she got at Aminatou’s party to her wrist.

  She insists that she will hold it, and grips the ribbon

  in her fist as I concede defeat and push the stroller

  home through Soho’s muggy afternoon.

  The Used Bookstore on Mercer where the fat guy

  in a woolly hat and a permanent rage works

  is closing, and behind me, softly, I want it back.

  Strange word for books that: Used. Manipulated.

  Consumed. When I say we’re alone with our thoughts

  I mean all the gathered history and particulars

  available to a single place in the universe,

  called a light cone. Each occupies his or her

  cell in the prison, and each is slightly unlike.

  She was three for me for such a brief interval,

  then four, five, ten, for almost nothing, almost

  never. A pigeon flies from the scaffolding unnerved

  by a shadow sliding of a sudden over the crosswalk,

  wrinkling on pedestrians, a lugubrious bulldog,

  and the shadow is cast by her balloon, Pac Man,

  ascending rapidly to heaven. I want it back

  and she adds, to clarify, Now, and offers me

  a puzzled look to check I’ve understood.

  Odd to watch the realisation take, up close,

  like this, the central lesson of one-way loss –

  and watch the knowing surface in her eyes as

  hurt, unquestionably personal, and she is sobbing

  now so loudly the bookseller, pricing up a stack

  of vinyl, is watching from the counter.

  I would get it back for you Katherine if I could.

  All of it. The afternoon. The sun. The bulldog.

  The traffic lights. The Libyan dry cleaner

  with the gammy leg and speechless brother.

  The cherry trees on Bleecker in their ordered

  rows of frothy blossom and the yellow fleck

  of Pac Man zipping upwards, almost gone.

  I’d send it west, back across the sky to swallow

  the luminous dot of the sun, and turn strobe-lit

  and frenetic, for a moment or two deathless,

  and have it hunt the bastard ghosts down

  one by one by one until the grid is empty.

  Mixed Marriage

  Poetry’s the art of introducing words

  that haven’t met & getting them to sit together

  in a small room where they might fall –

  improbably – in love – or try to kill each other –

  or first one thing & later on the other.

  Intermittently we felt it, the thready lining

  under the small change & balls of fluff at

  the bottom of the pocket of astonishment –

  & the best of the rest of the time we kept

  our heads down & tried to make sense

  standing together & completely alone

  while the words got along like a house

  on fire, a street of houses, like the perfect

  match had been struck and the cityscape’s

  erupting with sirens, collapsing in flames.

  The Hudson River

  Sekeena is really very sick and there is no way round it. In the boiler room when Eddie’s hung the heavy bag we hit it, and he hits it pretty hard, and in between the grunts discuss the various Terror Management Systems open to him now. His essentially boils down to smashing things and building them back again into separate boxes, and locking those boxes, and swallowing the key. Sekeena now is very sick.

  Sekeena is not old enough to be very sick and her daughter is not old enough to have a mother who is very sick, and Sekeena represents the public of this island the Lenape knew as Mannahatta, where she defends the wretched, the huddled masses, the innocent, of course, and also grifters, assholes, shoplifters, muggers, murderers, rapists, that guy who pushed another guy in front of the subway at Columbus Circle – but Sekeena cannot be defended now from this.

  I met Eddie at a party where he told a story up on stage, about when he was almost killed on Thompson Street by Latin Kings in an initiation, the initiation being you had to murder a random stranger. Eddie’d locked his bar up and was walking back towards his motorbike when one ran in at him from behind, and stuck a knife in him, and two ran in from either side and did the same, and left him for dead, but not before he knocked out the fourth, coming from the front, with a wild right hook. The surgeons put his chances of survival around three per cent, but look, he did, he made it, and here he is living. He doesn’t understand why it couldn’t have been him. He doesn’t understand why it isn’t him who’s dying.

  After hitting the bag in the basement Eddie and I get high on the roof of the five-floor walkup, having propped the fire-door with a brick, sitting in our plastic chairs on the asphalt amid the aerials and water towers. Tonight the city looks unpacked, laid out like components for some astonishing machine that the instructions have been lost for, and the sky is shot with pink and full of helicopters delivering billionaires to prostitutes or vice versa, and Eddie wants to know where one puts the rage, the outrage, how to box it up or pause it. How to kill it. The new Bishop of Wyoming came to see him to apologise for what the old Bishop did to him when he was nine years old. The worst that you can do.

