Jane is sucking on her bottom lip. She does this when she is concentrating or afraid. When Jane was 8 her father fell off a cliff when he was hiking with her mother. He reached down for his water canister, slipped under the stiff afternoon sun. Jane has been scared of heights and the dry stare of scarecrows ever since. The ferris wheel was my idea.

Sitting in the lap of a fresh cut moon, our knees graze and my bones firework. Jane of the lemonade sweat, the bicycle eyes, the pear shampoo that turns me harlequin skinned. Our mothers say we are too young for bras. I see Jane’s nipples through her shirt and feel a fuse flicker in the deep sea of my stomach. A small fish swimming fast. A warm, wet fish breathing blood through the gills, growing a hot flood in my gut.
Our chair sways, rocking us to and fro. The tiny feet of Jane’s breath skip over me like a stone on water. I want to make a scarf out of her sighs, wear it like a noose. Jane’s knuckles whiten over the metal bar. I place my hand over hers. Her wrists are so small, they are smaller than the stars spilling silver on our faces and I am a full cup of truth, trembling.

*

Heights make me thirsty. I think of the stilted man in the giraffe mask, if he is ever scared of falling. The sound of stilts in soil much like the thud of wet firewood, the spit of splinters and tear of grass a lot louder underground. If he were to fall I would not hear it, trapped in the microwave music of the ferris wheel, spinning slowly.

The chair in front of us holds two lovers. She wraps herself around him like a glossy snake. She has been found by something that has not yet found me. He can smell it in her, it lives in the crease of her neck, that secret cave where he goes. I imagine I am an island, waiting to be discovered. He will be the one to explore me, sinking his fingers into my sand, turning my rocks over gently, claiming I am his.
We are at the highest point now, in line with the spine of the sky, dangling like a bright gem from night’s black neck. My ankles hang over a mess of rainbow machinery, of sticky fists and electric laughter. I am too close to the edge. There is a desert in my throat, a cactus crying. Violet puts her hand on mine and I watch the couple in front. One day soon, I will drop from these metal branches and burst.

There’s a story that English artist David Hockney tells of the occasion on which his mother came to visit soon after he had relocated to Los Angeles in 1978. Hockney was born in Bradford, a West Yorkshire city that’s a little smaller than Cleveland, Ohio, and possessed of a similar degree of glamour and cultural pedigree. He was born into a working-class family, in 1937, and he explains that when his mother gazed out from his Hollywood Hills home at the beautiful clear blue skies of Southern California, what she found unable to fathom was the fact that no-one was taking advantage of the wonderful climate by hanging out their laundry to dry.

It’s a story that gently illustrates Hockney’s remarkable journey. Certainly, you’d have difficulty unearthing a role model for the artist from his Bradford youth. As Christopher Simon Sykes makes clear in A Rake’s Progress (part one of a planned two-volume biography), Hockney is unique, a character of his own invention.

David Hockney’s clear and obvious talent gained him early entry him to The Royal Academy of Arts in London, and he shot to fame immediately upon leaving art school in the early-Sixties. His work during that decade was political in the sense that from the beginning he used his work as a means of declaring his homosexuality. Perhaps it’s a little strange then that while he was busy announcing his homosexuality to the world at large, he was apparently neglecting to share the fact with his parents – and with his mother in particular, with whom he was especially close. After seeing Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary film, A Bigger Splash, shot during Hockney’s break-up with long-term lover Peter Schlesinger, Laura Hockney confided to her diary:
‘It was rather a shock…. At first it did not hit me – I guess I am very naïve – tho I’m not quite ignorant. I am very surprised David has allowed himself to be filmed in these private corners of his life, whatever he feels about it.’

Not that it altered Laura’s devotion to her son any. Equally unsurprising was the reaction of Hockney’s father, Kenneth – classically dour Yorkshire, and in this instance, monosyllabic. He declared the film ‘muck.’

What’s most striking about Hockney as we meet him here is his inquisitive nature, particularly as viewed through his unquenchable thirst for travel. Today we tend to take journeys across countries and continents for granted, but at a time when it was considerably more difficult and unusual to do so, Hockney travelled constantly across Europe and America. And as soon as he had the means, he lived for extended periods in New York, Los Angeles and Paris.

These varied landscapes in Hockney’s life prove a boon for the purposes of Sykes’s book, as do the colorful art world characters engaged by the artist: the writer Christopher Isherwood and his lover, Don Bachardy; the flamboyant theatre and film director, Tony Richardson; the great poet W.H. Auden (an uncomfortable sitter for a Hockney portrait. Of his weathered features, Hockney was given to wonder ‘If his face looks like that, what must his balls look like?’).

