Alcohol in basements, along sidewalks; up-all-nights & a couple tokes of the pot that did nothing but make him want to sit there drawing all the next day. A rowdy carousel of young folk and long hot days in George’s, with letters posted to Lilly on every day but Sunday—he stuck on her completely, his prime and only audience.
And late in July, drinking with an older crowd, one dame among their number placed her feet upon his leg and then for hours he was moving over her as she repeatedly accused him of being something other than the virgin he technically was—it was just that her body and the vibrancy of its sensations told him where and how he should attend them with his body and sensations and that instantaneousness of knowing and response was suffused with a profound, if impersonal, delight—not an article of clothing unfastened, doffed, unbuttoned (ignoring aching swell that to exhaust would cross a boundary he had thus far in life abstained from crossing with another) and when he woke a terror was sitting on his chest and bearing down—a totality of wrongness, crushing, he could not believe what he had done—and called up Lilly as soon as he could, and told her, crushing, beneath his guilt.
And I admit my hand in that—in that I did not allow him much room to wiggle distance from his crushing wrongness—for if he was a natural in ecstasy, how did that not make him a virtuoso in its assorted opposites? Have I not told you why I was perched there, upon either of his shoulders—bare or bloated by markings—for where he was to go was rife and rippling with every gamut of the bleeding beating heart—every one of them!
That said, I take no responsibility for what he did to her, his Lilly—those two weeks of one-toned letters—groveling before her—groveling? But who was it he wrote to really? It could not be Lilly—such a voice as his does not belong to a single set of ears—and whether or not his body was intended to be single-owner, I recuse myself from coming either the one way or the poly down on that—
Just so. August came. And she forgave. And returned from her very far away—and he was 20 now, and on an evening lit with red-orang summer wrath, he placed into her slow and fully his one true self, a promise, which was carried out that first time only so far, for her friend and Jeremiah had just got married, shotgun, pregnant, and Lilly was having none of that.
And with her now, his pages languished, and he dropped once more from the accredited path, and this time slept on couches and worked two jobs and explored every crevice of her body, all their time a fusion with little space for what I had come to him for, so that more and more I took the edges of things from him, the brightnesses and terrors, forcing he feel the lack that would become of him should money and family become his soul’s concern—tilling café registers and catering gay social galas and no end to the noise and the rush of the city, no end to the processes that churn time backward from the future into a cemented past—and one day on his way home he was drawn to a stationary store and found a blank black book that he just had to buy, and which he carried around without cracking open for a week or two, just to feel its promise—so distinct from the obviousness of the world I wished to witness, and that he wished to jettison.
For he was an adorer of what was not yet—for which the virgin page was the most accessible portal—even its walled-off blankness was something he adored—but much more so were its other states, those of drastic emptiness and those of teeming chaos, and that other one, which is like a fugue state between what is empty and what is full; how his eroticism found a potency beyond the forms of women, when confronted with a blank bleached plane—it allowed he brush against not the Transcendent Godhead but a resplendent godhood, secular, polyphonic, abundant with the wild growths which disgusted him, often, once a page he had filled and saw, in the after, how far his skill had yet to go, to catch up with his promise.
And yet, in this blank black book, within its college ruled sheaves, there began to gather a thing that both pulled and repulsed him not only with its promise, but its charge: he wanted to do right by it, he wanted it to be right, and so he hesitated from its inception, and would have hesitated for decades—verily til his heart skipped one too many beats—if, in George’s Café and Ice Cream Parlor, on the 5th of November of the year 1996, a stochastic tremor hadn’t overtaken his forearm and forced him to with Bic round stic fine place there, on its first page, this declaration—or else be it a summons:
Variating A Blackbird’s Theme
How long must I wait? How long must I grapple after the particulars of a clean beginning before what my dreams dream for me announces itself through my untried hand?
What, exactly, is your key? What is your seed, your essence? Of what are you composed? Who are your characters and what are your environs—how goes the precise measure of your cadence?
Must I assemble you from the Objects and Letters outside me, or do you reside, already, within, like the virginity I’ve always longed for, always discarded?
Rilke, what is Rising? Blake, what is The Deep? You sons of bent blinds, of cracked doors, of dressers cluttered with visions and with longing—
For me to desire, as fervently as my youthful blood directs—for me to envy your graven sights—for me to grasp not after what you saw, but your seeing—that I would swap decades of blindness for! And yet I doubt such portals may be opened to me, in me, where I cannot ever remember feeling, finding, prying open—
What surrounded your lives? What dementia, what rapture? Did you ever laugh—did you ever holler in the wet grass while our pregnant moon shone with her sacred wicked luster, her mournful eyes eternally directed toward The End of Games—of Pages—of Days—
Would you bring me, with your words, into those innermost rooms, those spacious rooms of Psyche? Would the letters that you set down in whatever Emotion, and formed into vague descriptions of those Sanctuaries, would they gather my scattered and scattering thoughts and allow me to descend that stairwell I know to lay dusty and crooked behind the heavy door which ever confutes as it conflates my ambition?
But alas, do you still lay, beneath my thoughts of tidal sins, untouched by what trips my direction as the cliffs trip the seas—?
You, who are waiting patiently in those depths I am removed from, is there ever a hint of sympathy on your unformed face? Do these riddles I apply over and again cause the least bit of apprehension at being brought into the world by one who so doubtingly walks through it?
I hesitate—do you?
And how much more empty talk will I allow, not as preparation for your arrival, but as its deferment—how many more adulterous words will I produce before I go about the actual labor? The relenting of my introductions for the actual induction of you into the world—
My daughter, if you do ascend that stairwell, I pray you come quietly, cell by cell, into this room I am apparently locked inside. Enter silently, so as not to disturb my sifting, that my clumsy attention may not be roused—for certainly I am not ready for your arrival—even though ever eagerly awaiting it.
And with that now writ in words come through his hand, I felt in me a constriction and release. For there was a bridle come to being now: a reign from which I could not release myself until its endknot was secured. And this restraint, alike a thread it was, trailing off into the future time ahead of he and I—my timebound boyman, he had contracted us upon his fate, in order the destiny I had been proposing to him become manifest—or, failing that, become what he would fail as he should he not wager all his self to accomplish insofar as he as he could do.