Walkman
I didn't mean to quit drinking,
it just sort of happened.
I'd always assumed
it'd be difficult, or not
difficult, exactly,
but impossible.
Then one New Year's Eve
twenty years ago
at the VFW, Craig and I
were drinking beer
from brown bottles,
peeling the labels off
into little confetti nests.
In Mexico
the previous New Year's Eve,
I'd started drinking
again after a year sober.
I traveled by myself
in Oaxaca for a month
and had at least two
beautiful experiences.
The bus I was on broke
down in the mountains
and I watched the stars blink
on with a Mexican girl
who later sent me a letter
I never answered. That's one
of the experiences. The others
are secrets. We left the VFW
at a reasonable hour for once.
I never took another drink.
I'm not sure why not.
I don't think it had anything
to do with me. I think
it was a miracle. Like when
the hero at the last
second pulls the lever to switch
the train to the track the heroine's
not tied to. I was always broke
in those days, whereas now I'm just
poor. I brought a Walkman
and a backpack stuffed with
cassettes to Oaxaca. I was sick
of them all within a week
and longed to buy a new tape
but couldn't spare the pesos.
I listened to Live Through This
at the Zapotec ruins
of Monte Alb‡n,
Rumours on the bus to DF.
At Puerto çngel,
my headphones leaking
tinny discord
across a rooftop bar,
I sat watching the ocean.
An American man about the age
I am now
asked me what I was listening to.
I said Sonic Youth. He asked
which album, I said Sister.
He chuckled and said
"I'm Johnny Strike."
It probably wasn't a miracle,
but I couldn't believe it.
Here was the guy who wrote
Crime's 1976 classic
"Hot Wire My Heart,"
which Sonic Youth covered
on their 1987 classic, Sister,
which I was listening to
on my Walkman
at the end of Mexico in the sun.
Except actually I was
listening to Daydream Nation,
I change it to Sister
when I tell that story.
But it's a beautiful story
even without embellishment.
That's another of the Oaxacan
experiences I mentioned,
but the rest are secrets.
Oh Mexico, as James Schuyler
wrote to Frank O'Hara,
are you just another
dissembling dream?
Schuyler was too tender
for me then, but now
he is just tender enough.
I love his wishes.
That "the beautiful humorous
white whippet" could
be immortal, for instance.
But I can't always forgive
his Central Park West tone,
his Austrian operettas
and long long lawns,
though he wasn't rich
and was tormented
enough, God knows.
In the summer of 1984
in Salida, Colorado,
I had Slade and Steve Perry
on my Walkman.
I drank milk from jumbo
Burger King glasses
emblazoned with scenes
from Return of the Jedi.
You can't buy tampons
with food stamps
even if your mother
insists that you try.
Salida sits along
the Arkansas River,
whose current
one hot afternoon
swept me away
and deposited me
in a shallow far downstream.
It was the first time
I thought I was going
to die and didn't. The Arkansas
and everything else are mortal.
My mom had been born again,
to my chagrin. But lately I find
I do believe in God
the Father Almighty, Maker
of heaven and earth:
and in Jesus Christ,
his Son our Lord,
who was conceived by
the Holy Ghost. How
the hell did I become
a Christian? Grace,
I guess. It just sort of
happened. I admit I find
the resurrection of the body
and life everlasting
difficult, or not difficult,
exactly, but impossible.
There is no crazier belief
than that we won't be
covered by leaves, leaves,
leaves, as Schuyler has it,
which is to say, really gone,
as O'Hara put it in his lovely
sad poem to John Ashbery.
But hope is a different animal
from belief. "The crazy hope
that Paul proclaims in 2
Corinthians," my friend John
wrote to me when his mother
died. The Christian religion
is very beautiful sometimes
and very true at other times,
though sophisticated persons
are still expected to be above
all that sort of thing. Well,
I'm a Marxist
too. Go and sell that thou
hast, and give to the poor.
On his new album Dr. Dre
says "Anybody complaining
about their circumstances
lost me." At the risk of losing
more billionaires, complain
about your circumstances,
I say. I listened to The Chronic
on my Walkman the summer
I worked the night shift
at Kinko's. I was dating Deirdre,
who when I placed my headphones
on her ears and pushed play
said "Why is this man cursing
at me?" Said it more loudly
than was strictly necessary.
