cellphone photo courtesy of alexandria sciarappa
One day I’m onstage reading an old cursivebuildings post & reciting the following poem (from memory, because my hands are shaking too wildly to read my own handwriting) at The Believer/Tumblr book release event in celebration of the matchless Sheila Heti’s latest novel:
Flowers fill a wall three stories tall near the river, by the Parc du Champs de Mars
& I’m there, eyes wide, mouth sharp, in another year, long from now, far far from here
& old Paris seems so complete - so completely covered in concrete & meaning
I’m only bone-tired again, ready to be swallowed up by the din of Europe’s evening
Reborn as a Basque tour guide, or a pigeon on a park bench facing the seaside
… never leaving. My Mediterranean mothers & the gentle nudging of Italian weather.Impressed by ordinary men less than humbled by the overwhelming obesity of time
Who go on, set apart from location, from station to station, & fashion some sort of home
In love like long rambling walks w/no destination - Teach me that language
Run out my weakness on the roads of history stretched out to infinity & still arriving…
A thriving marriage of humanity & patience. Paris, I am there, unthinking.Until a sober cathedral bell shakes me, reclaims me from a dumbstruck stupor
Here are the paved sand dunes of my poor California, America’s bold boutique future
Here are four hard years of my tracks, from hill to bay & back, from that Parisian wall of plants
& these nights - these nights lit like fires in the center of stars die out entirely. Morning in ruins, running
Two tickets to Istanbul & then the Serbian countryside & then… nothing.& finally, that life can still be like this.
