Walkman

Walkman

I didn't mean to quit drinking,

it just sort of happened.

I'd always assumed

it'd be difficult, or not

difficult, exactly,

but impossible.

Then one New Year's Eve

twenty years ago

at the VFW, Craig and I

were drinking beer

from brown bottles,

peeling the labels off

into little confetti nests.

In Mexico

the previous New Year's Eve,

I'd started drinking

again after a year sober.

I traveled by myself

in Oaxaca for a month

and had at least two

beautiful experiences.

The bus I was on broke

down in the mountains

and I watched the stars blink

on with a Mexican girl

who later sent me a letter

I never answered. That's one

of the experiences. The others

are secrets. We left the VFW

at a reasonable hour for once.

I never took another drink.

I'm not sure why not.

I don't think it had anything

to do with me. I think

it was a miracle. Like when

the hero at the last

second pulls the lever to switch

the train to the track the heroine's

not tied to. I was always broke

in those days, whereas now I'm just

poor. I brought a Walkman

and a backpack stuffed with

cassettes to Oaxaca. I was sick

of them all within a week

and longed to buy a new tape

but couldn't spare the pesos.

I listened to Live Through This

at the Zapotec ruins

of Monte Alb‡n,

Rumours on the bus to DF.

At Puerto çngel,

my headphones leaking

tinny discord

across a rooftop bar,

I sat watching the ocean.

An American man about the age

I am now

asked me what I was listening to.

I said Sonic Youth. He asked

which album, I said Sister.

He chuckled and said

"I'm Johnny Strike."

It probably wasn't a miracle,

but I couldn't believe it.

Here was the guy who wrote

Crime's 1976 classic

"Hot Wire My Heart,"

which Sonic Youth covered

on their 1987 classic, Sister,

which I was listening to

on my Walkman

at the end of Mexico in the sun.

Except actually I was

listening to Daydream Nation,

I change it to Sister

when I tell that story.

But it's a beautiful story

even without embellishment.

That's another of the Oaxacan

experiences I mentioned,

but the rest are secrets.

Oh Mexico, as James Schuyler

wrote to Frank O'Hara,

are you just another

dissembling dream?

Schuyler was too tender

for me then, but now

he is just tender enough.

I love his wishes.

That "the beautiful humorous

white whippet" could

be immortal, for instance.

But I can't always forgive

his Central Park West tone,

his Austrian operettas

and long long lawns,

though he wasn't rich

and was tormented

enough, God knows.

In the summer of 1984

in Salida, Colorado,

I had Slade and Steve Perry

on my Walkman.

I drank milk from jumbo

Burger King glasses

emblazoned with scenes

from Return of the Jedi.

You can't buy tampons

with food stamps

even if your mother

insists that you try.

Salida sits along

the Arkansas River,

whose current

one hot afternoon

swept me away

and deposited me

in a shallow far downstream.

It was the first time

I thought I was going

to die and didn't. The Arkansas

and everything else are mortal.

My mom had been born again,

to my chagrin. But lately I find

I do believe in God

the Father Almighty, Maker

of heaven and earth:

and in Jesus Christ,

his Son our Lord,

who was conceived by

the Holy Ghost. How

the hell did I become

a Christian? Grace,

I guess. It just sort of

happened. I admit I find

the resurrection of the body

and life everlasting

difficult, or not difficult,

exactly, but impossible.

There is no crazier belief

than that we won't be

covered by leaves, leaves,

leaves, as Schuyler has it,

which is to say, really gone,

as O'Hara put it in his lovely

sad poem to John Ashbery.

But hope is a different animal

from belief. "The crazy hope

that Paul proclaims in 2

Corinthians," my friend John

wrote to me when his mother

died. The Christian religion

is very beautiful sometimes

and very true at other times,

though sophisticated persons

are still expected to be above

all that sort of thing. Well,

I'm a Marxist

too. Go and sell that thou

hast, and give to the poor.

On his new album Dr. Dre

says "Anybody complaining

about their circumstances

lost me." At the risk of losing

more billionaires, complain

about your circumstances,

I say. I listened to The Chronic

on my Walkman the summer

I worked the night shift

at Kinko's. I was dating Deirdre,

who when I placed my headphones

on her ears and pushed play

said "Why is this man cursing

at me?" Said it more loudly

than was strictly necessary.

