Old Friends / Bookends

Our conversation this morning reminded me of Simon and Garfunkel's song "Old Friends/Bookends," though we were not nearly as old as the two old friends in the song, and we bookended not a park bench but a continent, voices reaching each other without wires. You were sitting on your bed in New York and I was sitting on my bed in San Francisco, and we didn't talk for very long, because we both had work we were equally unenthusiastic about doing that nonetheless needed doing.

Neither of us was in particularly good spirits, and our reports to each other about our respective lives were a bit lackluster:
At least February's almost over, I said.
I'm just sick of being poor, you said.
I'm having a hard time feeling like my work is meaningful, I said.
I have to remind myself, when I have a bad day of it, that it takes years of practice to become a good teacher, you said.
I had a tough conversation with my parents last week, but at least I felt like they respected me, I said.
We spoke briefly of the people we were dating. So that's at least cool, on both ends, but of course we are old enough now to know that that's not enough.
Yeah, I've been pretty up and down recently, we said.

Ten years ago, when we first met, fellow young Americans in a foreign country, with everything to discover in the great land of abroad, I'm sure we thought that by the time we were 32 years old, we'd have it a little more together than this. You'd have the children you always wanted, and I would have published a novel. We'd at least be more secure than month to month. We'd have some clue of what our hearts wanted.

You'll get a kick out of this, you said, I'm picking hairs off the blanket on my bed while I talk to you, and I'm finding several different colors, from the different people who have spent the night here. I'm sure back when we met we both thought we'd be married by this age. How simple, the things we're told to want! How easy to want them when we are young!

Yeah, I just don't know why I can't seem to get anything done. I ruin whole days of work by going out too late the night before.
Yeah, things have been pretty up and down on my end, too.
Well I'd really better go, because I have a deadline for work.
Recognizing the exact timbre of despair in each other's voices.

Still, the brief conversation cheered me a bit. We have never lived closer than two hours from each other, and most of the time we've been friends, there has been either an ocean or a continent in between us. We've crashed in each other's living rooms and beds, we've visited each other in too many apartments to count. We've met each other's friends and significant others and we've reported back to each other from the various frontiers of our experiences: job changes, going back to school, falling in and out of love, transatlantic moves, cross-town bus rides. We've remodeled the various rooms of our lives and our world over drinks and smokes, on walks, on trains, on phones, in e-mails. And though we are wiser now, we also understand that this wisdom is our only tool for cutting a path through the unknown wilderness that grows only thicker as we age.

Maybe our world-weariness and our lack of direction would have dismayed our younger selves, but I have a feeling those two old guys on the bench in Paul Simon's song would just scoff and perhaps ruffle our hair, as if we were their grandchildren. Old? What do you know from old? Talk to me 50 years from now, then you can tell me about old. Quarter-life crisis? No such thing in my day. We were too busy fleeing the war, learning English, working in factories to support our families. When we could sit on a park bench with a newspaper and a smoke, now that was a good day.

Then my imagination's off and running: how terribly strange will it be to be seventy? If we make it that far, and for myself I am doubtful. Then I start wondering if there will even be park benches then, if there'll still be newspapers, if there'll still be grass. Our lives may look much different outwardly from the two old friends in the song, but the feeling of the song, that will be there, and I hope we will be too.

Today, before I get to work, I stroll down a city street of my imagination, pick up two cups of coffee to go, and meet you on a park bench, where we sit in companionable silence, at whatever age it is that we are, in the timelessness of the wind blowing leaves and paper over our round-toed shoes.

Tangerines

I eat tangerines every morning as if they were slices of the sun. They taste delicious but they also taste like replacement, like the missing of what they stand in for. Their sweet flame takes its stand against the long wet smear of this time of year, and some mornings manages to stave off the gray.

Other mornings, like this one, the tangerines can't even masquerade as their symbolic approximations, no matter how carefully I assign their metaphors. Today, tangerines can't begin to trick my tongue into tasting the warm light whose touch, like yours, I have gone too long without.

