Saturday, December 15, 2007
[Time is the school in which we learn
Time is the fire in which we burn]
"I have the biggest love in the oasis you piss in" that was the last thing I said as the daylight was breaking over the old tiles and we were sitting lastly together at the dawn in that tightly controlled and neat railroad station which reminded me just then of some kind of miniature of Europe’s old grand stations long lost to memory as then I was alone realizing I’d just awakened from some dreaming sleep with soft almost vanishing echoes of conversation and image in my new-earth eyes for no one had bothered me just another sleeping lump on the long wooden benches and even if I wasn’t quite supposed to be there the overnight clerk and the cleaning crew never put me out but I awoke staring straight up to that painted and stained-glass ceiling incredibly sightly and beautiful like Venice or Paris or Rome something that had gone from dust to gold and (apparently) quite back to dust again underneath the no-starry sky now vanished with daybreak and the slim glimmer of crescent moon sinking the air-held arrival of the plain south soaking up the light and the air the uneven warm days one after the other rolling in and unexpectedly staying the roaring puffs of white and billowy clouds over the Hudson across the wide fat swath of Hoboken’s broken old piers the rails and buses and train tracks and the old settled deep cobblestones where they still were and the paradise itself in which I was the enclosure the roundabout the old plaza and the open-air tracks with posted destinations running out along the platforms so tellingly plain as people embarked or entered smiles and faces and lights a’glimmer in every eye and heart but mine the long-awaited SECOND sight within each man and woman together hearts and minds and bloods flowing ‘totally and fatal FOR YOU’ I can hear them saying sighing staring lost in one another’s eyes that shadow book of passage and loss that death which haunts belied for time by the pure happiness of living the seamless stretch of travel all those ELEGANT SYMBOLS OF NONSENSE we wear the watches and charms and hats and bracelets and necklaces and flowery scarves and boots and shoes and coats and sweaters and jackets and jewels everything for something and even the tattooed kids say to one another ‘my famous hot-stamped tongue is yours’ IF YOU WOULD ONLY OFFER LOVE A PASSAGE for we are at the station and so close to destination so close to arrival so close to the very end RIGHT HERE stop and think but a while of the message we offer ONE TO ANOTHER ALLIED (and here even I stop wondering and remember back to what I must have dreamed - that titled Dutch waif - of which my time and place right now bears no trace) and my mind tries to sleep again for I am tired and disoriented YET HERE I STAY awaiting bloom and in my head all this I hear: "straight potential that you’ve had to simply do something stated without lead-in or other alteration and most certainly Mein Herr without reservation I’D SAY in space like all those deep-rhymed memories of someone else’s Fred Allen American Youth Cecil B. Schlemiel Weinstein Churcheil combined with a Gandolf Hinthler of the mind an opening in the sand an entry to the other land YOU PASSING like broken time at the only river and it comes from not knowing so hard and
TRYING TO BE SO HARD WHAT I WASN’T…"
