I had a dream last night that I wanted to chase today, and thus this very raw and exploratory draft, very different from the work I’ve been doing this month. I’m unsure if anyone else will be able to see what I see in this, and I find when I write things that draw so heavily from life they usually end up not going anywhere and being way too personal to be interesting to others. But at any rate, this is today’s poem:
How funny meeting you in a dream, yet again,
and we actually sat down and talked.
Did you fall for Elon Musk’s
door trick too, upstairs in another
part of this dream complex? So much has changed
in the world since we were together:
hard to believe it’s over 5 years
since I’ve been in NYC, over 3 since
I’ve eaten inside in a restaurant.
The pandemic killed Dean last year–
does your mother know? I remember
how charmed she was by his poems.
And my god, 20 since that first date,
when to your surprise and dismay I refused
to cross Lincoln Plaza in a downpour.
And so we took some strange underground route
by subway and by foot, and had drinks in
Grand Central until the rain stopped.
(There’s at least three different reasons
that’s something I would never do now.
Though “the world has moved on” gets said
again and again, I wouldn’t be surprised if
you and I are the last ones wearing masks.)
“Sometimes we go back just to look
at the constellations on the pearl blue ceiling”
I wrote later. Or am I confusing that date
with others? I can’t even fully remember
the dream (reader, have you forgotten
how we started here?), writing it down
too late in the afternoon.
But one thing I can swear on is how the night
ended, watching you go up the stairs
from the N train platform,
noticing how straight you held your back–
because I know now very well
that the end can be found in the beginning.
I do remember the dream-conversation
felt as it should be, rather than
the last time we saw each other in real life:
passing late at night in Penn Station,
both of us headed back to Jersey
on our separate lines. You
with your sister and her new husband
(we broke up too soon for me to
see how I looked as a bridesmaid
in the wedding pictures).
Me alone alone of course alone,
coming from a Columbia astronomy
open house, where grad students took us
to the telescope on the roof.
We were both startled to the core
to see each other, no way to pretend
we didn’t. You stammered out a hi,
because you’re civilized to a fault,
and I was too angry to speak and so
looking right at you, I kept walking,
bundled neatly in my coat,
but my rage all claws.
It was too soon. That was November.
We had broken up in August, and I had spent
all fall on the long commute from Brick to Madison
three times a week, bawling at break-up songs.
But two weeks after that evening in Penn,
I was offered a long editing gig in Chelsea.
In January, I moved back from the Shore
to Jersey City. I connected with old co-workers
who that spring became good friends,
and we sometimes played hooky
to sit in East Village bars at 2 p.m. on Wednesday,
had BBQs on Rafiq’s roof in Williamsburg.
Shortly after Sue’s birthday in August,
when we ate her tomatoes from the vine,
I got an editing job at Columbia,
and also met my husband. Two years after that
I was divorcing him. At any rate
I was too busy to be mad at you.
But around that time I went to a reunion,
and was driving south from Cedar Rapids
in a rental, that drive I did so many times
in grad school taking you to and from the airport.
My head was thick in separation terms,
and what I would say to all these people
who knew I’d gotten married the year
before but not what happened next.
Imagine my surprise to find
your ghost instead in the passenger seat.
Sometimes I think I’m picking up you,
and Michelle, and Lauren, and Kirsten,
and David and John (oh Miami),
and Alejandro who I never met in person
(but when I wrote years later to say hello stranger,
responded with hello almost-known),
and Joe C. oh god Joe C.,
and all the others out there
in the universe but gone from my life,
and stringing you all
like twinkling faceted beads
onto elastic. Making a bracelet
likely to break someday, and then
I’ll have to start all over.
If I can find you in this dark.
Post-script: The following day, I wrote a response to this.