Take Another Look

A bad night lies ahead

And a new day beyond that–

A simple sequence, but hard

To remember in the right order.

—Mark Jarman, “Psalm: The New Day”

Twice I woke up tonight and wandered to

the window. And the lights down on the street,

like pale omission points, tried to complete

the fragment of a sentence spoken through

sleep, but diminished into darkness, too.

—Joseph Brodsky, “On Love”

I must say. Don’t you love that expression? The suggestion of compulsion, of being forced, or helpless, to say, even when, as now, the million dollar question is, say what? Something, certainly.

What was I going to say? That’s another good one, and the story of my days of late, all day, every day and long into the night.

There always seems to be something lurking in the peripheries, moving in and out of the shadows, the ceaseless hide-and-seek of an exhausted consciousness. Earlier today I was certain that there were two lines, or two strands of thought –almost ideas– that at some point I felt should be recorded, or at the very least preserved somehow, committed for some purpose to memory.

But they’re gone now. I’ve been sitting here for an hour with a pen light clenched in my teeth and my brain in a soup bowl in my lap, poking through the weird coils of meat with a chopstick, trying to find those elusive fucking words. They do, however, seem to have vanished. They’ve slipped back into the brush and headed for the river. I suppose they’re drinking beer and huffing paint under the bridge even now, avoiding the moonlight that’s making a moving screen of the water. I can just barely hear the distant murmur of their voices carrying back up the river.

By tomorrow they’ll have forgotten themselves. They will have wholly disappeared. I can’t keep track of all the deserters any more. They go right from smiling, bright-eyed babies to fugitives to just plain gone.

we passed a long row

of elms. She looked at them

awhile out of

the ambulance window and said,

What are all those

fuzzy-looking things out there?

Trees? Well, I’m tired

of them and rolled her head away.

—Williams Carlos Williams, from “The Last Words Of My English Grandmother”