Together and by Ourselves Read online

  Yet in some jeweled corridor of their lives

  where time was a freedom and hell-mate,

  the fish circled, openmouthed, and never left the aquarium.

  Every lover is a stranger, every stranger a lover all over again.

  So I’ve been popular and unpopular

  (you’ll be a body on the earth and in the earth too).

  It’s mostly the same thing, mostly the same fears.

  Voracious and bound. They didn’t know it

  (and it wasn’t a choice) how we’re truly impossible.

  We had to. They had to live here.

  Strangers and Friends

  We slept with the doors open one more night.

  And now when I try it alone it does not feel the same.

  Something about time when it’s right there in front of you

  disguised as a person. A person disguised as a voice

  at the end of its reach. A photo booth strip.

  You’re more material to me than a house

  and I haven’t felt much of the weather living inside.

  Rain on a mouth. Fingers in dirt.

  I wish I had the mind of an orchid or sky.

  A childhood beach when it’s cold yet not late in the year.

  I am leaving you there with the shirts and the shoes thrown about,

  waiting to be retrieved by the people who’ve given them use

  and aren’t done slapping their bodies against the sea.

  Nothing has come to impress me. We leave.

  Thrown in the blue of the wet afternoon

  where no one can stay without being bled;

  we, who are so full of blood.

  I am watching you make all the lights.

  The Madonna swings across the dashboard,

  her face does not change.

  And whether it’s the mountains of New Mexico

  or the streets in this city of lack,

  we are driving in the easy silence

  of people who do not yet know

  what they’ll take from each other.

  This is the shortest part of the drive,

  the part that won’t photograph well but seems real.

  Soon we’ll be stopping at a gas station and a pool

  and a diner where no one will eat.

  No matter the places I’ve taken my clothes off

  I always keep one thing on. One.

  One of us. Asking for more than what’s ours.

  Tonight

  Tonight in your hours away from earth

  you have questions

  that won’t trouble you inside it.

  People

  On the plane from New York to California

  the handsome men sit alone like the past.

  I have so much to say to them but don’t

  and order a scotch—neat. A word

  that describes almost nothing.

  Your dress in a storm one September.

  Ethan’s red shoulders coming out of a bath.

  Maybe I haven’t loved men the way I love women

  although often in the afternoons

  and now somewhere in the middle of the country,

  I want even the bad things to do over.

  The wheels coming down right before landing.

  The wheels you can feel but don’t see.

  And the people, how being with people,

  has turned out to be, more or less, something like that.

  Lines for People after the Party

  And whenever they couldn’t speak they looked at each other.

  How long should I look at the world before I go home?

  It’s a moody life like Debussy on a weekend

  and all the appointments and money and drinks they do go.

  So with our beautiful coats we went back to that mess

  and what happened? Someone found what they wanted

  by night, by mistake. In the car it felt like summer

  and we lived with no sun…just metals and leather.

  A lot of Mondays. A lot of you in the grass I go to and touch.

  Oh and Los Angeles for its slow light. Rome for when it gets late.

  You. Not you, but you who are reading…

  what won’t you ask for and want?

  Of course I remember it differently because I was broke

  and it feels like I’m broke still.

  The cabs lined up but no one took him

  where he wanted to go. Those months shared a face

  and the face of a dog on a street was the only thing

  that really saw you (for a long time).

  Then I heard you were traveling, I heard you were somewhere,

  I heard you were nowhere anyone looked for at all.

  French stationery. Construction. Sent then deleted. Missed you

  so sorry next time press yes to continue press now.

  And I stood on Barrow then Greenwich then Allen

  then all streets, every street, all the time, everyone.

  There was a check you used just to drive out there.

  There was a storm that brought a gold door in front of their shoes.

  You know, it doesn’t get easier with the lights off.

  It doesn’t get easier to watch the play with an end.

  On the way out someone said, what a terrible way to portray life.

  But about us. Hide all week then some place

  we go empty the dark in. In the dark

  with our vices and best shirts and history’s dress.

  Then you could find me anytime. And then there’s right now.

  Where wouldn’t we go to be no one and those people again?

  Alone Together

  Where I’m writing this there’s an ad for high heaven.

  It cost me more than those evenings to see you;

  more than a lifetime to see my own face.

  Money and time then. Both seem misspent here.

  I want the bedroom wall bronze

  so I sleep without looking for more.