A crazy man

would come into Kinko's

around two a.m. and ask me

to fax dire, scribbled warnings

to every news outlet in Denver.

He wanted to let people know

that God would punish the area

with natural disasters

if the county succeeded

in evicting him from the land

he was squatting on. He'd ask me

to help him think of various

extreme weather events

that God might unleash.

I'd say "Typhoons?"

though we were in Colorado.

He'd scribble typhoons.

Scraps of dirty paper absolutely

covered front and back with ominous,

angrily scrawled black characters:

attn. nbc nightly news there will

be fires tornadoes typhoons.

I would help him compose his screeds

then fax each one to Denver's

major TV and radio stations, the Denver Post,

and the Rocky Mountain News,

which has since stopped its presses

for good. Except in fact I would

only pretend to fax them

and then refuse his money,

saying I was glad to help the cause.

What if he wasn't batshit but a true

prophet? The Denver metropolitan area

was not visited by disaster

at that time, but this proves

nothing. Look at Jonah and

Nineveh, that great city.

I don't believe he was a prophet,

but Kinko's is beautiful

at two a.m. even if I hated

working there. The rows

of silent copiers

like retired dreadnoughts

in a back bay, the fluorescent

pallor, the classic-rock station

I would turn back up after

my coworker turned it down.

Did the guy sketch amateurish

floods, tornadoes, etc.,

on his jeremiads or did I

imagine that? I wish

I'd thought to make copies

for myself. I wish I'd kept

the Mexican girl's letter.

I wish I'd kept the copiers

with their slow arms

of light, the lights of DF

filling the Valley of Mexico

as the bus makes its slow way

down and Stevie sings what you

had, oh, what you lost. Schuyler

and his wishes! "I wish it was

1938 or '39 again." "I wish

I could take an engine apart

and reassemble it." "I wish I'd

brought my book of enlightening

literary essays." "I wish I could press

snowflakes in a book like flowers."

That last one's my favorite. I wish

I'd written it. I would often kick

for months until driven back to a bar

by fear or boredom or both. I saw

Tomorrow Never Dies-starring

Pierce Brosnan, the second-worst

James Bond-in Oaxaca and

came out wishing my life were

romantic and exciting and charmed

or at least that I had someone

to talk to. So I stopped at the first

bar I saw, and someone

talked to me. It's so sad and

perfect to be young and alone

in the Z—calo when the little lights

come up like fish surfacing

beneath the moon and you want

to grab the people walking by

and say who are you, are you

as afraid as I am. And you don't

know that twenty years later

you'll be writing this poem.

Well, now I'm being sentimental

and forgetting that in those days

I wrote the worst poems ever.

"I held a guitar and trembled

and would not sing" is an actual

line I wrote! The typhoon guy

could have written better poetry.

Today I want to write about

how it's been almost twenty years

since I owned a Walkman.

Just think: there was a song

that I didn't know

would be the last song

I would ever play on a Walkman.

I listened to it like it was just

any old song,

because it was.

The Deep Heart's Core

We must stop feeling things

in the deep heart's core.

That's where the lies live.

If you would see what's behind you,

close your eyes. Shut your mouth

if you want to send people to hell.

You have to want to go to hell. Deserve's

got nothing to do with it.

Yet hell has a waiting list.

Well, that's how dumb I am,

feeling my way to hell one

name at a time.

You Haven't Texted Since Saturday

You haven't texted

since Saturday,

when I read Keith Waldrop's

translation of Les Fleurs du Mal

on a bench by whatever

that tower is on the hill

in Fort Greene Park

until you walked up

late as always and I do

mean always

in your dad's army jacket

and said "Hi, buddy"

in a tone that told me

all I needed to know,

although protocol dictated

that you should sit next to me

and spell it out

and we should hold each other

and cry and then pretend

everything was fine, would

be fine, was someday

before the final

trumpet, before heat death,

zero point, big rip

sure to be absolutely

perfectly completely

probably fine. And

though it wasn't and

wouldn't be,

I walked you to the G

then rode the C

to Jay Street-MetroTech.

Just now I took a break from

this retrospect

to smoke one of the Camels

in the sky-blue box marked

il fumo uccide

you brought me from Italy

and page through a book

on contemporary physics.

