Lifier

I ran into my friend Joanne in New York at the Best American Poetry reading last week and somehow we got to talking about our lives being Lifier these days. Well, she knew it about herself in reaction to recent events and wondered it about me. Lifier being a good thing, but scary too, in that all the old illusions about order are blasted out the door. This probably explains why I haven't had a minute to put up the collage promised in a comment a few posts back. (Was it to David of Montreal?) Or why I haven't been able to section off the everyday into discrete pieces. I keep thinking about what I said in the last post about seamless fragmentation. That paradox feels a little true to how it is now, and yet I'm going to try my best: a fledgling chronicle, in pictures. Here, the month of August, at least.

Convention Hall, beach side, Asbury Park

Back porches of Asbury Park house

Bonfire on beach, Asbury Park

Church carnival, Asbury Park

Church carnival 2, Asbury Park

Shark River Inlet, looking north to Avon by-the-Sea & Asbury Park

The former Howard Johnsons, Asbury Park

Beach at Ocean Grove

My brother's backyard in Miami

House in Miami Historic District

A house of leaves in Key West

With my friend Polly Burnell, Cafe Heaven, Provincetown

Found wood sculpture, Herring Cove beach, Provincetown

At Nick and Lili's bonfire, Hatches Harbor, Provincetown

Herring Cove marsh, Provincetown

Leonardo, Atlantic Highlands, Little Silver, Ocean Grove...

For my Innovative Prose forms craft class, I've been rereading Sebald's The Emigrants, which ends up being too great for superlatives. The old adjectives can't help but lie down in the face of it; they're inadequate and tired. Those of you who know the book know how difficult it to find an excerpt--there is something seamless about Sebald's fragmentation. But I keep on circling back to this passage, in which the beaches north and south of my house--for whatever reason Asbury Park is silent here--make an appearance--then disappear.

from The Emigrants
W.G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

After lunch, Uncle Kasimir became visibly restless and paced to and fro, and at length he said: I have to get out of the house!--to which Aunt Lina, who was washing up, replied: What a day to go for a drive! One might indeed have thought that night night was falling, so low and inky black was the sky. The streets were deserted. We passed very few other cars on the road. It took us almost an hour to cover the thirty kilometres to the Atlantic, because Uncle Kasimir drove more slowly than I have ever known anyone drive on an open stretch of road. He sat angled up against the wheel, steering with his left hand and telling tales of the heyday of Prohibition. Occasionally he would take a glance ahead to check that we were still in the right lane. The Italians did most of the business, he said. All along the coast, in places like Leonardo, Atlantic Highlands, Little Silver, Ocean Grove, Neptune City, Belmar and Lake Como, they built summer palaces for their families and villas for their women usually a church as well and a little house for a chaplain. Uncle slowed down even more and wound his window down. This is Toms River, he said, there's no one here in the winter. In the harbour, sailboats lay pushed up together like a frightened flock, rigging rattling. Two seagulls perched on top of a coffee shop built to look like a gingerbread house. The Buyright Store, the Pizza Parlour and the Hamburger Heaven were closed, and the private homes were locked up and shuttered too. The wind blew sand across the road and under the wooden sidewalks. The dunes, said Uncle, are invading the town. If people didn't keep coming in the summer, this would all be buried in a few years.

Here, my Sebaldish interpretation of the Asbury Park boardwalk, the day after Labor Day.

And The Rumpus Poetry Book Selection for October--

is Unbuilt Projects. I don't think I ever announced that here. 

Also, the book's now available on Amazon, ahead of that October 9 pub date. 

Four New Ones

The online magazine CEDARS just published four new pieces of mine: "Thomas Looked for the Happy Ones, "Cyclone," "Defunct," and "Ocelot." You can find the published versions of that work here.  And here's "Ocelot."

*****

OCELOT

She wanted the house more than she wanted her health. No one could talk her out of that, especially as a water view was a lot less to ask for than working lungs. Her lungs had given out months ago, and all the things she'd lost since then--a father, a sister, a dog, three lovers, a teaching job--Well, those could fill the pages of a book.

She had every right to dream about the pelicans in their squadrons, every right to count on the sight of the town dock far below the trees. She didn't give much thought to the fifteen minutes it took to climb the stairway from the road. Every step was felt in her lungs, but when she got to the front door, she breathed better than she'd ever breathed before.

When she couldn't get past the tenth step one day, she stopped. She just stopped, not giving a thought to the forecast or what it might feel like to sleep in soaked clothes. She wasn't going to cry, as she knew there would be plenty of reasons to cry much later. You had to be careful about what you spent your tears on these days or else you'd have no more left when you really had reason to cry.

The Life Coach found her the next morning. Somehow she'd managed to crawl to the twentieth step despite the roughness in her chest. She wanted her house. She needed her view, the clean white planes of her walls, anything better than the soiled houses down below, airless and tight on their jungly lanes.

But the Life Coach had ideas of her own. In order to bear herself, the Life Coach needed a calming view. Illness, war, crime, hunger, addiction: these were the things her work defied, and the sight of a sick woman on the steps behind her house did not work for her. It made her sick every time she thought of the woman climbing home, and after a few martinis one night, and maybe a toke or two of weed, she came up with a plan. The two could switch houses. The woman could live down below, among the fishmongers and the police, while the Life Coach could live up high, far from the conveniences that made her day bearable.

The woman agreed to the proposal, but that didn't mean that she was happy about it. One morning she opened her eyes to see an unfamiliar view outside her window. She didn't see the tops of the trees, but saw leaves dripping with sprinkler water. A stained stucco wall blocked her view of the house out back. She sat up for a minute. What were her books doing in piles on the floor? And that painting of the ocelot--it didn't belong by the window, but over the the bed. She moved to the sofa. She sat there for some hours until the sky went dark with rain. She walked into the kitchen to cut up pineapple. She couldn't shake a certain thought from her head: as much as she hated her current arrangement, it shouldn't have been so easy to leave the house she'd loved behind. The house she'd left behind was leading another life without her: different furniture, looser clothes in the closets, brighter jewelry in the drawers. The Life Coach was up there, with her macrame and candles. The house did perfectly fine without her. The woman felt it in her lungs, and she didn't even need to look up out the window to see that this was so.

The woman lived many years in the house on the ground. She took up cigarettes. She painted her toenails black, wore sunglasses at all hours. She tattooed her ankle with a ballpoint and a safety pin. She outlived her lungs to the wonder of her doctors, who wrote about her in the medical journals, while the Life Coach withered at the tops of the trees, beset by views of poverty, war, sickness, and addiction, until she walked down the steps one day and took a job behind the counter at the DMV.