  I think we choose our friends because the brand of madness is familiar to us, either from the mirror, or the genre of it is a type practised in that family also, and Sekeena is Canadian, hence pretty reasonable in some ways though not, it’s fair to say, in all. Her father manufactured toys in Montreal though the family’s Lebanese Muslim, and emigrated west, like we all did, except Eddie, who came east. In the morning Sekeena’s spending some time lying on the floor of the shower crying as her celebrated hair comes out in clumps.

  I meet Eddie at Fanelli’s where we sit at the bar, its glossy dark wood as worn as a banister and on its frontispiece – I had never noticed – the huge carved face of the Green Man, the forest dweller, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, that drives the truck into the wall, the bike into the river, the cancer from the pancreas up into the liver, a motion and a spirit that impels all objects, all thought, and rolls through all things and so on, that drives the fist into the heavy bag or the face of a boy with a knife … How do you defend this? What quality of grace or mercy could adequately exculpate whoever perpetrated this? Sekeena, our defender, our writer and our reader, our mother and our sister and our daughter and our lover and our wife is very sick.

  The hair of the Green Man looking out at our knees is made of delicately carved leaves, and he has apples for his cheeks, and when Eddie says touch wood, and we do, we are communing with the trees that stood here once and will again. Ghost forests of the past and future, all of the branches outstretched and empty. What I want from my friends is what I want from a poem, to share a space and time and feel you have been proximate to another’s consciousness.

  The week the state went into lockdown Eddie and I were meant to fly to Wyoming to pick up a pickup truck and drive her back from Laramie to New York. A mint green 1972 Ford F250 – a machine of harsh beauty, eight cylinders, three quarter ton payload. Longbed. Bench seat. Not mint green, Eddie says, but anti-establishmint green. We’d keep it upstate in one of the barns at Jay’s place, in the mountains with the bears and the creek and the Trump signs in the yards, where we ended up waiting out that first lockdown.

  Now Sekeena sits opposite, outside Blue Ribbon at a table on the pavement well away from everyone inside. Her eyes say, I am the one, I am the one: there is no way not to be me.

  We are finishing twelve Chesapeake oysters when Eddie pulls up in the truck, Big Green, having driven from a film festival in Vancouver. He’s in a documentary called Procession about therapy and the Catholic Church and child abuse. It’s the first time I’ve seen the truck, and I go along for the ride through Soho and the Village to park it up over on the West Side. The cab feels like an engine room, and the truck shudders when Eddie turns the blade of the key, and the thing thunders awake and seems to enlarge, then chugs like a boat through Soho – and must be tacked and calmed and handled, managed – and we find at the garage on Chelsea Piers a space on the top storey, open to the sky. Eddie’s telling me about the hospital receptionist, a righteous prick, who was explaining they had the wrong insurance and couldn’t get the next set of scans without paying a deposit – immediately – of eleven thousand dollars. It’s a warm night and we park at the edge and over there is the Hudson River, fast and unimpeded, churning darkness, and in the distance the water glitters with the lights of Jersey City.

  Growing up there was a river two fields over. A tributary to the Ballinderry. Not large, it was persistent, a thing that mattered, since it lasted, and lasted since it changed. You couldn’t quite look at it. The surface dragged your gaze along so you had to focus and refocus to hold the same spot. An object in motion is better in kind than an object at rest. The first refuses definition. The static dwindles, halts and rots, but that which is moving, that which continues to move, involves, perforce, eternity.

  For the surgery, a distal pancreatectomy for adenocarcinoma, Dr Enrique Chabot needs multiple shots from the scans, and must get Diagnostic Imaging to burn them to CDs, and they found that having Eddie deliver them by hand between the hospitals was the fastest way to get the necessary information to him. Especially now with Covid, everyone is fucked and overloaded and short-tempered and Eddie had just emailed to tell me he felt like a Pony Express rider on the prairie there for a minute as he pulled up in Big Green, outside Sloane Kettering, clutching the bulging envelope.

  Talking to the Sun in Washington Square

  Looking after children means simultaneously building a field hospital,

  a hedge school, a diner and an open-air prison with your bare hands

  and operating them at a continual loss. In this instant they are playing

  and you’re sitting on a bench where the sun applies itself to the square

  and you can feel it on your skin asking how it’s been since you last touched,

  and you tell her things are alright mostly, the sky is the epitome of sky,

  the clouds give birth to themselves, the little people are getting even better

  at belittling the bigger people, and you are done in now. You did your bit.

