Broadway for Paul

by Vincent Katz

  The anger, the lack of understanding. I can’t really take that.

  I don’t trust people who give up on people. Thinking now of Fitzgerald, who died at 44. In that short time, he was able to give up on Zelda, with whom he had found a world of writing as a salve against the pain of existence.

  8/14/17

  “To be gone in an instant” is a beautiful moment. So maybe to be gone is beautiful too.

  There is the work one has done that one leaves as legacy. There is diminution. And then one is gone.

  8/15/17

  A roundness returns. Light through morning poplars, morning shadows on grass. A colloquy. A coming together of sustenance and feeling. A ride. A conversation. The light shimmering. Some words composed. A swim. A mountain seen in light. Paintings arrayed around a wall. Two shooting stars.

  8/16/17

  I saw the road being ripped apart by a machine manipulated by a large determined man. Road and earth.

  I’ve been trying to keep to my rules. Eight days now. I’m doing pretty well. Enjoying being less rigid in habits and decision making. I used to determine my behavior so much as a set of rules. Now I’m much more able to adapt.

  I’m also more able to see things. Like the phone number on that sign next to the name M & L Seafood. And it doesn’t scare me anymore. One time I tried to write a song about that but it didn’t quite work. But now I can see it.

  A quiet pile of junk beside a barn, with healthy weeds pushing high in a patch of grass. Many different kinds of barns. And light on fields and shadows now. Houses with different entryways and porches.

  8/17/17

  I wanted a place to shoot to, and I saw it, in a pyramidal corner extending into infinite distance. Could I but extend, likewise, into that space, I’d become one with the universe.

  A grey day, but somehow one balanced on its own vectors. Tall pines across the pond. The grey of pond’s surface. Nearer pines, their branches sheathed in darker green.

  8/18/17

  The same place with the same junk but a different emotion. In the side mirror, a different look of green leaves, pattern of a wall hanging in nature.

  8/19/17

  A great cream slate of sky above a bluer light plane of lake. Earlier, we saw a light-colored hawk attack three crows lurking in a nearby treetop. She has her nest at the top of one lofty pine, they perched in another. She seems to have been successful. All is quiet now, except for human kid chatter across the way.

  8/20/17

  I don’t know what I signed up for. The sun going down, the light filtering through the trees, becoming yellower as it spreads over the green. The pond in the distance, reachable sound and smell. The person I chose to be with.

  There is a time of day and an endless list of things. There is the viewing of time, and its interruption by others.

  8/21/17

  Manna floats slowly. Not from heaven, but from pine trees. Not manna but particles, bits of seed fluff? Blades of weed grass stretch, swelling, each burst an expression of life. Birds hum and whistle a polyphony, human kid sounds from the house across the water punctuate and a distant motor.

  This is the perfect hour for a canoe ride and a sport I invented called fish watching. I can hear one of the two loons from across the lake. Sure enough, the wind is blowing in my face. The wind of nature. Or is it the wind of the earth?

  8/22/17

  The day is sliding down but still flourishes. There are animal sounds—birds’ sudden animated chirping—and the humans have gone away. A few minutes of quiet. No questions, no answers. The bigger problems wrap around us, but at least there’s an us. Sometimes, it feels as though the best thing one can do is to do one’s own work, whatever that may be—dancing, bricklaying, working at the library.

  Now, finally, the sun, even lower, has become more cutting and brilliant. It seems to say that these flies around the picnic table are eternal. Faintly visible filaments from cobwebs illuminated, only now, in branches. And the distance across from shade to this very last sunlight of this typical, overlong, day, hints at something beyond. There is effervescence.

  There are certain people who give me something. It’s hard to explain. Someone who is passionate about something, music, let’s say. And their passion leads them to know something, to know more and more, and they are excited to share their passion. The final sun through trees before it goes behind other trees, then land, as the earth turns away from it.

  You take the walk from the cottage to the studio, a walk you’ve done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. But now it is night, so it seems longer. And you lie down on the deck and look up at the stars. It is unbelievable that there are stars and that you can see them. It is interesting to know the science that explains why they shimmer, but it’s more important to realize that everyone, whether they know the science or not, sees the stars shimmering. And you see the Milky Way, that beautiful conglomeration of stars that is our home.

  8/23/17

  All my liquids flowing this morning to her amber quarters.

  There are a lot of clouds but it’s still a nice day. It’s very sunny where we’re sitting right now.

  I’m waiting for someone to come out of the place I’m sitting in front of. Now she has come out and is sitting in her car talking on the phone.

  There’s something about the way the land comes down and makes a shape, smaller and smaller, until it reaches the sea. Seen from a departing vessel, these shapes possess an emotional intensity.

  8/25/17

  I look up and see so many stars again. How many days will I see so many, before returning to a churning field of exertion? I am attempting patience, and I am learning.

  8/26/17

  I wonder how well I can communicate, for how much longer.

  8/27/17

  Bird rhythms in morning, crickets, wanting this to stay. Not wanting to go back to city, ever.