It’s difficult to recall an unfavorable impression of Hockney from the entire narrative, but then, A Rake’s Progress adheres to a biographical mode that follows chronology rather than critical analysis. No great time is spent raising a cultural backdrop, and considering the size of the project, there is relatively little in the way of extended observation of Hockney’s art. What Sykes does, instead – and does very well – is provide a palpable sense of the man himself. Hockney is revealed here as flamboyant and gregarious, loyal and witty, keenly intuitive and supremely devoted to his craft. He’s good company, and so, in turn, is the book.

When Progress ends, Hockney is thirty-eight years old, and mostly recovered from the traumatic end of his affair with Schlesinger (an event described by Sykes as ‘the first really painful thing that had ever happened to him.’ Those who wonder about the existence of art without angst might do well to consider Hockney). Ahead lay the years in Hollywood, the vast Grand Canyon paintings, and the formal experiments with photo-collage and computer technology (Hockney is a leading proponent of I-Pad art, utilizing the ‘Brushes’ application).

The current Hockney exhibition at The Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture, is the draw of the season in London, and it cements a kind of homecoming. Hockney returned to Yorkshire in 2005, making it his primary home once more. It will be worth following Sykes through volume two of his biography to find out exactly how he got there, and all that happened in between.

David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress- The Biography by Christopher Simon Sykes will be released on April 17th.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is up at The Royal Academy of Art in London through April 9th.

Top Image: iPad drawing by David Hockney.

When the poet Frank Bidart came to speak at my father’s memorial service in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I was touched. Bidart had been my father’s favorite student at The University of Riverside in California and was often the subject of dinner-table conversation. After moving to New Jersey, where my Mayflower father taught at Rutgers, we’d periodically receive phone calls from the man Louise Glück called “one of the greatest poets of our time.” One day a babysitter informed my parents that she’d received a sinister phone call: “I think he said his name was Frank the Dart!!!” Which became a family joke for decades. Sure does sound like some underworld figure. But there is nothing underworldy about Frank Bidart’s poetry. Take for instance these otherwordly opening lines from For the Twentieth Century:

Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
Technologies of ecstasy

Boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
Rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button:–

Or the universal minutiae (and elusiveness) of the poem “The Poem Is a Veil”:

V E I L,–as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
High at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see

Catches, clinging to it’s physiognomy.

Hence, it’s no mistake that Bidart’s work Music Like Dirt (2002) became the first chapbook to ever become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (It now makes up part 1 of Star Dust.) Bidart’s work achieves an originality and breadth of scope that is dizzying in its implications. His emotional depth is matched only by the brilliance of his poem’s semi-immaculate conception. I won’t pretend to be a formal scholar of poetical techniques (I can’t tell a dactyl from a spondee), but I can safely say that this is the most readable collection of modern poetry I’ve ever leafed through. It makes an excellent X-mas gift for anytime in the new century, and might indeed in the future be used for making “evolved” peace with colonizing immigrants from the outer planets who say with an alien warcry, “This Bud Is For You!”

Nominated for the National Book Award, Star Dust is a must to chuck in your Amazon.com cart. It both reaches out into the cosmos like Steven Hawking and withdraws inward like The Incredible Shrinking Man. Bidart says he hoped to make a sequence “In which the human need to make is seen as not only central but inescapable,“ a celestial tapestry seen in the context of other processes—sexuality, mortality—and inseparable from it. Clearly Bidart is on the make himself, but it is hard to figure out what direction he’s going in before a surprise enjambment wakes us up. In Little Fugue, for example, we have a haunting lilting melody worthy of a young Mozart: “beneath every journey the ticket to this/journey in one direction.” Or in “In Luggage” there is the hint of unconsummated sexuality: “In your stray moments, as now in/mine, may what was not/rise like grief before you.” Here we have the urge to create and destroy united like polar opposites, or a couple who love each other to death in a classical domestic dispute. In Advice to the Players, the rules of the game are set forth in Bidart’s definition of a human being: “We are creatures who need to make.”
This takes extreme form in the first section’s end poem, Lament for the Makers:

Until my mother died she struggled to make
A house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me

Many creations must

Make, but only one must seek
Within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

*

Teach me, master who by making were
Remade, your art

Bidart’s fantastical book, reminiscent of Italo Calvino on shrooms and divided into 2 parts, continues with a “Curse” where “Each time you enter them/they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.” The “you” addressed in the poem is–at least when we ask Frank outright “whom” he means–whomever brought down the World Trade Center, though the poem can be read on many other different levels. Since I was born on 11/9, the 9/11 timing of the terrorism seems the topsy-turvy stuff of rank nightmares and emergency rooms. We all feel numb from numerology. And then there is my personal favorite, Phenomenology of the Prick, one of the best titles of a poem I can think of—with its hint of sexual games gone awry: “You make sure/I see how hard/your wife makes it . . .” Bidart’s humor is both ferocious and farcical; there is more here than meets the eye. Experience and imagination collide, like worlds and words.

