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A Cou­ple of Quotes:

“If we wish to speak of it sub­stan­tively, we must make a sub­stan­tive of it by writ­ing it out thus with hyphens between all its words. Noth­ing but this can pos­si­bly name its del­i­cate idio­syn­crasy. And if we wish to feel that idio­syn­crasy we must repro­duce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the whole sen­tence bathed in that orig­i­nal halo of obscure rela­tions, which, like a hori­zon, then spread about its mean­ing.” –William James

“I’m a roman­tic; a sen­ti­men­tal per­son thinks things will last, a roman­tic per­son hopes against hope that they won’t.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Cou­ple of Theories:

In one, every­thing is clipped. Cured. Cap­tured and killed. The story is refined by a thou­sand retellings. Torn from the orig­i­nal giant and passed through suc­ces­sively smaller hands down smaller halls to the tini­est office with the tini­est edi­tor at a knife’s-edge desk. Glib myth. Pat per­sua­sion. A kiss.

In the other, we are after a panorama. Truth is not a point, an accu­racy, but an entirety. A ram­bling drunk. An accom­mo­dat­ing tan­gent. Begin­ning one sen­tence after another with, ‘Else­where…’ and ‘Mean­while…’ and ‘Also…’

In both, romance is com­manded by the impos­si­ble. It makes heights bear­able. We can’t extend our reach, but we can manip­u­late the dis­tance. One’s a stab, the other a flood. Angles on infinity.

A Cou­ple of Poems:

1.

A man at Good Will scared me
with Hello! He was tall
and honked like a blade
of grass between my thumbs.
Then one with weak eye­brows told me
he couldn’t reprice those ‘til tomor­row.
A warn­ing, like a crav­ing, meant to shame me,
and the yarn was taken out of sight.
All this put me in a bad mood
and I thought again about the ad; the one nam­ing
the lit­tle white gully of her chest, and
how she’d com­pli­mented his blank
–reply with the thing she liked
if this is you–
I left feel­ing my own bra fill
with sand. It was that kind of day,
when I had the idea, too late, of
answer­ing his blank
with a list of things
I’d tried to buy
but couldn’t.

2.
The neigh­bors moved in to walls of pri­mary blue.
I heard them ham­mer­ing
at night, heard them back up against a first gladness

while I was mak­ing a kind new word for you;
one that includes river, inlet,
trib­u­tary and stream: the whole ocean
abbre­vi­ated to an arm,
like a pruned limb under my side—

What has this to do with neigh­bors?
Oh, an arriv­ing love; a purchase.