The Starting – episode 2

Hahaha. Look at the date. Then look at the date of my last post. What in the HELL is wrong with me. Wait, there’s nothing wrong here…I just wrote my fourth post for my once-a-year-blog. Haha. But seriously folks. Here is the sad reality. I had good intentions. And that was all. I had no follow through. You know what happened in 2013? My son grew about 6 inches. We went on a 2 week road trip . We went to Kansas twice. I took the train with 3 girlfriends to Kansas. I taught school. I won he Viola award. Barry built a studio in out back yard. I did an artist’s residency. My family met in Park City for Thanksgiving. And the list goes on, baby. And I got nothing. No stories written down. No dates. No pictures. It’s time for a poem. And then, it’s time to improve the follow through. Here’s to 2014, and to writing it down.

 

The Vanishings

Stephen Dunn 

 

One day it will vanish,

how you felt when you were overwhelmed

by her, soaping each other in the shower,

or when you heard the news

of his death, there in the T-Bone diner

on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts

of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.

One day one thing and then a dear other

will blur and though they won’t be lost

they won’t mean as much,

that motorcycle ride on the dirt road

to the deserted beach near Cadiz,

the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,

his machine gun in your belly—

already history now, merely your history,

which means everything to you.

You strain to bring back

your mother’s face and full body

before her illness, the arc and tenor

of family dinners, the mysteries

of radio, and Charlie Collins,

eight years old, inviting you

to his house to see the largest turd

that had ever come from him, unflushed.

One day there’ll be almost nothing

except what you’ve written down,

then only what you’ve written down well,

then little of that.

The march on Washington in ’68

where you hoped to change the world

and meet beautiful, sensitive women

is choreography now, cops on horses,

everyone backing off, stepping forward.

The exam you stole and put back unseen

has become one of your stories,

overtold, tainted with charm.

All of it, anyway, will go the way of icebergs

come summer, the small chunks floating

in the Adriatic until they’re only water,

pure, and someone taking sad pride

that he can swim in it, numbly.

For you, though, loss, almost painless,

that Senior Prom at the Latin Quarter—

Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and you

just interested in your date’s cleavage

and staying out all night at Jones Beach,

the small dune fires fueled by driftwood.

You can’t remember a riff or a song,

and your date’s a woman now, married,

has had sex as you have

some few thousand times, good sex

and forgettable sex, even boring sex,

oh you never could have imagined

back then with the waves crashing

what the body could erase.

It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,

the story-fodder,

everything you retrieve is your past,

everything you let go

goes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides,

in cahoots with thin air.

The jobs you didn’t get vanish like scabs.

Her good-bye, causing the phone to slip

from your hand, doesn’t hurt anymore,

too much doesn’t hurt anymore,

not even that hint of your father, ghost-thumping

on your roof in Spain, hurts anymore.

You understand and therefore hate

because you hate the passivity of understanding

that your worst rage and finest

private gesture will flatten and collapse

into history, become invisible

like defeats inside houses. Then something happens

(it is happening) which won’t vanish fast enough,

your voice fails, chokes to silence;

hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.

Every other truth in the world, out of respect,

slides over, makes room for its superior.