I’ve been thinking a lot about coincidence, as one tends to do when cold weather suddenly breaks, people are leaving their homes, and life seems to be picking up where it left off—as though, over the winter months, we were too busy burrowing to consider the notion of change. Being a person who is extremely gratified by the sense of connecting one disparate thing to another, I have spent these spring days thinking of the different ways that the recent changes in my life might be interrelated.
With the following poem, I wanted to capture the strangeness of noticing these coincidences along with something of how it feels to search for their meaning. It is this experience of noticing and searching that, on a day to day basis, come to shape our perspective of how nature and the universe work; they lead us to find that our lives are not individual entities subjected to objective forces but instead overlapping circles, like hot water poured over coffee, looping back forever and retracing steps, finding old things new and new things old. I also wanted to write an ode to the people I know and the miraculousness of our lives together, which really is all I’m ever trying to do.
I was partly inspired to write this after seeing a performance by Steve Benson at the Portland Conservatory of Music. Benson delivered an improv poetry reading with a flute accompaniment, riffing from words and phrases that he seemed to discover hiding in his pockets along the way. What was so astonishing was not the particular subjects of his work, but the way that his mind would jump from one subject to another in a way that at first seemed totally random but that eventually began to feel like a spider casting a web over various objects in the room. I wondered then if that was the real beauty of creative writing: the way that it’s not just utilizing words and phrases but putting them into an order that, in another context, might not make any sense. The effect is to make one consider and feel ideas in an order and in a proximity that is totally new, allowing for an interesting and even revelatory experience.
An April Sunday, 8:30am, Pouring Coffee In Concentric Circles...
1
If we are all celestial bodies, then we must be radically busy
with grocery shopping or making sure our mothers have fully documented
histories, because people should know the risks she took
when leaving home at eighteen and how American history changed
when she took that bus to Newark, where thirty years later
I would leave on a plane in a selfish attempt to escape. Individual gravities
seem to not only keep us trapped in orbit but
occasionally they make us aware that we are not circles at all
but ovular: encroaching upon one another, overlapping
at our sides. It’s uncomfortable, really. Perhaps we are instead
pots of boiling water: we notice whenever someone else
boils over, and then it’s the most chaotic thing
to have ever happened.
Or ships at sea. Entire seasons of relative happiness,
playing puzzles by sorting pieces by number of limbs
half-heartedly watching childhood nostalgia on loop.
A squall reminds us that we have always been taking
shelter from the inevitable, for we had not been born
on the sea. We are made for the deep: wooden beams
and tanned hides. Astonishment & fright
as morning comes again.
*
A friend asks if I am busy, if I have the time to talk.
I will not return to work for the rest of that day. We take walks
and talk, staring into an indefinite future of tennis courts
unfortunate pickleball. Things
will never be the same, I realize,
as I pour coffee and take a seat.
2
Of course, we never learned how to build things properly—
we learned to admire the bricks, the particular shades
and tones that say nature, or age, or a time of activity
in human history that for some reason is not repugnant to us.
For a while there it appeared to be working—We really did have
fun, didn’t we? We had such beautiful friends. They’re still beautiful
but the pictures have aged. All along we have been guessing
upon the sheer weight of memory, the way that one thing tends
usually not to part from another, hoping
with tongues cemented to the bottoms of mouths
that nothing would move.
*
Things are fucking crazy, my brother says; but he feels good.
He feels free, living now on a friend’s couch.
At the time I am living on an island, trapped
by the sense that something might be happening differently
in some other life. I remember
my brother telling me of his divorce,
how it felt to hear him over the phone.
3
A draw of the cards:
XVIII. THE MOON.
Peace, watery emotions, cycles and growth.
Seems a bit too much
on the nose.
You can find freedom by unveiling what is hidden.
*
Someone tells me that they have always been unsure
and part of my foundation shifts. I never learned very well
how to mortar, so either I have to deal
with unsure foundations or rebuild
completely. The task is beyond monumental.
I’m watching someone else who’s trying
to do it: their lives are pouring out
home goods, affectionate
toiletries, bedroom stuffed animals
the things we should never be embarrassed
by littering the streets. I am crying for them
and for myself. Soon we will adapt to chaos, and perhaps
that will be the best test of the examined life. . .
. . . Will you keep on watching
as things fall apart, floors go unwashed and
people try to love you but turn away
to love themselves? Can’t you tell when someone really needs
that strawberry ice cream in order to live,
even though it makes you think of beaches riddled with trash
and a too salty-ocean? Will you know when it’s time
to take out a shovel and enjoy the rain,
to admit that we will return to the dirt
and so might be better to go
voluntarily, hands-first
naked and splashing?
It’s okay.
I have been the last to learn how to say ‘love’
and mean it. We can try to speak the truth
together; I will learn that you’ve been lying
and it won’t destroy me because the salt
will already be in my throat. I never loved the ocean
the way that you do. I have always dreamt
of rivers, rocks, cool-flowing hills.
The taste of ice.