Joni Mitchell and Other Poems

The Double Dream Of Spring

Did I tell you about this ashtray? Dan says. It was Ashbery’s. Emily gave it to me with three of his ties. We’re in Dan’s living room. The night before, he had visited me on Water Street where halfway into my residency I decided to return with him to the city. This one looks haunted, Dan says, but this one speaks. He runs his finger over the fading paisley. It's yours, he says. After dinner we walk the promenade wet from spring rain, misty clouds obscure the skyline as Swifties drift past singing “Mastermind.” Across the footbridge over the BQE the woods are lovely, dark and deep, Catalpa leaves so thick we use our hands to make way for our bodies. Deep in Pier 3, repurposed mooring bollards punctuate a grove of trees where Dan discovers a labyrinth of full-length mirrors multiplying his reflection in a cavity of light in love with itself. We follow a path to a strip of grass marked at both ends with identical sculptures shaped like the satellite dish my friend’s parents installed. Into the sculpture’s concave surface I recite “Birches,” the soundwaves carrying silently across the grass to the receiving sculpture where Dan bathes in Frost’s iambics. Back on the Q, Dan says the breakup poem he wrote for S elicited zero response, but the one he wrote for C made S weep. That reminds me, I say, of my first dream on Water Street: you, me, and C were eating cannoli under a European Beech tree upon whose trunk hundreds of bees swarmed till their buzzing became orchestral. In the adjacent garden C found an antique glass bottle she uncorked, took a whiff of and for a moment appeared blissfully calm. Then she fainted. You cradled her head in your lap till my son texted to say that Dot and Brandon were expecting, at which point C woke up and walked us back to the tree upon whose trunk we carved Welcome Baby Yumi. Back in Dan’s apartment, notes from Pharaoh Sanders’s Promises fill the room like steam. If poets aspire to music, I say, musicians aspire to gods. Pharaoh’s voice enters on a minor key, like Ruth’s emerging from the alien corn. Sanders aspired to be exactly what he was, Dan says. Like Ashbery, I say. And by the way, thank you for his

tie I will never  

return, even if you say  

you have changed your mind.

The next day it’s easy for me to imagine Dan’s day-to-day existence in Flatbush as outwardly routine and as inwardly rich as Merrill’s days on Water Street, where, early in my residency I buzzed with anxiety amidst Merrill’s trinkets, the hand-painted wallpaper featuring bats with cloud-shaped wings, the kitchen wall’s whiteboard preserving reminders Merrill scrawled in his final days in Connecticut before traveling to Tucson where he eventually died. Every visitor seems drawn to the object that speaks to them. Over lunch I confide to Dan I was too afraid to touch the Ouija. Not me, he says. He even considered sleeping in Merrill’s bed but changed his mind when he pulled back the covers to find the sheets recently slept in. After goodbyes I take the subway to the park busy with joggers navigating horses, dog walkers, professionals in tailored suits, jackets enjambed, slow tourists in white shoes, landscapers listening to sports in a haze of vape. In The Ramble I read The Making of Americans, perplexed by the vagaries of Stein’s sentences. And everyone is imagining some such thing. A painting? A baguette? A beautiful couple surveys the grass before ascending into another realm of beauty as they unfold their Turkish blanket and recline into their paperbacks. Maybe Stein means the “thing” that makes life bearable. I take a nap and dream that I’m standing waist deep in a river the day before my wedding to EP, first-baseman on my college baseball team and a crush I couldn’t admit to amidst my teammate’s homophobia. Standing in the river I began doubting me and EPs compatibility, my mind caught in the eddies of life/work balance, health insurance, threats of wildfire smoke ruining the ceremony, the depth of our relationship forever thwarted by the fact that where we lived no one talked about opera. When I wake up I write in my journal: Why can’t I relax into the space Merrill made by transforming his father’s wealth into rooms where he could be himself? Is Inventory my memoir in the manner of Eden? I make another chapter, over-spell omelet. Your mom's not dead, she’s depressed, Dan had said as a prelude to

Bellinis—two for  

me, one to splash on his art 

ificial cactus.

What death means I can only fathom in the Elizabeth Street Garden where I name each tree “Violet,” decrease the distance between myself and language. And if it’s true that all that happens to an object becomes embedded in its very substance, isn’t everything I’ve ever touched a little bit of me? You? Merrill turning the page in Ashbery’s Self-Portrait. Ashbery in the mirror practicing a half-Windsor? Writing a thank-you note for letting me sleep on his couch is almost a conversation with death. Dear Dan, in the time we have left are we united only by the space through which we pass? And why do I love more than anything the people who make art as a stay against capital’s vortex, poison to the glow of  conversations about the dreams of poets and painters, feral voices echoing through gardens, the wonder of riding a northbound train where a person boarding in New Rochelle hands me their coffee, stuffs a bag in the overhead bin, and I avoid touching my neighbor by flexing my ass into the curve outside Bridgeport where Dunkin’ Donut signs elicit minor waves of calm, and on the platform in New Haven people kiss long and hard, and the trees in Old Saybrook are better than me at grieving though I do believe the dead become cedars casting shade over their own graves if not spiders nesting deep in summer grass, and if the future is nothing I can touch and I’m closer to my seatmate than I am to the past, then just outside Mystic I’ll finish reading Merrill’s Nights and Days whose currents lift me gently off my feet and set me down again in a pool of pure perception reflecting what I see, existence the mystery preparing me for contingencies downstream where even though the scenery

is more or less the  

same, I am changed like the light  

over Water Street