the locks?" The man's mother was reading some 1940s edition of LIFE magazine. I could see her crossed legs through the doorway into the kitchen.

"Well, you better get your friends upstairs," she said, her head bent, squinting around the doorway. "The Klan is coming, I think."

Outside the oncoming torches cast colors on the curtains like the candy-colored lights of cop cars. There was a friendly murmuring outside. I wanted very much to escape to the roof with my friend, to hide behind old dress forms and hat boxes while our enemies swarmed over the town. Our host lead us up the stairs.

"It's just up this way," said the man. "Take a right."

I ran my hands along the dark wooden paneling along the walls and trained my eyes up the bannister as we ascended.

Family Reunions

I was in the car with my family, on some sort of mass migration to visit my dying grandfather. We had a six-seater in the dream, the old kind, where three can sit in the front. My mother refused to wait for my father at the rest stop. He was inside, looking through pastel maps, maybe buying a pack of chewing gum.

“It’ll take two seconds!” I said as she pulled away from the parking space. No one responded, my mother, my aunt, my sister all silent dream-omissions.

“Let’s just wait for him!” I said, but all too late—my mother was gunning down the highway. I turned around to watch in the rear window as my father jogged through traffic, our relatives’ vehicles stretched out before us on the highway.

“Let’s pull over,” I insisted. I clung to my mother’s headrest and watched the shoulder shrink beside our lane. “Let’s pull over now,” I shouted, but there was nowhere to do it. We were sitting still in the right lane when my dad caught up, hardly winded. He got in without speaking.

The cars began to move, and we traveled along miles of sound barriers. We finally emerged from those roadway doldrums at a bay of dark water. The sun was low. There were tall, shining buildings gleaming the same color as a noontime sky. Was that Boston? Chicago?

As we slowed alongside the bay, an enormous black shape rose up from the water. It was a scoreboard, and we stopped the car to watch video screens plunging from the sky. The advertisements! We had found the Summer Olympics.

The sun set, and we brought out our lawn chairs. My father’s family had come in from Japan. Together we stationed our seats along the deep end of an Olympic pool. The walkways were narrow, and passers-by threatened to upset our balance along the edge. The water was incredibly deep. Dark shapes moved slowly many years below us.

At one point, someone dropped a bottle cap into the water. I watched it slowly sink and disappear. A moment later a beautiful woman in a long, cream-colored gown and matching high heels emerged from the depths carrying something large and muddy black, the bottle cap transformed. I looked at her carefully, and saw with horror that she was covered in patches of mold. Her body was a strange, greenish-white. Just as I watched her slip back beneath the surface, I saw an enormous, pink octopus glide by as if my vision had temporarily been sunk down half a mile.

Just before the race began, video footage played of two stretching Italian swimmers. Their practice speeds had already broken records, said a loudspeaker. I watched them curiously in their large suits, with billowing black bodies and sleeves that looked like fins. When a gun went off, they sprang forward in a spray of diamond beads, their bodies like fish kites caught in a gale. Audience members splashed the water with their hands in appreciation and in a flash the race concluded. And then, my sister, just a toddler in the dream, fell into the abyss.

My eyes fell with her: I watched her float down, my ears submerged in that underwater rush of quiet. All around us was a teal blue, the pool’s walls completely invisible. My sister didn’t struggle, just let her weight carry her down. I watched our savior, the woman in the gown, rise to meet her. She took my sister in her arms. Then she glided downwards. My sister’s eyes closed as if she had fallen asleep.

Far in the deep was an underwater replica of the ledge around the pool. Relieved, I saw my father’s brother there, in real life just eight days deceased, sitting next to their mother in green and yellow lawn chairs. The woman offered my sister to them, and they received her in their arms. My uncle looked at me and smiled. A baby, he seemed to say to me. They were finally meeting. I realized then—this was where the dead resided.

As if triggered by this knowledge, I was returned with a snap to my position in the crowd. There amidst flags and the slap of water against tile, I felt a wave of grief flush through my body.

Summer '99: An Edit

The year has hopped back in the title (see Summer '01), but it's the same piece. A lot of these changes are sparked by some great line edits from one of my professors at Columbia. After taking a couple of swipes to clear out the clutter, I reorganized to keep the language throughout the piece consistent. I credit my professor with the "gloom/hand" line. I think it's such a smart combination of the sensory and emotional worlds of the narrator, which are really colliding at that moment of grief. There's also a silly play on the name of an ice cream chain.

