“We are not just those persons which we were,”
wrote John Donne, and it was a question.
How love disappeared like money,
and you ran the asylum inside you alone…
American Money
Perhaps this was one way through being here:
the lists, the lanes; the pills, the days.
You don’t scream but occasionally sit in the shower.
Everything people won’t say to each other
covers the walls of rest stops for years.
Patrick, you never call.
A new shirt or bedroom, some known shift;
“whatever it looks like,” you’re telling the doctor,
your mother, the doorman—“I don’t want to know.”
The fashion is everyone’s loosely committed to something,
it drives the mind wild. To lose, yes,
and also to keep any one thing (with all things)
in any one life (would you try all this twice?).
You take yourself uptown to see all the paintings.
You take yourself downtown to take yourself up.
“Between scotch and nothing, I’ll take scotch,” said Faulkner.
Between nothing and nothing, it may be there’s this.
And the wrong kind of gazing can halt conversation.
Our being at funerals is perfectly planned and polite.
You don’t know this but yes, I watched the boy in Miami
drop bills from his hands and I did want to keep him.
Hair in his face, jeans almost off.
That year, on a plane with a woman terrified of flying,
I talked her through all of the stalling, the going,
once in a while rehearsed lying, once in a while
here we are. We arrived.
At the end of a trip, in another punishing city.
Perhaps people pay for most things. The lost keys or court papers.
Yet no one had a check for the guilt or that weekend
no matter how often, how quaintly we asked.
American Nothing
Tonight the wind tears through a flag
building a religion from cruelty.
Someone lifts his face out of privacy, out of death.
I’m here to marry you, lonely American nothing—
with my useless name and your aimless car
ready to take me out of myself. If the body was harmless,
history would read lighter and we’d take our drinks long.
I can smell your hair from here and it’s years after.
Below my window boys eat chocolate with their fingers
and the taste of their cheap sweetness keeps me awake.
Even now the voice on your radio takes me home
where I never lived. The question I sleep with
grips stronger than any stranger that finds me.
What do we want when we ruin each other?
I’ve done terrible things and I still want to know.
Jesus in Hollywood
It’s three days past Easter and at the light on Fountain
one car behind me is Jesus. He’s driving a white BMW
and he is alone. I drive slow and keep an eye on the mirror
wondering if I’m the only one who sees him,
making a list of the awful things I’ve done
this year, should he pull me over.
Jesus, I abandoned my longest relationship
and wasn’t sorry. Not sure I am now.
I stopped talking to my mother
then started (and stopped again after),
so these days I’m not sure who’s talking to whom
even when we are screaming or silent.
Like you, I kept coming back to Hollywood.
I wanted to believe in life after death
and if it’s true anywhere—surely then—here.
I tried to be alone and with people
and both almost killed me.
Then I almost killed me:
drinking in a bungalow in Venice (July),
reading the tabloids and Milton,
buying myself two hours with another bottle of wine
then buying myself more with a book
even longer than Paradise Lost.
Jesus, they probably think you are glamorous.
Look at the car you’re driving. It’s a beautiful rental.
You should stay in your price range.
They probably think you are lucky and set.
Maybe too young and mysterious. Just imagine.
Who wouldn’t let you in if you knocked on his door?
And who wouldn’t cry with you
in a parking lot outside any American mall?
Do you even cry, Jesus? Do you even pay rent?
Would you live in the world that we do?
keep your sunglasses on, keep the real you inside:
a white BMW on Fountain. Or wherever it is we are now,
I’m going to let you pass me.
I’m not going to follow you, Jesus.
I’m going back to the sun and the people,
back where I never belonged.
Elvis in New York
Time stopped and everyone was seventeen.
For a moment, you thought, why get out of my seat.
There they were: walking in the streets
like a lake caught running in a house.
One in the morning. You in the evening.
It was Friday, June 9, 1972.
He wore a golden cloak,
you dressed for one more Friday in the world.
There are many places that I haven’t been, he said.
Like I’ve never played New York.
Somewhere in a place like here there ’s more than people.
Sometimes with you, I don’t know who’d think about the dead.