What really makes “Star Dust” move, though, is the semi-epic longpoem called The Third Hour of the Night, a powerful autobiographical monologue of sorts attributed to the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor of Perseus With Head of Medusa. Set in a believable historical context, the poem describes the dual aspects of both sublime creation and destructive energy. Throwing everything into the forge—including cutlery—Cellini finds, “Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay/sheath had been with great care removed I found/what was dead brought back to life again.”
In effect, the Promethian Bidart says through his soullmate Cellini, “My art is my revenge.” The last part of the poem jumps in time and space into the songlines of a murderous Australian Aborigine, who brutally destroys a woman with his “killing stick”:

He smirks, and in silence repeats that all life exists
At the expense of other life.

What is made is ultimately destroyed.

Bidart’s Imagination and Power (a nod to my dad, Thomas R. Edwards Jr., whose book of that name was nominated by the poet C. Day Lewis, Daniel Day Lewis’s father, for the National Book Award) is almost cinematic in scope. The prose is delivered with the controlled suspense of a Coppola flick. Like the great Jacobean dramatists, Bidart is aware of the possibilities of violence. In Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words, he provokes, “Kill whatever killed your father, your life/turning to me again said before your death.” Ah, the possibilities of the page: the pared-down poems are not so much printed as sculpted. Bidart’s “which” craft resembles sort-of creation itself. Just blow off a little star dust. With its classical and revolutionary forms and themes, seething imagery, and complex ideas, Star Dust places the Spanish-French-Californian “Basque” American Bidart as one of America’s most important poets.

But to me he’s still “Frank the Dart,” a made man of the made-up poetry world. His work seems as accessible to me as a bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats eaten by Grandpa Bob. As a primary source, though, he is unknowable: a friendly stranger who comes alive on the podium and pulls an alien alphabet out of thin air.

Text by Annie DeWitt, images by Jerome Jakubiec

My mother never said, Don’t Usher The Good Times In.  She never took the pot from my hand and said, Don’t Beat On It With A Stick.  Don’t Make Noise.  She never threw up the window shade and said, Don’t Look Out.  Or, I Remember Chilly Scenes of Winter.

I remember sitting around the fire while my father sang a song about a railroad that stretched all the way from our living room to Kansas.

“What else,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.  “Never mind. Teach me to dance in the kitchen.”

*

“The bus dropped me off at the corner of 9^th and 10^th,” you said.

“I thought,” I said.  “You said that bus stopped in the Bowery.”

“I thought so too,” you said.

Or maybe you said, “That fair went on for a year.”

It kept going round.

The ride I meant.

“Right here,” you said before I left with my belongings.

“Yes,” I said patting the trunk.

You said, “I sure will miss it.”

You were speaking about the chair.

I thought, Maybe I should sit in that chair a little longer.  Maybe if I sit in it I will start speaking upwards.

“Sightlines,” I think they call it.

*

“You can borrow my name,” you said that afternoon in Reno.  “If you need it at the Motel.”  We were chasing down my Uncle again.

“Who’s following whom,” Uncle said when we caught him.  He pointed out the window at a neon yellow Thunderbird sailing down the highway.

“Birdwatcher,” you said.  “Sightlines, they call it.”

Maybe they call it night driving in the west.

Maybe they call it fishing for sticky.

*

I could say I did not keep dirty laundry.  I never took his shirts and folded them out so the pit stains were under my head.

“What’s this mean,” he used to say whenever he freed something from my body.

“Just a drop in the pan,” I’d say.

These sort of rarities.

I remember happy.  Just like that.  Old boating shoes.  Faded red sweater.

*

You said you would pack my knitwear and drive me there.

You wanted to do things that made you look humble.

On the highway you drove with your hands over your eyes when we hit those square patches of sun.

When we arrived we unpacked me.  There was an old woman sitting at the entrance to the clinic.  She asked what I wanted with her mess.

“It’s MISS,” I said.

Afterwards, we stood on the street corner just outside the riverbank.  I cannot say I didn’t wear that white sundress.  You kept your car running.

“I guess I leave you off here,” you said.

*

Across the river, that ewe was struggling, hefting her rear back and forth so that her tail looked like it was swatting at a horde of fruit flies in summer.  Her calf must have been half way down her chute.

“The problem,” I said, “Is finding a small enough dropper.  One big enough to stick in the corner of our mouths yet small enough that it doesn’t emit so much that our nostrils start to fill.”

*

We watched the backs of that ewe’s shoulders.  The way she held her small frame.

*

The old woman keeps the apartment across the hall from mine.   The night after our first meeting she entered my room.  She turned the knob with her palm – gripping the teeth of the thing hard against her.  All you could see was the tops of her nails tapping at the brass.

She said she was wearing the coat her Grandmother gave her.  “In here,” she said, throwing wide the lapels and drawing me close to her body.  There was a small silk label.  Dear China it said.

