mmmcccxv

Things to Do When You’re in Love.

          OK, let’s cope.
             —John Ashbery

I do but fall, I cannot

even catch myself, but 

how fantastic and how

horrid it most certainly

would have looked had 

anyone but me have 

been here to see it

(and keep in mind

there is nothing act

ually hurting save my

pride), half underneath 

my bed, slipping madly

off the desk chair my

good friend Diane so
graciously sent as an
early birthday present
when I first moved in
nearly 3 years ago
(I must make time
cease to give the
impression it’s flying
buttresses) – and with

the phone still at my 

ear no less, as he had

called and was he ever
laughing – hang on. So
half under my bed, my big toe
torn in two (ok, it’s just the 

toenail, and it’s much worse than
it looks?) by my foot’s suddenly
being thrust by my fall to the floor

into the bookshelf, the one
with almost no books
(but lot of dried beans
in little diabetic baggies: 

like garbanzo, pinto, black, 

and black-eyed pea, where 

here we might leave the legumes,
so as to get right to the lentils –
orange and navy green – but
how am I to know, so long
as it isn’t string green beans,
strung beans, unless of course
it’s a lima (a lima bean, I remember
the two Limas [L e e m a  and  L y m a]).
Oh, shut up, you crabby fool!

Sure, I’ve fallen, stuck beneath

my bed, and I am trying to

tell you about it only because 

it’s hilarious. By which
I mean tragic. You were
laughing through the face

on my phone (always with that

drop dead face!). I wanted to stop

your laughter dead in its tracks by crying. 

Sobbing like a watermill. I remember watermills.
Oh, broken toe. Leg at such an odd angle. 

Okay, two legs. Not at horror angles.
You were laughing, I was sobbing
into a milkshake. And not 

an  imaginary milkshake.

“Don’t forget about midnight,”
you say, so sweet, and all my broken 

legs and toenails and the assemble-
out-of-box chair from Diane
that she sent when I moved into this,
wow, I don’t even know what
to call it as I look around won-
dering what to ever call it. . . . .
And you looking at me, 

tragedy of comedy,
half under the bed, 

broken toe on the 

bookshelf with 

almost no books, “Don’t
forget midnight,” but
by then I can’t shut up.
About Mozart – da Ponte
operas and Aristophanes
and Shakespeare, broken

under my bed.  But from
tragedy, or more from 

drama queen, at that, 

I was practically bubbling

over talking about sublimity, 

I retell the same stories (do they 

ever even change?) – and just like

always you said something 

that made me seem 

invaluable. And

most especially

thanks to that,

I   s o m e h o w
n o w  m a n a g e
to haul myself
up onto 

the bed

which I

was just

beneath;
and upon

which I 

now curl

up some-

how not so

uncomfortably.

And it is the 

exact opposite

of tragic, with

yet an hour 

to go before 

midnight.