Manhattan, you’re more beautiful than any man on any morning.
Between nine and midnight if you cross the avenue you’re someone new.
What was it, they asked, that made him try this.
Why relive the same known highs?
Like a question at the bottom of a pillbox,
(one you shouldn’t answer)
I just missed it, he said flatly. There are many places.
There are many places that I haven’t been.
And with that, the flags along Eighth blustered.
City papers sent their crews.
It’s the bright nights we remember,
those that live outside the hours
like a show in early summer, or a vision at the Garden;
knowing nothing of our narrative.
Once in a great while, the Times had written,
the way a thing is done becomes more important than the thing itself.
So there they were again. Returning.
To the walls where they had hung things.
To required love. The record playing in a room and ending.
Like a life someone once had.
July Fourth
On one of them and rather unforeseen,
walking across a roof still full of people
perhaps to find someone or smoke
with the New Yorker sign in view—
a friend soon getting married and another
leaving the country to start over—
I remember the late suburban echo
of the television’s flicker
one teenage summer watching videos
of Greg Louganis dive in 1984,
the same year I was born
though I’m not there yet (in the world)
or on that platform in LA,
his body in the air
what I sometimes imagine to be
freedom: unattainable state of being—
and even in the replay, in slow motion,
the brevity of his freedom hurts me
in a way
I can’t admit, not then
when I was just a boy, or on a roof
and looking up at thirty-one,
fireworks on all sides
of the night—and the sky—
do I not love the sky
although I’m seldom there?—
and if that’s true why not today
or on occasion think
that freedom might be real, that somehow
someone got there once;
even for seconds, moments, fantasy.
Speeding Down the FDR
Dressing himself in the cab for one room then another.
The new fame on the radio playing—past the cathedrals,
toward the young graves after that.
In the dusk, they sold flowers to everyone
stopped at our red light. In this life you’re far.
Like the sun appears to the water when late.
All those people you see, all the hallways you drink in;
through tunnels and traffic—you might wear a tie,
you might keep your shoes on forever today.
Let them photograph your soul, says Jimmy.
Memorize your alleys, take yourself back home.
Already we’re here and already we’re through it.
The toll’s blinking wildly at you.
They’ll stop you from smoking indoors, they’ll arrest you.
But no one can stop you from kissing the wrong kind of men.
Up ahead, a police car lights up like a kids fair.
The phone in my hand won’t keep still.
Maybe it’s you and you’re driving the wrong way;
a feeling you hailed once.
Something to steer you toward me then away.
If the shirt’s fitted well, ten blocks and it’s off you.
If the light starts to bother, let it grow darker still.
I was speeding down the FDR one night,
it was August and heavy.
I am speeding down the FDR tonight,
it is April and dead. Who would drive himself away?
There’s a stranger who’s doing it for me.
Who would drive herself below?
Like a bath in street clothes.
Eyes on the throat, money counted to zero.
And everyone’s cleaned up like heaven.
Believe it. Everyone’s dressed down for hell.
Speeding Down PCH
Almost arriving, I’ve gone somewhere else.
You threw so much of yourself getting where,
going far, like the waves growing restless
in a white convertible speeding down PCH.
Who could lie? It’s still such a pleasure and panic
to wake up alone, unable to answer
one person instead of two.
I arrange the pills into hearts, spread them over the desk:
we are not mathematics.
When the waiter tells me his name
it’s the part of the meal I like most.
I am never coming back.
Even if the setting is different, even if the plan
is to speed through it twice. A vase—some familiar face
instead of a clock on a mantel.
A video of a person with both hands in his hair.
I come to your door, get you off,
watch you shave in the morning.
Through the hurry (inside the waiting)
I realize the director is someone who doesn’t show up.
Like the end of the day, I am orange for more
and in minutes I go dark.
What you’ll find is our lives are addictions:
money, love, gossip. Gossip, love, work.
And if the video plays as it should,
both hands do come down.
The hair’s going any which way and the gaze
can’t be read—even looking into the camera is dying.
Why fight it. If you die enough times
you become your own saint.