In the cleft of her stomach there was a small pit where she kept all her food.  It was fair and broad and when I looked out of it I saw the place where I used to be before I came out here.  That spot inMcLean’s field.

When I’m stood there in that spot I noticed a good clean breeze coming on.

“I never said,” the woman said.  “I wanted to gather my own stale air.”

On the Trail of the Book

At dawn stanchions
stand at attention
when the pearl

sky with smudges
stretches
The bridge is the zone

of dull shadows
nosing around
the washed out snapshot

where the word oblivion
affixes wings
to the paperboy

and the road
is a partisan
smuggling colored thread

inside the cinder
garden The flickering
maiden will unfold

a garment of smoke
and embroider the name
of the air

_____________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin Gantcher’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Slate, The Brooklyn Rail, and Tin House. His first book, If a Lettuce, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series contest, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Painting: Ryan Schneider, I’m All Around You Now, oil on canvas, 96″ x 144″, 2010.

Love is War for Miles

Aquarius Heaven…
Blu and Exile (letter)
(Quit it) Nat Adderley (Give me my month) Blake
(Mike and the Sensations) Nico Jaar
(Anything Goes/You used to think) Erica Pomerance
(The Idea of Ancestry) Etheridge Knight
Blue and Exile (Don’t be…)
(Tia) Arthur Nunes
Gonjasufi (Love of Reign)
(Black Christ of the Andes) Mary Lou Williams
(I only know (what I know now))Blake
(Black Swan) Nina Simone
(Hello to the Wind) Bobby Hutcherson
(Seasons) Blu/(Tom Waits (The World Keeps Turning)
Nicolas Jaar (Why didn’t you…)

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, and sound artist. Her debut collection of poems Negro League Baseball was published by Fence Books last year. Brian W. Rogers is an artist, writer, and musician whose work most recently appeared in the London group show “A Sunken Trembling Recalled Dimly.” Together they have teamed up to form État de Siege (ÉSP) a production house whose work encompasses text, music, the moving image, dance, design, architecture, and curatorial platforms. In this project, they have focused their attention on the 70′s cult horror film Ganja and Hess, about an archaelogist who gets stabbed in the heart and becomes a vampire. The video below includes poetry by Fred Moten, and is a preamble to their forthcoming re-imagined soundtrack for Ganja and Hess. Below that is an open letter to Bill Gunn, the director of the film, regarding certain propositions raised by his film, such as how one extreme of motion can lead to paralysis and what one must do to avoid this, such as enacting a bridge between classical myth and modal myth.

The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic… every disappearance is a record (between checking-out and checking-in)
{Ornette Coleman- To Whom Who Keeps a Record}

1. Are there some things you would like to say, but have not been able to, because no one asked you the right questions?
[Être - Nicolas Jaar]

2. What are the politics of being ready to die, and what do they have to do with the scandal of enjoyment?  Of any action as one way ticket to the end of health? ‘The love-recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is an ever refining self-fertilizing cycle wherein nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the cycle,’ impregnating the place where memory flinches and (esp.) begins and at once slows down and accelerates the metabolism of that commons, into the decadent non-territory of the idea of an “other” as an ego-ideal whom the self  can achieve through devotion. In those moments of precise forgetting, did you find the traumas and excitements that express the need for a modal myth most acutely?
[Moodymann - I can't kick this feeling when it hits]

3. The statues in profile featured in the title sequence remind us of an experiment that Derrida proposes. Do you know it? ‘This is an experiment of acting as if you were dead. […] But what does it mean to be dead, when you are not totally dead?  It means that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there. To see the vessel as such means to see the vessel as it would be without me. If I were dead it would remain the same as it is, the colour, the same consistency, and so on. So, to relate to an object, means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth, the condition of perception, the condition of objectivity, at least in their most conventional sense’ (Will you give up your death for me?) And so, if life is endless, why not try to relate in this way, what is the risk. What is the cost that we are not willing to pay? On the other hand what is the pleasure of mortality or so-called loss that we refuse to admit in order to keep it sacred and free from principal, free from the colony of false nobility?
[Rufus Harley - Queens]

4. If ultimately oblivion is abundant, one has reason to ask, ‘on what grounds does one critique and propose an alternative to the brunt of exclusion and the sense of social shipwreck one suffers from?’ Is it a form of suffering or a relief? Does our exclusivity relieve us? Are we absolved by a feigned turning against them—toward what? (‘I will not be punished, I will not be tortured, I will not be guilty,’ Hess decrees)— And from this can it follow that philosophy is a prison, that it destroys the uncustomary things about us? That the frontier is a prison? That the route past nothingness is to accept nothing in particular? That the vehicle driving us toward abundance is extreme stillness just as the route to paralysis is frenzied motion?
[Julia Holter - Introduction]

