The hour badly spent

I left the building, glancing
At white-haired old stranger with a
Marlboro in her left hand, cheap paperback in her right.
And she looked back at me like she just didn’t give a fuck.

One day, the summer we
lived together, I found,
tucked like a whisper, between
pages one hundred thirty-eight,
and one hundred thirty-nine, of
“Handmaid of Desire,”
an old snapshot of you,
which you are never, ever
getting back.

I.
Late at night, you
used to take me
by the hand and,
voice like a halo,
say those three little words:
Come to bed.
How did you ever do that?
What kind of magic makes a whisper glow?

II.
The best part
about having a girl with glasses
always came
right before you took all your clothes off
slid into bed
draped your leg over my hip
and we’d made love;
right before that, when you’d
set your glasses on
the nightstand.

III.
That spring night, when you
wearing that nimbus-white nightgown,
fiddling with your fingers, sat up, because you
couldn’t sleep;
That was the night you told me you loved me for the first time.

That fire-red hoodie,
Those sparkly slippers;

Your virgin-white nightgown.

The cut-off denim miniskirt, on which,
while you drove, I liked to put my hand -
Not-so-secretly
loving
the pleasant resistance of your thigh
underneath the fabric;

Also, the longer one, the dark gypsy skirt, which, each time you put on,
you’d show off for me with a flourish
and a smile.

And that smile: it really went with the skirt.
Perfectly.

It’s roughly a twenty-minute
walk up hills
around stone walls
across the street
to reach the dimly lit
smoke-filled room
where the bubbly girl
behind the counter
doesn’t know your name
but remembers what drink
you like and her smile,
much too bright for a place like this,
is
the only human contact
you’ll have all night.

Determined to meet other, better English majors and silently judge them, Friday night I hiked to downtown Manhattan for a poetry reading at the Streckler-Nelson Art Gallery.

What’s more sad: that this kewgr leers down at me on my way up the stairs to the gallery, or the fact that I kind of wanted her? Just kidding! These are both cause to celebrate! I’d never been here before so I gave myself a quick tour. It seemed to be about the size of 10 dorm rooms, all full of paintings and pottery and plants. I would have taken better notes but I was too busy prowling for grad students to hit on. After a minute of this I remembered I don’t know anybody and made my way to the room full of chairs. I sat two seats down from a Pretentious Literary Douchebag who had his nose in Penguin Classics’ Medieval Literature. Jonathan Holden, a poetry professor with furious, leonine eyebrows sat in front of me with his wife. Apropos of nothing, I like to secretly sit behind my professors and snap photos of the back of their heads whenever I see them at some function.

See, I snapped this one of Donald Hedrick - perverted Shakespeare professor - last week at the violin concert:

Meanwhile, the grad students around me made small talk:

"Aren’t we having fun?"
"Fun fun fun!"
"By the way, I put arsenic in your club soda!"
"Great! That way I won’t have to see your douchebag face anymore!"
"Super!"
"Grand!"

Once we got started, the rule was that anybody with poetry of some sort should just walk on up to the podium and show off. Lisa, the first reader, was boring. The guy after her, Joe, wore a button-down shirt two sizes too small, and no matter what he did, he was showing off his triceps. He had taken a passage James Joyce had written about snot and copied it onto a roll of toilet paper. After him, a hipster cutie presented her "Studies in Prepositions," poems consisting of the same preposition repeated musically for entire stanzas. "It does neat stuff in your head," she explained, which I took to mean when she’s done I won’t know whether to hate her for thumbing her nose at conventions I continually fail to get the hang of, or to love her for her playful, impish mastery of the quirks of language. I put this dilemma to rest the instant I realized that this chick was probably kinky enough that if I could give her a really clever pickup line, she might tie me up and ride me so hard I couldn’t stand up straight for three days. In that context, her poems were pretty rad. Her last one was somewhat more traditional. "This is where we move past morphology into syntax," she said. Hot!

Next: until now, all the poets had the common decency to read TWO or THREE of their favorites and then sit back down (Joe: "I’m gonna share a couple of these and then stop ruining your life"), but this particular reader, Nelson, had written a bunch of Really Deep poems about birds and the night and vegetables and breasts, earnestly challenging us to ponder things like The Night and Love and Curiosity and Truth and Beauty and Birds and the size of his thesaurus and, well, Breasts. He must have used the word "breast" every stanza and the thing is, well, the thing is I have NEVER IN MY LIFE WANTED ANYBODY TO STOP SAYING THE WORD BREAST LIKE I WANTED HIM TO STOP FUCKING SAYING THE WORD BREAST but he just went on and on (like this sentence), with these awful mosaics, so many of them, their roman numerals crashing against my BREAST like kamikaze pilots, a sickening montage of VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI…… until finally he was done.