End of Summer
Late afternoon he walks into the Pacific.
A plane spells out an offer that dissolves in the sky.
On the boardwalk a man takes down dictation
from Jesus and reads it to anyone who’ll listen
for a negotiable price. Visit the afterlife
reads one sign. Death is an illusion another.
He likes to swim out and find a place
where voices from the shore
are no longer audible. Surely, he thinks,
like the boardwalk, the afterlife is crowded;
where would anyone find peace there.
A surfer catches the last good waves of the day
and someone blares a boom box while passing.
You only gotta do one thing well
to make it in this world, babe.
And the seagulls scatter then collect themselves
around the same spot; shameless and unknown.
Most of the week goes on like this:
without messages from home, without reason.
The hard hours are to come. They won’t
announce themselves with signs or music.
And he decides not to prepare.
For company or anything else.
III
In the New Century I Gave You My Name
The orchestras kept playing. They had a gin fix.
Why in this fog I still see you I can’t say.
With your beard and high darkness around me.
In your small machine many messages
and faces that once let you in.
The ocean drowns time all the time, slowly.
Everyone had a birthday and buried something.
I was coming from one person and into another
when really what are we: some accident.
In this show where we all have a favorite.
What we have is a taste for that thing we can feel,
will not say. Some of us wanted more
and in all the wrong ways too.
There was of course an escape…
in a year, on a street, in some near distant past
when what had us was childish and flame.
And maybe it would have been different
and maybe it would have been this.
Do you remember my hair when I met you?
Much longer. The violins ended it well.
Outside, the city continued to tease us.
Hurricanes came, storms couldn’t please us:
it was all very fast and beautifully made.
You ask why I’m thinking of death
but I’m thinking of you and it’s fleeting.
We were terrible, unrelenting and everywhere then.
All I know is I can’t stop writing about people.
So much happened. I can’t stop writing about love.
A Living
I watched you row us back, into the distance of human familiars.
And the bees gathered as if to become more than one sound.
In the city, when late, I want even the well-behaved strangers
at boring parties. They exhaust me.
All small talk and posture; (come here and exhaust me)
and what is the mind?
Even you. The leaves. In their temporary dying,
give a rich background to people taking each other to bed.
Why would I give up the physical world?
Today, it is all I believe.
And whatever addictions it sells me
(the first open mouth on my own teenage mouth)—
I am shy but impressed.
I am living and badly. The oars hit the dock,
the plates cling to their places,
look at all that has come here and gladly
to rot. A handful of flowers and vinegar.
Leather and silk. Cancer and love.
I don’t even need to be promised fidelity now.
Someone’s lowered his ha
nds to a place without speech.
The pelting on the window is rain.
My tongue, I have found, is warmer
than any sentence I’ve wanted to feel.
And what I have wanted, I should try and forget.
So I stay;
don’t you think so—where else would we go,
what is open this late?
I have waited all day just to see you.
In the darkest part of the water.
I see you in the darkest part of the water and swim.
Out of Some Other Paradise
And people walked out of churches and bars,
cafés and apartments, cities, towns, photographs,
someone’s Friday night party,
someone they once knew or slept with.
They walked out of meetings and dinners,
out of lives, on each other, on love
and rarely on time.
Some walked out of dark places,
slow places, strange places, places
they wouldn’t go back to, places they never did find.
Then did. And walked out again
for the third, fourth, fifth time perhaps.
People walked out through doors
and through letters, through looks across rooms,
gifts that gave nothing of what they withheld,
what they couldn’t give back. Then others
just walked out on everything. That was that.
What can be said about what we do to each other.
What street, I don’t remember,
on the way to someone’s going-away,
I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence,
snow: your new evening clothes.
The Past Remembers You Differently
I returned with a new way to think about you.
On another page Whitman described what it feels like to live.
The day loosened its intentions. Even these recent errors.
The lights in the street almost speaking.
The terrible more than anyone wants.
And where is that life from a past that can’t see you…
what wouldn’t we want death to know about us?
Today, he wants to know where to put all the old things.
He wants to know about signs.