Together and by Ourselves

by Alex Dimitrov

  If you once signed your name here no one now sees it.

  I swallowed some part of the evening

  then left and went looking

  and looking is where I can follow the plot.

  The kids of those years ran back through the fires.

  They were here, they were young, they were all

  in their faces, their small frames: that’s us.

  I want to run through my life without asking for anything.

  I want to run through my life until I am a word.

  This is the nineteenth line of the poem.

  I am waiting for you to look at me.

  Sun bleaches the paper.

  Time slides through the flesh.

  Someone on the corner is imprinting the building

  with a kind of humanity

  just by touching it.

  We are often in mirrors and small in this suffering.

  This is never enough. And of course I’m still here

  waiting for you to look at me.

  To bring me the dead leaves

  at the bottom of the river.

  In the mud of the madhouse.

  And the light that breaks open the casket,

  stitch it over my eyes.

  All the Way Up I Took Myself

  There’s a little of myself in you, you know it.

  Like the night in day, like that feeling

  of New York in Paris.

  I could say a lot of things,

  I could tell you about Venice

  or how Turner’s paintings make us

  much more beautiful

  when we’re in front of them,

  the story of Bulkaen, how he stood,

  mouth open, and one by one

  a group of boys would spit in it—

  how spit will sometimes turn to roses,

  how roses turn to nothing.

  We’re below the fog,

  sometimes we’re in it

  and we try—we try to write or call,

  hang up, forget just why

  or who we’re missing.

  Did I tell you? I finally made it

  to the Empire State, that building,

  all the way up is where I took myself.

  It’s wild I know, but everyone I love

  I saw below, like figurines.

  You were walking in the city

  in your long black coat

  and you felt far and happy.

  The rain was red, the rest, unlike

  the past, was roses.

  Some New Thing

  The best reason to live is that there is no reason to live.

  I walked to your apartment in the late night.

  Flowers I didn’t plant began to be flowers

  and I was a color and then I was none.

  Conrad said, let the train take you anywhere,

  pass all the old stops. I let the train take me anywhere,

  I passed all the old stops. With you I liked being nowhere

  and with you I live nowhere now.

  The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.

  Keith Haring wrote that. It could be about us.

  I go into churches and I go into bars:

  I feel the time stop.

  To feel—you can’t stop at some point.

  Not a religious thing. Why on earth or why not.

  Let’s be in a Sunday morning

  with no complacencies of the peignoir,

  no late coffee or oranges—all he does

  is watch the neighborhood dogs getting walked.

  No one will let you through if you don’t walk your own sadness.

  No one will let you touch if you’re a person at all.

  One summer we walked the entire island of Manhattan,

  we were our own animal.

  From Inwood to the water to your small want.

  And you. You, you, you

  you can read these lines in any order

  because I want to leave nothing out

  and there’s nothing here.

  Words are just words. What I feel

  I feel twice and risk three of.

  Some new thing.

  How there’s more here without us at all.

  All Apologies

  When we drove through the canyon toward Taos

  I remember feeling relief at not knowing you at all.

  We were strangers in a car

  and then strangers in a house in the desert.

  The gate. And the days no one else lived in.

  I think I made a mistake in wanting to be known;

  but I came to New York and I stayed.

  So the rain now feels like a language for warmth

  when it’s just like the leaves are:

  they fall whether or not you take note.

  It’s not time to be older but easier to assume so.

  Someone I almost married is crossing the street.

  We could let a coincidence end us completely.

  We’re people. The gods know this about us.

  I stared at the cracked windshield but found my way

  to your hands; in your hair, on the wheel.

  Let me be obvious.

  There is nothing easy about November or the desert.

  You could lose a lot in both.

  Sometimes a conversation between people

  is a mirror to fix yourself in—a departure.

  Who wants to be what they are?

  Not the mystics. Not even the saints.

  We could be on burial grounds or long beaches.

  The arrival of the mildest winter.

  Where I stood in a courtyard with tall, marble warriors,

  asking them the same question.

  Who wants it? Who thinks they’ll withstand it and do so.

  The windows through which we watch something change

  live on highways and bridges with little to show for.

  Of course it’s all coming.

  Let me be obvious.

  We ’re both leaving and here.

  Birthday

  While the arrangement overwhelmed the blue vase

  and died quickly, everyone looked.

