an abandoned chest of roistering literature for the drunk and rampant reader.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality, even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.
David Levithan – The Lover’s Dictionary
Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go?
Tell me, is the rose naked,
Or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
The splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
Than a train standing in the rain?
David Mitchell: “Letters From Zedelghem”
After supper, the three of us might listen to the wireless if there is a broadcast that passes muster, otherwise it will be recordings on the gramophone (an His Master’s Voice table model in an oak box), usually Ayrs’s own major works conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. When we have visitors, there will be conversation or a little chamber music. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read to him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.
My tongue like bark,
I lick the froth from
my steamed soy milk
like the taste of Mom’s pinecone crafts.
Unlike the sap of my early days
of 2% that Mom had filled for my
jelly jar glass each dinner
in the dining room with crystals.
Like cardboard, soy steam pours
over my tongue’s tip—
scrapes the buds, like the way
Dad scraped buds in the backyard,
the lawnmower chasing us
in diagonals and cupcakes.
My mouth a dry scone,
I sip more, sipping mean,
until my tongue chars like
the night I reached for the switch
and realized Dad no longer
tucked me in.
The grand bland lather of Silk
rushes over my tongue of shingles
until the foam slopes at the bottom
like shampoo slopping below my ear.
My tongue of pinecones, bitter and
arching for froth,
for the kitchen sink after midnight,
for a venom of milk,
for the sap of my early days.
That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out. Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control.
All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death.
All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I’d bought in Shelton, Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn’t know how to panhandle. I stumbled out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits. I knew I’d be arrested if I spent another night in Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggard man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving to death as we rolled east he said, “Fine, fine, there’s nothing better for you. I myself haven’t eaten for three days. I’m going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old.” He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac. I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who’d say, “Let’s stop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans.”
No, I had to get a ride that morning with a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health.
After a hundred miles he grew lenient and took out bread-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hidden among his salesman samples. He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania. I devoured the bread and butter. Suddenly I began to laugh. I was all alone in the car, waiting for him as he made business calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughed. Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But the madman drove me home to New York.
For a long time they looked at the river beneath them, saying nothing, and the river said nothing too, for it felt very quiet and peaceful on this summer afternoon.
“Tigger is all right really,” said Piglet lazily.
“Of course he is,” said Christopher Robin.
“Everybody is really,” said Pooh. “That’s what I think,” said Pooh. “But I don’t suppose I’m right,” he said.
“Of course you are,” said Christopher Robin.
I feel time like you dream. Your dreams are jumbled. You can’t remember the order of your dreams, and when you recall them, the memories bend. Faces change. It’s all in puddles and ripples. That’s what time is for me.
I won’t abandon you, the land said
clutching me
tight
the same way she spoke clutching the sea
just before being torn from it by force
drunken library 