A crazy man
would come into Kinko's
around two a.m. and ask me
to fax dire, scribbled warnings
to every news outlet in Denver.
He wanted to let people know
that God would punish the area
with natural disasters
if the county succeeded
in evicting him from the land
he was squatting on. He'd ask me
to help him think of various
extreme weather events
that God might unleash.
I'd say "Typhoons?"
though we were in Colorado.
He'd scribble typhoons.
Scraps of dirty paper absolutely
covered front and back with ominous,
angrily scrawled black characters:
attn. nbc nightly news there will
be fires tornadoes typhoons.
I would help him compose his screeds
then fax each one to Denver's
major TV and radio stations, the Denver Post,
and the Rocky Mountain News,
which has since stopped its presses
for good. Except in fact I would
only pretend to fax them
and then refuse his money,
saying I was glad to help the cause.
What if he wasn't batshit but a true
prophet? The Denver metropolitan area
was not visited by disaster
at that time, but this proves
nothing. Look at Jonah and
Nineveh, that great city.
I don't believe he was a prophet,
but Kinko's is beautiful
at two a.m. even if I hated
working there. The rows
of silent copiers
like retired dreadnoughts
in a back bay, the fluorescent
pallor, the classic-rock station
I would turn back up after
my coworker turned it down.
Did the guy sketch amateurish
floods, tornadoes, etc.,
on his jeremiads or did I
imagine that? I wish
I'd thought to make copies
for myself. I wish I'd kept
the Mexican girl's letter.
I wish I'd kept the copiers
with their slow arms
of light, the lights of DF
filling the Valley of Mexico
as the bus makes its slow way
down and Stevie sings what you
had, oh, what you lost. Schuyler
and his wishes! "I wish it was
1938 or '39 again." "I wish
I could take an engine apart
and reassemble it." "I wish I'd
brought my book of enlightening
literary essays." "I wish I could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers."
That last one's my favorite. I wish
I'd written it. I would often kick
for months until driven back to a bar
by fear or boredom or both. I saw
Tomorrow Never Dies-starring
Pierce Brosnan, the second-worst
James Bond-in Oaxaca and
came out wishing my life were
romantic and exciting and charmed
or at least that I had someone
to talk to. So I stopped at the first
bar I saw, and someone
talked to me. It's so sad and
perfect to be young and alone
in the Z—calo when the little lights
come up like fish surfacing
beneath the moon and you want
to grab the people walking by
and say who are you, are you
as afraid as I am. And you don't
know that twenty years later
you'll be writing this poem.
Well, now I'm being sentimental
and forgetting that in those days
I wrote the worst poems ever.
"I held a guitar and trembled
and would not sing" is an actual
line I wrote! The typhoon guy
could have written better poetry.
Today I want to write about
how it's been almost twenty years
since I owned a Walkman.
Just think: there was a song
that I didn't know
would be the last song
I would ever play on a Walkman.
I listened to it like it was just
any old song,
because it was.
The Deep Heart's Core
We must stop feeling things
in the deep heart's core.
That's where the lies live.
If you would see what's behind you,
close your eyes. Shut your mouth
if you want to send people to hell.
You have to want to go to hell. Deserve's
got nothing to do with it.
Yet hell has a waiting list.
Well, that's how dumb I am,
feeling my way to hell one
name at a time.
You Haven't Texted Since Saturday
You haven't texted
since Saturday,
when I read Keith Waldrop's
translation of Les Fleurs du Mal
on a bench by whatever
that tower is on the hill
in Fort Greene Park
until you walked up
late as always and I do
mean always
in your dad's army jacket
and said "Hi, buddy"
in a tone that told me
all I needed to know,
although protocol dictated
that you should sit next to me
and spell it out
and we should hold each other
and cry and then pretend
everything was fine, would
be fine, was someday
before the final
trumpet, before heat death,
zero point, big rip
sure to be absolutely
perfectly completely
probably fine. And
though it wasn't and
wouldn't be,
I walked you to the G
then rode the C
to Jay Street-MetroTech.
Just now I took a break from
this retrospect
to smoke one of the Camels
in the sky-blue box marked
il fumo uccide
you brought me from Italy
and page through a book
on contemporary physics.