"Something must be

very wrong," it said,

and I agreed,

although it turned out

the author meant that "no theory

of physics should produce

infinities with impunity."

I'd point out that every theory

of the heart

produces infinities

with impunity

if I were the kind of jerk

who uses the heart

to mean the human

tendency to make

others suffer

just because we

hate to suffer

alone. I'm sorry

I brought a fitted sheet

to the beach. I'm sorry

I'm selfish and determined

to make the worst

of everything. I'm

sorry language is a ship

that goes down

while you're building it.

The Hesychasts of Byzantium

stripped their prayers

of words. It's been tried

with poems too. But insofar

as I am a disappointment

to myself and others, it seems fitting

to set up shop in almost

and not quite and that's not

what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,

though, with its

infinities. And I have to say

I am not a big fan

of being sad. Some people

can pull it off. When

we hiked Overlook, you

went on ahead to the summit

while I sat on a rock

reading Thomas Bernhard.

I'd just made it to the ruins

of the old hotel

when you came jogging back down

in your sports bra

saying I had to come see the view.

But my allergies were bad

and I was thirsty,

so we headed down the gravelly trail,

pleased by the occasional

advent of a jittery

chipmunk. You showed me pictures

on your phone of the fire

tower, the nineteenth-

century graffiti carved

into the rock, and the long

unfolded valley

of the Hudson. At the bottom,

the Buddhists let us

fill our water bottles

from their drinking fountain.

We called a cab and sat

along the roadside

watching prayer flags

rush in the wind. I said the wind

carried the prayers

inscribed on the flags

to the gods, but Wikipedia

informs me now that

       the Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread

       good will and compassion into all pervading space.

So I was wrong, again,

about the gods. Wherever

you are, I hope you stand

still now and then

and let the prayers

wash over you like the breakers

at Fort Tilden that day

the huge gray gothic

clouds massed and threatened to drop

a storm on our heads

but didn't.

Shed

I wish I had a shed out back

of a house in an open

place and I'd sit in the cold

shed on quiet nights when all

the televisions go out and

the wires and the other wires

sing, and wonder what the small

things think about. A bitumen

boat in a royal tomb and a snake

and an angel too. Away from

loss prevention officers and

11 Secrets to Refinancing Your

Student Loans. I don't mean

some romantic Unabomber

shit, just a shed. The light

from a candle in the shed's

single window tosses a golden

square upon the snow that I

now see should surround

and shroud the shed. I hate

winter, so these snows must

be aesthetic. The December

before last I didn't leave my

apartment except for bodega

runs to stock up on Diet Coke

and peanut butter. I watched

every Anthony Mann Western

and spent half a day trying to

arrange Cheez-Its into the form

of Jimmy Stewart's face, then

ate the face. Some sorrow is

so baroque you look back

on it and feel like a schmuck.

Just yesterday the CBD Lifestyle

Station clerk asked how I was

and I said "Good, and you?" like

you're supposed to, like they teach

you in disaster simulations. I

know how to feel in my shed,

away from these statues

of assholes on horses,

and I let the shed field

the questions. Even in my

shed I want a shed.

When Didn't I Know It

I was born without language

and thus without the ability

to formulate a plan.

It was a few years after

the moon fell

to an American incursion.

I was smaller then

and prone to fits of pique.

I began to learn things

about dinosaurs and the way

a bag of vending-machine chips

will sometimes get stuck

on the Slinky-like contraption

that pushes it into free fall.

And there is no remedy;

according to the system

a fair transaction was concluded.

I learned that airplanes hang

on wires from ceilings.

I feared wasps. I remained

outside most churches.

I required stitches.

I was an expert on Bigfoot,

a reputed hominid

called s‡sq'ets

by the First Nations peoples.

I watched the moon

precisely blot the sun

on the wall of a shoebox.

As for Sea-Monkeys,

they did not, in fact, ride

one another like cowboys

on ponies or follow

a candle beam as if hypnotized.

Cobalt gives off-scientists

say "emits"-electrons. I

read that. I read about little

houses, big horses, assistant

pig-keepers, red ferns.

In those days of products

without clocks, I called

a number to hear

the time and temperature.