Seamstress for the Band

If I was looking for proof of us, our fingerprints would be on nothing. If they marked the skin of a tomato, we’d have cut it up and reduced it to juice for a sauce. If they were once on the window on the twelfth floor of that hotel room, housekeeping would have wiped them, and anyway it would have been only my palms splayed there. Your hands would have been on the square bones of my hips, those open windows. If they were on wine glasses we abandoned for each other, you’d have rinsed that evidence by morning while I cooked your peculiar eggs, a skill I learned quickly in order to demonstrate a case one wants to make but would prefer to keep circumstantial. If my fingerprints were on your body, you’d wash them even if I were in the same bath. Our crime is the absence of clues.

If we were looking for proof of us, we wouldn’t find a hair, though mine fall everywhere, stopping up your drains and dropping on your floors the thin map lines of a terrain that has a history of many names. I wipe them away best as I can, you know, so after I’m gone, I can meet you again without having just been seen in the sink.

If I were looking for footprints, I’d find none except where a certain pair of shoes has pocked your hardwoods all the way to the fireplace where I crouched to get warm, all the way to the piano where I plunked out the same three half-songs swearing I can finish if only I had the sheet music, all the way to that yellow chair  I imagined was a wild horse who would buck me off for leaning too far back, the chair I pretend I discovered and tamed, but eventually came to respect the rules of its balance. Then there are the places we can merely speculate I removed my shoes to confess: I’m staying.

If I had studied your case more diligently, I’d have known that the solution was the mystery, which is not the same as erasing a chalk outline the trapezoid shape of someone who clearly fell but insists she landed on her feet. If I’d not been so concerned with the accusation, I’d have left my fingerprints all over everything and hidden my hands. I’d have clogged your drains until the bath was as deep and unfathomable as the ocean. I’d have burned your eggs, unobservant of your customs, so that you would doubt my allegiance. I’d leave a trail of lipstick and hairpins like bread crumbs but I’d not wish for you to follow me. I’d expect you to keep them sealed and stored in case I came back and you could offer evidence that I left. Then I would pour them out as proof that I didn’t.

MP3:James Blake- A Case Of You (Joni Mitchell Cover)

I dislike people as a general rule. People are things ahead of you in line, stealing the cab you hailed, shoving past you, inflicting their neuroses upon you like black magic. I think most people dislike other people. It’s why we misuse car horns, our elbows and wear sunglasses in the shade. It’s also why people consider New York City to be the greatest city in the world. Everyone is bothered, and everyone suspects that they are bothering everyone else. There is a peace about that understanding, as there is in any understanding. Keep moving or be moved.

Sometimes when in a crowd I pretend I love everyone. I take in a deep breath and exhale like it’s a good spell. It hurts really bad like sunburn, or like not having skin at all. I played this game Friday night. Oh, it was a crowded and loud swirling soup of the worst chaos.  While I was still pretending that I loved everyone, the bartender pointed at me; I nodded over to the guy next to me and said, “he was here first.” Turns out, we were drinking the same potion. We knocked our plastic cups together. For that second, our only second, he was a member of my tribe. He offered a familiar gesture that acknowledged that I’m reasonable concerning the notion of fair.  I looked down from the balcony where the people had been shoving each other to see the stage.  If they were ever shoving–a hypothesis I now recant–they were now engaging in an act of using allotted space cooperatively in response to a shared stimulus. They were dancing.

Afterward, out on the street, a girl put her hands on the cab we had hailed. Her tribe got in a street fight with our tribe, and she shoved me. Then a civil war broke out in my tribe. Too much potion.

The next morning the sun was too bright, and I needed to walk. I couldn’t even think about my game. People were mass. There is a place in Union Square that I imagine belongs to me. I hated a slow man shuffling into the intersection while talking quietly into his wrist. I made up a mean story about him, a spaceship, and inadequate mental health care. Once he was out of my way, I saw that he was comforting  a green bird perched on his arm. Still, people were things buying young trees in pots and bottles of fresh cider, local honey and wine. People had short dogs that I almost stepped on. People were holding hands and taking up too much horizontal space. People were rising up on me like they were on escalators while I was trying to get down. Keep moving or be moved, I thought.

Eight hare krishna monks had folded their bodies on a blanket and were chanting with drums and tingshas.  A man wearing blue jeans and a saxophone stood by them and played jazz along with their hare ramas. They were from very different tribes, but there was only space for one noise. Imagine it, if you can, a sad sax working with happy monks, the discipline of monks cheering along the renegade of jazz. I stopped moving. I took off my sunglasses so I could hear them better. I needed a moment so desperately that I almost mistook reality for desire. I almost made up bad stories about cults and upside down hats meant for heads but beg for dollars instead. I almost forgot about pretend-love because nothing will make you feel so alone as letting yourself believe for a minute that you aren’t, and it hurts like sunburn–getting that close (or whatever word is so opposite to distance that space isn’t even implied) to light (or whatever word is so opposite to existence that you or I don’t even apply.) People captured the moment with cellphone cameras. Their hands raised up in the air like submarine periscopes so their future eyes could spy on the event without the threat of  having actually been there–the far left jazz player blowing at the ground to the monk at the right with the bells and his smile directed at the sky. Their whole human span, a crowd raised up their machines.  I just got really badly sunburned, and I wasn’t even trying to love everyone.

The slow man and the green bird strolled by like familiar aliens. The bird had a white ribbon tied from her foot to his finger.  She opened her wingspan full length but she didn’t try to fly anywhere.

MP3: The Low Anthem- Charlie Darwin

From the album, Oh My God Charlie Darwin:

posted by holly.