I was in love with a beautiful drug addict. I was seventeen then, the last tangy summer of teendom, the bitter note at the end of an era. Summer love: it’s Classic, it’s Romantic. Spring breezes would carry it down to the high school parking lots and by graduation we’d all be sick from it, the allure of that ephemeral butterfly between June and September, down the shore, in the mountains, in seasonal jobs and just around the corner stores of adult disapproval. We chewed our black nail polish or flipped our golden hair, we dreamed of some eyes, some so-and-so’s skin hot from the sun. I was part of it that summer, that stiflingly hot, that revereality. So it was imperfect—such are the American manifestations of dreams descended to earth. So he was a drug addict.

His situation offered me much solace: in the throes of sea-air blowing loud in our ears at night, in the clawing of our bodies from the insides to creep into one another’s very skeletons, in the words we fed one another with tiny pink spoons basking under fluorescent lights, we shared intimacies, yes; but we would never suffer the pang of anything as terrible as fizzling. We were both entranced, I by those very brown eyes, he by the forever rippling of the moon on the ocean and something unattainable. I clung to that gaze of his as though I had lost my own, and he accepted this with a firm grip on the steering wheel.

It didn’t matter so much that he was clean (which he was), but that he was still addicted. He directed that hunger towards me, and I gratefully applied pink lips to his white wrists and brown neck, to the faded blue of his eyelids. Perhaps this seems delusional. But I was no fool—we would be out soon, and with a thunderclap. A love as complete as a full moon hanging a like a nickel, or a perfect, glowing fingerprint, a paper lantern.

I would count the stitches in the leather seats for hours under my fingertips and watch those familiar pastel motels stream past with the feeling that inside no vacationing family, no ecstatic junkie would ever possess quite the same assemblage of scents and textures, their senses unheightened by such a passion as this. Give me the embroidery floss and I’ll weave you a thousand-string tapestry as a testament to it.

Perhaps these exaltations are a bore: we also had our lows. Arcing downward in our medieval Ferris wheel, he departed me for days at a time. I would feel my very soul drifting out of my body like the waves the unbearable heat made over the pavement. I never used, but I thought about it in desperation, fantasized about exacting the mutilation of the thing he loved. Would tragedy reach him in a way I couldn’t? And then, as fortune will have in these affairs, he’d return to me again, a slice later we’d be kissing in some pizzeria, bleary, holding hands in a teal swimming pool.

At the end of the boardwalk, they airbrushed our names across a sunset on XXL white tees that I would cut up later. The hemp rope I’d been devising all summer was an umbilical cord, I saw my face on a telephone pole: I was gone. I don’t mean to be annoying this way, in glorifying this love— that shot rainbows through my veins, making all scratchy my chest cavity until I felt it would burst, orange juices spraying across balconies of Astroturf— I found and lost entire planes of existence. It was so big no mere kid could take it, at least I certainly couldn’t.

It was late in August then, and the sun was setting over the building next door. His face was dusky and mine was yellow in the clouds. In that world I would doze off in the afternoon under a plastic palm and wake up in a dewy sweat. I could wax poetic for hours, scrawl ten thousand words on napkins and eat the stars like red pepper flakes for breakfast. It was electricity then, this unbearable rolling down a hill. We seemed to be on some sort of cusp. Then, as if striking a pothole, we were over the edge.

But that is the nature of these things. That August my heart dropped out as I waited by my mobile phone on the bathroom floor. I felt gloom touching me like a hand, I peeled back its skin and felt my teeth with my tongue. That was all it would ever be, my beautiful drug addict with caution whipping through that old jalopy as he sped away down the highway, I on smooth tiles just touching my cheek.

We were so young then, and now it’s all history. I remember it, yes, but it’s as far as the exit you didn’t notice three hours ago. It’s written on a piece of yellow paper underneath a red white and blue wreath of polyester flowers, it’s in the blade of grass between my toes, the particles of smog in our lungs, the endless neighborhood of the self that is and the one that was.

pt 3: Summer '01

Might as well keep on:

This is a first draft, a fictional piece inspired by a line a friend used to explain a beautiful artwork he created. Will post revisions if/when they happen. Soon, there will be wild and colorful dream transcriptions, but those I'm going to let marinate for a few weeks.