"Something must be
very wrong," it said,
and I agreed,
although it turned out
the author meant that "no theory
of physics should produce
infinities with impunity."
I'd point out that every theory
of the heart
produces infinities
with impunity
if I were the kind of jerk
who uses the heart
to mean the human
tendency to make
others suffer
just because we
hate to suffer
alone. I'm sorry
I brought a fitted sheet
to the beach. I'm sorry
I'm selfish and determined
to make the worst
of everything. I'm
sorry language is a ship
that goes down
while you're building it.
The Hesychasts of Byzantium
stripped their prayers
of words. It's been tried
with poems too. But insofar
as I am a disappointment
to myself and others, it seems fitting
to set up shop in almost
and not quite and that's not
what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,
though, with its
infinities. And I have to say
I am not a big fan
of being sad. Some people
can pull it off. When
we hiked Overlook, you
went on ahead to the summit
while I sat on a rock
reading Thomas Bernhard.
I'd just made it to the ruins
of the old hotel
when you came jogging back down
in your sports bra
saying I had to come see the view.
But my allergies were bad
and I was thirsty,
so we headed down the gravelly trail,
pleased by the occasional
advent of a jittery
chipmunk. You showed me pictures
on your phone of the fire
tower, the nineteenth-
century graffiti carved
into the rock, and the long
unfolded valley
of the Hudson. At the bottom,
the Buddhists let us
fill our water bottles
from their drinking fountain.
We called a cab and sat
along the roadside
watching prayer flags
rush in the wind. I said the wind
carried the prayers
inscribed on the flags
to the gods, but Wikipedia
informs me now that
the Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread
good will and compassion into all pervading space.
So I was wrong, again,
about the gods. Wherever
you are, I hope you stand
still now and then
and let the prayers
wash over you like the breakers
at Fort Tilden that day
the huge gray gothic
clouds massed and threatened to drop
a storm on our heads
but didn't.
Shed
I wish I had a shed out back
of a house in an open
place and I'd sit in the cold
shed on quiet nights when all
the televisions go out and
the wires and the other wires
sing, and wonder what the small
things think about. A bitumen
boat in a royal tomb and a snake
and an angel too. Away from
loss prevention officers and
11 Secrets to Refinancing Your
Student Loans. I don't mean
some romantic Unabomber
shit, just a shed. The light
from a candle in the shed's
single window tosses a golden
square upon the snow that I
now see should surround
and shroud the shed. I hate
winter, so these snows must
be aesthetic. The December
before last I didn't leave my
apartment except for bodega
runs to stock up on Diet Coke
and peanut butter. I watched
every Anthony Mann Western
and spent half a day trying to
arrange Cheez-Its into the form
of Jimmy Stewart's face, then
ate the face. Some sorrow is
so baroque you look back
on it and feel like a schmuck.
Just yesterday the CBD Lifestyle
Station clerk asked how I was
and I said "Good, and you?" like
you're supposed to, like they teach
you in disaster simulations. I
know how to feel in my shed,
away from these statues
of assholes on horses,
and I let the shed field
the questions. Even in my
shed I want a shed.
When Didn't I Know It
I was born without language
and thus without the ability
to formulate a plan.
It was a few years after
the moon fell
to an American incursion.
I was smaller then
and prone to fits of pique.
I began to learn things
about dinosaurs and the way
a bag of vending-machine chips
will sometimes get stuck
on the Slinky-like contraption
that pushes it into free fall.
And there is no remedy;
according to the system
a fair transaction was concluded.
I learned that airplanes hang
on wires from ceilings.
I feared wasps. I remained
outside most churches.
I required stitches.
I was an expert on Bigfoot,
a reputed hominid
called s‡sq'ets
by the First Nations peoples.
I watched the moon
precisely blot the sun
on the wall of a shoebox.
As for Sea-Monkeys,
they did not, in fact, ride
one another like cowboys
on ponies or follow
a candle beam as if hypnotized.
Cobalt gives off-scientists
say "emits"-electrons. I
read that. I read about little
houses, big horses, assistant
pig-keepers, red ferns.
In those days of products
without clocks, I called
a number to hear
the time and temperature.
Walkman
I didn't mean to quit drinking,
it just sort of happened.
I'd always assumed
it'd be difficult, or not
difficult, exactly,
but impossible.
