Traveling With Ray

How much more
it might have meant, a few years ago on a train
passing a row of houses strung along a lakeshore, to
have had you there. Idly chatting, making
the endless hours seem "normal" rather than running away from something, an
accretion of "somethings:" too many people with names and faces and stories
to tell which all become blissfully beside the point on a quick circuit
of our vast Nation, no goal in sight but to obscure the ultimate destination,
back to where I started, of course, the dog chasing, the snake eating the
clichéd tail, like "love" which gets automatically renewed without even
having to stand in line for it, requires no identification, in fact, it's
criminal how easy it is to begin the whole damn thing over again, no matter
how many miles you’ve logged between yourself and the object of your affection.

Which is one way to look at it. Clinging to that the way you cling to
the clear memory of your twenty year-old body as the way you actually look, the ideal
representation of "you, the perfectly designed container
for the person you still want to be, wise and foolish and full of hope, believing
in the way a particular shirt hangs off your shoulders like armor, the
smoke that drifts into the nostrils of your enemies, causing lust and
confusion, just the way you imagined it in the steamed-up bathroom mirror
after your "disco nap." Where did I bury that? Only to find it again
in a succession of premeditated smiles, drowning in admiration for anyone
who somehow seemed to be able to keep certain balls
in the air, with the sense to wait for the opportunity to fall, lightly
without speaking to the unimaginably soft pillows of actual release,
the appropriate music playing without ceasing and ever-changing as
though one had actually spent the time to figure out the cold
technology whereby that happens, can happen without any
sort of magic at all.

So my mind turns to weathered shingles and Provincetown, or your personal row
of white buildings backed by a towering wood. Not so much a person as a path
through some non-local underbrush, an actual timetable, the thrill of being able to mark
the entire future up to account, the realization that no-one believes in me so much as
the Chase Manhattan Mastercard which, thus far, has provided me with all my dreams...
seriously, as if that were the ultimate thing, opening the present
you've bought for yourself and finding it's exactly what you wanted.
"This modern life.” Knowing it all turns upon you. Well, not you, exactly,
but me, if that makes sense, the marginal distinction between me and the parade
of "you," no single one of whom is so distinct as to make me forget myself and the
responsibility which is mine, an indebtedness to the vaguely cruddy world which
spits me out the moment I forget how important it is to remember time,
the kind that counts you out one minute and in the next discovers
there is water on the moon.