4

My whole life I've felt I was doing something wrong. The unlivable world, the not knowing, the ability to fake it being the skill I wish I could let go of. You can be anyone you want, I know. But to be everyone you are -- the parting of leaves, the loosening of the grip, the pulsing gaze into the kitchen. A slip of hair is pulled behind the ear. The seagull is still there, sitting on the telephone pole behind my apartment. Back again because that's what it does. Back, because even if it was a different seagull, I wouldn't be able to notice. I have someone to turn to again. I'm still in no-time. It's still the same day. It's still march and the pink flowers are blooming. All along the boulevard.

3.2

What I say is never that, but something else. I’m walking the molten center, standing two hundred yards away, calling towards the break; Crouching on the floor with the hundreds of letters while windows rattle, screens brighten, the gyre spinning outward; Finding form in so many arms, a momentary dream of becoming a spider so as to open again with that much more, each limb only holding so much; What I say is never that, but something else; The distance of hands, a spine curved just so a chest can fit; What I’m saying is that pea tendrils can be cooked up with lemon and garlic and sit, somehow, on a plate; We fit around each other.

3.1

We spoke, our last conversation and what we most wanted. I said, to be reached for, and you, to be returned to. Reaching has no prerequisite, it’s movement towards, extending. The approach. There’s always leaving before there’s return. Waves lapping at our ankles. Months later I went to where we’d walked, under the lifeguard tower, and sat in the sand. Some shade in the midst of everyone. I didn’t know what I was doing, then did. I’d returned and was waiting. If desire can’t complete itself, it can be an opening, a slow sweetness before all’s swept back to sea.

3

Attention is paid or given and something is exchanged in the glances that happen through wooden frameworks. Sometimes things demand your attention even when you’ve already given what feels like enough; even when you don’t want to. It’s not always mindful, but there’s always a choice, even in the face of loudness. I keep coming up with names for the sounds I hear, as though that will make them more bearable: nail guns, drills, hammers, forklifts, engines, generators, people yelling, laugher. Everything has a category and can always be described further, given an even more thorough name: a rubber hammer hitting a hollow metal frame; morning conversations happening through the windows of idling cars; rocks colliding with scraps of wood and the metal edges of a dumpster; footsteps of the last person installing cables after dark. Months ago, I recorded the sounds of next door when it was trucks moving in and out and I slowed it down, hoping to find some kind of music. There wasn’t anything there, just the same familiar abrasiveness. We search for hidden messages that say what we want them to, what we suspect but can’t prove. When I get frustrated, I do my own banging, hitting my cabinet doors open and closed so as to at least join in. Sound demands more sound, a response.

2.1

2

January in Columbus

Outside grey sky and clouds so slight they disappear
when, not quite distracted, I turn to the trees
and watch shivering branches for whom waiting means
holding oneself and all the leftover rain.

What’s hard to believe is that they’re really blossoms
like coffee filters, still silhouetted crowns
that have already done it—opened up and drank.
But then, what else was there to do?

The setting sun appears in the tallest branches
glowing like certain fog and the sky, lighter now,
so easily distinguished from the clouds.

When we die, who becomes a tree?

I watched like there was something to be said,
the very air breaking open, spilling petals
of last year, this year
the same for cherry pies made of thawing.

Then, as an answer, a photograph of hands

a leaf large enough to fill them

the difference between wanting meaning and holding it.

Waiting means something, has to. 

1

Still, I keep waiting. Today I wait for the heat to pass. It’s 100 degrees at 10am and without air conditioning, there’s nothing else to do but wait. Wait for the weather to cool, for the night to come, for the breeze that will blow through our house, for the quiet of the weekend, for books to arrive, for Thanksgiving when I can see my family again, for the distant future in which my friends return to LA and we go out to dinner again, for when we can embrace and hold each other, for an easing of this pressure.

When writing about waiting, one waiting opens up into another. My waitings becomes a series of doors that with the slightest push swing open, so that the hallway in which I find myself continually gets longer and longer. Or maybe my waiting might be better described in sound, these waitings forming a wind chime and my writing the slightest wind. In waiting, each imaginary and unfulfilled desire is linked to another—and to memory as much as the present. In writing about waiting, a network forms. There’s only more waiting and more ways to speak of it. And from this web of waiting I speak to you.

The Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec writes, “I was always drawn to waiting, which sometimes I get the feeling is the only thing I’ve ever really done.”[1] If waiting is the only thing we ever do, then let’s wait together. Come wait with me in the unfinished crumbling and building and crumbling again. Let’s keep naming our waiting something else, like writing or reading or listening, and if those don’t seem right, let’s try again, and name our waiting walking with you to get dinner, or reaching out to each other, or speaking to each other, as we keep doing, being witness to each other’s lives.

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[1] Sergio Chejfec, Notes Towards a Pamphlet trans. Whitney DeVos, (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), 2.