5.  What tole does the yearning for ritual in a culture where trends often supress traditions, take/give in your film? Ideas of oblivion and tedium often unite in the sublime (transcendence of limits of the human condition) their inevitable destination, where they are turned into a solemn abundance that often shows up as ritual and the place where ritual and addiction meet and do not diverge (at once forgotten and remembered needs). Do you believe that ritual should engage variation deliberately in order to separate itself from addiction, bearing in mind that anything repetitive becomes a need no matter how sacred or pernicious? How do we improvise on a ritual and re-tell it to itself again and again ad infinitum, what role does the sacrifice play in that coiled and elastic dynamic, where does it enter its disappearance and reject it, live on? You can’t enter into this dynamic except in exhalted states, elevated states. How do we conjure those states while at the same time resisting their capture? What is the economy of survival in Ganja and Hess? How is an addict’s labor different from a worshiper’s?
[Monks of Bhutan - Silnyen played solo]

6. Is eternity an impervious horizon and do the acoustics of blood allow us to at once traverse and return to the forever that the blue myth of life eternal lures us across? Is the film a myth of/for black America, of/for America in general, the sole (soul/sold) myth retrieved as the ‘terror and terrible lure of vacuum?’ Voices from beyond the event horizon, trying to out-mode our oppressors, to translate our motion across that border? Creating an impossible space between origin and dream/out-dreamt origin, unoriginal dream, the lucid dream everyone wants to learn how to possess but is afraid to enter, a certain amount of traveling, deferred. Choreographer Alvin Ailey believes that movement is molecular revolution, ‘blood memory,’ future anterior, and that any black body in motion has experienced centuries of war and pain ‘no casual pleasure brought about those features.’ Hess says of Ganja, ‘Some great horde of peoples have had to suffer’ to bring about her beauty. In grappling with erotics of suffering (the does-my-distress-arouse-you rhetoric) what did you discover about our agency therein? What is peace in this context? What is justice?
[Julian Priester - Coincidence]

7. One of the things that we are trying to inquire toward is the role of aural hallucination in Ganja and Hess. The way in which sound abducts away from the optic towards a kind of blind transversality, plothole in the lightsickness of the past three hundred years. This is to say that it (the one way border the recording is a portal across) is one of the conditions for the choreography of syncope, of possession, of being possessed and dispossessed at the same time. 1976: Julian Jaynes puts forth the Bicameralist theory of mind. If his formulations are just, it can be said that we have inherited a memory of experiencing ourselves as ghosts. We are haunted by exteriority only inasmuch as we fear (because we know) that we are a focalized twist of that exteriority, to hear is to be unbound toward it, that we are laced by it, that the real trauma is that we experience ourselves only as ourselves, rather than being no one. It’s not that minds changed, it’s that we evicted the ghosts. Hallucinatory fugitivity and it’s rush toward eternity; endlessness; devotional erasure; ambivalent rapture; the audial smudge; a voice followed to the other side of the event horizon–
[Theo Parrish- Love is War for Miles]

To contain it so gently

The first time I saw him he had barrettes in his hair, wore a huge hoodie and big pants and looked like a cross between a raver and a boy in a fairy tale. The last time I saw him he was hooked up to a ventilator—all tubes, neck brace, IV drip. The first time he may have been standing outside our dorm, smoking, trying to look fucked-up enough to make the right friends. It was about time for me. Neil was a year younger than me, a freshman who landed at Oberlin one year after I did. I wonder if I picked him because he kind of looked like a girl, except he wouldn’t have been a very pretty girl with his deep-set eyes and slightly big nose, which were exactly the best things about his face. And full lips. But he was small-framed, so maybe less threatening as a male specimen, and more familiar—the city boys I’d grown up with tended to be shorter, slighter than boys from outside the city (or maybe it was just that everyone swam in their baggy clothes). When he didn’t wear those barrettes, he would have to brush his hair out of his eyes.

The last time his eyes were sealed shut and blue, blood dripped down from the corner of one. The first afternoon in the hospital I thought he could hear us talking to him. It almost looked like he smiled or nodded but I can’t remember if his eyes were open that day or if the doctors opened them at the end or if they never did. I vaguely remember a blank stare, the big brown eyes. But mostly that blue, purple. All bruise. Life support. What is that?

I think of Neil sitting on the ground, feet tucked under him, knees pulled up to his chin. Ratty jeans bottoms that dragged on the ground when he walked. I think of us making eggs in my frying pan in the dorm kitchen on special occasions, pretending to be grownups or kids at home even though any food we bought had to be labeled (when someone ate my Phish Food I went ballistic). I think of when he first read me Rosy Ear by Zbigniew Herbert, a poem he wrote about Achilles, and the drawings he left in my Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, large-eyed boys and girls with spiky, misshapen hair next to lines by C.D. Wright and Tom Lux.  When I went to his house while friends were collecting his things (when do they become “personal effects”?), I took his copies of Frank Lima and Zbigniew Herbert, whose work he’d introduced me to, hoping I’d find notes in the dog-eared pages, or more of his drawings.

