The Feel of Things
You say no one should start so early. I say no one
told me that's what I was doing. I saw stories everywhere,
wondered how did people get in them? In the morning I jumped
against the arid high valley chill. By the afternoon it was so hot
I forgot my windbreaker. Sometimes a balloon would land
in the playground, spitting fire, and we all ran to it.
At night the air smelled like piñon and chile. When I think
of that dog now I remember his ears, silky smooth. I'd run things
along my lips: my right thumbnail, satin hem of a blanket. There was
a kind of ditto paper, stinking chemical blue in the back, 4-digit
multiplication problems in the front. I finished at recess. It was
repulsive; I had to taste it. Nevertheless, I learned that way.
My surface was tactile; my feet itched and peeled until they bled.
I'd chew the strips of dead skin. I'd devour pencils, sinking canines
into the yielding wood until it was covered in deep dents. Desk
chairs were unyielding to my skinny little butt. Once
I cut my own bangs. I spoke to an alien in the air-
conditioning vents. One Saturday morning I had to miss
cartoons as a consequence. Another the President
had done something historic, so it was just the news instead.
I learned my lesson and started reading the news, but
the bottom of my cereal bowl was still cane sugar sludge.
Balls were impossible to grasp, some other kid at the other
end. Instead, I ran when no one could see me. I scrambled
up beige and pink sandstone, or mottled black and white
granite. I stared at a crag for minutes, calculating
could I reach it, would it hold my weight. No one
told me I was doing it all wrong. But I could tell.
Maybe it was just the touch I needed. But I had
to dress everything up in stories.
I still do.
Max Beckmann vs. Mean Curvature Flow
You'd have enjoyed this Circus too,
Max. I can see how you'd have drawn
it, thrown together like you do, waiters
to dining sheds on 2nd Ave dodging
delivery cyclists while sharp-faced children
in crocs and polar fleece chase each other
in circles around the Amazon delivery guys
smoking on a palette box on a dolly,
the Queensboro Bridge and tram
to Roosevelt Island overhead,
and in the corner, a body falling under
the wheels of a refrigerator truck. And no one
can see all that but Braque understood,
and Hamilton and Perelman, that if
you're going to continue the transformation,
just a few ways make sense. And if
you understand that, you could include
the crooked white towers at Blue Slip, the ladies
in Sunday hats outside the Pentecostal church
on Flatbush, and the woman assembling
a puzzle on her phone on the 4 train, and it gets
ridiculous, but the developer who coded a moment
of algorithmic joy, shared over the network,
because so many invisible mathematicians
feel the beauty in the scaffold of reality
we'll never know. But you understood
that when there's a bottleneck, a choke point,
everything explodes to infinity. Bodies
are grabbed and mutilated. Wars are like infection
on the news, and every table at a cafe
becomes a cable talk show over Caesar wraps
and flat whites, no end to how tight and fast
it can get and you know how bad.
Sometimes there's a dog or a cat. They sit
under couches or on a piano. They don't know
they are part of the picture. To be like that.
Is that why so many people yawn? Or to
slow the transformation down? My radius keeps
getting smaller. I may not be safe in this picture.
