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This book is for Nicky Pavlov
I see you in the darkest part of the water and swim
…so long alone together. Alone together so much shared.
Samuel Beckett
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Dedication
You Were Blond Once
I
Together and by Ourselves
Always
Seduction and Its Immediate Consequences
Champagne
Cocaine
Chance Visitors
Today
Affairs
The 25th Hour
The 13th Month
Poem with William
Lifetime
The Hall of Mirrors
II
Famous and Nowhere
The Standard
The Last Luxury, JFK Jr.
Lindsay Lohan
Los Angeles, NY
American Money
American Nothing
Jesus in Hollywood
Elvis in New York
July Fourth
Speeding Down the FDR
Speeding Down PCH
End of Summer
III
In the New Century I Gave You My Name
A Living
Out of Some Other Paradise
The Past Remembers You Differently
All the Way Up I Took Myself
Some New Thing
All Apologies
Birthday
Perfect Day
False Spring
Central Park
New Year
Gentleman’s Hour
IV
Nights with People, Days Without
Night Call
Strangers and Friends
Tonight
People
Lines for People after the Party
Alone Together
Together Alone
Bloodless
Vacation with Death
Water
Handsome View of a Lifetime
Biography
V
Days and Nights
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alex Dimitrov
Copyright
Special thanks
You Were Blond Once
I have a photograph…
when I describe it, you’ll know.
On a long train ride they sat and said nothing.
In a pocket, a ticket stub of two hours on a night five years ago.
If you left your life, what life would you leave for? Tell me.
A lot of terrible things used to make me happy.
For years, my friend looked for the perfect chair,
that space he wanted to be in.
Found it two summers ago—never sits in it.
They sat in the back of the restaurant
so he could be upset privately and in public.
You know those streets that have two names,
one before and one after they intersect with another?
How sometimes we can’t find them on maps.
Well, I got lost every day that summer in London.
It’s the kind of film you want to see by yourself,
but take a car home, don’t get lost on me.
None of this is important—and still—
I have a photograph of you…
when we ate an orange in bed.
What month was that in? What did you want from me?
Every book is a book, is a thing you feel by yourself.
You are here. I am alone in this poem.
The window open all day: rain on the white desk, wood floor,
that strange curve on the back of your head (only I knew).
Sometimes I go outside just to feel movement.
Is that why you live here?
Did you imagine your life would turn out this way?
It takes the way someone asks a question to know
if you really want to know them.
You were blond once. So handsome.
And the streets kept their names, and that restaurant closed
and I found the right film when I needed nothing.
Where is he going with this? Where were you?
How you approached the water and never went in it.
I’m telling you it’s not cold. It’s not cold anymore.
Today it’s perfect out there. The tea’s tea,
there’s work, pills, unsent messages, empty glasses.
A lot of things to say with one body (unlikely).
It wasn’t that long ago.
I have a photograph of you from that day…
I
Together and by Ourselves
I opened the window so I could hear people.
Last night we were together and by ourselves.
You. You look and look at Diver
for Crane by Johns and want to say something.
In the water you are a child without eyes.
Yesterday there was nothing on the beach
and no one knows where it came from.
There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us.
There are minutes of peace.
Just the feel. Just this once. Where does the past,
where should the period go?
What is under the earth followed them home.
The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James.
We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command.
Slow—in black—on an orange street sign.
Missing everywhere and unwritten—suddenly—all at once.
Him. He misses a person and she is still living.
I haven’t missed you for long and you are so gone.
Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence…
we must have been lonely people to say those things then.
But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at.
In the perfect field someone has left everything
including themselves. You. You should stay here.
It’s a brutal and beautiful autumn.
With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under time
he touched something else.
People are mostly what they can’t keep and keeps them.
And inside the cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world.
In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so...
so if you’re looking for answers you’re looking
at every wate
r tower around here.
Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?
Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news.
How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make?
And the leather of your chair…it has me marked
so good luck forgetting. The world was a home.
It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic.
Make sure you date and sign here then save all the worn things.
Because everyone wants to know when it was,
how it happened—say something about it.
How the night hail made imprints all over.
Our things. Our charming and singular things.
Always
On the ferry to the island I burned alone that way.
At least, he thought, there ’ll be an earth to sink in.
The last scenes in Shakespeare I forget to breathe.
When history caught up with us: no less cruel than our parents.
Wanted to tell you of the psychic witch who found my life with one eye
though we weren’t speaking then and here you’re dead.
I’ve put a period to end each thought that won’t end.
Come into my house (they were) and talk to me about another life.
The park is true and in perpetual August. Yes, I’m late
and going, going back there.
These small hopes. Traces. Spit on the sidewalk.
I’m an adult and feel less urgent every day.
No one’s number matters but the voices anchor;
and the coolness at the bottom of a memory
or how people stop to watch the moon together.
Finally knowing you, I know I cannot know you.
This body’s terrible at your religion.
And why eternal life if pleasure’s time-bound
and each new year’s a killing…
he said, the dead are one long summer.
Walking, going nowhere
and some punctuation in an emailed note
reminds me who I am more so than what I’ve written.
I would pause for you and be a million commas.
The way a flock of birds will leave a tree.
Not just the sound or lifting.