  In the day-to-day headlines of science and capital

  the talk was of water and being beyond this small Earth.

  Someone called in to say “many more”

  and although it was known what the many would be—

  once again—I needed to ask.

  How would I know what was mine here and when?

  Each one went (as they do)

  and was silent in adding its mass and its mark.

  As it turned out I slept and then rose and the many were true.

  I kept watch of the nights it would rain and the days it was clear.

  Until passion grew useless, of course, and the weather would come

  as the weather would like, how it all just became what it was

  regardless of proof or our planning for more.

  What were these lives people had if not

  too small to count and still counted like stocks.

  A patient outside the waiting room asked for a light.

  It’s my birthday, he said

  and I smiled short but true.

  We know too much to smoke and too little for anything else.

  That morning another celebrity mess made the papers.

  By evening the city forgot to bring us all home.

  Like faces we put on at parties for people we won’t see,

  our eyes they go looking despite who we are.

  Something else I became on those birthdays then with you.

  Not feeling or figment; not larger than slight.

  Every time we fucked without saying more than hello

  to each other. Wanting nothing and all things.

  The bowl on the desk finally breaking.

  Two people astonished and waiting around.

  Perfect Day

  This late and it seems they’ve
been everything.

  The low light of the lobby spreads out like a day.

  What are the windows for you? What are the dead-end streets?

  I would give you these relics unprompted, without doubt—

  but even a strand of hair needs to be looked at and carried and changed.

  Watch the man on the balcony settle into his life.

  All winter I’ve done it. And I would be venom

  then fire, a true unpaid actor. I do not care to be air.

  At Coney Island, on the first of each January

  people take off their clothes and watch the Atlantic make room for them.

  Even if it was for the obvious beauty—the sentence began—

  even if it was all the money and fame.

  Who’d ask to stay?

  In London Robert is cutting an apple with only his eyes.

  The world (yes) is turning. It’s like a fast date.

  And in the cab’s silence I’m loud but not talking,

  less young than expected. Less ready or sane.

  On that Tuesday (a Midtown billboard

  in the graceless morning) all but an X had gone out

  and so flickered. Stating the nothing without fear or blame.

  In London Robert is closing his eyes by letting his hair grow.

  So much blond falling over his wrists.

  An earthquake. Another reversal. Do answer.

  Are you often surprised with yourself?

  Because even here in my body

  I waited outside like a stray. Perfect day then

  what did you tell me: 8:39 when the sun sets,

  5:21 up again. “Oh, but you would,

  it’s too like you to miss it.”

  Become less and flee more—that’s us.

  We’re those people.

  Catching each other just barely but pleased.

  False Spring

  Forgive this brief message. It’s mostly to say this:

  Rachel, I changed my hair, where I live,

  changed the way I touch people…

  but the balcony plant is still ugly and stubborn.

  He will not be loved.

  And you were in Paris, while you were in Paris,

  everyone mistook him for something else—

  even the season. His favorite.

  False spring.

  Central Park

  Now we see each other every day.

  As if the buildings had forgiven us

  for something done by others once here long ago.

  Strangers, spectators, witnesses

  and how shy we go round (and the dead going with us)

  the Kennedy Onassis Reservoir where it’s still summer,

  where we appear the same but different to each other in a park.

  Late crossings on the Sundays of your small life.

  Off of streets, without plan, north of Strawberry Fields.

  “An artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century

  English romantic tradition.” Performance.

  It’s still a surprise I keep finding life here.

  What a person can have, where desire can sit;

  how to have must be twice a verb—

  it delivers, it makes calls. It won’t let the rest of us rest.

  But we come for the sun and the cold rain regardless.

  We live with the leaves that die fast

  and the lamps that go late. If I do know one thing,

  there ’s more fiction around than true people.

  Less beasts on their leashes than beasts of our kind.

  At dusk, when I leave (which is something I’m good at)

  the paths will refashion the way earth hunts time.

  Many questions I’ve hurried through stay here;

  unwanted, unasked for. The lawns keep your secrets.

  The trees do retrieve us. It’s little like dying in fact.

  And on the way out, if the park should become you—

  this no one told me, this I forgot—

  only because its own center escapes sight:

  the statues, the wonderland.

  Like us, it is seldom all there.

  New Year

  I know someone who’ll watch and won’t be touched in bed.

  You did not find the news you wanted.

  The desert was more than a drive.

