This Could Be the Last Time

For a change in perspective:

Here I am at night. The wind’s white noise is the only sound. There’s a collective ambient light, just enough to write by, coming from the libraries, streetlamps, and cars.  The fountain across the street gushes water for the first time this year, marking spring and the near-end of this project. I can smell the water in the air, an almost sweet freshness that reminds me of humid summer evenings, and it seems triumphant, for some reason, to watch the fountain’s plumes against the purple and black sky.

A couple passes. They’re holding hands. The woman says something about Rolling Rock, about how beautiful it is, about how she’d like to take the man there someday, and it takes me a minute to realize that she’s talking about a landscape. Which is disappointing. How interesting, I’d thought, to talk about beer as a place, which I guess in many ways it is.

How would I tell someone about this place? Now that I’ve done this project, something’s different about my relationship with the plaza. It’s become a familiar addition to my life—an extra room in my apartment, a tattoo. I see it and I sit in it and I try to transcribe it. It’s where I’ve gotten over the self-consciousness that comes with writing in public (although tonight, sitting here alone under the darkened tent, I’m pretty certain I look like a psychopath).

A procession of clouds drifts southward, dimly lit from below as if retaining a few final ounces of residual daylight. The birds, who’ve been waking me up this week, are silent, and I realize that I never think of them—those tiny, trembling puffs of energy—as animals that need to sleep.

(They do, of course, and later I’ll read that birds have the ability to put one half of their brains to sleep at a time. When the right half sleeps, the bird’s left eye closes. When the left side sleeps, the bird’s right eye closes. Sleeping birds can react to stimuli in their open eye, thus protecting themselves from nighttime dangers.)

On my way here I stopped at a gas station. When I went inside to pay, a man with a bundle of newspapers under each arm charged ahead of me toward the clerk. The clerk shot him a what the hell do you think you’re doing? look through the bulletproof glass.

“My mother died,” the man said. He started to weep. “I need these. She’s gone.”

The clerk’s eyes softened.

I’m thinking about this—about how the man needed something to mark an end—as I step over the plaza's protective rope, standing for the first time in this lawn I’ve been staring at and writing about for ten weeks. The grass is damp and it swallows my bootheels, leaving a pair of divots that the rope was no doubt intended to thwart. But it feels right to be standing here after so long, listening to the breeze in the quiet night. It feels right to leave a mark.

***

Friday Afternoon in the Universe

Wow. I mean, I wander out of the Carnegie Library, having wasted a few hours in the Pennsylvania Room researching an essay that’s going nowhere, feeling sorry for myself, pissed off and ready, for the ten-thousandth time, to give up writing altogether.

So I come down the marble stairs, trying not to look at anyone, keeping my eyes on the floor as I sulk toward the exit. I hear footsteps behind me, but they’re far enough behind that I push through the door without looking up to hold it for anyone. Another set of stairs now: cement, broad and awkwardly-distanced so that you can’t simply put one foot in front of the other, you know, one on each step—instead it becomes an embarrassing game of one foot on one step, then two together on the next step, then deciding which foot should move forward next…should you alternate? Or does it not matter since you’re returning to baseline every other step anyway?

It’s too much to think about. To hell with this essay. To hell with this winter. To hell with these stairs that lead to sidewalks that lead to Schenley Plaza.

And then I feel it. Not quite spring, but better than winter. Warmth.

I stumble into the plaza, avoiding my usual spot under the tent, trying to get into the spirit of new perspectives brought on by the uptick in temperature. I try (and, triumphantly, fail) to sight a cloud in the thawing sky. I feel, in taking my scarf off, almost indecent. Scandalous even.

But then I crumble as I always do on the first warm day, overwhelmed by thoughts of what I should be doing for maximum enjoyment and advantage-taking of the weather. It’s a kind of paralysis: I start one thing and think about another, about how that other thing would surely be better than what I’m doing now, and then I go do it and the cycle repeats.

And I almost feel ashamed, sitting here and writing, ready to explode, feeling that I should be doing something. I try to remember that I am. I am doing something. I’m here, writing, feeling hopeful in a very general way on a Friday afternoon.

This notebook, this assignment…today, they’re anchors. Today they force me to sit outside and just be; to sit here and soak it in.

Everything feels new.

New attitude. New seat (a warm green park bench I’ve had my eye on all winter, covered in ice heretofore). New weekend. New list of submissions logged in Submittable. New movement in other, less infuriating essays. New tone of voice in the passing conversations (jubilance—the verbal equivalent of skipping). New sun on my neck.

The patches of snow that remain are pathetic, defeated, dirty and cowering.