The Land Is A Body So Love It

I go down into dreaming easily, though sometimes awake.
Where the laws of physics are not recognized in court.
The city extends itself in bridges like arms stretching from one's shoulders to another's.
I sink easily into the thickness of the palpable world, merging the boundary like a bridge makes two landmasses one.
If I opened my chest would the contours of my organs mirror the geography of the land that is in my blood?
A vein that smiles through the eye of the world. A heart that loves through the vein of the world.
The landscapes of the possible are infinite, yet within this body. Below natural and constructed surfaces.
Hands are stitches that bind the two sides of invisible wounds with tiny bridges cemented with lust, stretching thirstily for waters they cover yet never touch.

Paper Ships

Sing to me again about a ship coming in
and let me believe for an instant it's mine:
an origami boat in a children's fleet
let loose on a river in a mountain night.
Each ship bore a candle that we set alight
for one who died by our nation's hands.

And I won't weep for leather boots she never sent,
nor for the man who turns his back on me.
My tears are reserved for the little girl
who thought her boat would really reach the sea.

We all fold dream futures out of paper
and take them out of pockets years later
to shade us from the strange constellations,
to shelter us from the fallout radiation.
On the plain we light them with tiny candles
for the memory of our green growing lands.

Bordeaux Sestina

I secretly wrote down all the things you mouthed,
Saved them for leaner days when bread
Was wanting and they'd fished the river
Dry and the economy was propped on wine,
The frightening drop of the curve's arch,
Productivity set against hunger like a stone.

Criminals were roundly stoned,
Oil-drenched cloths shoved in their mouths
And lit on fire under the Victory arch
While the mob seethed with wanting for bread
Almost enough to drink the wine-
Colored blood flowing like rivers

In the whip-lines on the slaves' backs: rivers
Of dominance in flesh permanent as stone.
Oh, in the old days we drank wine
By the liter! Poured it into our callow mouths
During meals topped off with cheese and bread
And later, in bed, how my back arched

In pleasure meeting your body's arch
And I would flow like rivers,
I flowed, before the shortages, before bread
Was gold and gold was stone,
Our bodies reduced to stomachs and mouths,
Forgetting the taste of wine,

Forgetting the reasons for drinking wine,
Forgetting even the people tortured under the Arch,
The people pleading with one mouth
For the golden old days or the mercy of the river,
And the governor's voice like stone,
Like a sentence: Let them eat bread.

Exile: What We Forgot

At each solstice we gather in the town square and sing songs of rejoicing. We sing of exile and the long march that leads to the homeland. We sing the joy of two feet to carry us along the solid ground, of arms strong enough to carry our children into the future. We sing thanks for the bounty of our cultivated corner of earth. We sing thanks for our safe arrival here.

But when I am apart from the crowd, a bit in shadow, working at a solitary task, I sing a soft song that came to me many years ago, which begins Oh, if only I had wings I would fly back to you, and people must have overheard it over the years, because sometimes when I come upon someone, old or young, a little apart or at a distance, I hear that person singing it, and sometimes they raise their eyes and look upward, longing for something they cannot name.

You Asked Me to Mark You But I Was the One Marked

I knew you planned to be gone a long time when you asked for a stamp in your passport, even though it wasn't required any more. It was like the other typical souvenirs you took: postcards and a cheap mug, a few digital photos of your face in close-up, smiling, with me in the background. You didn't stay long enough to learn the customs of my country, you were scared to taste the regional delicacies and too timid to try out the language. And lest I choose the wrong words to describe your visit, lest I make a mistake in the photo captions, I won't say what it was you were looking for when you crossed the border into my uncertain nights, but I will say I knew you were only passing the time until a flight was leaving for some other enticing land. Our parting kiss was too brief; the cab was waiting downstairs; you were impatient to be going. I touched your skin with the brand and your flesh yielded like a belt to the notching knife; I was sore for weeks afterwards.