  Birdwatching today in Central Park until you saw an osprey with a fish

  in its beak and a splinter in a finger meant you had to all walk out and hail

  a cab, and you saw the booth on sixth had its phone yanked off and wires

  dangled. It took you to the endless conversation at dinner last night

  about silence where your wife mentioned John Cage and the persistence

  of absence in presence, or something, and the Mexican writer recited the noun

  for quiet in four languages and you said nothing, offering, you thought,

  the most evincive contribution. Now the sun is trying to tell you something

  by splitting through the cloud like that. Some secret as to how its light

  walks and flies at the same time, or why the nature of formations – clouds,

  crowds, poems, marriage – is that they dissolve, and why there is such

  an effort in just not. Heaven is a past participle of heave, the sun notes,

  and the fountain stands to attention until she sets and it slumps to the pool.

  You’d like to hear more about that sometime but not quite yet. You want

  to know if all lives viewed from the inside present as a series of failures.

  You want the side door held ajar a moment longer. This is the permacrisis,

  sun. It is grim, the era of collapsing systems, of gaming the algorithm,

  of the discontent late capitalism must inflict on us for it to thrive.

  What you want is old friends who admit to complications not followers

  or allies. The instantaneous personal magnetism of other people

  is almost overwhelming sometimes – attractive or repelling.

  The sun rests its hand on you and everyone and says, very softly,

  Look how my light alights on the rock dove and the litter bin alike,

  useless to corporations, meeting the froth of the cottonwood,

  the bespectacled pianist, interstitial fauna, the angry kings of meth,

  lovers solving the crossword, a Chinese student quietly crying,

  all varying configurations of the code, and wait until I disappear

  before you wander back in the way that fire wanders to make

  an early dinner and clean up, to bath the children and tell them stories.

  Anne Frank

  The hair salon is called Who Cares and on Vigilstraat

  the barrier says welcome in the secret village.

  I take a table on the pavement as the edible kicks in.

  What is this implement called that’s a fork and a spoon?

  Yes. What if I saw myself in the spork and thought the face

  remoter? Who was this anyhow? What’s it for, why the dark?

  What if we get there and the inn’s already full? What if no

  water gushes from the tap? We require details of the fire

  all the same.

  The windows of the house across from yours

  reflect the sun so viciously I cannot quite look at it although

  later, in the square, a chain of giant bubbles made by a man

  dressed as a medieval jester are billowing and wobbling

  and the little children run through them screaming.

  Curation

  Consciousness is just the white noise

  emitting from the vent, and has no bearing

  on the workings of the air conditioning unit

  distant in the basement.

  Consciousness is just

  the patrons clicking their heels on the parquet,

  stopping at the painting the gallerist selected –

  this, this all but monochromatic still life;

  its objects set on a linen cloth in a kind of

  tonal banquet – lead, then pewter silver

  chalk slate bone –

  the desolation overwhelming

  until consciousness is just

  distracted by this something else, the accent

  of a few yellow tulips on the sideboard behind

  and consciousness moves outside to sit

  on the hard bench as sunlight advances on

  the rectangular lawn where the grass

  blades are slicing through to the visible.

  For Vona Groarke

  Sesame Street

  There’s no way to dress as a puppeteer.

  Anything you wear is weird.

  We tried watching the Elmo documentary

  after Tom had left but I was too high.

  My mind was shuffling itself, cutting in on itself.

  Tom had just seen the documentary about the King of Pop

  and those white

  men who were learning to feel

  something for themselves as

  little children and Tom began recalling

  being taken

  into the bathroom

  when he was three to

  three two one

  ‘perform fellatio’

  on the twelve-year-old

  his parents took in for a spell.

  It’s being processed.

  Everything everything more

  medication. Unhappily miscellaneous.

  It was a kind of full distortion.

  Finally, sentimental items.

  Tom won’t go back to Arizona.

  He’s off to meet a blue-eyed woman –

  it’s all taxonomies at this point –

  and is sharing a car to Brooklyn

  with my weed guy Asian Phil.

  Asian Phil was Asian Phil

  because White Phil worked the week.

  Asian Phil did weekends and services

  finance guys mostly,

  doesn’t get much ‘old New York’.

  Tom has left his wallet.

  Why I thought of poetry

  only this morning

  walking through Penn station at

  its most packed with the travelling intent

  presences of these people I don’t

  know parting like flames before me

  Ars Poetica, with the Salmon of Knowledge

  Only I am standing here,

  at the bathroom mirror

  hacking at my lockdown hair

  with the scissors

  on my penknife

  when I catch my eye –

  and something like a poem

  glances back

  from the deep inside

  but making out the grey figure

  standing there

  wielding a blade,

  swims off immediately

  and with good reason.

  I would eat it for its secrets.

  Fun for One

  Taste wood. Taste stone. Taste

 

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