I put on one of my favorite jazz albums, Medeski Martin and Wood’s Friday Afternoon in the Universe, and let it loop in my headphones. The music’s great, but sitting here watching the sudden buzz of people leaving work, high-fiving one another as they shuffle around this greening, roped-off lawn, I realize what I like most about the album is its title—the ability of a phrase to conjure the limitless energy and hope that everyone in the plaza seems to feel today.

"I still had two friends, but they were trees."

March now. I’ve been away for a while, coming back to what looks like (at first) disappointingly little change at Schenley Plaza. Still the sound of dripping water, still the thin layer of snow, still the breath between my face and my notebook, still the park workers clearing ice from sensitive places, still clips from passing one-way cell phone conversations (“I feel bad, you know, we broke windows and stole stuff from their yard, you name it, everything but hard drugs, we did it, skipped school the next day…”), still my hand going numb before the first page is half-full, still the self-consciousness of being the weirdo who writes outside here in 16-degree weather, still wearing one glove (on my right hand, so thick it distorts my handwriting) because he lost the other one in December and hasn’t gotten around to buying a new pair yet and figures we’re so close to spring that it’s probably not worth it and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

(Forgive him, he just read the Jamaica Kincaid essay, and is feeling parenthesis-prone.)

No birds today. Just the distant passing of trucks and buses.

Some changes, however few:

Our snowman is no more. Reduced to a white divot. Reduced to somehow more than gone. To say that he never existed (or that he was erased) would be an understatement—by the looks of it, our snowman in fact lived some kind anti-existence. Like when you erase a word so thoroughly that you tear the paper, leaving a hole instead of blank space.

The rebel footprints on the lawn, which must have thinned the snow, are now patches of green grass side-by-side. As if Spring herself walked through here (but kept going).

Workers clear ice not only from the pavilion, but from gardens and plane tree braches as well. They use scythes mounted on long yellow poles, scraping the freeze until it breaks so the trees won’t suffocate when they come back to life. I asked one of them (the workers, that is).

Which reminds me of a poem by Larry Levis I heard at AWP, the poem that’s been stuck my head ever since (in the spot where there’s usually a song). All I could see was this plaza, as if it’s become the Default Background of my mind just as it’s the background of this journal and this blog (and it occurs to me now that I’m about to fill the last page of said journal, the one I started right here in this park seven years ago).

I, too, read late at the library (back then) and looked out black windows onto (this) black lawn.

I, too, felt (and still feel) brother limitation and his clinging.

I, too, have walked home on dark winter nights thinking of acquaintances.

Most of all, I, too, have sat amidst the joggers trying to find this place and make it my own.

(I hope you enjoy it like I did.)

***

The Two Trees

by Larry Levis

My name in Latin is light to carry & victorious.
I'd read late in the library, then
Walk out past the stacks, rows, aisles

Of books, where the memoirs of battles slowly gave way
To case histories of molestation & abuse.

The black windows looked out onto the black lawn.

                                  ~

Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced
By failure. It clung to me & did not let go.
When I ran, brother limitation raced.

Beside me like a shadow. Have you never
Felt like this, everyone you know,

Turning, the more they talked, into . . .

Acquaintances? So many strong opinions!

And when I tried to speak—
Someone always interrupting. My head ached.
And I would walk home in the blackness of winter.

I still had two friends, but they were trees.
One was a box elder, the other a horse chestnut.

I used to stop on my way home & talk to each

Of them. The three of us lived in Utah then, though
We never learned why, me, acer negundo, & the other
One, whose name I can never remember.

"Everything I have done has come to nothing.
It is not even worth mocking," I would tell them
And then I would look up into their limbs & see
How they were covered in ice. "You do not even
Have a car anymore," one of them would answer.

All their limbs glistening above me,
No light was as cold or clear.

I got over it, but I was never the same,

Hearing the snow change to rain & the wind swirl,
And the gull's cry, that it could not fly out of.

In time, in a few months, I could walk beneath
Both trees without bothering to look up
Anymore, neither at the one

Whose leaves & trunk were being slowly colonized by
Birds again, nor at the other, sleepier, more slender

One, that seemed frail, but was really

Oblivious to everything. Simply oblivious to it,
With the pale leaves climbing one side of it,
An obscure sheen in them,

And the other side, for some reason, black bare,
The same, almost irresistible, carved indifference

In the shape of its limbs

As if someone's cries for help
Had been muffled by them once, concealed there,

Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark

—while the joggers swerved around me & I stared—

Still tempting me to step in, find her,

                        

                          And possess her completely.