letter from jones street

January 7, 2001
Dear Philipp,

Forgive me. I’m drunk again.
The whiskey is holding time still.
Even the guitar strings go on thrumming
without the hand.
Where to find you?
You told me you will be singing
in the one red room
in all of pale Germany.
Tonight I stand in my front yard,
wind lifting my scarf like birds’ wings,
and anxiously raise the nets of silence,
listening for your voice to slip through
and bend me down under the branches of the maples.

But I am lonely, Philipp, and cannot
bear all the beauty in this life.
My eyes have been pinched shut by a star,
and there is dark in me. The colors have closed.
You, Philipp, are a bird who can still rise up,
cross oceans, find me in these miles of fields.
Pull me even with the lines of your body.
Fasten me to you.
I, who will never be brave,
who will never be pieced together,
will wait with you for the morning storm
that will blow the burdens off our shoulders.

back home and recouping.

surgery went smoothly. the two stents that have been in my pancreatic duct since october were removed. i'm taking the knockout prescription pain drugs and am hazy and cozy on the couch, every few hours delicately lumbering to the kitchen for hot spearmint and lemongrass tea.

at mayo clinic ...

surgery tomorrow on my pancreas.

philipp, play "photonegative" on your guitar?
alice, would you sing?

deep in winter

You are so deep in winter, the bathroom faucet knob squawks when you turn it on in the morning. Something like your shape in the mirror, but you don’t want to look. Even your body lies to you, hunched shoulders and blackened eyes telling you stories you wouldn’t dare to believe. What you say to yourself as you brush your teeth threads through the mirror frame and gets tangled up in itself, the text snarled in the frame like knots of your hair you haven’t brushed out yet.

So deep in winter
– cats sleep in broken-windowed garages
– you warm yourself running from bar to bar
– the wind is caught in the spaces in fences
– you drank seven cups of hot tea today, all different kinds

You believe in things like picking up the check and true love because they represent God to you. They make you feel better. You can live from day to day with some of your words missing, stuck in the mirror frame along with the river water ghost you leave there each time you study the way you look. Your drafty, windy head blows itself off your shoulders and you're left with the reverb vibrating the springs of your ribs. The winter is so long and at the end of it, we will pull your body from the ground again.

[ Philipp, one for you: I’ll tie some poems to my shoes so when I look down while walking, I’ll think of you and beauty and perfection and derangement. Ten years since I wrote that to you, and finally the poems on my shoes are my own. The text is being threaded through the frames and the story coming out is mine. I'm impatient to find out who I am but I'm just crawling along. Regrets piled high wherever I have been. ]