The hospital said it was a broken leg. Then they called back and said come right away. They wouldn’t tell us much because we weren’t family. We sat and smoked in the “Sobriety Garden” overlooking the river and the FDR Drive. We got drinks and waited a few hours for his mom to arrive. I picked a piece of mint in the garden, or maybe that was one of the next days. It was unseasonably warm and nominally “better” to be outside than pacing the hall waiting for news, trading visitor’s passes as more friends arrived. There was also sitting in his room, listening to the machines’ accordion of air, heave and collapse, the occasional beep. Looking at his cheeks, his skull wrapped, his feet. Touching a hand I hadn’t in years.

At his funeral service I read from a postcard he wrote me about brushing his teeth with soap and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle while on a camping trip in Yosemite with one of his friends Gabe (there were two), but why was I one of the readers? I couldn’t have been to him what he was to me, a first in that way. He lost his virginity years before we even met, so I probably started out to him as just another person to sleep with. The card he made for my twentieth birthday, after we’d been together on and off for many months, had a drawing of a slim, long-haired girl. I wanted to believe it was a drawing of me, but I was also weirdly jealous of the drawing, figured it was of someone else or some dream-girl I could never be, like the girl in a screenplay he wrote—the perfect girl drawn on a sheet of acid. But the card said he loved me and “everyday it astounds me that you tolerate my nonsense.” Neil was my training for a lot of nonsense. Neil was the original nonsense.

It happened in a dorm, naturally, the shittiest dorm on campus, where we lived down the hall from one-another. (My roommate and I had gotten second to last draw in the housing lottery.) It was in his room—his roommate was probably out with his role-playing game crew. I think we first kissed the night of the annual “Red Party” (one of the school’s most frat-like events), after talking in the terribly-lit cinderblock hallway for a while post-party.

Around that time my friend Sarah threw a “tequila pajama party” in her room in the all-women’s dorm. We didn’t actually sleep over, and not all of us even wore our PJs, but I drank tequila for the first time and wound up puking all night thanks to a shots and beer one-two punch. Sarah is known for being blunt as hell and asking slightly inappropriate questions in front of large groups of people, which is perfect for slumber parties at any age. We played a variation of “Truth or Truth” or “Skeletons in the Closet” and Sarah asked everyone who was a virgin, or not a virgin, to raise their hands. It was a fairly even split, but I was still determined to get rid of it pronto. It was getting ridiculous, and there was a known shortage of straight (even straightish) men at our school.

We probably used a condom from the vending machine downstairs. I can’t remember much else other than feeling relieved, and I’m sure it was incredibly awkward except he knew what he was doing compared to me, and he was very sweet. I was glad to get it over with already. I probably did a little dance in my head like Tom Hanks in Big when he finally gets with his grown-up lady girlfriend and orders coffee, black, the next morning.

Right after the big event, or maybe it was a couple nights later, Neil and I took a walk over to Fairchild, the nicer dorm nearby with a semi-vegan food coop in the basement. Sarah was standing outside. Could she tell? Did I signal to her in girl-speak? I was relieved to be delivered into the safe company of a friend, or mixed company at least. I also felt some kind of small triumph. Check that off the growing-up list. That I soon fell in love with Neil was a benefit or inevitability (given how much of a romantic I am and how much of an under-the-radar charmer Neil was) that I hadn’t counted on but I’m sure I secretly wished for.

When you can’t see someone, can’t physically be near them again, it makes you want to speak to those you can, keep them in your life in some capacity no matter what. Writing to those who are gone magnifies the line between the possible and the impossible. To address them—does it soothe or just call up the ghosts to keep you from sleeping? It’s the kind of sentiment Neil might scoff at or at least express more eloquently. When I read the cards Neil wrote to me, he is still addressing me. We are not back in the time when we were in love, and I don’t wish to be, but he calls me “you,” he calls us “we.” He writes, “I’ve seen beautiful things. I’ll never be able to describe them, but I hope someday we can come here together.” He frames that time I learned how to share space, choose words carefully, nurture and be nurtured, hurt and be hurt. The main character in Cut Out Paper Heart, Neil’s screenplay, eats the entire sheet of acid, not tab by tab, but devouring the whole thing in ragged pieces, chews up the girl, not swallowing her whole but still consuming her entirely—by the same token she consumes him from the inside out. Neil was that kind of love, albeit in a less menacing or cannibalistic way.

