October in Triple Meter

I.

I’m starting to see why some things matter more than others, the reasons why that is allowed. Somebody told me so. Maybe that was G. and he was talking about freedom or that was J. and he was talking about the Phillies or you were my mother and you were talking about love, in which case you were standing in the kitchen with that one burnt-out lightbulb and your hands on the granite countertop. Maybe you were me and I was sorry, or you were somewhere else entirely and my heart was still beating in my teeth.

And there were the birds flying south right behind us, and each year at least one would fly into the glass back door, and some of those times you didn’t even flinch. There was the dew dripping slow out beyond us. Maybe we were talking about selective attention.

II.

So I left and said I was going to Providence. Actually, I was getting to the heart of the matter. Like that conversation with R. this summer about all these books that have at least one scene at a chapel—and just last week, your gold flecking face looking like the strongest feeling I’ve ever known to travel in a straight line. I’m learning that maybe there is a place for holiness after all, and maybe it’s just the word others have been using for conviction, which you know I’ve always liked.

But what did I know about filling space when I was thinking that was a question of architecture? About shoes left heel to toe on the ground when I was thinking that was evidence of removal? Or sheet music with its verses and chorus—verses we were asking about just this morning, crossing the street after breakfast time. Under the curving sycamores, past those red wax leaves strewn like so many thumbprints on the brick.

Also the vertigo—and what did I know about how to break a fall?

III.

I’m learning what it is to think, in a constellated year, that all of this is becoming more likely all the time. That I can be so far from the summer, when all the day long I passed over the bridge with something blonde caught in my eye. I’m left with a brand new impulse to write in the past tense. I’m left closing my eyes and thinking I know something about narrative arcs, something about fabulation.

It would probably look like you on the ferry or you on the sidewalk or you, dodging allegory until the day you die. You, reading the words off my wall. Head turned sideways, reading real slow. Peeling them off one by one.