Then one New Year's Eve
twenty years ago
at the VFW, Craig and I
were drinking beer
from brown bottles,
peeling the labels off
into little confetti nests.
In Mexico
the previous New Year's Eve,
I'd started drinking
again after a year sober.
I traveled by myself
in Oaxaca for a month
and had at least two
beautiful experiences.
The bus I was on broke
down in the mountains
and I watched the stars blink
on with a Mexican girl
who later sent me a letter
I never answered. That's one
of the experiences. The others
are secrets. We left the VFW
at a reasonable hour for once.
I never took another drink.
I'm not sure why not.
I don't think it had anything
to do with me. I think
it was a miracle. Like when
the hero at the last
second pulls the lever to switch
the train to the track the heroine's
not tied to. I was always broke
in those days, whereas now I'm just
poor. I brought a Walkman
and a backpack stuffed with
cassettes to Oaxaca. I was sick
of them all within a week
and longed to buy a new tape
but couldn't spare the pesos.
I listened to Live Through This
at the Zapotec ruins
of Monte Alb‡n,
Rumours on the bus to DF.
At Puerto çngel,
my headphones leaking
tinny discord
across a rooftop bar,
I sat watching the ocean.
An American man about the age
I am now
asked me what I was listening to.
I said Sonic Youth. He asked
which album, I said Sister.
He chuckled and said
"I'm Johnny Strike."
It probably wasn't a miracle,
but I couldn't believe it.
Here was the guy who wrote
Crime's 1976 classic
"Hot Wire My Heart,"
which Sonic Youth covered
on their 1987 classic, Sister,
which I was listening to
on my Walkman
at the end of Mexico in the sun.
Except actually I was
listening to Daydream Nation,
I change it to Sister
when I tell that story.
But it's a beautiful story
even without embellishment.
That's another of the Oaxacan
experiences I mentioned,
but the rest are secrets.
Oh Mexico, as James Schuyler
wrote to Frank O'Hara,
are you just another
dissembling dream?
Schuyler was too tender
for me then, but now
he is just tender enough.
I love his wishes.
That "the beautiful humorous
white whippet" could
be immortal, for instance.
But I can't always forgive
his Central Park West tone,
his Austrian operettas
and long long lawns,
though he wasn't rich
and was tormented
enough, God knows.
In the summer of 1984
in Salida, Colorado,
I had Slade and Steve Perry
on my Walkman.
I drank milk from jumbo
Burger King glasses
emblazoned with scenes
from Return of the Jedi.
You can't buy tampons
with food stamps
even if your mother
insists that you try.
Salida sits along
the Arkansas River,
whose current
one hot afternoon
swept me away
and deposited me
in a shallow far downstream.
It was the first time
I thought I was going
to die and didn't. The Arkansas
and everything else are mortal.
My mom had been born again,
to my chagrin. But lately I find
I do believe in God
the Father Almighty, Maker
of heaven and earth:
and in Jesus Christ,
his Son our Lord,
who was conceived by
the Holy Ghost. How
the hell did I become
a Christian? Grace,
I guess. It just sort of
happened. I admit I find
the resurrection of the body
and life everlasting
difficult, or not difficult,
exactly, but impossible.
There is no crazier belief
than that we won't be
covered by leaves, leaves,
leaves, as Schuyler has it,
which is to say, really gone,
as O'Hara put it in his lovely
sad poem to John Ashbery.
But hope is a different animal
from belief. "The crazy hope
that Paul proclaims in 2
Corinthians," my friend John
wrote to me when his mother
died. The Christian religion
is very beautiful sometimes
and very true at other times,
though sophisticated persons
are still expected to be above
all that sort of thing. Well,
I'm a Marxist
too. Go and sell that thou
hast, and give to the poor.
On his new album Dr. Dre
says "Anybody complaining
about their circumstances
lost me." At the risk of losing
more billionaires, complain
about your circumstances,
I say. I listened to The Chronic
on my Walkman the summer
I worked the night shift
at Kinko's. I was dating Deirdre,
who when I placed my headphones
on her ears and pushed play
said "Why is this man cursing
at me?" Said it more loudly
than was strictly necessary.
A crazy man
would come into Kinko's
around two a.m. and ask me
to fax dire, scribbled warnings
to every news outlet in Denver.