  I like the fact that I’ve hosted somebody.

  I think I can get by by not expecting too much. If I just take each moment, try to bore into it, I can feel the breeze that comes from the earth. It always picks up when I am having this thought, as if to affirm what has occurred.

  8/28/17

  A sip of tea, the morning is starting. It’s been quite cold at night, we had to buy comforters for the beds in the cottage. Every day feels like a fresh start—an opportunity to do the right thing, exercise mind and body, communicate with others, provide care.

  The sounds of geese coming from the back of my head. I love to sit under this massive pine in the mornings.

  The month is ending, two more days. Vacation, too, is ending. It is time to return to the hustle of regular life. My takeaway this month is the Latin word curare. To take care of, care for. That’s what I’ll devote this year to. More cooking, more palpation. And maybe continue the year after that as well.

  As the cicadas here continue.

  8/29/17

  This is almost the last day. I’ve been realizing that I can continue if I can secure a way forward with the determinations of life. Give it to that, not talk, or vaunt, but a simple, straightforward desire to help.

  8/30/17

  Everything gets broken, but some things get healed. I come in silence, and the silence is poetry.

  8/31/17

  AUTUMN DAYS & HOURS

  for Anne Waldman

  Today it all started again. I am all ages—5, 12, 23, 35, 42, and all the other ages in between and beyond. Until that age when age stops mattering.

  9/5/17

  Today it is fall. A forceful grey covers the sky, with punctuations of light pressing through here and there.

  9/6/17

  At the talk at the gallery on Saturday morning, there is coffee in cardboard
containers with handles for pouring. This is something I can imagine appearing in a John Ashbery poem.

  It’s all about igniting people’s imaginations.

  9/9/17

  There is a long, straight path just inside the park. Models by the park’s edge, the path hugs it, presenting an unusual, somewhat European vista. But one moves instead inside, where paths wind, and bicyclists and tourists congregate, making plans.

  9/12/17

  Slow notes blow above river. Cars stream past. It’s all okay. Stray windows, lives emit. It’s about being, but also sensing, some sense different from what has come. There’s a sensitivity to those windows, to be back. Sensing this height of things, reflections, glows, and a bus passes, below.

  9/15/17 [Chicago]

  A boat slowly enters the marina’s mouth, which is formed by two lengthy perpendicular causeways. Another slips in, and two pass out more quickly. There’s a lot of action on the water today. Earlier, seemingly hundreds were gathered into, on, boats, as though for a lavish party on the water. Today is not the Cinco de Mayo, but it is Mexican Independence Day, if that has anything to do with it. Elsewhere, memories lodged in the brain confront present realities.

  9/16/17 [Chicago]

  I can’t live in a fantasy. I have to live in my life, which is that thing it is. But I have a vivid imagination, so I am always seeing inflections in life that others do not. They must see the same scenes in very different ways. That is a scary thought. Am I so different from others? Maybe my projections are all dust. But as long as I am living, they seem to be the way I see and the way my mind works.

  9/17/17 [Chicago]

  Listening to the prelude to act 1 of Lohengrin, I need to stop. Everything is going away. All this life that we have built up, worked on all these years, will end soon. That will be it. A sadness overcomes my body in the swells of this music. I recognize that sadness, let it penetrate my body. Then, something strange happens. I feel, in my body, a hardness form over my heart and all my organs, muscles, and bones. It is not a denial of the sadness, but rather grows directly from it, in the further harmonic and chordal delineations. Then I am listening to the melodic line in the horns, with harmonic counterpoint higher in the strings. And then the sadness returns. It will all end, soon. But the ending of the music recognizes the ending, accepts it, and that is all.

  9/18/17

  I’d like time to stop at this precise moment in the bathroom at the Japanese restaurant. My mother is waiting upstairs, my father is painting downtown. Vivien is coming to join us. Isaac is at school in Brooklyn, Oliver at school uptown. Maybe if I just stay here, don’t go back upstairs, this moment can lock in forever.

  9/19/17

  I’m lying on my back, looking up at the leaves on the ash tree, and the blue sky behind them. It is early fall but feels like summer. It was in the high 80s today. The view is endlessly entertaining, like a slow-moving film. It’s late afternoon, minute by minute the leaves change, some becoming more lit, others less, as the sun changes position, moving closer to the horizon. A bird will fly by, or an insect, and I saw one of those very faint airplane outlines, like the bones of an airplane, so high above, through the branches. As I tried to follow it, I lost it beyond the tree, where the sky looks inexplicably white. Above, it is blue—light blue, but without a single cloud, a perfect blue. Yet a little to the south, beyond the tree’s last branches, it looks white. The sun is to my left, it is so nice to by lying on this bench, looking at the trunk of the tree now, in light, as I turn my head, the brightly lit leaves near it. Many leaves are brownish now, as autumn is here, yet some are still green, a dynamic mix of colors. The ash trees are under attack from two different diseases. I am silently rooting for them to survive. Please survive! You are too beautiful to die. Now another skeleton plane passes, going south, followed by a lower, embodied plane, going north. And now another going south.

