i went to new hampshire to hear people speak about theater. in an old dormitory, on a bamboo cane chair, i sat with a few dozen others, waiting for the last lecture of the series to begin. the lecturer was impatient too, and didn't wait to be introduced. "I've really enjoyed the past few days here," he began, people still adjusting in their seats and pulling out legal pads and things to jot down all the answers with. "Actually, I guess I arrived yesterday, so I've enjoyed the past day here." He's interrupted by a younger, but not a young man, who has set out three bottles of poland spring like a triangle, in case this ancient man began to foam at the mouth or something i guess. "Everyone, we'd like this lecture to be...a sort of..Q and A...you know. You'll ask questions. This is David _______. Founded this in this year and did that in that."

"Why directing?" asked the young old man, doing his best James Lipton (but without that aweful goatee).

"I began in literature. At Havard. I studied there under the G.I Bill. Literature and Medicine. I thought i'd get it all covered."
His audience laughed, and we all relaxed a bit in our seats. He did his undergrad, and then masters at Harvard as well. "It was all paid for."

A woman in the front row, with a white bang cut straight across her forehead, cupped her hand around her ear. "A little louder please, Mr. ______." He leaned foreward. "Do I need to be louder? Can you hear me back there." We all nodded, we could hear him. "Better put your hearing aid in, Bronia," he teased her, but raised his voice all the same.

"I switched from literature to directing because I was chasing an actress. That one," and pointed a finger to the front row.

The lecture was anecdotal, another student complained later. He didn't answer any questions. He only told stories. Mr._______. How do you prepare for a show. A story about Dusty Hoffman. Mr.__________. What do you think of conservatory training. Remember that time that poor guy got electrocuted in the lighting booth. Mr.________. How do I get into directing. This one guy, he had a disease, gave him a long jaw and arms, and a nice deep voice that let him play many roles - we had to have his pituitary gland operated on.

I could have listened to him for hours, but i couldn't. I started to stop hearing the words he was saying, and just the sound of them. I wished I had a tape recorder to capture the rise and fall, the shift in his chair, the sound of his coffee moving into his mouth. Then I lost his voice altogether, and I started just to see his hands draped across his stiff knees, one clutching a cane. They slowly began to dissapear too, until I had nothing but his eyes, brown buttons framed with wrinkled pastry puffs above and beneath. Then I lost his eyes as my own filled up with tears. I took out my own legal pad and scribbled a note to the student next to me, and got up quickly to leave the room.

Not a moment too soon, as a sadness so thick came over me, and I pushed into the ladies room and into a stall to cry. I leaned against the support bar and sobbed into my hands, and i thought of another old man who died a year ago next week. I didn't know that I missed him, or that a stranger from Boston would hit me out of no where. It was good to cry, and fine to be sad when people die. And I think when you cry, or at least, when I cry, I want to think about the sad things, I want it to hurt a little, I want to remember. I did, I thought about holding his hand when he had the mask on, and buying all those newspapers and coffees for aunts, something to do. Sleeping on that bench with my grandmother, waiting for the alarm and the nurses to run in. the bruises on his hands where they put the needles in, blue on top of the brown sunspots. and then my aunt singing amazing grace. I just wanted her to shut up. Please, please stop, it was killing me. The funeral, where my mother sobbed into my shoulder. "Be sad, but don't be sad forever," I tried. "They're putting my Daddy in there..."
and I let her cry.
When I felt good and sad enough, and heavy with those memories, I wet a paper towel and tried to fix up my face a little. Ah, it'd be red for hours. I gave it up, and slipped back into the room. He was talking about the first rehearsal. Or rather, someone had asked him about the first rehearsal, and he was talking about something else again. His son sneaked in a few minutes later. "Here he is..." he beamed. "Here's my son. They want to know how we've been so sucessful as a family in the theater, Louis." Louis is an actor. "How our marriage has been so successful." "I don't know dad, you'll have to take that one."

