The Last St. Patrick's Day Of The Nineteenth Century

On Saint Patrick's Day I always think of my grandmother packing her things on a spring morning in 1899. She's fifteen years old and she's looking at the blue skies and green meadows of County Mayo extra hard, trying to remember every detail, because she knows she'll probably never see them again. She's never been twenty miles from the spot where she was born, and now she's going to cross the Western Ocean to a place she's only read about. She has two dollars and a steamship ticket in her pocket. There's a boy on the village green, waiting to see her off. He'll kiss her cheek and wish her well, and when she's well out of sight he'll cry a little, for what might have been.

Haiku For The Ides Of March

Here in the Forum,

Admirers all around me,

Sun glints on my crown.

My Lady Is Back Home, After Far Too Long

I saw her on the Promenade just before sunset today. I knew it was her right away, even though I hadn't seen her since last fall up in Fort Tryon Park. She was dressed differently, slim brown jeans, ski sweater, suede ugh boots. Her hair was in a pony tail that made her look totally adorable. She still wore the same glasses, and she was walking a white dog. She looked younger like this, maybe seventeen.

She smiled at me when she caught my eye, asked me how I'd been since October. The funny thing was, she didn't seem any more surprised than I was that we were meeting here, under another sunset. I told her I'd had the kind of winter where you start feeling your age and she laughed. "You're not old, Jim!" she said, "It just seems that way because you've been here so long. I used to feel the same way, but now I know how short our time is here. Does that make any kind of sense to you?"

Silly thing was, it did make sense to me.

We stood side by side leaning on the fence, watching the sun slide below the foothills of the Watchung Mountains on the edge of the Jersey horizon. I wanted to put my hand on her shoulder, but I was too afraid that it would pass right through her and touch the cold steel fence instead. I melted inside when I saw how the sunset colored her warm brown eyes. She smiled up at me and said, "Jim, you know that sooner or later you're going to kiss me. And you know what's going to happen when you do."

God, that day seems like it can't come soon enough....

Crazy Lily

Yesterday was your birthday and I wanted to write all about you, about everything you meant to me. About the nights we spent lying in your bed drinking vodka and listening to Beatles records, kissing with your door locked against your mom. About those nights on the beach under the summer moon, tracing star paths and singing spirituals. About how you introduced me to the first true love of my life, and how I'll always be grateful to you for that. But I decided not to, because I want to keep all those memories to myself, nobody else could ever figure out just what it was we meant to each other. So, wherever you are, peace and joy. And thank you!

Which Side Am I On?

Nights like this, when the sky is starry black and moonlight blue, and winter isn't finished dying and spring isn't finished being born, it's so hard to not think of every stupid thing you've ever done wrong in your whole life. The full moon floating like an icy ghost is the last full moon of winter. The stars that glowed on Christmas Eve are sunk down near the western horizon now, fading like solstice memories. And the spring constellations are still somewhere below the eastern horizon, waiting for the equinox. And everywhere I look I see regret.

I've been having serial dreams for a while now, at least since last fall. My life is so different in those dreams, so much happier. In the dreams I'm married to a beautiful Spanish girl and we have an eleven year old daughter. I work at some job that has to do with taking care of rescued animals and we have a very obese cat who always wears a sweatshirt. She sleeps in a cat bed with the litter of  baby squirrels we rescued, whom she's raising as her own. My daughter sings them lullabyes in Spanish to help them sleep. It's almost always a holiday weekend, either Christmas or Fourth Of July, and we're always going to a party.

The longer the dreams go on, the more I find myself hoping that they are my real life and this is the dream, where I sit in the dark writing by the light of the computer monitor. This morning I woke up around sunrise, at the end of a really sweet dream about my daughter's birthday party, and I almost cried when I realized I was here again. Then I remembered my daughter kissing me goodnight in the dream and thanking me for the party and telling me she'd see me in the morning. I guess morning there is night here, so good night.

People Get Ready

I think I dreamed my own death last night, God it felt good. I was walking down a street in Soho on a morning just like today, cold and sunny. To myself I was naked, but when I saw my reflection in a store window I was wearing my usual work clothes. There was no cold, no wind, no weight on my steps. I knew I was dead, and knowing it was a candle burning in a clear red glass. I saw other people who were dead too, I knew them because we all were carrying window panes in our hands.

I came to a corner where there's no subway entrance in the real world, but here were the stairs, wide and smooth and filled with people carrying window panes. As we approached the turnstiles a beautiful woman took the windows from our hands and smashed them on the concrete floor, they broke with a sound like the ghost of  a wind chime you heard on a summer night when you were eight years old. She handed each of us a ticket and we went through the turnstile and down to the platform.

The train came rolling in, pulled by a diesel engine from the 1950s. The cars looked so much bigger than normal, or was it just that I was so much smaller? When the doors opened I walked in and sat in a cross seat by the window, it was upholstered so soft and thick and warm that I wanted to go to sleep. The conductor came down the aisle, she had beautiful long hair and the kindest smile I'd ever seen. She handed me a dog, who curled up in my lap. I looked at him and realized he'd belonged to an old lover of mine, more than a lifetime ago.

We climbed out of the tunnel and started up the ramp like we were going to cross the 59th Street Bridge, but we just kept climbing higher and higher, and the sun looked so cold and the sky looked like liquid pearls and the people in the train looked so happy and I'm sure I saw at least two of my old lovers on board.

And when I woke up my body was as limp as a dishrag and I felt disappointed, but I knew it's only a matter of time.

Ashes

February's a hill made of sadness and dirt. You can see it coming from so far away across the plains but no matter which way you turn it's still in front of you. The trails are all so cold, and the rain that collects in your footprints freezes at night sometimes. But the saddest thing is that tree all the way at the summit, standing black against the opal sky. The bare branches are hung with flowers and necklaces, smoke and heartbeats, all left as talismans by hopeful lovers who passed this way.