  And a man with his hands on his face is a man.

  Nothing solid.

  It’s hard to believe. Harder yet when we’re here

  and repeating the same things into the days without grace.

  The ocean is old. Planes curve by

  and you’re back or that’s luck,

  though not lucky enough to become love.

  Or the day in my mother’s life

  when she forgets (even briefly) about me.

  It’s not kind to acknowledge affection is finite,

  that all kinds of love have to end.

  So if cruelty is one side of freedom

  we may want to stay free together alone in the thin afternoon.

  I can’t be here or with you. I know that.

  But maybe I’m simple, vicious

  and human after all.

  When the clocks of this world all go useless with promise,

  the coyotes crossing the yard

  look beyond us and roam.

  We can dine and pretend that our lives

  are our lives without speaking.

  Fog in the hills.

  People stuck in more traffic but moving.

  Someone thinking of us. Someone setting the knives.

  Together Alone

  We may have been alone together

  flying over the coast where we both couldn’t stay.

  The gentleman in the novel came into your bed;

  one day, without warning, you felt like him too.

  Drawing the shades up, by the door with your hair wet.

  When we met, you kept me up saying very few things.

  As all else, and dressed wisely, we fled our flawed forms.

  Are you surprised then that anyone’s staying together? Surprise.

  How surprising it turns out to be.

  The three of us at twenty or close to the same age.

  And no one wore a jacket wherever we went,

  like no one wanted
love for more than a day.

  The boy I buy gin from says you’re next at just the right moment.

  I pay him and slip into touching his hands.

  In Bastille—on Sunset—late and blurry in Dolores Park.

  What does time have to do with us there?

  You ask if charm can redeem someone (maybe),

  but none of this runs on logic, and it isn’t Voltaire.

  At some point they walked in and needed

  to throw it away or in someone’s way somewhere.

  Take your pick, find your match—

  it’s a real marketplace.

  Overlooking Second Avenue I said,

  this is one life view. “The delay is temporary.”

  Over a speaker the sentence repeats like your face.

  And I followed you into that temporary;

  over the canyons, away from the hills,

  far from the ocean and back here.

  Toward what felt found and mostly—

  it’s morning now, nighttime where

  you are—was not, would not be.

  Bloodless

  All day the trees touch each other blindly.

  When I pass they don’t know I’m going away.

  How would you describe the way a person enters a room

  they must burn in or swim through?

  It’s a rumor that anyone lives.

  The things that are things, I threw them in boxes.

  The things that are mine, I threw them in you.

  So he walked from the park, from the past, to the party.

  You thought the flowers would like to die with the music on low.

  I thought, let some of it live. Let there be people inside there—

  turns out just cocktails and language,

  another part of the evening, a wind on the river across.

  If buzzer is broken, please call.

  If stuck, do not push or pull.

  He kept pushing until he wasn’t himself or you with him.

  It’s a rumor that anyone gets out in fact.

  Once—we saw each other and stayed

  in different rooms, like two different countries.

  All night I wore your favorite color by mistake.

  On the street: voices—“we have a lot of time left.”

  “All night he looked at me,” you said to our friend.

  Someone they didn’t know spoke loudly and happy.

  All the time. All my life. Mostly it’s been misleading.

  “…And your own life while it’s happening…

  never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.”

  To who? Warhol said that, not Proust.

  Little remains but it’s all here

  and I’ve come to give it to you.

  What part to write down in order to tell nothing.

  Texts. Emails. No sleep.

  And some ink, although bloodless,

  marks where you were and they’ve been.

  This was left at the end of the night, this here.

  This is what no one wanted to say.

  Vacation with Death

  Stranger stranger stranger all the money in this world won’t work.

  And yet, and yet

  we wanted our terrible lives.

  Every vacation but this one was temporary.

  That’s us in the photos and us in the bed.

  Holidays. First address. Wrong flowers.

  I keep a tab and a door open for you.

  And the cigarettes smoked in your black sheets.

  All that love and the unloved…

  strange how strange how strange how it goes.

  Water

  On a Sunday in Paris a woman is looking for a grave.

  We arrived at the hour of champagne flutes,

  we were promised a toast so we stayed.

  Philip says you won’t call like you’re needed

  so be a calm person in all my dark clothes.

  Well, how easy. The curtains part weekly

  and the neighbors look in unimpressed.

