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    3 sorrows and a poem

    wilhelmina (November 18, 1979)

    Skinny Love by Bon Iver

    dawn (sometime in 1988)

    You Are Goodbye.mp3

    pearl (May 6, 2005)

    This Is The Thing by Fink


    The Story Of Our Lives
    by Mark Strand

    —1—

    We are reading the story of our lives
    which takes place in a room.
    The room looks out on a street.
    There is no one there,
    no sound of anything.
    The tress are heavy with leaves,
    the parked cars never move.
    We keep turning the pages, hoping for something,
    something like mercy or change,
    a black line that would bind us
    or keep us apart.
    The way it is, it would seem
    the book of our lives is empty.
    The furniture in the room is never shifted,
    and the rugs become darker each time
    our shadows pass over them.
    It is almost as if the room were the world.
    We sit beside each other on the couch,
    reading about the couch.
    We say it is ideal.
    It is ideal.

    —2—

    We are reading the story of our lives,
    as though we were in it,
    as though we had written it.
    This comes up again and again.
    In one of the chapters
    I lean back and push the book aside
    because the book says
    it is what I am doing.
    I lean back and begin to write about the book.
    I write that I wish to move beyond the book.
    Beyond my life into another life.
    I put the pen down.
    The book says: He put the pen down
    and turned and watched her reading
    the part about herself falling in love.

    The book is more accurate than we can imagine.
    I lean back and watch you read
    about the man across the street.
    They built a house there,
    and one day a man walked out of it.
    You fell in love with him
    because you knew that he would never visit you,
    would never know you were waiting.
    Night after night you would say
    that he was like me.
    I lean back and watch you grow older without me.
    Sunlight falls on your silver hair.
    The rugs, the furniture,
    seem almost imaginary now.
    She continued to read.
    She seemed to consider his absence
    of no special importance,
    as someone on a perfect day will consider
    the weather a failure
    because it did not change his mind.

    You narrow your eyes.
    You have the impulse to close the book
    which describes my resistance:
    how when I lean back I imagine
    my life without you, imagine moving
    into another life, another book.
    It describes your dependence on desire,
    how the momentary disclosures
    of purpose make you afraid.
    The book describes much more than it should.
    It wants to divide us.

    —3—

    This morning I woke and believed
    there was no more to our lives
    than the story of our lives.
    When you disagreed, I pointed
    to the place in the book where you disagreed.
    You fell back to sleep and I began to read
    those mysterious parts you used to guess at
    while they were being written
    and lose interest in after they became
    part of the story.
    In one of them cold dresses of moonlight
    are draped over the chairs in a man's room.
    He dreams of a woman whose dresses are lost,
    who sits in a garden and waits.
    She believes that love is a sacrifice.
    The part describes her death
    and she is never named,
    which is one of the things
    you could not stand about her.
    A little later we learn
    that the dreaming man lives
    in the new house across the street.
    This morning after you fell back to sleep
    I began to turn the pages early in the book:
    it was like dreaming of childhood,
    so much seemed to vanish,
    so much seemed to come to life again.
    I did not know what to do.
    The book said: In those moments it was his book.
    A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.
    He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,
    anxious in his own kingdom.

    —4—

    Before you woke
    I read another part that described your absence
    and told how you sleep to reverse
    the progress of your life.
    I was touched by my own loneliness as I read,
    knowing that what I feel is often the crude
    and unsuccessful form of a story
    that may never be told.
    I read and was moved by a desire to offer myself
    to the house of your sleep.
    He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,
    to see her in the refuse, the discarded
    plots of old dreams, the costumes and masks
    of unattainable states.
    It was as if he were drawn
    irresistably to failure.

    It was hard to keep reading.
    I was tired and wanted to give up.
    The book seemed aware of this.
    It hinted at changing the subject.
    I waited for you to wake not knowing
    how long I waited,
    and it seemed that I was no longer reading.
    I heard the wind passing
    like a stream of sighs
    and I heard the shiver of leaves
    in the trees outside the window.
    It would be in the book.
    Everything would be there.
    I looked at your face
    and I read the eyes, the nose, the mouth . . .

    —5—

    If only there were a perfect moment in the book;
    if only we could live in that moment,
    we could begin the book again
    as if we had not written it,
    as if we were not in it.
    But the dark approaches
    to any page are too numerous
    and the escapes are too narrow.
    We read through the day.
    Each page turning is like a candle
    moving through the mind.
    Each moment is like a hopeless cause.
    If only we could stop reading.
    He never wanted to read another book
    and she kept staring into the street.
    The cars were still there,
    the deep shade of trees covered them.
    The shades were drawn in the new house.
    Maybe the man who lived there,
    the man she loved, was reading
    the story of another life.
    She imagine a bare parlor,
    a cold fireplace, a man sitting
    writing a letter to a woman
    who has sacrificed her life for love.

    If there were a perfect moment in the book,
    it would be the last.
    The book never discusses the causes of love.
    It claims confusion is a necessary good.
    It never explains. It only reveals.

    —6—

    The day goes on.
    We study what we remember.
    We look into the mirror across the room.
    We cannot bear to be alone.
    The book goes on.
    They became silent and did not know how to begin
    the dialogue which was necessary.
    It was words that created divisions in the first place,
    that created loneliness.
    They waited.
    They would turn the pages, hoping
    something would happen.
    They would patch up their lives in secret:
    each defeat forgiven because it could not be tested,
    each pain rewarded because it was unreal.
    They did nothing.

    —7—

    The book will not survive.
    We are the living proof of that.
    It is dark outside, in the room it is darker.
    I hear your breathing.
    You are asking me if I am tired,
    if I want to keep reading.
    Yes, I am tired.
    Yes, I want to keep reading.
    I say yes to everything.
    You cannot hear me.
    They sat beside each other on the couch.
    They were the copies, the tired phantoms
    of something they had been before.
    The attitudes they took were jaded.
    They stared into the book
    and were horrified by their innocence,
    their reluctance to give up.
    They sat beside each other on the couch.
    They were determined to accept the truth.
    Whatever it was they would accept it.
    The book would have to be written
    and would have to be read.
    They are the book and they are
    nothing else.

    ___________

    • 26 July 2009
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  • Paul Pomeroy's Space

    Oh a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park / Or the lion hunter In the jungle dark

    Or the Chinese dentist or the British Queen / They all fit together In the same machine

    Nice, nice, very nice
    Nice, nice, very nice
    So many people in the same device

    Oh a whirling dervish and a dancing bear / Or a Ginger Rogers and a Fred Astaire

    Or a teenage rocker or the girls in France / Yes, we all are partners in this cosmic dance

    Nice, nice, very nice
    Nice, nice, very nice
    So many people in the same device
    _________________
    From "Cat's Cradle" (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

  • About Paul Pomeroy

    Oh a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park / Or the lion hunter In the jungle dark

    Or the Chinese dentist or the British Queen / They all fit together In the same machine

    Nice, nice, very nice
    Nice, nice, very nice
    So many people in the same device

    Oh a whirling dervish and a dancing bear / Or a Ginger Rogers and a Fred Astaire

    Or a teenage rocker or the girls in France / Yes, we all are partners in this cosmic dance

    Nice, nice, very nice
    Nice, nice, very nice
    So many people in the same device
    _________________
    From "Cat's Cradle" (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

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