Let’s go on a roadtrip and make mix cd’s of Bob Dylan, Old Crow Medicine Show and The Beatles to listen to in the car. Let’s stop from time to time to take pictures and feel the wind on our skin at the highway-side. Let’s look at the multiplicity of stars at night. I don’t know any of the constellations but Orion; you can’t see most of them through the city light. Let’s stop in every single little tourist trap town in the West and eat over-priced ice cream cones while watching the passerby’s. And then when we get back we can laugh about all the things that occurred and make plans to do it all again.
I should start making art again and take the stairs instead of the elevator and say “i love you” before hanging up the phone and be a better person in general.
I’m packing up my past and donating it to Goodwill.
It is lovely to be alone.
Afternoon sun,
embrace me through the window.
My speakers
tell me things:
“For Emma, Forever Ago.”
Catching voices from below,
five floors below.
The physics of it astounds me.
The stirring of the seasons brings a stirring of nostalgia. Cracked and icy blades of grass: sharp and shaped like morning air.
The top shelf.
8 month’s dust on a box full of sweaters: quietly folded, soft and secondhand.
‘This cold spell’s only meant to last a day.’
Memories tucked away on the top shelf with the sweaters.
Bleary-eyed in the bathroom
spitting in the sink
yellow
thicker
sicker
under fluorescent lights
These wilted August days are hot and glary, and all things point towards the encroaching death of summer. Sweaters take the place of tees on store front mannequins, city crews armed with glossy white paint arrive to touch up corner crossing stripes, cicadas high in the trees sing louder and more frantically than ever before, aware that their summer-long dynasty is rushing to an end. Later this fall I might find their brittle husks hidden in the secret places of the yard, like lifeless relics of an ancient tomb, left behind to reveal bygone glories of an era. They cling to fence posts and leafless trees in defiance, bug-eyed reminders of summer.
I love books. Not just the words within them, but the look and feel of them as well. I like the way my books look lined up on the shelf, all different textures, tones and heights. And I like how each of my books carries a second story, separate from its own story. This one a distinct, personal story: the story of where the book came from and what it means to me. There are those I bought myself, both new and used. Others were gifts, some acquired secondhand. And a few, (I’m sorry to say) which were borrowed and never returned, like the complete Robert Frost poetry collection with someone else’s name written in the front.
When I pull out my copy of The Sun Also Rises I’m once again on a springtime road trip to Santa Fe, reading in the car, exploring the stonework of the city, my head filled with thoughts of bull fights in the sun and a bygone era. If I open to the front page of The Joy Luck Club, bought for $2 at a used book fair, I find a handwritten note which reads, “To my loving Wife, Your the light in my sometimes dark life. Without you to show me the way, I’d be lost. I love you. Happy Birthday, love, Fred,” dated August 28, 1989. And this is probably the only time it hasn’t rankled me to see ‘your’ used incorrectly. All Quiet on the Western Front reminds me of over and over again listening to the song ‘Someone Great’ by LCD Soundsystem while writing a report over the book, wanting to cry but not crying. The Razor’s Edge, the sunny spare bedroom at my Grandparent’s, Just So Stories, my Mother, The Great Gatsby, driving through Dallas at sunset, Life of Pi, standardized testing week, sophomore year.
So it goes to show, that a book isn’t just what it is. It’s also what it means to the people who read it, where they are and what they’re feeling. The same book is a different book to different people. And I love that.
These are the midnight hours when the house breathes and my thoughts are at their fullest. Some lovely voice is singing through speakers, singing of a season not yet come. And I wish again for winter after another three-digit day. The distant groan of traffic off the highway whispers a reminder of all the billion strangers in the world: of their comings and goings, their thoughts and desires, the things which do not cease. There is always traffic on the highway, even at the deepest deep of night.
I dropped you off at your mosque just after sunset, in the moment where the light still lingers. While you went inside to pray, I sat in the dusty parking lot beside a crumbly brick wall, watching traffic glide by. With the engine off I could hear bugs singing drunkenly in the trees above me. I got a few curious (though not unkind) glances, but it was a peaceful moment, and you weren’t gone long.
The other night I was listening to the BBC news on my radio where a discussion was taking place about Andy Warhol. The reporter brought up the fact that some people look down on his work and don’t consider it to be ‘art’ since he painted ordinary things like tomato soup cans. The guest speaker responded with the explanation that Warhol painted things which he found to be beautiful, and tomato soup cans were one of those things.
And the thing is, when you think about it, tomato soup cans are beautiful: the way the deep red contrasts so sharply with the bright white, cut cleanly across the middle in a perfect line.
I guess that’s part of what makes a great artist, being able to see the beauty in unconventional things. Anyone can look at a sunset and say, “that’s beautiful,” but very few would ever find anything special about an everyday soup can. But sometimes the everyday things are the most beautiful. Unlike a sunset, a Campbell’s soup can appeals in a simple, linear way, and in a world filled with cheap flash and glitz, sometimes simplicity is the most desirable form of beauty.
In this dark place
I can’t see your face,
nor you mine,
but our voices are fine,
and that is enough.
The neighbor’s mowing like a sedative,
fixing sounds repetitive,
lulling off to foreign land,
dismissing book in hand.
And now said book is on the floor
from its fall three hours before,
undone by careless fingers
in a mind who lingers
still in dreams.
