thirty.

The things
we say
when drunk
are the
ones
we don't
mean
to admit
and yet.

And yet.

twenty-nine.

Even with the windows closed
a breeze twists
blue stone windchimes,
crookedly screwed into the ceiling,
their wooden ring askew.
They catch on each other, clicking together
and reminding of that day, rain
threatening, the familiar dusty
air of the shop we visited
each August, buying candy
and birchbark dolls and
copper beads, comic books
and lead sinkers. The gravel
snapped under the tires the year my sister
turned sixteen, that last thread
of childhood. We bought ice cream
cones, blueberry and pecan,
and sat in the
grass trying to swallow
faster than the heat. Our
licenses crackled in pockets and
we'd rarely talked before, always
just that side of too far apart,
too much friction
in one tiny room. It was
the last summer I came home
to sleep in that house,
the rooms grown too tight for
all of us, soon to shrink smaller still.
I was in love with violence, the
stories of losses and redemption.
With words. With music.
With secrets and girls in red
lipstick and fishnet stockings,
with my childhood sweetheart,
with the desire to own everything
and admit nothing.
She was in love with a boy
who played the trombone.
We agreed on being somewhat adept
at ignoring the discontinuities.
We didn't buy windchimes or matching hats,
didn't take them home
in some parody
of eternal bloodline affection, but
years later, together
again in the same place,
she chose a set
in green for her son, hung them in the
window of a rented house in a
state I drive through on my way from
where I live
to the place I'd like to call home.
They hang there
still, and I wonder if, sometimes,
they chime in the stillness.

twenty-eight.

These days, whenever the future
seems fraught
with the moments
that will go wrong and the words
I'll be unable to reel back
into myself like fishing line,
like celluloid, like
the unraveling of a knot,
I picture
zombie kittens.
It has nothing to do
with life
or love
or the universe
or the price of tea,
but since when does that matter?
I repeat the phrase
to myself, imagine
the back of a rented sedan,
lost in the streets
of downtown Philadelphia, halfway
from Jersey to Princeton again.
It's enough, maybe
to know that should I ever decide
to start again,
I'd still have that day.

twenty-seven.

Ginsberg, on the back of a photograph, writes
William Burroughs ,
answering the first question; creating the last.
Burroughs by now is
a familiar constant, an image
known even when unknown, a figure of
dreams and nightmares and the violet minutes
between waking and grief, unposed,
on roof of
apartment house East Seventh Street.
His unseen viewer, always the archivist,
the collector of moments,
instants, people, things, places.
He, more than any of them, was the one
left holding the memories, left
with the need to record it all. The one
behind the camera. Scrawled,
where I had a flat,
softening the disjunction, leaving space for
we were lovers those months,
an announcement tasting of requiem,
and then the quiet,
editing his letters into books
not published till decades later,
the broken doubt and we hardly need
(as Queer, 1985)
to clarify, nor the
Lower East Side Fall 1953.
The looming tragedy of this moment,
this impression
is locked in a box in the basement
of a museum in a city far from
its beginnings. Nothing to witness its
hovering here, the ordinary
marking the boundaries of the possible.

twenty-six.

The pens in the bottom of my
backpack are playing hide-go-seek.

Each afternoon, I reach inside, grasp,
pull out a new color. Pink, green, purple,

blue, black, the red I have grudgingly acquired
in this, my transition to responsibility.

Sometimes I achieve only a pencil. Sometimes
even less. Sometimes I find nothing but erasers.

twenty-five.

We are reading the lives
of soldier poets.

It started with a copy of
The Waste Land.
Mine is composed of
17 pages of poem,
263 pages of notes.

This does not include the index.

It does not include the preface, or
the rather disingenuously named
A Note on the Text,
full of remarks that argue there can
be no text, the text is ephemeral.

Do not look for the text,
for you shall not find it.
The text, like all texts,
is a lie.

It contains no cake.

The Note is itself
approximately 61% text, and
39% notes regarding
A Note on the Text.

I tell myself this isn't excessive.
It's a complicated poem,
a poem sung in a minor key
but even the author
would agree that some things, some
existences, are perhaps
too ridiculous to be
named properly as anything but
comedy.

I do not laugh.

It is this strangeness
that leads us to Robert Graves,
to Siegfried Sassoon,
to Wilfred Owen, to the
complicated recollection that is
every soldier who meanwhile
dreamt himself elsewhere.

To the juxtaposition
of mud and blood and rhyme.