journal 19/10/10 (vancouver-montreal)
I.
Think of Ben & I sketch-obsessed, tall letters & thin women, freedom scrawl & death-fixation. What does it mean to be displaced in space, singularly in gauzy airline stupor & then on a mountain with a boy in a sharp jacket, technicolour sunrise & my jaw terror-tight. What does it mean to still need you, even at my most powerful & adored? There are songs about death, whiskey filling a cathedral; there are songs without names. Isn’t there a fluency to self-aberration, a taught swagger, the wordless definitive nothing of smashing pills under paper. To breathe the powder off a Visa Infinite, to connect vaguely with someone handsome thumbing the amphetamine from my nose… On the roof, up a ladder, the tagged & visual city, beer bottles lobbed into a car lot, the great smash of gridded light. Ed looks at me with difficulty over the radio, sort of burning urban martyr in a chapel of posters, a heartbreak saint sipping screw-top wine. There’s a bathroom crammed with mud & bikes, the rickety heavenward exit, the red-hot hand language of the older, grittier east, boys kissing train cars with the bold script of their names. Where is Johnston in the fur coat, Gillian in torn stockings, Philip sleepless & disappearing towards morning shift as I fade in & out of sickness on the fire escape? What a ragged brawl with time, all these faces dissolving absence, the thrill and then weirdness of it, suddenly still on a futon where the room fades fast from light. Talking past dawn, talking all day, turned screw in the hinge of our mouths, the strange lifetime work of keeping out loneliness. Now don’t all these row-houses look familiar, every stoop conjuring a name, a dirty mattress, a bubbled laugh.
II.
Futon dreaming, riddled monologue adrift out the bricked window. Hot-stomached, feeling drug-dirty, lost out in a body talkin’ dance, returning home to be moved to tears by the pure crippling earnestness of you — feeling rabbit-foot lucky, inexplicably charmed, thinking about how, body-to-body, it’s only against you that I’m heart-height. Sun-headed, lion-hearted lover, your eyes are annals of mythology…
III.
A dream you have: the elevation of forgetting, the faceless familiar death, the palpable loss more chilling in hilly downtown core. You say: my hand was on an arm that was yours and then suddenly wasn’t yours. We walked mourning through a park; you turned to face me but your face wasn’t there. You were gone when I called your name.
IV.
Don DeLillo, Underworld: There were weeks went by when we barely slept. We were together every hour of the day … sleeping and waking up and looking around and it was still dark, or still light, depending, and finally we’d stop driving for one reason or another … but only until it was time to go again and she’d rumble up in the 1950 Merc, chassis lowered and driveline slightly souped, and we were headed west again.
“Don’t tell me your dreams,” I said.
“But you have to hear.”
“I don’t want to hear.”
“Oh you bastard, you have to hear,” Amy said, “because everything that happens has to happen to both of us.”
“Don’t you know people don’t want to hear other people’s dreams?”
“Oh you bastard, what other people? Who are these other people?”
“Watch the road.”
“Every smallest thought I thought we said we’d share.”
“Watch the road. Drive the car.” I told her.
And once I dropped her off in Santa Fe, where she had family friends, and kept the car myself and didn’t play the radio or read the newspaper and she caught up with me a week later in a miners’ bar in Bisbee, Arizona and we played a flirty game of liar’s poker and climbed the high tight streets and felt a thing so powerful, and knew the other felt it, that we thought our faces might ignite.
V.
Think of the mattress-feathers afloat on your jacket all over. Think of the time I cut my pelvic bone and you bit my hip with nothing short of great devotion. Of the horsefly turned over dead in the ginger ale, the idling car in the cold street, the prints by Otto Dix — House Destroyed by Aircraft Bombs, Nocturner Encounter with a Lunatic. The lightness of form and ultradense darkness, primal nothing. Think of the threadbare blazers cut of cigarette smoke, the wonder of this strange city breathing poverty, of becoming a regular of the corner coffee-mongers & tomato polenta & the sun shying away thru the clouds. What force of friendship dedicates books & holds a hug too long & endures your folded clothes on the ottoman, packets of cheddar in the fridge? Talks you down thru your drunken displacement & distance doldrums, wanders pregnant into the great laughjam of your life? It’s great & beautiful here, walking to corner diner/depanneurs where there are sunsets painted on the wall and our sandwiches are made lovingly by a boy in a knit sweater who dances while he cooks; where we chat in parks with hands frozen stiff and drink bad wine in friends’ houses full of paintings and sculptures and objects culled off the living street.
V.
Don Delillo, Underworld: She didn’t know the West and she’d never flown above it in weather so clear. It looked young and untouched, it had the strangeness of worlds we’d never seen, it was not ours from up here, it was too flowingly new and strange — we hadn’t settled it yet.