  I know someone who has the phone one pillow over

  like a person, should it ring.

  And you can dress yourself for nighttime in the light,

  and you can’t say more than you have when someone’s gone.

  What to do now with the ribbons from the old year?

  It’s just as well I love that one fast hour after parties,

  when alone and driving back late

  with whatever has been said or done

  still playing sharply in the mind.

  One peels, one straightens, one does it all over—

  it is not / it must be enough.

  Bring me the plate with our complaints

  arranged so lazily, everyone’s forgotten to eat

  so they walk through the rooms

  looking for someone to sink their teeth in.

  It could have been a place quite free

  of our attachments and obsessions,

  where we decided then to meet—

  the first in many months, the last one of its kind.

  Some lost place in Manhattan

  where we’d never go together when we were once.

  The type of haunt we all know well;

  the songs are free but nothing else is.

  And by some door or window in the front or back,

  a faded map of New York State,

  Nebraska, California, homebound.

  Someone’s life is interrupted without promise.

  Neither doom nor luck, not funeral or party.

  Gentleman’s Hour

  It’s nothing like they expected.

  Kennedy is dead. The childhood dog is dead.

  On my desk is a lamp with the face of a lion

  and rust where its teeth used to be.

  People and how they described each other…

  incomparable to the sea.

  The point in the day when it’s no longer morning but memory.

  Memory. What did I say to death to excuse myself

  for always being somewhere else?

  What would they do with all this if love ended before life,

  and the trains crossed the earth but never did leave.

  IV

  Nights with People, Days Without

  How could I describe the ending to you?

  The streets on the way out were wet.

  Floors, bed, walls—impossible not to press against something.

  Who called. Who cares. I had a drink by myself at the bar.

  A long skirt on the avenue reminded you of your mother.

  The scent in the car took him back to a place where he’d left something black.

  Every morning is a little different, isn’t it—

  nights with people, days without.

  So they woke up and wanted nothing so close to them.

  Nothing next to whatever was there.

  Me, I had another drink by myself at the bar.

  I don’t think we deserve anything for our suffering.

  But I have this old self and it’s wanting…things, things.

  Isn’t it funny, he said—no, I can’t tell you…

  so put your mouth here or leave.

  A season, another, no subject with your email

  and why language—where we’re all mostly helpless—

  may be a place to give in and give up on…

  being a person. Being a person. Being a person.

  With that, the student asked how he should end his poem.

  What would help? He asked twice.

  Me. Me again. I had a few more drinks by myself at the bar

  (and I’m sorry I’ll never write back
but I’m telling you

  here in front of no one and everyone).

  Be your own fantasy.

  Me. Back to me. I came home to a freezing apartment:

  doors, windows, books open. Characters. All of us,

  everywhere. I took off my clothes and I was a person.

  In a cold room with a dead light.

  A subject with no subject line.

  Night Call

  When we did then go after each other in those most unreasonable hours.

  Twice at the Lowell Hotel: bringing you uptown,

  bringing you down. Let me walk this situation

  and touch each window from within. “I hate funerals.

  I’m glad I won’t have to go to my own. Only, I don’t want one—

  just my ashes cast on waves.” And that was the beautiful child.

  For the short while then, briefly, like the inside of a wrist turned toward you

  we forgot we were awful people. Now isn’t that nice,

  how animals walk toward what calls them by a name no one can give.

  Part of the menu, wardrobe, backdrop…

  what did we ask for in fact?

  Not always will the sun stay where you live.

  On some ship that’s so far down there, where the elevator stops just once.

  Lead us into death now said the priest, and the men all wove it in their hair.

  Outside the Spanish Steps we took photographs for everyone who wasn’t there.

  And I watched a small bird run that yard without its head

  so the blood could be a blessing. So you saw someone you love kill something too.

  When the head goes there are muscles that keep going.

  One of them would call the other if the night called for a smoke.

  Remind me then…what is this? Our agreement.

  You can watch me while I read you something.

  You can have me while I’m here.

  Love is difficult for brutes like us, with or without assets.

  Agree or disagree?

  How the bay made the day feel wide, unlike a tunnel.

  My voice had nothing to say after the beep.

  Or let me show you: unlimited intimacy

  is a kind of poison. So is counting checks or pills or weeks.

  And many critics felt he wasted his gifts by going to too many parties

  and appearing on too many talk shows.