That’s where I want to put my hands inside you.
And I found it on a train, beside lit pools,
passing mountains near the city dust
between the ribs or where the dusk waits.
I gave my life a real nice show.
And then you went away so I could see you
as graffiti in a bar just once.
A man is stepping on the moon.
The earth or your one life is gone.
The phone rings in your leaving.
Let your black hair, let your black hair
get in my way always.
Seduction and Its Immediate Consequences
One April in autumn you were my story for hours.
The silence of those days became like a shirt.
“His screaming fits were nothing other than
attempts at seduction,” writes Freud in “The Wolfman.”
How many accounts for how many things and what did we own?
In the movie of their lives there were people
they saw like notes in the margins
and in the vials a bright mess they carried inside.
Michael, Michael, Michael.
If a name is said enough times in a poem
something will happen. But that isn’t your name
and it isn’t a city, so where do you live?
Winter taught me to wear a very thin nothing those evenings.
When the car sped through the tunnel, when the cemetery
filled with the living, when the drink was named
for what they couldn’t quite taste.
And you didn’t decide on the friends or the lovers,
the shoes or the card that was sent and said
come—it’s a party for all of our questions.
And why shouldn’t we have it.
Why not invite what no one can have.
Immediately, he could tell. Even in the middle of the water.
Soon it will all close without warning or lights.
And between the acts, where we live,
after a while you’re wearing too much
no matter what you take off.
But you, filling the room with smoke,
trying hard to be human—
I love you and it’s cinema to keep looking.
Listen, I would say in my messages…
on a page or a screen, through a window.
I’d follow you home but it’s a very brief night.
Champagne
Lucky or not, we were riding in cars through the seasons.
I read you Baudelaire. I have more memories than a thousand years.
And our skin began to look like a puzzle
despite lighting or pleasures.
Columbus Circle at midnight.
Turn around and remind me how late in these photos
you look like an Andrew or prince.
There is fog by the bed and house weather I live in.
Then by dawn I’m a fold in the fabric’s small play.
Believe me, he said, every hand finds the right door without keys.
A neck in a low blouse.
This waiting for calm that feels more like a drug or a phase.
How bizarre then to show up and stay in this faulty material.
My eyes or your legs or these lips. Do not wince.
Calm your face with another’s. You’re meant to. It’s safer.
All the days have turned up and like models won’t change.
What’s the evidence then if I’m given receipts
but can’t make out what’s missing.
I’m still here. One more sip.
One more drag then drag me.
Pull over.
Wherever you park it’s the law, you must pay.
We are known when we’re walking our bodies
on Mondays and weekends.
J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans.
Who’d believe that what ends here continues,
it’s senseless. Don’t listen.
Use up all the memory. Use up all that’s there.
Cocaine
People disappear.
And go looking for a place to be looked at.
All the way down Wilshire and above us: like a sheet of indigo tile.
As we waited, our nicotine glowed in the distance like flies
to some heaven, some high road.
“Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons?”
Like gods and at home being extras at best.
I almost believed love then someone new called me
and time’s been repeating. Time’s on like a show.
They say we’re all wanted for living, that somebody’s coming,
but even the darkest of frames makes a face feel unsafe.
Yours was here, yours was seen
and it could have been two but you sold it for nothing.
Goodbye to all that then we’re back low,
trying to fit the right size for what passes as days.
Take a vitamin, angel. Drink water.
The earth is a big thing.
Would you still like to have it or take the check early tonight?
I get worried then go for a drive with my eyes closed
right here—on the thirty-third floor of my thirty-third year—
what a party it turned out to be.
No one wanted to leave.
When the car you steer best is not yours; or the body.
The house and the job. Rooms of white lines. Gold lobbies.
We cringe at these lists but without them, who’s counting?
I was flying over the country with you,
over states in their neat squares and fixed laws.
Flying over the country with women and men
in their trim suits and skirts.
Some nights I wait right out front for a moment
well after I get home. (Forced silence.)
I know what’s inside.
We know what comes next.
Chance Visitors
They’re all only chance visitors.
By the West Side Highway all summer lighting old fires.
From New York to California, California to New York,
what you told me looks nothing like water or ice.
People change their lives, people change their lives
and the world stays the same.
With the trees tonight (and inside them a century)
by the sailboat pond (and no one knew what you were).
Long mornings: you pass yes.
White nothing: someone should be happy for you.
The main dish, I admit, was a little bit bloody.
That year he shortened his hair many days.
One of us is angry, one of us remains so
neither one remains or keeps this look long.
Every umbrella I’ve lost was stolen by a stranger, he told me.
The nice ones, the awful: you pay the same thing.
Like a woman who walked up to the shoreline today,
put a chair down and looks like she’s still there. She ’s still now.
Or when you’re tired of having the same thing
(when the sun burns your shy skin)
come make your mistakes like you’re used to. With me.
Because there’s an hour here everyone speaks of and won’t name.
Where the light moves past the Pacific
and arrives somewhere low, somewhere under your feet.
It’s human to want the sky with you everywhere.
Inside your apartment. Inside the inside life.
And however I say it, the last sentence
sounds better if spoken, not here. By a stone street,
in another city, they’re older and trying the same.