Third Summer 

THE MOVIES

The last time I visited my parents, I walked around the block and stopped at a house I had forgotten about

It looked exactly like it always had, run down and surrounded by an overgrown yard

One night I decided to walk through the broken gate

Almost immediately, a man appeared

He asked, don’t you live around here? Did you know there’s been a lot of robberies recently?

I never cared much for the poem about the father who worked on Sundays and quietly cared for his children, but I loved the line what did I know, what did I know? and often repeated it in my head

What did I know?

Palm trees used to signify tropical landscapes but they are everywhere now

You can find them next to people’s houses in England

I used to read poems I’d written on my phone in the bathroom at parties

I read them to people slumped in the bathtub and they said more, more so I read another poem and then another

The next day my whole body would feel dark and charged, like when I broke into that yard

Why am I telling you this?

My first job teaching English to preschool children was at a Catholic school run by nuns

The mother superior wore a white habit and enjoyed sitting by the playground

She behaved so maternally towards the children that they eventually started referring to her as their actual mother

This became confusing as they called her mother mother

Before things began to click at the second school I worked at I envied the woman in charge of the printing

I watched her select the number of copies people requested, whether they needed them to be front and back, if they had to be trimmed or laminated

She organized the papers into piles, with a post-it on top labeled with the name of the person they were meant for

I wanted to do something certain like that when everything else pulled me at an angle

Exiting the midnight screening of the Karen Dalton documentary, I stopped to see two boys on a ladder, changing the letters of the marquee

I stood on the street with other people until they finished spelling SOON

Karen Dalton said her ideal performance setup would be if she was playing music in her living room with her friends and then somehow the room was put on a stage surrounded by the audience

Two circles, that’s how it has to be

At the poetry festival someone read a poem I had memorized

I knew exactly which words would come next and I cried until I had to leave

Outside was Josh, sitting on the lawn

He told me about the possibility of seeing yourself from behind in a black hole

I thought, I know this already, this has happened to me

I found relief in the physicist who read mostly poems about her love for horses

She talked about causality and a supposed arrow of time preventing things from unhappening

For weeks it consumed me: the ice cube left melting in the corner of the room, the cup dropped on the floor, the water spilled, the glass shattered

The word unhappening

When I crossed three boroughs to tell Sam about the arrow of time I felt proud of myself

But when we met again his face was washed white and blue like someone had put a filter over the sun

His eyes had changed and were a totally different color, like in movies

Just like the movies was what my father kept saying at my American graduation

When I put on the shiny polyester gown, when I was called for group pictures, when we lined up outside the auditorium

We got dinner at a Thai restaurant afterwards and I rode the bus to meet my friends at the bar

It felt good to be there in the first circle

I once read in a storybook that when you’re gathering you see nothing but what you’re looking for

What is it called when the thing you’re thinking about is suddenly everywhere?

When it’s been there all along?

I watched my favorite movie about the angels who listen and comfort the humans living in the grey city

The angel who chooses to become mortal, and therefore visible, so he can taste food and touch someone’s hand and feel pain

It begins with a poem about the way things were like for a child and how those things changed

The last lines describe the time the child threw a stick against a tree like a spear

I feel so visible

I love poems and I love the movies

I love you Chris Eigeman talking in the parlor

I love you Elliot Gould reading the newspaper

I love you Elaine May finding a new fern species and naming it

I love you Gena Rowlands buying all the farm animals

Almost as much as I love you, Peter Falk

I can’t see you but I know you’re there, he says.



WHEEL

The book opened with a question, was the optical illusion real or fake?
All the kids said real, the ground was real, the glacier clicking apart and darkening was real
My coworker rubbed a stick between her hands, can you see it?
The bird in and out of the cage

Today I watched a presentation that began with this is where we are
Planet earth, third planet from the sun, solar system, milky way, space
Arranged like an address on a letter

On my way home from the gym I tuned in to Liam’s radio show of field recordings
The bus filled with birds and static
When I got to my door the lights in the building went out
My bag slumped down to my elbow, headphones caught on themselves
My wet hair touched my face, released a herbal scent
I just stood there

The preschoolers keep asking me to play the song
Where you have to lie down and pretend to sleep until you hear the ringing of an alarm
Then you must get up
When I sit down I will think about the one who really fell asleep on the ground
And the ones who asked me to play it again

Riding my silver bike across the city,
I would sometimes look down and ask who was doing all of it
How I could think that and keep going
Watch the ground slap and change




MY LIFE OR THE POEM

When Nora told me I was ready
On my knees on the hardwood floor
It felt like I was in a moving car
The air coming in from the rolled-down window
Would make my outline known to me

When someone recognizes you from afar then close
Says, of course it’s you

You are you for a long time
You read the Odyssey ten years ago and underlined all the wrong things
Now a specific part at the beginning moves you
Before you set off to gather knowledge you sleep under lambswool

Julia and I climbed the hill that overlooked a bigger hill
She said you can’t have a quest and a curse
I told her I wanted it to feel like Pangea
I didn’t know if I meant my life or the poem
If I assembled the poem what could happen

It wasn’t a dream it was a place
Julia came home, closed my laptop and turned off my bedside lamp
A face close to mine on the bench I had been sitting on by myself
It was Rami on his rollerblades who spotted me
On the busiest side of the park on the warmest day of winter
I climbed the stairs of the club basement and found Baron
Sitting businesslike at the bar
I took the seat next to his and he said it was all light
I spent the rest of the night spreading the message
To every friend, every familiar face that flashed before mine, I told them that

Lucy said what I wanted was not going to happen but other things would
On a pink quick-dry towel embroidering a small sunset
And I laughed knowing it already
The woman at the post office pushed my hand that pushed the letter through the slot
I wrote my message and it was okay
I would be capable of different thoughts, different poems

Maya was waiting by the museum parking lot holding two paper cups
She showed me the painting of the woman holding a boulder
The poem she wrote in her head while on a walk
The whole time she was afraid an animal would suddenly appear and attack her
Our teacher told us she wanted to honor the animal
That Maya’s fear meant she was really somewhere
Then snow began falling outside

A small hand holds on to my knee during story time
A grandma sends her grandson to collect eggs from her farm
It takes the child some time to complete the task
He knocks on every door, asks all the animals
With each rejection my students chant oh dear
But they are not worried, they are laughing
Recognizing the pattern that is being formed

The children cheer when it happens
Takes me back to the moving car
This is the poem I have been writing in my head
The poem that could uncrack my phone