Imagining Imagining New York from Astoria, 2007

So they built a library by the wharf where the paneled windows shook

and I sat in one of the chairs chairs facing out. wind on the windows. holding a book.

It was a calamitous moment, though I didn't move at all,

because of the storm.

It was a storm that I was thinking about, that I had heard about on the news, a tornado touching down in Brooklyn thousands of miles away.

It is three hours in the future there, and I am waiting for six thirty seven to happen here, three hours from now. This part of the country has never felt more useless to me.

Strangely, there are few clouds in the sky here.

and as I look out to the water past the library windows holding Dusklands and waiting, waiting a long time while my neighbors are losing their homes and newscasters are talking about fallen trees in a park

I curse the Pacific to which I have no affiliation

and feel every vein of mine like string

pulled to the mouth of the Hudson River Bay

and its terrible breath.

When you introduced yourself to me, and I to you

Somehow, the importance of what was taking place became caught in the flaking shards of its surroundings.

I found you in a minefield.
A mind field.
A mined field.

You told me your name, and I cannot remember it at all.

The telling, not the name: that I remember. But I stubbornly refuse to repeat. Your name. Like the ocean, it must have always been sounding. It was only now that I noticed. So it feels like that is how I know you - just as I know the ocean. There was a time that I met you, though I do not remember it. I was raised at the mouth of the bay.

I would do better to know you if I did not know it - your name. You would become a place again, I would walk in and out of you, the way memory works. I would hesitate before drawing vowels and consonants with each look to your face; you could be new each time we came together, infinite each time we come apart. There are no syllables to this sound, there are no letters. I want to listen. I want to use it to make music.

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in air. It moves.

I cannot find the shape of your name between leaves of grass, no matter how many lines I pull from that field. I cannot connect your name in the stars, there are not enough of them. I cannot find your name anywhere on your skin or in your hair, I cannot tell your name from your smell, sweet, which I have come to know.

And if I shook your hand when we met, I should have taken it and walked, made you follow, given you a place to meet me again, and left. That is what we can call ourselves: we are here.

this week i heard our eyes rhyme
and it sounded sweet, but you used a word
i didn't understand. my thumbs tapping
on your neck, i didn't ask the meaning.
i'll be sounding the vowels for days.