Future anterior

October '25

Taking a break now from scrawling Deluge in double columns while sitting in this grandpa-esque brown corduroy rocking armchair and feeling like quite the phenomenon. All done weeding, I’m waiting for [X] and fruit pie but she’s half an hour late and I wonder if I misunderstood her. [X] said she has incredible intuition. I feel, now that [X] has left in her late mom’s dilatory Subaru (slow up the hill as molasses), that I could be the mysterious presence. Butterflies are never quite fully in view before they fly away; in fact, they are fickle. The Aquarians care for me only. I do feel partially suspended in the past, amber: that I will have to leave and remember this place again. Shapeshifter, androgyne (or like the visitor in Teorema). 

==

It was too frightening to walk back up the steep rocky slope to sleep one more night in the cabin, the flashlight waving wild like a pistol and throwing shadows, causing some great critter to throw itself in or out of the moon-glossy pond as I passed it on the way down, so I told myself I’d leave at the call of [X]’s bugle. Instead I buried myself deeper into his bed and stared at the wood slat ceiling waiting to hear tires on gravel for what felt like forever so I could steal back up to [X] and I’s brief room, one of so many squat sites, now a work-from-home office. The halo came over the suspended goldenrod—[X] my seatmate on the plane saw Warhol and Patti and talked to Ginsberg too once, has never found love yet, Greek and coming not far from Thessaloniki, liked the ecstatic dance in Asheville, lost her twin brother after one day of living. Chills overtook me as the cityscape careened into view past my shoulder. Every human interaction I have had for the past while has been totally pleasant—think I could be high from just that.

Belly-fire, basalm smoke, the holy mountain, upland journey: anabasis. I am more vital now, even returning to the city, than I have been in months: so much speed in transit, sweat and cold, the coke with [X] I thought was surely cut with meth at [X’s], its warped thrashing crowd and scintillating disco ball, as quicksilver as these thrown romances, all interchangeable, him pulling down my tights in the [X] bar bathroom trying to genuflect, put his mouth on me. What I said to him in streetside drizzle when he begged me to take him back with me to my twin cot, him still living with [X] in Williamsburg, the truth: I just want to be alone.

It’s werewolves and vampires. All these jottings to, what, keep track of my fast-paced rockstar life and its high-wind experiences? My rabid thirst for chasing the thread. Will I meet someone who really understands that? [X]’s struggle, scrap, and victimhood: is that what gave him that, am I imitating at least the looseness if not the loserness? I lean into the thrash, the burn, necessary dangers! Life has froth. “Maven of theater,” [X] said. Roserock, labdanum. The world—end of major arcana—[X]’d drawn for me, the hermit reversed, five of wands, crossing scrap.

Under siege

The knell imaginary

Scalded brain

Overflown kettle 

I am not giving to the taker—I am declaring instead what I take, i.e., “I can take it, give it to me,” act of withstanding, shouldering, receiving

==

Knocked out cold with an empty cigarette pack in the pocket of [X]’s pajama pants—he carried me up the stairs—I wore cowboy boots and accidentally stomped on a gray cat named Apollo trying to stumble forward and thank someone for saying I look like Fiona Apple instead of Chelsea Clinton, took sheepish drags in the bathroom, leaning out of the fire escape’s window, the courtyard with clotheslines strung high across, the backs of buildings taken by ivy, opposite windows lit, occupied by warm figures moving through rooms, the sky still light...overdoing it ecstatically. Correcting my pronunciation of “con-jure” in the poem: otherwise mum, I’ll never read to him again. Why bother. I’m still seeking the semblable—laid awake in the loud rain the other night, the machine guns making pocks and hissing against the window, gale-forces, thinking of it always, the permanent impression I will never stop chasing, getting towards, all else and everything a failure.

