Back When I Drank

All these years alone it turns out I wasn’t alone but now I am?

 

Sitting on a bench in Boston Common, bright sun in the mid-eighties, the troubles beginning, the logic of the interior dissembling.

 

What are minds but change?

 

What was it my mother thought which she can longer say.

 

You ask when it will matter but the answer is that it will never matter the way you want.

 

The structure of the mind is kin to the structure of crystals, its function kin to prisms.

 

Stars falling through the night sky, river blowsy in the distance, and everything briefly aligned in ways that used to indicate Jesus was near.

 

Divine cephalopods reminding me not so much that I’ve over-emphasized sex but that I’ve been confused about its actual – i.e. its cosmic – function.

 

Back when I drank, back when I would wake up in strange places with my knuckles raw, back when I was so scared of my anger there was no other way.

 

Or try this: Mama it’s not alright, you’re the one that made me bleed, so can we – at this late and getting later juncture – talk?

 

It’s not the notes so much as the sound they make – is that right?

 

In my heart there are half a dozen copies of Gulliver’s Travels but only one copy of Shogun.

 

Chrisoula and I discuss a trip to Cape Cod, our hearts slowly attuning to the lessons of the beginning, when all that mattered were long walks, sprawling dialogues about justice, her stacks of books and my poems, and the gentleness with which we cared for one another, knowing the great pains we had both already endured.

 

The amber hurricane lamp in the dining room, a kind of warm glow that sometimes serves to comfort those of us with insomnia.

 

Prone to rambling still, but getting less so.

 

Oh I remember Starkweather Road, how could I forget.

 

Let’s call this the seventeenth sentence but not otherwise disclose its content, can we do that.

 

This sentence has thirty-two letters (not anymore it doesn't).

 

Things we survive that we think define us but which are closer to images hanging in the museum of our brains than to anything actually causal.

 

Oh my grace, oh my dear, oh my love.