  What is aging exactly?

  There are new jobs and people

  and someone dies before noon every day.

  I am swimming and swimming…in May or an ocean,

  I don’t see the reason. “But that’s unimportant,” you said.

  “Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.”

  Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.

  The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;

  that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all fools

  then fast friends. One more time then:

  What do you do here? Where are you from?

  How long are you planning to stay?

  A friend tells me how when he leaves for a trip

  he sets out a glass of water on the counter of his kitchen.

  The woman’s still looking. I watch from a bench

  and I’m reading a book—she is reading the names.

  Faithfully. With much compromise.

  I can’t tell if it’s better than one more French exit today.

  So why do you do it, I asked him;

  playing my own bartender, taking it down

  easy, unlike everything else.

  And there’s months when I still hear you tell me

  “I can’t keep anything living.”

  Not plants. Nothing requiring care.

  It’s the same glass, only the trips differ.

  Something in us needs water so we give it to someone else.

  Handsome View of a Lifetime

  How despite their secrets it was a handsome view of a lifetime.

  The viola player we remembered your street by soon moved.

  And I suppose that’s how I knew I was happy. I didn’t take photos.

  The nights were more than our gossip and part of it too.

  For the ice to melt, for the bottles to empty—

  we seldom saw ourselves in this forecast as brief.

  America went on loudly and we stayed here

  but listen: scenery, scenery. Matchbooks with one match.

  What people wrote to each other in books no one kept.

  And your lawyers. They said there were things we can’t have back.

  The eyes. How they look before we go thinking something.

  Past your screen the face of a lover or stranger. What difference.

  The monks who were asked what they missed and said

  missing was not what they felt. Missing missed them.

  It may be enough now to walk in these meaningless rhythms.

  Rise, think, undress, repeat.

  Each week he spoke to the past with real ceremony.

  After years of being next to each other—they met.

  Salt covered their bodies, myth took them far west.

  “Everyone wants to live,” Elizabeth Taylor told Capote.

  “Even when they don’t want to.”

  In graveyards and countries where no one’s name knows yours.

  Where you are most welcome and want to stay least.

  The stiff Christmas trees lined each block in that last month.

  The New Year’s balloons slowly feathered the floors.

  And in the daily order…all the laws and the lawless

  there was so much no one could ask for.

  Why she lived alone in a village of ninety, believe it.

  Why you lived as one in a city of crowds. Well, you did.

  With its terms of affection, hurried forms of attention

  our shameless century tried to find a shorthand for love.

  These affairs of ours should only be felt without touching.

  But if you sit close enough for a while and do not blink;

  you can see they’re not dead. Sad to say, we’re not saints yet.

  We ’re simply having another and taking it in.

  Biography

  …or ask the mistakes to give the day texture.
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  December to seem like July. The sea to make room

  and the room to be right here. Language to do more than fill time.

  If you forget who you are there’s a desk in the afterlife

  meant to retrieve you. Yet by some kind of error

  (someone told me today), it’s been sent and is heavy,

  it’s been lost on the earth.

  I’m no more at home if I’m walking or swimming,

  catching an airplane or riding trains backwards

  like people of previous years.

  This is what he looked like, you said to them,

  handing over a photo.

  This is how a car drives out of view.

  Nothing—not even the nothing—gets written by us.

  V

  Days and Nights

  And every poem with people is for them.

  That’s how it began: you and me.

  How quickly I found myself in the evening.

  How slowly Manhattan invited us there.

  The past slipped away with the fare and who’d ask for it back?

  It so happens you see there were novels and paintings.

  Some films and these short days. Then again, we were alone.

  Sun and a bit of sand. No money or celebrity

  but love for all that it is worth. What you wrote.

  When winter found its darkness without us. Of course

  there was time and a moon. There was air. All we typed out.

  And still. No one knew who we were.

  We looked for each other in all of the rooms and their mirrors.

  What the champagne couldn’t fill. The brief extras and dinners—

  so I thought: let love kill us, let it start here.

  It’s real for them. Even the irony.

  When each morning the water hits the back of his neck.

  That face. Or the next thought. The next pause.

  Someone’s cigarette smoke rolling into the street.

  And where could they take themselves now (where did we check out)?

  If you’re asking, it’s hardly time to go home.

  Because the ticket says here and we arrived at the wrong place.