It is my secret wish to become the school’s Pretentious Literary Douchebag. But the guy sitting two seats across from me, his nose in Penguin Classics’ Medieval Literature, had me completely outclassed. He was a slender man, with a strong chin, gold-rimmed glasses, hair like a field of sun-kissed Kansas wheat, eyes as blue as swimming pools and flowing with erudition; he wore an oxford and a blazer that had a gold star pinned to the collar, as though he had just stepped out of Dead Poets’ Society and materialized in this very room, Streckler-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan, at 7pm this Friday night in February. He got up and introduced himself.

"Those of you who know me know I’m rather fond of medieval literature," he smirked, leading me to reflect wistfully on James Joyce’s snot. While he read, I got up to get some wine.

The lady after him was excellent; she recited from memory a poem about having an orgasm (or was she really just having an orgasm right before our very eyes?). Climax notwithstanding, she used a lot of muted synechdoche and really managed to craft a good poem. Some other people recited some other stuff after her, but I wasn’t paying attention because an orgasm is kind of a tough act to follow. Then the thing was over! I probably should have stuck around to meet people, but true to form, I had a better party to go to, so I bounced. But not before snapping a pic of Lit MILF Elizabeth Dodd:

Hot pants, Liz! I mean, Ms. Dodd. Ahem.

I’ll never be one to get up and dance
but I like to watch.
And if you look closely, you might
see me sitting here
swaying to
the same tune as you.

And if you could
meet my lingering glance
halfway
with your own eyes

And if you
could follow
the tip of my smile, like a faded trail on a crinkled map

And if you could feel the tug of my heart, invisible, lovely
like the tides

And if you see my lips, locked up tightly, and if you could read between them

You might
discover me so
by these faint
indirections.

I never thanked you
for taking so long
to call me back.

A moment too soon and I never would have discovered

this book of poetry and the soothing noise crowds crowds make in small spaces
this dimly lit table, this ashtray, my first cigarette in two days
the clink of glasses in the hands of this barmaid,
who forgot my name as soon as I pronounced it
    but will remember what I came here for:
    this two-dollar bloody mary.

To think! With you, I might never have found out!
Or worse: I would have had to share.

I.
The old man
reclines on his chair in a bottom-floor office
His bookshelves burst with novels I know. Phillip Roth! Carol Shields! Anthologies! Histories! Truth! Beauty!
So many magazines; Writers’ Digest, Writers’ Quartely, Writers’ Review, Poets’ This-and That.
An old metal typewriter, a monument, squats against the wall on table of its own.
He’s got papers all over the place. Letters, clippings, rough drafts of his own, assignments not his own.
There’s a classmate’s poem on one sheet. Like what students write these days, it’s full of scattered images, tossed all over the page like fairy dust.

-Sometimes I wish I could do that.
-What, you mean wing it?
-It’s so fluid, so playful.

Nah, you’re not that kind of writer, he said.
Much too serious.

So fucking serious!
Pardon my French.

II.
The other
lives in a bowl of soup.
She writes poems like she’s serving dinner, dishing out love and memory in bite-sized portions, scattered like coins spilled from a piggy bank.

One time,
She came to visit me. We talked, and talked, and talked, all night, while she made a big charcoal sketch of me. The sketch is still hanging on her wall.

And this other time,
she took me to a party, and I found out that when she dances, her hair, long dark and tangly, looks like the edges of a stormcloud. Meanwhile, I got drunk
And met the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

But that was nothing like the time
She drove me forty miles east of here, turned onto a dirt road, chugged past an iced-over lake, and stopped at the top of this hill.
A graveyard,
Where lay her revered father’s bones.
Big, black, and smooth, his tombstone was the most stylish one around.
And though I didn’t know the guy, seeing him like this almost made me wish I had.    

The imprint of her head on the pillow
Her scent in the sheets
Along with, possibly, a few long curly hairs
And her puffy black coat.

Later, with a smile, I realized -
she’d be back.

For the coat.

We can

    Never know

        What

            we want.