Y2K

On my most fearful days, the days where the gap between my instincts and my self-confidence is the widest and apparently the most insurmountable, I wake up thinking I know nothing of importance. If I have the energy I analyze what I mean. I mean that I can’t figure out how to do anything practical that will have a practical result. I mean I can start a project but never find my way near the finish line. That’s everything seems like a finish line, the end of a race during which I get winded early and fail, fail, fail to achieve and rest from the achievement. And there are few expressions I hate to hear more than “Everyone feels that way.” Because tied into the fear is absolute certainty that there is no one who feels “that way” but me. In fact, the only thing that makes me feel better, gets me going and reminds me how smart my little boy was, is hearing how stupid everyone else can be. Do you remember Y2K? The entire world was, like Gigi, trembling on the brink. Mankind had produced a computer-generated Armageddon, a quicksand of global financial destruction. Everywhere you turned, everywhere you went, people were talking to strangers, connecting to each other, girding for the coming of the inevitable end. I sat in a friend's house on Martha’s Vineyard with happy people sipping champagne and chatting idly. Quietly, over several hours, we watched the world on TV as one city after another across the globe exploded not into economic smithereens but in glorious celebration, a tribute not to failure or fear or insufficiency or any of my little worries, but to the farcical heartbreaking brilliant catastrophic glory that was the 20^th century and to the delirium that we humans had turned another corner in spite of everything.

The old gal

Burial

For now
My dog—uninterested
In life, in chewing,
In thought, in love for me—
Is interested only in burial.

Later, the bone, a white rawhide,
Will be sniffed out and disinterred
And, gnawed and drooled upon,
It will be torn wildly apart
Into wet and white runts,

At which point
I’ll throw them away
With the wasted table scraps
And crumbs of bread

And slowly
My dog will come to me,
What once was there
Now gone.

How to budget

My shampoo is so expensive I must spend 25 cents every time I wash my hair. And sometimes, more than I need comes out in my hand and then what? It’s not like I can put it back in the tube, so I use it, probably 35 cents worth. I don’t have that much hair. What a waste. But it’s the shampoo my hairdresser says I should use. She’s not just my hairdresser, she’s my friend, she’s been cutting my hair for 30 years and right from the start we were friends, she’s dear and generous and has had the same true heart all these years and I care for her and would trust her with my life. So naturally I trust her when she tells me what shampoo to use. I must admit too that sometimes I think my hair looks fuller now than it did a few years ago, falling out in clumps, before this shampoo was part of my daily toilet. I don’t really have to buy it more than once every three or four months but thinking about it I realize it’s so expensive I must spend 25 cents every time I wash my hair. Or if I’m going out that night I might wash it again in the late afternoon, and that would be 50 cents.  At least. If I’m careful and in control when I squeeze the bottle and not thinking about something else that may be annoying me. So we’re trying to budget, again, so I ask myself how can one budget that? Do I put some money aside each paycheck to cover myself for the day when the shampoo runs out? I don’t even do that for auto repairs, tires or oil filters and a bum radiator. But it should be in the budget somewhere, otherwise who am I fooling when, at certain times in the month when it's all expenses and no income and I look at myself in the mirror, with my hair frizzing off my head like a mad scientist, I wonder, what will happen to us all if we can’t pay the bills?

Dreaming in color

Dreams

1. The Affair
The feel
of a set of hotel keys
a set of thoughts of
what it’s been, of what
it will be
again, played out
in the screaming of her pulse,
outlined like a face below water
by the crisp wrinkles
of a white envelope between the fingers
of the man who pulls it from its hiding
place in the branches
of a mean growing bush
in a meridian between traffic
coming down, going up State Street.

2. The Accusation
Our old friend
G. her hair young and
blazing, on a lawn like a Wyeth autumn
beckoning me from three arm’s length
with her voice, her hair,
her large eyes, her old love,
her innocent boy sleepy in pajamas
waving from the front door.

3. The Fairy Tale
A young woman
like a young you
delicate in her lace, in her
wedding gown, in a skullcap
like blushing Cinderella’s
in the window of an arboretum
a raglan sleeve shaping a feminine
hand gesturing to the stars
high above the lawn
where I stand dreaming
by her stone castle,
where far below
you stand
anticipating my return.

4. The Re-creation
Writing this poem
sliding out of white sheets
on the bed of our apartment in the city,
you stir, purr and, to forget
nothing, I try to write by
standing above you, how
it feels of
what it’s been and
what it suddenly is,
again.

Playing Songs and Carols

Playing an amped portable electric piano with 56 notes, seated on an ottoman, the piano on the radiator, requires a sure-fingered fluency and a noisy room overstuffed with warm partygoers who are interested mainly in hot hors d’oeuvres and cool chit-chat. If your middle right finger, for instance, is weak or tired or sore and sits heavily on an A with your left hand playing a G chord, it ruins an otherwise evocative rendition of  I’ll be Home for Christmas, when other Christmases with another piano more forgiving would have brought the living room a kind of soft silence and pure tone to soften the hungriest of visitors, and carry them to the best of remembrances, their hunger instead for sweet childhood, late friends, grandparents’ frosted windows, a young beautiful mother and father, the miracle of Christmas lights and twinkle in the living placement of notes from a singular old rich piano and a clear voice of a man aching to be young.

Controlling the message

“The internet is fucked up,” my son said. We were discussing “Seinfeld” and the smooth career of Seinfeld himself and we slipped into discussion of the rest of the cast and their lives since and then naturally of Michael Richards. “If he had only been heard by just the audience that night without somebody videoing it, he might have just been able to apologize and that would have ended it, instead of it going everywhere, with Seinfeld having to go on Letterman to defend him.” We decided it’s the modern way of doing celebrity business: control the message while appearing transparent. It began with Watergate. In his own clumsy, half-distrusting way, Nixon created the internet. He tried to control the message about the burglars but didn’t destroy the tapes. Be a snoop but watch out for snoops. Nixon did the former but self-destroyed because he carelessly overlooked the latter. That’s the internet message to my twenty-first century children: trust almost no one, they’re all listening, and some want to impeach you, expose you, hurt you and as long as you try to be free, there will be those interested in watching you be ruined, and take an occasional pot-shot of their own on Twitter. We tell my children, control the message, the complicated, nuanced balanced truth simply doesn’t matter. It’s a bloodless world with a short attention span, and it’s listening to me, and you, right now. Forty years ago we were so happy, we Nixon haters, with Watergate, with watching him pathetic and beaten. We didn’t realize it was a double-edged sword, exposing evil only to ferment ignorance and hatred all these years later.

Shortest day of the year--the sun's resolution

Please set, old sun. Then don’t refuse to rise in the morning, behind white winter clouds. Burn and rise and conquer the grey and frozen earth. Old sun, please set and settle deep into yesterday’s final darkness and have it be gone and forgotten, forgiven, and embraced for being done and past, its memory a long dead friend whose faults you’ve dismissed and whose life you celebrate now and then with a drink, a private joke, and a smile. And one thing more, old sun: make tomorrow last a little longer this year, warm and strong and young for a little while longer this year and  we may recover, and again feel your life, your hope.