I was seventeen then, the last tangy summer in the high castle of teendom, and that bitter note at the end of an era: I was in love with a beautiful drug addict. In the summer this sticks to our ribs like some barbecued Bangra beat (all the rage). It’s Classic, it’s Romantic, and as long as we keep our American school calendar, it will always be that ephemeral butterfly between June and September, down the shore, in the mountains, in seasonal jobs and just around the corner stores of adult disapproval. It’s written into the mythology that percolates through the pink and spongy Girl-Teen culture, magical storylines that resemble the twinkling life we so loved to hate. We chewed our black nail polish or flipped our golden sun hair, we dream of some eyes, some so-and-so’s skin hot from the sun and the saltiness of the water that fills so much of our bodies.

I am no different from your average high school set in this regard. Give me embroidery floss and I’ll weave you a thousand-string tapestry as a testament to this, round, red word dripping as an icee down a tank top. It didn’t matter so much that he was clean (which he was), but that he was still addicted. I applied pink lips to his white wrists and brown neck, to the faded blue of his eyelids. His situation offered me much solace: in the throes of sea-air bliss blowing loud in our ears at night, in the clawing of our bodies from the insides to creep into one another’s very skeletons, in the words we fed one another with tiny pink spoons basking under fluorescent lights, we shared intimacies, yes; but I knew that I would never suffer the pang of anything as terrible as fizzling. We would be out soon, and with a thunderclap. A love as complete as a full moon hanging like a nickel, or a perfect, glowing fingerprint, or a paper lantern, a moon as bright as a sun, no mere reflection.

The details are what you would imagine: the drug addict’s eyes were extremely brown. I clung to that gaze of his as though I had lost my own. He accepted this with a firm grip on the steering wheel. I would feel the stitching in the leather seats for hours under my fingertips and watch those familiar pastel motels stream past with the feeling that inside no druggie, no hooker, no family vacationing would ever possess quite the same assemblage of scents and textures, their poor senses unheightened by such a passion as this. Perhaps these exaltations are a bore: we also had our downs. I never used, but I thought about it in desperation, fantasized about exacting the mutilation of the thing he loved. Arcing downward in our medieval Ferris wheel, he departed me for days at a time. I would watch the world drift past under unbearable heat. I would feel my very self drifting out of my body like the waves the air made over the pavement. And then, as fortune will have in these affairs, he’d return to me again, a slice later we’d be kissing in some pizzeria, bleary, holding hands in a teal, painted swimming pool.

At the end of the boardwalk, they airbrushed our names across a sunset on XXL white tees that I would cut up later and I suddenly felt sick. The hemp rope I’d been devising all summer was an umbilical cord, I saw my face on a telephone pole: I was gone. I don’t mean to be annoying this way, in glorifying this cloying love— that shot rainbows through my veins, making all scratchy my chest cavity like I would just burst open, orange juices spraying across balconies of Astroturf— I found and lost entire planes of existence. It was so big no mere kid could take it, at least I certainly couldn’t.

It was August then, late August and the sun was setting over the building next door. His face was dusky and mine was yellow in the clouds. In that world I would doze off in the afternoon under a plastic palm and wake up in a dewy sweat. I could wax poetic for hours, scrawl ten hundred words on napkins and eat the stars like red pepper flakes for breakfast. It was electricity then, this unbearable rolling down a hill. We seemed to be on some sort of cusp. Then, as if striking an invisible pothole, we were over the edge.

But that is the nature of these things: Barbie summers spiral in to some candy center of gloom. That August my heart dropped out as I waited by my mobile phone on the bathroom floor, the feeling of the smooth tiles just touching my cheek. I felt it touching me like a hand, I peeled back its skin and felt my teeth with my tongue. I had an orange dream, I awoke. and remembered again that that was all it would ever be, my beautiful drug addict with caution whipping around that old jalopy as he sped away down the highway, I on some carpet, the floral print of a sofa fed teaspoons of cherry medicine and ginger ale and a memory.