  9/24/17 [Solebury, PA]

  I’ve been learning to appreciate the moment—whether it’s a concert or dance performance or walking down the street—rather than worrying about its being over. I’m still in my 50s and I will be next year. Then, maybe I’ll start disappearing from this place.

  It still doesn’t feel like autumn, still the heat of summer.

  9/25/17

  Walking on the avenue, seeing one person, then another, suddenly they are all themselves, unique, and with particular qualities that are human and endearing.

  *

  (War is not taking place here).

  *

  I guess ultimately I do have some knowledge. I was thinking I didn’t, was expert in nothing. But I have a certain knowledge, tonight, a warm night in the park, walking to the poetry reading, of how people become happy, and stay happy. Rowboats on the pond, large leafy vegetation in the fountain.

  9/26/17

  I’m looking for a place to sit, but I’m happy on this avenue. I have no need to deviate. In fact, I’ll stop right here, leaning up against this polished granite façade, in the shade of its scaffolding. This morning, I saw so many people on the subway. They were all so much themselves, there was space for each, even though it was crowded. The women were dressed so colorfully, as if in honor of the last day of summer. I saw at least two young women with long hair still wet from the shower. (There’s not a cloud in the sky today). On one seat, four people, different ages, all on their phones. One woman, the exception, stood, reading her New Yorker. And then, looking the other way, down the crowded car, I saw her. I could only see her hands. Her left held sheet music, while her right counted time on her thigh. For all of us in that moment, in that subway car by chance, in her music, which was our music too, she counted time.

  There was a smell of industry I used to smell. I took it for granted when I worked in those environments, and I would buy a sandwich (probably a cheese sandwich with lettuce, tomatoes, and mustard on rye) and a small coffee with milk. Now, years later, I’ve discovered that smell of urban industry is not inevitable; it’s just a by-product of the way the buildings were built. And though it can be comforting in a way to feel you’re part of something, it’s an illusion. So I’ll stay out here, where a fresh breeze is blowing.

  The smell of a playground is earth, dead leaves, and, faintly, urine.

  9/27/17

  As I spread the yogurt, I notice small bits of the meat of the berry spread in it. I won’t be able to go to London at this time. The heat pours down on my face. All is poetry for a moment, the moment at which the city turns to itself, as if in prayer (and maybe, given the state of affairs in the world, it is, at last, that, all other options exhausted) but really just the way city dwellers alternate in their constant shifting. Their day is not one that has a fixed contour. One sits in shade in the café, eats from a knife. Another sits in sun in the café window, waiting for the day to take its shape.

  10/3/17

  A woman singing, a horn honking, a man speaking on the telephone. Giant holly in a small front garden. Japanese maple in another. The weather warm, unseasonable, but appreciated by denizens. The stone church tower, not a steeple, or else a truncated one, horizontal top, rectangular in elevation, clockface functioning, Roman numerals for hours, seven minutes behind. Flower bushes planted in tree pits. Another tower, this one brick, also without a spire, but with four small turrets, one in each corner of the tower, and a crenellated parapet wall.

  10/4/17

  I avoid the music that takes me nowhere. The music of voices recounting their lives in cafés.

  I like to be in this neighborhood that is associated with a particular culture, to the exclusion of all else. I can be alone here, anonymous. And it is night now, a slight color still left in the sky.

  I finally learned how to say “my life.” It’s when I want to talk about my poetry.

  10/6/17

  There are nume
rous cranes on the tops of new buildings surrounding the park. I can walk through, and it is my park, as well as the park of everyone else here. I spoke to someone earlier.

  10/21/17

  I will still have something to give them, but it will become more and more abstract, until it becomes a general longing.

  10/23/17

  I exited the subway and smelled something I hadn’t smelled in decades, seeds. Most people just log along their lives. I want to ignite them, in a good way.

  10/24/17

  I like to stop in this place and say “I exist.” This particular architecture is one I can enjoy simply by standing here. It is on an avenue, but not a principal one. Rather, this is a peripheral borough, a small triangle with small plane trees facing. Here, I take my sustenance of the day, its light, before I move on.

  10/30/17

  Sky opens up above health pavilion, cloud scatter in attitude across richest blue. It’s finally chilly, as it should be now. This corner provocative in terms of history, gearing into a present that is aboveboard and agile.

  10/31/17

  Why are you so sad? Because I can’t get inside my own head. It’s a clear day, early November, and I’ve come to the park in advance of going to the exhibition. Even the trees and the plants cannot bring me comfort. There are too many people! And today, I’m taking my ire out on all the tourists! Why are they so well prepared? What are they hoping to find? Now, back inside the city, I am more consoled.

  11/2/17

  Back to granite, friend, but out of the loop, is all I write something for nothing? So much happening in this city all the time, so much, even, in poetry, but no way to gauge poetry, no measure that satisfies. A winter sun dusts in in all we conjure, the path is toward that building, and there is a way.