He wanted to let people know
that God would punish the area
with natural disasters
if the county succeeded
in evicting him from the land
he was squatting on. He'd ask me
to help him think of various
extreme weather events
that God might unleash.
I'd say "Typhoons?"
though we were in Colorado.
He'd scribble typhoons.
Scraps of dirty paper absolutely
covered front and back with ominous,
angrily scrawled black characters:
attn. nbc nightly news there will
be fires tornadoes typhoons.
I would help him compose his screeds
then fax each one to Denver's
major TV and radio stations, the Denver Post,
and the Rocky Mountain News,
which has since stopped its presses
for good. Except in fact I would
only pretend to fax them
and then refuse his money,
saying I was glad to help the cause.
What if he wasn't batshit but a true
prophet? The Denver metropolitan area
was not visited by disaster
at that time, but this proves
nothing. Look at Jonah and
Nineveh, that great city.
I don't believe he was a prophet,
but Kinko's is beautiful
at two a.m. even if I hated
working there. The rows
of silent copiers
like retired dreadnoughts
in a back bay, the fluorescent
pallor, the classic-rock station
I would turn back up after
my coworker turned it down.
Did the guy sketch amateurish
floods, tornadoes, etc.,
on his jeremiads or did I
imagine that? I wish
I'd thought to make copies
for myself. I wish I'd kept
the Mexican girl's letter.
I wish I'd kept the copiers
with their slow arms
of light, the lights of DF
filling the Valley of Mexico
as the bus makes its slow way
down and Stevie sings what you
had, oh, what you lost. Schuyler
and his wishes! "I wish it was
1938 or '39 again." "I wish
I could take an engine apart
and reassemble it." "I wish I'd
brought my book of enlightening
literary essays." "I wish I could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers."
That last one's my favorite. I wish
I'd written it. I would often kick
for months until driven back to a bar
by fear or boredom or both. I saw
Tomorrow Never Dies-starring
Pierce Brosnan, the second-worst
James Bond-in Oaxaca and
came out wishing my life were
romantic and exciting and charmed
or at least that I had someone
to talk to. So I stopped at the first
bar I saw, and someone
talked to me. It's so sad and
perfect to be young and alone
in the Z—calo when the little lights
come up like fish surfacing
beneath the moon and you want
to grab the people walking by
and say who are you, are you
as afraid as I am. And you don't
know that twenty years later
you'll be writing this poem.
Well, now I'm being sentimental
and forgetting that in those days
I wrote the worst poems ever.
"I held a guitar and trembled
and would not sing" is an actual
line I wrote! The typhoon guy
could have written better poetry.
Today I want to write about
how it's been almost twenty years
since I owned a Walkman.
Just think: there was a song
that I didn't know
would be the last song
I would ever play on a Walkman.
I listened to it like it was just
any old song,
because it was.
The Deep Heart's Core
We must stop feeling things
in the deep heart's core.
That's where the lies live.
If you would see what's behind you,
close your eyes. Shut your mouth
if you want to send people to hell.
You have to want to go to hell. Deserve's
got nothing to do with it.
Yet hell has a waiting list.
Well, that's how dumb I am,
feeling my way to hell one
name at a time.
You Haven't Texted Since Saturday
You haven't texted
since Saturday,
when I read Keith Waldrop's
translation of Les Fleurs du Mal
on a bench by whatever
that tower is on the hill
in Fort Greene Park
until you walked up
late as always and I do
mean always
in your dad's army jacket
and said "Hi, buddy"
in a tone that told me
all I needed to know,
although protocol dictated
that you should sit next to me
and spell it out
and we should hold each other
and cry and then pretend
everything was fine, would
be fine, was someday
before the final
trumpet, before heat death,
zero point, big rip
sure to be absolutely
perfectly completely
probably fine. And
though it wasn't and
wouldn't be,
I walked you to the G
then rode the C
to Jay Street-MetroTech.
Just now I took a break from
this retrospect
to smoke one of the Camels
in the sky-blue box marked
il fumo uccide
you brought me from Italy
and page through a book
on contemporary physics.
"Something must be
very wrong," it said,
and I agreed,
although it turned out
the author meant that "no theory
of physics should produce
infinities with impunity."
