Family Newsletter

Why should it come as a surprise? That the days
End up being mostly cliché, endless expanses
Of glaring whiteness waiting hopefully
To be filled with everything you never had, but somehow
Can't have anymore -- even though lately
You've been doing everything "right," or at least
Have remained so motionless
Relative to the rest of the world that your sins
Could only be those of omission.

So why even bother to go through with it?
The bridges all incinerated behind you, the forward path
Uncertain at worst, at best probably more of the same:
Occasional moments of clarity and feeling surrounded
On three sides by slick, black water stretched tight to
A flat horizon.

Still, it's not exactly an occasion for sorrow, is it?
Finding yourself at the end of your own particular world
Is exactly where you wanted to be, here
On this peninsula of dull pain you have finally
Reached the solution to the first half of your life.
You may now go on to the essay question,
Which fortunately for you has always been a snap.

After all, what better place for your ship to finally
Come in than on the very edge of life? Your
vision un-obscured except to landward, where
Row after row of gray hills cradle the morning fog until the sun
Is at its height -- or sometimes even longer, late into the afternoon.
Therefore, you wait, weighing the alternatives:
The golden messenger gliding on winged feet over the water,
Or the dark carriage emerging from the grimy foothills
To bear you unwilling away to destinations all the more
Fearsome for being known -- the cluttered apartment, the bench
Outside the coffee shop, the enduring silence
Of confusion stunned beyond regret.

Little wonder you always turn to the sea, scanning the glassy surface
For signs of life, though keeping an almost too-respectful
Distance, breathless with the image of being drawn
Into that gigantic mirror, disappearing without evidence
Of ever having gotten this far: the almost irresistible
Compulsion of the acrophobic, the second between jumping
And falling where flight is possible, borne up by fictions of
Holidays past -- the lives joined with yours over time and space,
The maple, split by freak lightning, bleeding sweetness
And profit onto the snowy ground.

Our Best Loved Waltzes
(for Jonathan Ceniceroz)

It's possible we have too much
information about the way "life works."
Who would have thought the morning, with
all its potential, would bring a private resolution
(over coffee with friends) to "keep things out,"
as though experience required editing even as it
washed over your skin, some bitchy but necessary obsession
with key lights and camera angles, ideas
about art brought down to the comfortable
level of catering, the legendary hours in
make-up that made Miss Dietrich...well, Miss Dietrich.

Not that I'm not
as sentimental about fearlessness as the next guy,
the beauty of flying brave flags on a promenade
down a dirty street -- a well-laid punch into
the solar plexus of sheer ignorance eliciting tears
of purest admiration but, somehow, no
impulse to join in, turn out the closets for a
stained bed sheet (sprinkled with spring flowers) and
leftover paint to make a banner defining
the moment which, from my place teetering
on the edge of the curb, has already passed, disappeared
in a tornado of paper and colored cellophane.

It's too fragile to believe in for any length of time, which
may be the problem, anyway. Casually bending
over backwards to check the straightness
of the drawn-on seams running down into your
sling-back pumps eventually becomes
a full-time occupation, gets lost in its own particular bitterness--
all the wild joys unshared, grimy from being handled,
put away "for later." Better to sink directly
into the tediously bourgeois than watch your wardrobe
trade its color for a cut that hides what time has taught you, props
up a hollow head on a slim stalk of ivory silk shot through with silver.

Happiness most likely lies elsewhere, under snow, some other
place where no-one else is looking. I'm tempted
to say "life" has no meaning, except that we feel that it does, walking
halfway home down some dangerous avenue clotted with people we
fear are carrying the disease of sadness and regret, marveling
at the slippery maroon plastic furniture in the window of the "Going
Out of Business Sale," injection-molded into coiled promises of endless
nights of hot, Tinsel Town sex on greasy polyester sheets. Climbing
into the popcorn-scented breeze from the "better" part of town, rung to
rung up shiny aluminum ladders forged from the kind and necessary illusions we
maintain about each other and ourselves, slightly above the headlights
of the oncoming taxis, and the rest of the world, now swept by Lotto fever.