After the lecture, some students stayed behind to take pictures and say thank you. I wanted to stop and shake his hand and to tell him, everything, really. I felt like he would listen. I couldn't though. How do you say, you look like a man I knew once, and it made me cry because I loved him.

I am not the first to love a man
I am not the first to love that man, and not the first to lose one.

a corot

je suis en possession d'une patience qui défie notre temps

i hope that you know
that you're sort of beautiful
and by sort of, of course, i mean so very much.
you'd be nice to jot down on a gray piece of paper in charcoal.
eye, nose, hair lips (not hairlip, of course that's a different story altogether! )
but i'm sure you haven't got the slightest clue that i mean you,
because the best and most beautiful never do.

the gift of the name

I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair




DON'T GO FAR OFF, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep....


Pablo Neruda

I can feel a heavy hand pressing me down into a tin tub filled with stones. middle finger on my face, baby and pointer wedged under my arms, and the thumb right between my legs, where it counts. A green garden hose slinks its way into my bath, and fills the tub with solid gold. Here, I am laid to rest, in monument to myself, and the panic. won't some friendly woodsman come and carve me out? Rub me down with terry cloth and sit me in front of a fire to feed me baked beans? Before he puts the can over the flame, he'll peel the label off it smoothly, and i'll read the secret message on the shiny white paper backing.

A little more patience, please.

- the universe

my mother told me that
I was born with an old soul,which makes me a little sad. I think of it shriveled and wrinkled, tucked in some aorta or ventricle, waiting, one day letting out a little gasp and letting go.
really, what it means is, i was born in the wrong century (but the right time of year i think, autumn is right for me).

Each day when I wake up I brush my hair one hundred times with a birch tree branch. Depending on the day of the week, I bouffant or beehive, tango my way around the bathroom with my hand mirror and draw on my eyebrows.

On thursdays, my hair is naked, and so am I. We ride bareback on tan horses, and sit crosslegged in high fields of hay. When dinner time comes and I head back to the camp, my mother is waiting at the door, and she wraps me in stiff silks and takes the bones from around my neck and pins me in tight so I can hardly breath.
It takes a while, but by dessert I admire the way my breasts move up and down with each tiny bite I take, and the puffs of powder that escape into the air each time I nod my head in interest.

When I blow out the candle that night, I inhale a little of the smoke, and someone starts to strum softly on a guitar. The songs about being in the moment, and being free, and a joints being passed around and I take it. This is more like it I think, and start to take my clothes off and look around for that horse. Always running off.
I get some sideways glances, but then those around the fire start to join me, and we dance and scrape our knees in the dirt.

When the sun begins to rise, I wake to find myself pressed against a set of blue cotton pajamas, with thin red stripes. My ear is sore from being slept on all night. I creep so softly out of bed and twist the blinds closed. It's friday morning now, and he'll want coffee. There's a soft thud and a jingle, it's the newspaper. Out comes the hairbrush again, it's a soft flip this time, and another flip when the pancakes start to bubble on one side. When I start to hear him creak down the steps, I panic, and make a dash for the door and run for it. I catch up with the bicycle, and steal it from the kid, thinking all the while that i hope he remembers to turn off the stove.

Each day is a struggle to put on jeans and socks and things, and remember to answer people outloud, and not just in my head. I walk on paths, between trees and smile, looking down at the pavement. If I were me, I'd think I was crazy. Honest I'm not, I'm just an old soul trying to write down my history before it dissapears.

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Outby Richard Siken




Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
Your want a better story. Who wouldn't?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I'm the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon.
I'm not the princess either.
Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I'm getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I'm the dragon. Bid deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn't deserve it.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And the the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn't look that much different from home,
because it didn't,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn't say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you're so great, you do it—
here's the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry
it's such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I'm coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.




"Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" by Richard Siken. From Crush, �© 2006 by Yale University, published by Yale University Press.