Together and by Ourselves Page 6
Painting your walls, letting the wax pool. Thinking of me
and then you. And then you. And then you.
“Mais l’horloge ne sera pas arrivée à ne plus sonner que
l’heure de la pure douleur!”
The handsome child put his hands in the water and his head in the flame.
After all, there was a lot of him left. Anniversaries, birthdays.
How it happened marked an occasion for no one but us.
And I can’t stop looking at you when you kneel for the last drawer.
It’s late or it’s early (to pick out a shirt). So pick out a mood.
Perhaps it’s impossible, why anyone goes back for more, he said.
I stopped calling my father and something in me did stop.
Faces of mannequins. Crowds. Capital.
The festival went on for longer than them.
Tried to leave you a note but it’s all wind today
and there’s more wind tomorrow.
Straighten your tie, throw on those nine o’clock eyes.
What I feel is I’m stopping for you knowing nothing stops for us.
We are here and beginning. In our one misread tongue.
And like that, when I finally arrived there was no one to meet…
looks like we’re nothing to look at.
The warmest thing in his house was a book open to page 52.
Past the church doors, away from these engines;
what would it mean if you give up your plan?
On a highway today the spare key found its owner.
We rode the train with a priest without prayer.
With the hundreds of ways to keep something alive
in lost weather. Or call it your body, your home.
When a sentence undoes us faster than money.
Why would we want to know how this ends?
“My life—” wrote Capote, “can be charted as precisely as a fever:
the highs and lows, the very definite cycles.”
It’s true. We’ll all meet each other and soon.
At a different place than we thought. Well past the marked time;
dressed for a happier outcome, they were.
Under the cab light, into the bar talk…
“I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.”
A new word that could finally address this.
Saw you. Saw no one. Saw nothing.
Saw no thing. Not one thing all fall.
For weeks getting mail for the dead until one of you wrote,
he is dead. Don’t you worry about him.
And if it wasn’t these grey eyes that had you then: here.
At last—at the start of the hour.
Days and nights at the party.
Nights and days for a price.
It appears, (only now it appears to me)
we’ve overheard too much to stay young.
How in front of the cameras
it was as if he was seen all the time
for the first time.
What I mean is, who are the people you know you can’t love.
Because while the dramas continued the plates under them shifted.
The water rose higher.
Finally they brought in a doctor to discern the small flaw.
Looking back—looks like just sad talk ( looks like no more then).
I threw out my hangers and kept all your clothes.
Frames for the savage achievements.
Frames for what cannot be framed.
Hours lost in a car waiting for something to move me.
To pieces. Or the #1 song when you were born.
And what cannot be seen is how chance doesn’t talk back.
Spend a life with your debt and your one clue.
Spend it working to work. Spend it spending away.
Old government in the new America.
They want all of your zeros. They want even our nothing.
And when my license expired the same life could see me.
Is it cruel to regret your one body that dies?
By this Union and Waste Land, I’m dazed
but I’m watching the seasons.
And after you leave I lose one of my senses for days.
Again and again. There were malls. Banks.
Years of bombed people.
In the real America with expensive, expendable taste.
“Vite! est-il d’autres vies?”
Please let this go and continue your sentence.
One of these mornings someone may just want to keep you baby
and you’ll have to learn new lines for “no.”
When you go to parties people ask,
what is it like being with him?
A Malaysian plane disappeared.
Something burned in a field twice.
What is it like being anything then?
And yet, all this happened so I’m trying to reach you
right here in the poem.
Smoking too many cigarettes, writing very few lines.
In the dream we said all we wanted and still took you back.
Without rain their calendars looked like nothing you’d try.
And what about pleasure…
how do you spend it?
Cancel. Cancelled. Cancel.
Ignored and forgotten.
Would I love you more than money?
I did love you and with less.
Whatever your fear is, safe to say that it’s coming.
Every night it’s all they figured to ask.
When and how often can this be rescheduled?
The far lane turned out to be empty.
He swam alone and heard his own lack.
And everyone has a sixth chapter in their biography.
The beautiful fish rarely live long.
“Then, at one point, I did not need to translate the notes;
they went directly to my hands.”
Where underneath the flecked skin
one or one thousand things failed them.
Instead of describing the grass he lay on top of it. Drunk.
Out of the ether, into the graveyard spiral—
if you’re thinking of leaving, if you’re asking again,
it’s hardly time to go home.
So if I’m honest, I’ll tell you,
I broke the glass you drink from on purpose.
Possible or unlikely—how Prince Street in early September
has everything anyone wants.
And right now you’ll remember
three people who sharply run through you.
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”
If it’s us (and who else), we aren’t there. We have fled.
In a comment, under some sort of loss,
a user has written:
“thinking how after twelve years
I came home to find David totally gone.