I’ve seen Neil more in the past year in my sleep than in the past almost-decade since we finished school, even though we lived a five-minute walk from each other in Brooklyn for several years. In the dreams, mostly he is telling a story and making me and everyone laugh, maybe doing his impression of an old man, maybe talking about otters or llamas. I was always competitive with and inspired by Neil, but he could out-word me any day. He could call something “grand” and get away with it or say, “I can’t wait to see you. We’ll make chicken soup,” in a letter. The last time I saw him conscious was at a party the night he got hit by a car; I had also run into him the night before that after not seeing him in a while. He had just gotten back from a few months away, practicing Thai boxing, about which he was writing a beautiful blog. Even though he was drunk at the party, he still managed to say something sharp, observant, and sweet to me in our brief conversation about my band’s performance that night. I wish I remembered his exact words.

I don’t remember much about the first time we slept together, but I do remember one of the last times. Fall of my junior year. We rode our bikes out to the golf course at the edge of town. It was misty—very The End of the Affair (a movie we saw that year), but with bad late-nineties fashion and neither of us looking nearly as attractive as Ralph Fiennes or Julianne Moore. Most of our last sexual encounters involved long walks or bike rides, tossing stones into the reservoir, me giving him a flat-eyed look in conversation to avoid saying what I really wanted to. At the time I was newly enamored with Rilke’s poetry, especially the Duino Elegies. In his Fourth Elegy, Rilke writes, “Aren’t lovers always / coming to sheer drop-offs / inside each other / they who promised themselves / open spaces, good hunting / and a homeland?” Sure, some of it was late adolescent hormones coupled with a penchant for drama on both our parts, but it was Neil who began to show me how to navigate the cliffs of intimate relationships, to search for adventure and a home. His postcard from Yosemite said, “I want so badly to show them to you,” the new landscapes he had seen and started exploring. I have been looking ever since.

Note: The title of this piece comes from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem Fourth Elegy as translated by David Young in Duino Elegies

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Rebecca Keith’s poems and other writings have appeared in Best New Poets (2009), The Laurel Review, The Rumpus, The Awl, BOMBlog, Storyscape, The Millions, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest and has received honors from the Atlantic Monthly and BOMB magazine. A native of downtown New York, Rebecca is a founder, curator, and host of Mixer Reading and Music series at Cakeshop. She also sings and plays guitar and keyboards in the Roulettes and Butchers & Bakers. To contain it so gently originally appeared in the seventh issue of Dossier.

Image: Adam Frelin, White Line, fluorescent fixtures and bulbs, steel cable, generator, 240′ long, 2005.

Awful Math

The commotion surrounding the awful math grew to a hollering, and soon Jenny pitched in an extra twenty dollars saying, “I’ll just give more, that’s all.” But that wasn’t all, and once we were in the car, she was off on a steady pace about which one of my moron friends was going to be wheeled out on a gurney from the force struck beneath his brow. I said, “Calm down,” but she turned back stern and spit, “How many twenties would it take for you to make your spidery arms into fists and cuff those assholes?” and I said, “Four,” thinking of a hundred, and she said, “That’s it? Eighty bucks?” and I said, “Oh wait,” then I said, “Five,” and she said, “You’re just as dumb as the rest of them,” and folded her arms tight like stuck drawer. By then we’d driven out so far that we were once again surrounded by cedars, tall and unflappable, and I tried to think about money and how it was made.

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Sophie Rosenblum’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, New Letters, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is currently finishing her first novel, which was recently a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. You can find links to more of her writing at www.sophierosenblum.com.

Photograph: Spruce Pond, by Bob Gates.

One of the great moments in Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited and under-publicized two-and-a-half-hour film, is when high school student and protagonist Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) approaches Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon), a well-meaning math teacher she had sex with, as he walks with a female colleague. Abruptly, Lisa tells the two teachers that she had an abortion. Mr. Aaron, who had given into young Lisa’s advances just a few weeks beforehand, tells her she should tell the father, whoever he is. Lisa says that it probably doesn’t matter, the guy is probably sorry. Mr. Aaron says that it doesn’t matter if he’s sorry, that doesn’t mean anything. The guy needs to own up to what he’s done.

The scene shows Lisa as a character in the mode of Hamlet. The story is about Lisa’s coming to terms with her sexuality and her thinking about culpability. Margaret has to make a big decision, and she goes about seeking the knowledge necessary to make this decision in a variety of ways. Approaching Mr. Aaron resembles Hamlet’s attempt to figure out if his stepfather is guilty of killing his father by staging a play and watching his reaction.

Margaret is the story of Upper West Side teenager Lisa Cohen who distracts MTA bus driver Gerry Marretti (Mark Ruffalo) by flirtatiously shouting to him about his cowboy hat as he drives a Manhattan bus. The driver runs a red light, accidentally killing Monica (Allison Janney), a middle-aged female pedestrian. Lisa lies to the police, covering up for the bus driver, and says that the light was green, when it was really red. As the film progresses, Lisa starts to think she made a mistake. She asks every person in her life who she respects whether or not she should go back to the police and tell them she lied. It is the best friend of the deceased—whose name Lisa got from making some phone calls—who eventually gets Lisa to revise her initial statement, saying it’s her responsibility to tell the truth.

