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By Root 638 0

major scenes were over. A sorcerer ruled my imaginings. The music of Mahler served as the background audio sound track. My visitors walked through walls toward me the way Marley’s Ghost seeped past the door on his errand to Ebenezer Scrooge. My dreamcallers carried their deadness around with them. Chains clanked. I can’t sort out what actually happened from what didn’t, and I can’t get the dreamstuff out of the narrative. Even though I don’t think about that time period often anymore, it accompanies me. My soul was mortgaged. I paid it off through regularity, routine, and hard work, until it was mine again. My history is what it is. Anyway, my crisis occurred decades ago, and I have a life to get on with. So I apologize now for this reconstruction, which is only an outline, a foggy sketchy thing, and for its necessary unreality. Also for its fragmentation. I don’t perceive the beauty in brokenness these days, though I once did. But I can acknowledge its truth.

28

I WAS LYING on the floor of my bedroom, praying to God to save Jamie, whom I adored, from all harm. When I came to, someone seemed to have taken away most of my furniture. I was in a blank space unbounded by dimension or time. The apartment had been almost entirely emptied. A mattress remained on the floor, and one book remained, the Brownstone Eclogues. No: over there, a book of translations of a German poet, whose name disappears on me every time I read it, sits on the windowsill. The rest of my books had performed a vanishing act. I went to the mirror. Coolberg’s face looked back at me. As in a Cocteau film, I fell into the mirror and swam in the glass.

29

SOMEONE IN THE CULINARY ALLIANCE called me, and I drove my VW down to Allentown where the People’s Kitchen was burning to the ground. I was surrounded by my friends from the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance. The firemen went about their work with deliberation. Joyous flames shot out from the windows the way they do whenever a particularly effective job of arson has been ordered and set into motion. I was weeping, first, and then violent sobs overtook me. This fire signaled the end of collective generosity in this our country, America. Bent over with sorrow, I was grieving for all our broken promises, for the loss of charity and loving-kindness. Someone reached down for me and ordered me to stand up, someone who looked like Jesus. In the early 1970s, many men in their twenties looked like that. Jesus had broken out on their faces. There was an epidemic of Jesus. What was Jesus doing here? I despised him; I had said so. He spoke to me. To this day, I remember that among other instructions, he told me to be a man. Then he vanished into the crowd. Most of his words disappeared from my head almost as soon as he uttered them because Jesus lives solely in the world of dreams. But not the part about being a man. Why did he care about that?

30

THERESA HAS CALLED ME a devil again and apparently I have hit her. Or tried to. She blocked my fist. I might have hurt her. Probably not: she seems pleased by my gestural violence. How is this possible? It cannot be possible. She’s a feminist. She has been giving me more of her typical knowing smiles. She recognizes that I have been two-timing her and that I do not love her or her irony or her great body. Nevertheless, she continues to ask me for sex, to demand that I fuck her. When I am tender with her, she becomes impatient and angry—that’s pretend-love, she says, and from you, it’s sickening. We start to get rough with each other in bed. We begin to cross the borders that you shouldn’t cross. With her, love is complicated by its opposite, contempt. On the other side of the border is pain and the promise of clarity, but in our case there is no clarity, just more pain.

31

THIS PASSAGE IS a palindrome.

My adored, my beloved. My life. Why did I love her? No explanation is ever satisfactory. How could it be? Jamie had finished her night’s rounds, had returned the cab to the central dispatcher, clocked out, and was waiting for the bus in