Car, clothes, accounts. Everything.”
Everything in full sun. With speech spilling over it all.
“It’s better to hurt people than not to be whole.” To Sontag, 1960.
There were portraits of newly made coffins the artist called tests.
Take them with you, he said. As in “to go,” if it’s urgent.
And why should I care if there ’s no direct route.
You’re in Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
nighttime. Over the bridge, under the sun.
Not the wires and pills, the announcements or guest lists.
What would we want to power these lives?
In afternoons when they said, don’t forget…
don’t forget what this was on your way out.
Like yards full of metals, like turned earth:
we’re stones. We are stones that grey on.
And if you keep your eyes here there ’s room for a question—
what makes happiness different from anything else?
“Well,” said the boy,
“I thought we knew more than that.”
Here you are. In the wrong shoes at the getting late social.
It’s the last person you think of. The first past the alarm.
Soon became every day we attended by promise or boredom.
1955. 1939. 1990.
Tuesday in March. October on Sunday.
If you’ve been a good host you forget all your lines.
Or, look here and see oil and pencil on pillow.
Your eyes like a hand on Rauschenberg’s Bed.
It’s noon or it’s midnight.
An hour in any one language is still just an hour
(it makes the drive longer).
16. 40. 33.
“I go on loving you like water but…”
I go on loving you and going and.
I go on, I go on, I go up.
Unreachable like a live wire in the sky.
We are Pacific, Atlantic, this north or south feeling.
Take the long way forever.
If you’re asking, if you still need to know,
it’s hardly time to go home.
Notes
“Champagne” borrows the opening line, “J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans,” of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Spleen.” Joanna Richardson’s English translation of this line, “I have more memories than a thousand years,” also appears in the poem.
“Cocaine” quotes Lauren Bacall in the line “Who sat on mountaintops in cars reading books aloud to the canyons?”
“The 25th Hour” borrows the line “Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,” from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “L’Albatros.” Joanna Richardson’s English translation of this line, “Exiled on earth amid the shouting crowds,” also appears in the poem.
“The Last Luxury, JFK Jr.” borrows lines from a note sent to JFK Jr. from Madonna. It also adapts the second-to-last line of Stephen Spender’s poem “The Truly Great” (“Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun”) as its opening line.
“Lindsay Lohan” borrows lines spoken by Marilyn Monroe from The Making of The Misfits by James Goode. The line “Her arm was full of bracelets, one of which, she said softly, had been given to her by S” is adapted from Vanity Fair’s 2010 profile of Lohan, “Adrift…” by Nancy Jo Sales and Jessica Diehl.
“Elvis in New York” loosely borrows lines from Elvis Presley’s press conference at Madison Square Garden on June 9, 1972.
“Some New Thing” adapts the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”: “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges…”
“All Apologies” takes its title from the last track on Nirvana’s album In Utero.
“Central Park” quotes a sentence fragment (“an artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century English romantic tradition”) from Joan Didion’s essay “Sentimental Journeys.”
“Night Call” was written for a multimedia poetry project of the same name through which I read poems to strangers in bed and online in the months of February and March of 2014. The poem quotes Marilyn Monroe from Truman Capote’s conversational portrait “A Beautiful Child.”
“Days and Nights” includes lines and quotes from Arthur Rimbaud, Truman Capote, T.S. Eliot, Francesca Woodman, the journals of Susan Sontag, and John Ashbery.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of the following journals and magazines where some of these poems first appeared, at times in earlier versions: The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, The Awl, The Baffler, Bennington Review, BOMB, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cosmonauts Avenue, Harvard Review, The Journal, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, PEN America, Phantom, Poetry, A Public Space, The Quietus, and Salmagundi.
“Cocaine” was the recipient of a Pushcart Prize.
“Chance Visitors” was written for Jessica Rankin’s show Dear Another, at Salon 94 in New York City, November through December of 2014.
“In the New Century I Gave You My Name” appeared at Poetry Daily on January 24, 2015.
Thank you to everyone at Copper Canyon Press.
Thank you to the sun and the moon.
It means a lot to me to have Francesca Woodman’s photograph Untitled (Rome, Italy) as the cover of my book. Thank you to the Estate of Francesca Woodman, George and Betty Woodman.
Writing this book coincided with one of the most difficult periods of my life. The work itself was a rescue.
About the Author
Alex Dimitrov is the author of Begging for It and the online chapbook American Boys. He lives in New York City.
Also by Alex Dimitrov
Begging for It
American Boys (online chapbook)
Copyright 2017 by Alex Dimitrov
All rights reserved
Cover art: Francesca Woodman, Untitled (Rome, Italy). Courtesy George and Betty Woodman.
ISBN: 978-1-55659-510-3
eISBN: 978-1-61932-169-4
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