Trying to hold it together, keep it together, fit it together, make it work together, stay together

forever.

Life is just obeying physics,

trying to get to its lowest state of energy.

A life alone.

Uphill, we continue.

Soundtrack of Mi Vida: So Many Roads-Fink

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching–
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after–if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

 Ellen Bass

Soundtrack of Mi Vida: Fever-Fine Frenzy (how fitting)

Wallpaper

1
A room papered with clippings:
newsprint in bulging patches
none of them mention our names
gone from that history then O red

kite snarled in a cloud
small plane melted in fog: no matter:
I worked to keep it current
and meaningful: a job of living I thought

history as wallpaper
urgently selected clipped and pasted
but the room itself nowhere

gone the address the house
golden-oak banisters zigzagging
upward, stained glass on the landings
streaked porcelain in the bathrooms

loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried
up to secrete the rash imagination
of a time to come

What we said then, our breath remains
otherwhere: in me in you

2
Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor
Fugitive Variations
discs we played over and over

on the one-armed phonograph
Childish we were in our adoration
of the dead composer

who’d ignored the weather signs
trying to cross the Andes
stupidly I’d say now

and you’d agree seasoned
as we are working stretched
weeks eating food bought

with ordinary grudging wages
keeping up with rent, utilities

a job of living as I said

3
Clocks are set back quick dark
snow filters past my lashes
this is the common ground

white-crusted sidewalks windshield wipers
licking, creaking
to and fro to and fro

If the word gets out if the word
escapes if the word
flies if it dies
it has its way of coming back

The handwritings on the walls
are vast and coded

the music blizzards past
Adrienne Rich