A man pushes a cart down the sidewalk lifting the back two wheels over the patch of broken cement where the rain and the wet leaves collect. That swamp is there no matter how long a drought has lasted, so he’s named it Swamp de Leon as it comes just before the intersection of Briarcliff Road and Ponce de Leon. In the south, Ponce and Swamp almost rhyme. He calls the cracks by their names as they stump the cart, “well, hello to you too, harry!” “That’s a mighty firm handshake you got there, emily.” “Horace, it seems your family has grown since last time I saw you.” And so forth.

There is a dead cat in the bed of the spruce trees that give privacy to a condominium complex. Her mouth gapes three teeth, the crooked keys of a last chord. Someone had tucked her in with a kitchen towel which meant someone was sorry.

It isn’t time for popsicles yet, but there is a festival half a mile up the road filled with people and outdoor music and sloshy plastic beer cups that will all end up flat like lily pads in Swamp de Leon. He pushes on toward the music and the matchstick people who are just a little too chilly to crave a popsicle, but just hungry enough for spring to buy one. Most currency isn’t in exchange for what a person wants right here and now anyway, but for something from the time and place they wish they were, the closest thing they can get to what they really wish. Otherwise, someone would smooth over the sidewalk so it didn’t feel so much like rolling wheels over the surface of the moon. Someone wouldn’t have blanketed the cat who has no need to stay warm. Otherwise, the man with the cart would have no customers paying for ice. Especially the children want ice just like they want their faces painted like cats and ladybugs and a balloon from another man who has pushed his cart from the other direction. He names the clouds along his way and then sells plots of air in the sky.

MP3: Nick Drake- Things Behind the Sun

posted by holly.

This song never made me happy before I had a dream in which I attended my own funeral. I didn’t have the best seat and was under the impression that I was in a theater to see a Cirque du Soleil performance. Then this song came on and the lights went up instead of down. A parade of carnival characters came out from the stage entrances. It took four clowns to carry my casket which was covered in a white sheet. They lifted it over their heads and back to their shoulders like it was a tuba. Women with painted faces carried trays of food as they walked up the aisles. People reached over each other, mostly preferring the fruit. I took a slice of cantaloupe. It tasted like nothing. Initially, I thought it was tacky that they were serving fruit that is not ripe or in season. Then realized it was I who was no longer in season.

By the end of the parade, the whole crowd was standing and singing along until the body had left the room.  And all these years I’ve spent worrying that I am going to die were gone when I woke up. All the pressure to have done something important, all the determination to get over things that have caused me suffering seemed amusing–like when a child’s ice cream cone gets licked right off the cone and rainbow sprinkles swim in a puddle of pink bubblegum on concrete. Grown-ups exchange smiles over the child who cries over this. They know the secret knowledge: things get so much worse. This will seem like nothing. Also, there is more ice cream.

Well, that’s how my funeral felt after my life was over. It was a spectacle responding to spectacle. After everyone had  followed the song out of the theater, I went backstage (is that where you go? I didn’t know.) A man wearing a red and white striped suit was sweeping up flower petals and confetti with a janitor’s broom. He tipped his top hat  and smiled under his mustache when I passed him, and then I found a counter where a man was spinning pizzas on a series of turntables. He showed me how different albums sound if they are all played at the same time and on top of each other, how all the notes will mesh and then clash. I understood.  I took a number, pulled up a chair, and waited to order my remix.

MP3: Obla Di Obla Da

posted by holly.

Formerly a seven franchise chain, The Near Nothing Museum has only one remaining location. It’s worth the ticket ($12.34) and the drive out of your way for the Room of Latitude and Longitude where crossword cut-outs dangle from the ceiling, the clues grazing the top of your head and where blank squares spread the walls and you can reach all the way from 34 across to 59 down, a clue no one has yet solved. You can climb inside all the black squares, but I won’t ruin all the surprises therein. Inside one of the squares, familiar poems are communicated via sense of smell. Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree” smelled mostly of a basement, which initially confused this reviewer, but made sense once the scent began to turn sheet-white, a shade that flaps and hisses at the wind or at loneliness, if there is a difference. One of Shakespeare’s sonnets (#130) smelled like rain, lipstick, old copper, and formaldehyde–which is astonishing in its ability to please and can be purchased along with the elixirs of other poems as a perfumes in the gift shop (prices vary according to meter.)

Also worth a look is the broken heart, which you can hold gently in your hands, or, as most visitors seem to prefer, toss at the wall which presumably once was white but has been painted over in cathartic splatter. Like an inverse Oscar Wilde’s tomb, people have come to pay a different respect.

The less adventurous can take communion from an intoxicated bear. The travel-weary are free to nap in front of a live audience who are encouraged to participate in the sound effects of dreams.

Most notable and the main attraction, the reason people veer off the desert highway (please have a full tank of gas and a spare dispenser in the trunk, plenty of water and snacks–all of which can be fulfilled at the turn by a shop with no attendant; pay in the drop box) is the Near Nothing Man. You must give up all your possessions to visit with him. He will return your heart when you leave, but it will have been altered  (for most it will continue to perform all physiological functions.) This reviewer had no trouble afterward with its beating and response to stimuli. However, she had a deeper understanding of not-knowing the answer to 59 Down, left with the scent of Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” pulsing on her wrist (licorice, star-pointed lilies, wet moss), and a print of her heart’s reaction to the wall, that car-wreck stop and the explosion of retraced paths, first in the frantic, slow seconds when brakes could have been applied, then the minutes when an alternate route could have been taken, hours of steady stretches of open road, days of waiting just to get somewhere, until the womb-beginning before the heart is actually a heart and therefore doesn’t yet have its singular desire to get so near everything.

MP3: How To Dress Well-Say My Name Or Say Whatever

posted by holly.