Lisa does, and the film explores the question: Is it Lisa’s responsibility to tell the truth? Won’t she be hurting the bus driver, who has a family to raise and protect?

The film’s fidelity to exploring and ultimately answering these questions is one of its many strengths. It is a coming-of-age drama, but a sophisticated one. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan seems genuinely concerned with tracking Lisa’s consciousness, watching her as she considers the situation and learns.  Nearly every scene involving Lisa shows her worldview coming up against someone else’s and Lonergan writes each scene with both knowledge of his characters and real verve. The film’s characters are all intelligent and idiosyncratic. We do see the characters’ foibles through what they say, but one never gets the feeling that Lonergan feels anything but compassion for them.

Lonergan’s subtlety and cleverness as a writer is exemplified in one scene between Lisa’s single mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) and her love interest, Ramon (Jean Reno). The two go to an opera, at Ramon’s behest, and the show ends with tuxedoed audience members shouting “Bravi!” “Bravi!” On their walk out, Joan comments on how pretentious the Americans are who shout “Bravii!” Ramon explains that it is customary in Italy to shout “Bravi” because it is the plural of ‘bravo.’

JOAN:  It’s just so pretentious. “Bravi!” “Bravi!” Why can’t they just say bravo?

RAMON:  Well it’s the plural.

JOAN:  I know—

RAMON:  It’s the plural of “Bravo.” It’s what they say to acknowledge the ensemble.

JOAN:  No, I know it’s correct, it just—don’t you think there was something a little pretentious about those people?

RAMON:  Pretentious?

Here, Lonergan subtly dramatizes the new couple’s inability to connect. As one watches the film, it becomes more and more clear that, in addition to the expansion of Lisa’s consciousness, it’s the development of relationships that is driving the movie forward.

Lonergan imbues each of his characters with sparkling intelligence, particularly Lisa, and this makes for exciting and often combative interactions. So often in the film, we don’t know who to root for. When Lisa argues with her mother, Joan, or the deceased’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), with whom Lisa eventually partners to bring a lawsuit against the city, it’s difficult to say which of them is acting irrationally. Lonergan isn’t pursuing a simplistic idea of youth being wiser than adults, but he does show the messiness of relationships and the fallibility of people in general, no matter how intelligent they are.  Most effectively, he dramatizes how difficult it is for a child to sort through the varying worldviews held by the adults by whom she is surrounded.

Consider this interaction between Lisa and Emily, the executive of the deceased’s estate. Here, Lisa explains that when she held the dying Monica in her arms, the woman mistook her for her deceased daughter (coincidentally, also named Lisa).

LISA: But then when I found out her daughter was dead, ever since then I keep having this really strong feeling that some way, for those last five minutes I kind of was her daughter. You know? Like maybe that’s the reason I was there: Like in some weird way, this obviously amazing woman got to see her daughter again for a few minutes, right before she died.

EMILY (very dry): I see.  And is she still inhabiting your body? Or did she go right back to the spirit world after it was over?

LISA:  I didn’t mean she was literally inhabiting my body. I don’t believe in all that stuff at all.

EMILY: I don’t give a fuck what you believe in.

LISA:  Oh my god!  Why are you so mad at me!?

EMILY:  Because this is not an opera!

LISA (flushing): What? You think I think this is an opera?

EMILY:  Yes!

LISA:  You think I’m making this into a dramatic situation because I think it’s dramatic?!?

EMILY: I think you’re very young.

LISA:  What does that have to do with anything? If anything I think it means I care more than someone who’s older! Because this kind of thing has never happened to me before!

EMILY:  No, it means you care more easily! There’s a big difference! Except that it’s not you who it’s happening to!

LISA: Yes it is!  I know I’m not the one who was run over—

EMILY: That’s right, you weren’t. And you’re not the one who died of leukemia, and you’re not the one who just died in an earthquake in—Algeria!  But you will be. Do you understand me? You will be. And it’s not an opera and it’s not dramatic.

LISA:  I’m well aware of that!

EMILY:  And this first-blush phony deepness of yours is worth nothing.

The scene starts to wind down when Lisa tells Emily she’s being ‘strident.’ Lisa isn’t sure about her usage of the word—she claims that she didn’t know exactly what it meant, and that she must have misused it.  But Emily is being strident. She also has a point—Lisa does need to be aware that this situation is affecting others more than her, that she is not the center of the universe. But Emily could stand to work on her delivery. Lisa is forced to learn two things here: one of them is about herself, and the other is about Emily.

The brilliance of this film lies in that we sort through the moral dilemma with Lisa; we grow and learn with her.

It is a grueling, glorious and enlightening experience and, for my money, the best one offered in the cinema today.

Eric Rosenblum is the founder, editor and host of www.theartsinnyc.com.  Eric teaches writing and English at Pratt Institute. His writing has appeared in Guernica Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader and Playboy.com.