Grand Marais, Minnesota

I fear all the things that we fear really happen, predicted with crystal ball eyes. New York City: we're already there, living beyond our meager means and coalescing poetry from air we pierce with heels too high for practicality. I'm writing to share what will happen next (not necessarily in the trick sequence of chronological order but next in a sense we cannot see):

We'll cast aspirations (material, love) out windows of 6th story walkups we walked too many times and we'll move to my cabin in old Grand Marais. We'll stop writing poetry and began to understand that poetry is a poor translation of a way of living, and we'll live this way, glowing in the garbled classical beamed cross airwaves that paints the dark of empty roads swirled white with snow; we'll learn to live like locals in two outfits or maximum three and know the trails like they are extensions of our veins, spread into acidic earth that births the pines. We'll wash dishes in the tavern and count tips while paying riddance to the rent we paid in Brooklyn. We'll swear we'll never move back East, back West, abroad-- we will.

Hike to the Beaver Dam

We hiked through cold that crept through our soles, schooling my feet
on the making of bricks. The trees seemed to crowd close around us,
not used to warm creatures, clothed in such colorful furs.
My mother said Shh! Let's listen for owls, and I answered:
Who!
Who!
Who!
In laughter I saw like a phantom that page, full of names,
titled solemnly "Deaths". Mostly olds, with names that ring
of eras passed and many nights well spent.
At the end of the list is a name I know well, under bolded title
'10-'11 like one of us needed to go. The fearsome thing,
was how the name nestled neatly, a perfect fit to the page,
like Death consulted all listings of deaths
before deciding who goes and who stays.

The cold makes beards of breath and fools of us,
in bag lady coats and scarves pulled tight 'round necks.
I'm learning to tell white from white
to follow paths of snow. I pass a pretty patch of pink
where rabbit feast was had, chunks of fur adorning ice,
At the bottom of the gully is a clearing and a beaver dam.
Between the walls of trees the sun is sinking lower, dragging
paint across the sky. I'm breathing flags of white which mark
my misbelonging, my hot breath and bricks for feet.
The ghosts come tugging from my mouth and soon I'll go,
back up the hill, away and far from here.
Here, where the rodents have changed how the forest looks,
felling trees with teeth and piling them, those linking logs,
to dam the little river, grow it wide and flood the earth.
My mother says Shh! and I listen, listen, listen.

Newark, NJ

On the eve of Christmas Eve I am alone and after scrubbing wall to wall of my flat above the ghetto, I walk three miles while standing still on that backwards horse machine we call a treadmill. I practice being in love by smiling to myself and in the window made a mirror by the darkness of abandoned brick my mirror self smiles back.

For my friend

I want to say one day you will be famous, but those words lose meaning in existence and I realize this: that what you are you are, you are now, before, forever. And when no word you wrote exists, when every letter's melted into future fossil fuels and garbled waves way past the Milky Way, emitted in an era long forgotten, you yet will be a writer.