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 at

all 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!
Some people don’t mourn
every day like I do, mourn
every day? If I weren’t so
stoned I’d be ROFL. Which
is really all I was trying to
tell you about, because it
was so 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.
Watermills. Broken toe. Leg
at such an odd angle. Okay,
two legs. Not at horror angles.
You were laughing, I was sobbing
into a milkshake? An imaginary
milkshake that had been real
only a few short moments ago.
“Don’t forget about midnight,”
says he, so sweet, and all my broken 

legs and toenails and the assemble-
out-of-box chair from Diane
that I got nearly four years
ago 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. . . . .
Elvis in August (me half
under the bed, how can
I miss Elvis, no matter
which way I move my
broken face, no matter
if I spin the chair on
top of me clockwise
or counterclockwise –
which one is Australia?
I forget), 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, the
only things worth a damn
older than a hundred
and fifty. And wouldn’t
you just know it, but
from tragedy, or more
from drama queen, at that, 

I was practically bubbling

over talking about those
damned operas, sublimity
and Peter Sellars, it’s the
same stories (do they ever
even change?) – and you said,

and did you ever say, just

like always, something 

that made me seem 

but invaluable. Elvis,
with his really nasty
jailhouse sex-face

sneer, Elvis the Un-
realistically Twisted 

Pelvis, tilted there

above my also

oddly-twisted

body which  

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

the bed

which I

was just

beneath;
my bed

with all 

the boxes

atop it

and with

and upon

which I

now curl

up some-

how not so

uncomfortably 

feeling just

exactly the
opposite
of tragic.

And it is

yet an hour

to midnight.