We were so young then, and now it’s all history. I remember it, yes, but it’s as far as the exit you didn’t notice three hours ago. It’s written on a piece of yellow paper underneath a red white and blue wreath of nylon flowers, it’s in the blade of grass between my toes, the particles of smog in our lungs, the endless neighborhood of the self that is and the one that was five, ten years past, some lifetimes ago.

New Directions, pt. 2

This is written from Maya Deren's work 'Meshes of the Afternoon.'

Across the street, a woman with a veil, her face is dark I cannot see her.

I recall my mother wondering where I was in the day, what I could be doing that forced me to stay so far while calling, she was learning she needed me at her side. My mother wore another veil then and her eyelashes were mascara and foreign. They make sounds to me as their lid opens and closes, shift with the fading in and out of smile. There is a great hum that seems to come from the trees, which I know not by seeing them, but by some dappling effect they have on the pavement. It was all in color, but it was so dim, it may as well have been cast in greys. I saw her eye only, then, and soon I realized that it was my mother creating the hum. I turned my head as though to swivel my mind. The things she was saying to me she said so fervently that only the feeling was there, and the words were leaves on the pavement flying past. My mother’s face was a mirror, I felt the ecstasy of fear.

When I rose from this place I walked down to a park very near to where I was renting a room from an elderly woman. There were many people and the trees left marks very similar to those in my dreams. There were two handsome couples at the entrance to the park, and two women arm in arm facing over the bridge. The men were very tall, dressed in grey suits in quiet discussion, heads bent in towards one another. As I watched the women tossing their hair and laughing with heads cocked back the trees shed small yellow leaves like tiny birds and said something to one another that I could interpret only as a collaborative ceiling above me.

I couldn’t tell what their relations were to one another, these four. As I stood watching I felt that suddenly time had stopped around us. I saw a leaf hover very silently in the air just a few inches before my face. I saw the women tossing the hair, hands like doves poised in mid toss, in the air the strands trembled. There was a silence in feeling then, and I felt that if I moved the world would never resume spinning, that some shell in the sky would crack and like a nut we would suddenly be exposed to black space.

I thought very hard about this, but never strained my face for fear the movement would bring the end. My mind flashed to the men, whom I noticed then were moving very subtly. Their minds were large and they were dancing as though perfect strings pulled between them. They were mesmerized by one another and I saw the flash of a knife’s blade between their jackets. What this could mean I did not know, my mind was frozen then, and before that leaf I could find nothing else. The women were still and I suddenly understood that in that leaf was the entire world, all the movement that had ever passed before us. I saw a winter in that leaf, and a summer. I saw seven rains and the feet of eighteen thousand couples. I saw ninety suns and a dozen moons and colors unspeakable. Ripped back suddenly: the woman in the dark veil then drew me towards her down an avenue. My shoulders felt for some tangible grasp then, and out of the silence my ear awoke to the humming of a black phone ringing and in that sound, a voice I knew better than my own.

New Directions

I have been working lately, but haven't posted anything! This piece and the next are recent (summer-October) forays into prose poetry, and they're both pretty early drafts right now. As I rewrite, I'll post new incarnations as well.

Dawn of the World

Could you, when the winter sneaks up to the panes of the living room window, remind me that when we began we were not snow children, nor flakes, but flowers on the mirrored surface of a natural-seeming, man-made pool?

When the snow falls over the meadows, remind me of the first days of the world, when the sky was a dune and the land was a blade of grass. The creatures all had eyes-to-be like blue-green algae, new to everything, yet still looking for more. The animals we cannot imagine were young, communicated in languages not yet developed, the world so new it smelled like a blank notebook no pencil had ever touched with its salty tip.

In the first night, when stars first bloomed in the sky and darkness collected about the sun, the Earth, a pool of gray water, roiled until twilight, and insects rose formless from freshwater. They professed their love to one another and below the surface dove back to a pit of liquid fire and commemorated their beginnings with tiny, imperceptible fossils. The air was a sea, and nothing knew cold, just as later, nothing would know warmth.

Now far away, we bend over a precipice to survey the core of the world. Our eyebrows singe, we do not mind. We discover new forms every day, we track the history of the world, you and I. We enter every millennium like a one-cent coin dropping into a pouch. It is nothing to us. An angel dreams about a folding mountain range. Somewhere in a crater, a tree makes its first seed out of metal and heat.