==

Difficult to come to the page now when I’m so near sleep, wonder if I’ll be legible or even close to continuous. I’m certainly never direct, rarely clear: this being my diagnosis from [X] in conference, and I agree with her. Funny mirror in analysis today: hungover from two vodka martinis, two pilsners and one shot of Jameson, voice ragged in the chilly fall air, the blabber with the Irishman and the pumpkins—I found myself speaking of rooms, living rooms, bedrooms, nesting, couches, taste. [X] found us a metaphor: I let others build a house and I find a room in it. Closeness, distance, sameness, distinction, together, apart—what do I want? What do I want? Not men who try to read my hiding face as I tried to read my mother’s last weekend.

==

I am ark-dove, and I am missing my other.

Flood drove us, filed us in by pairs.

Two-scheme of procreation, the necessary pieces.

“Natural rapture” (Galway Kinnell)

==

“When asked whether the voices...”

This morning it appeared to me for the first time—the mourning dove on my fire escape, its feathers rosy, flushed as Brooklyn dawn. My visitor, my revelation: the peripheral thing finally seen while applying my mascara in my haunted cabinet’s mirror. I am medieval these days: product of the dark ages. 

==

Red light glancing off steel, sumptuous sky: I crane my neck, swivel my head for it going over the bridge. In awe of the yellow effusion from the trees on Gates Avenue, in Fresh Pond, in the lazy early afternoon, in a brown sweater, feel I’m in a nineties movie. Last night had a pornstar martini on an empty stomach and read the trials of Joan of Arc, later became kaleidoscopic, blunt-force-trauma drunk; a stranger’s bump was all that saved me. 

==

I feel like I’m falling down a mine shaft while also walking around upright, talking, or brushing my teeth. Like the terror of a come-up on a trip. The whole defining logic of my life, which is to follow towards what I cannot and will never see, failure wired into desire, has unravelled in one motion. Nothing—not even the smallest rattle of a dead leaf on the sidewalk from the wind which must be blowing from somewhere—makes any sense. Everything prepared me for it and nothing at all did. I don’t feel like myself—there is no more self, I am nothing. Nothing to grip on to (no more nothing to grasp toward). The point of fantasy is to guarantee, by imagining it, that there can be no corresponding reality. C then D then E—before that A, B—next logical step, I thought I’d get closer to the locus-nexus, magnetic center, the “hold,” but also knew that by wanting it I’d never get there. What, then, do I want? When will my body stop trembling? What does it mean?

The warped sheen of elevator doors splits and reveals the face of it. My mind can’t click it together. I go to move past him. He says my name, low, then I have to turn, slow down my ignorant, trudging-on body—the mind’s poor slave—and just stand there. I’m yelling. He has to ask if I’m alright and I have to volley it back, but by alright I just mean real. My feet walk until I realize I’ve just passed 84th. My throat didn’t constrict like it did when I glimpsed him at the party two years ago. It felt different, more of a weight pounding down and stretching out my field of vision—I can’t even get past the sheer coincidence and confront the rest. Not yet, anyway. Not sure if I will but I have exactly three days. Although talking to him—does it matter? That too will puncture the silence; something will end. Sat in Washington square practically immobilized while golden limbs of trees glowed beyond the fountain, a tuba sounded its broad flat breath, could barely eat a thing when I got home so instead I drank until I couldn’t see, smoke from the fire escape window turning white in the streetlight—spent the whole night in a state of half-sleep, the mind still struggling to hold the body when the line between reality and figment has already fallen.

==

Future anterior, fainting as a child, on snow days, into the future. I don’t know what this will take from me.

My inability to process what I saw I think is for several reasons: first, that I look for this face everywhere, am always scanning and identifying and compositing a stranger’s features until they finally emerge as such, fear and hope rising before it falls and scatters, the heart clenched still as if it were really a close encounter—the figure at the door is only the coat you left hanging, etc. Never once has it been so sudden and precise a match; the routine I know implodes. Second, it’s that the only instances when I do recognize his face is when I’m dreaming, asleep or awake; it is a precise but false image I only see in fantasy. 

“I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable,” (Dickinson’s letter to Thomas H.)

And there in the syntax is the distance between I and you. Heard the call of the dove before I saw it.