I'd point out that every theory
of the heart
produces infinities
with impunity
if I were the kind of jerk
who uses the heart
to mean the human
tendency to make
others suffer
just because we
hate to suffer
alone. I'm sorry
I brought a fitted sheet
to the beach. I'm sorry
I'm selfish and determined
to make the worst
of everything. I'm
sorry language is a ship
that goes down
while you're building it.
The Hesychasts of Byzantium
stripped their prayers
of words. It's been tried
with poems too. But insofar
as I am a disappointment
to myself and others, it seems fitting
to set up shop in almost
and not quite and that's not
what I meant. I draw the line at the heart,
though, with its
infinities. And I have to say
I am not a big fan
of being sad. Some people
can pull it off. When
we hiked Overlook, you
went on ahead to the summit
while I sat on a rock
reading Thomas Bernhard.
I'd just made it to the ruins
of the old hotel
when you came jogging back down
in your sports bra
saying I had to come see the view.
But my allergies were bad
and I was thirsty,
so we headed down the gravelly trail,
pleased by the occasional
advent of a jittery
chipmunk. You showed me pictures
on your phone of the fire
tower, the nineteenth-
century graffiti carved
into the rock, and the long
unfolded valley
of the Hudson. At the bottom,
the Buddhists let us
fill our water bottles
from their drinking fountain.
We called a cab and sat
along the roadside
watching prayer flags
rush in the wind. I said the wind
carried the prayers
inscribed on the flags
to the gods, but Wikipedia
informs me now that
the Tibetans believe the prayers and mantras will be blown by the wind to spread
good will and compassion into all pervading space.
So I was wrong, again,
about the gods. Wherever
you are, I hope you stand
still now and then
and let the prayers
wash over you like the breakers
at Fort Tilden that day
the huge gray gothic
clouds massed and threatened to drop
a storm on our heads
but didn't.
Shed
I wish I had a shed out back
of a house in an open
place and I'd sit in the cold
shed on quiet nights when all
the televisions go out and
the wires and the other wires
sing, and wonder what the small
things think about. A bitumen
boat in a royal tomb and a snake
and an angel too. Away from
loss prevention officers and
11 Secrets to Refinancing Your
Student Loans. I don't mean
some romantic Unabomber
shit, just a shed. The light
from a candle in the shed's
single window tosses a golden
square upon the snow that I
now see should surround
and shroud the shed. I hate
winter, so these snows must
be aesthetic. The December
before last I didn't leave my
apartment except for bodega
runs to stock up on Diet Coke
and peanut butter. I watched
every Anthony Mann Western
and spent half a day trying to
arrange Cheez-Its into the form
of Jimmy Stewart's face, then
ate the face. Some sorrow is
so baroque you look back
on it and feel like a schmuck.
Just yesterday the CBD Lifestyle
Station clerk asked how I was
and I said "Good, and you?" like
you're supposed to, like they teach
you in disaster simulations. I
know how to feel in my shed,
away from these statues
of assholes on horses,
and I let the shed field
the questions. Even in my
shed I want a shed.
When Didn't I Know It
I was born without language
and thus without the ability
to formulate a plan.
It was a few years after
the moon fell
to an American incursion.
I was smaller then
and prone to fits of pique.
I began to learn things
about dinosaurs and the way
a bag of vending-machine chips
will sometimes get stuck
on the Slinky-like contraption
that pushes it into free fall.
And there is no remedy;
according to the system
a fair transaction was concluded.
I learned that airplanes hang
on wires from ceilings.
I feared wasps. I remained
outside most churches.
I required stitches.
I was an expert on Bigfoot,
a reputed hominid
called s‡sq'ets
by the First Nations peoples.
I watched the moon
precisely blot the sun
on the wall of a shoebox.
As for Sea-Monkeys,
they did not, in fact, ride
one another like cowboys
on ponies or follow
a candle beam as if hypnotized.
Cobalt gives off-scientists
say "emits"-electrons. I
read that. I read about little
houses, big horses, assistant
pig-keepers, red ferns.
In those days of products
without clocks, I called
a number to hear
the time and temperature.
We are celebrating Disability Pride Month in July with books from disabled writers, artists, and activists who have fought to create a more inclusive world. Find our full collection of titles, which includes literature, memoir, and history here.
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