Will you come home now that they’re gone?

I used to think all art and poetry should be free

and still do

but how to get it to you

have you sit with it

and not take for granted

the act of generosity or openness

built into your listening

even if the voice

with which it’s spoken

is little more than a thin note

barely distinguishable

from the quiet in a room at night

that looks out over Manhattan from across the river

a room more someone else’s than my own

as sober now

I have little sense of what’s mine to assume

not just in terms of what we say about ourselves

but when you close your eyes

and imagine your body

how you sit in this chair

feeling your stomach settle into your pelvis

as though there were an internal stability

to your presence

or this irregular movement of language

as the ground over which we’re traveling

its slow progression

illusion of forward momentum and obsession with division

instead treating that movement

as a sense of the body in space 

one moment followed by another

disconnected

but continuous

little more than an address

despite our mutual absence

me as I’m writing this 

you as you’re reading it

since we’ll never access this page together

and yet we continue through this long season

and slow immiseration of life

punctuated by a brief memory of another time 

as when we were waiting for the weather to change

so that we might take a walk around a park with greater ease

imitating a video 

we watched together of the same park 

living in New York and seeing ourselves 

in the recorded movement of others

but also a fantasy of a past

in which we imagine ourselves present

but not yet together in this space

and when I speak to you

I understand your pain 

through a lens of my own suffering

wondering if what I see is a projection of myself

that this desire for openness to what you’re experiencing

is a continuation of my own ego

but again to return to a sense of the morning

in which you are sitting watching

say

starlings land outside the window

learning their way of imitating another’s song

in these early days of spring

and I had said that I no longer wanted to write about grief

or some ambient sadness

untethered from a specific object or reason

but to write of love

no matter how difficult to experience

and say nothing other than to utter its name

yet when it’s missing

this necessary feeling of openness to the world

how earlier I walked

in the rain and unseasonable warmth

to drop off the rent check

and felt as though a wound had opened up

as I looked out over the umbrellas

balanced along the street

in the air

and vanishing line of traffic lights

providing some color down Seventh Avenue

notes that seem to repeat an earlier question

as though an idea of myself

was contained in their constellation 

or as if I knew this wasn’t going to work and told myself as much

sharing something too early somehow

deprives it of a particular energy necessary to continue

and I wonder thinking again

if any way of addressing you

as though this occasion were enough

as another said it takes place in a life

and there’s beauty in that limited necessity

of these minor notes

a way of finding a place together

and we had talked of ways in which listening

the body opens itself to the world

skin becomes porous

acting like a gateway rather than a boundary

between myself 

and the air that surrounds

feeling that in saying it somehow

the air in the room gains in intensity

or a kind of thickness

that for once gives birth to a silence

that feels less desperate

more able to see itself as a way of moving forward into it

or if I can understand how I don’t want to do something

I can find a way to do it in which

I cause myself less pain

as in now without an image to justify this precise moment

the desire for an activity can become simply what it is

a material practice within a certain limitation

when picking up your head again

to watch say birds nesting in a neighbor’s window

or listening to snippets of conversation

that come in from the street two stories below

I wonder how long the page will be

and if you will remain here with me

or that this could cause some kind of joy

as we insisted

in this act of writing

one might construct a life

with a few friends

and the desire that it would continue

so that this pain we feel at any moment

is temporary and real

only expressed as a little voice in a larger chorus

chanting 

but at a distance

arising as a light breeze 

something calm in the wind

expressed in the rustle of leaves

or moving ripple of water 

across a lake

on whose shore we find ourselves

sitting together

watching a cormorant or wood duck

swimming lazily toward the shore

as against a greater stillness 

alongside the quiet beneath your breath as you read this

or quick movement of the eyes

imagining my voice in your ear

an intimate whisper

perhaps no different from your own

and somehow a way of getting closer to something

an emptiness

which these words can simply pretend to fill

or postpone

the way in which air holds space

as though a crowd of people was buoyed up in it 

and I thought of how in the morning

your sadness was met with correction

rather than moving towards

even now I’m ashamed to use the first person

imagining failure as easier to recognize at a distance

the same with pleasure

in which the flowering trees attract attention

of those sitting beneath them

already seeing themselves being looked at somewhere else

this possibility of address

or just your bare regard

in the same way rain obscures the city seen through a window

love is diffuse

or rather not so abstract

but located in the body

somewhere in the face

as listening to the rain strike against the air conditioner

and the birds flying against the grayness of the sky

instead of adding more stripping back to leave what little is here

and allowing it to be here

this minimum that makes up a life

the bed

a few plants and a desk

a pile of clothes on the floor

or that somehow our absence

would mean an emptiness

that was only ever realized while we were here

as the continual grayness of the clouds

or crumbling brick façade in the building opposite ours

or that it’s just out of a desire for stability

that you tell yourself

this deprivation allows you to continue

at least in some little way

doing that which gives you pleasure

a sense of being enough

writing for the few others one needs address 

at least in your head

to find some way to tell them you love them

without breaking down

in the first moments

of being in their presence

the silence that follows the realization

you can no longer speak

to feel time unfolding in a landscape

or a home

to feel it in this very breath

how it moves under each word as its uttered

as though it were the material of this page

or rather a regard within the fantasy

of my voice speaking out loud the name of a book

wishing for a joyous form of intimacy

I imagine others capable of

but within this feeling of time

sadness disappears

not to be replaced with joy

but an acknowledgement of a fundamental poverty

understanding this deprivation

or stripping away

as a mode of life

and again

intimacy or regard

a necessary way of being together

and yet

there are mornings when I get up

that everything feels like the night before

somehow broken

and this desire to erase time

to move toward the nothing of afterwards

there are bugs in the kitchen

piles of clothes on the floor

the lines remain

and a lack of history in the present moment

no images left

but something loose

nothing collected nothing sure