THREE AND SIX AND FIVE

325/ of things to say when accused of comparison with the past

It could not have been helped, how much people asked me how I really felt with D. when I’ve written so feverously about A. It was as if nobody could believe the heart’s resilience no more than they accepted the heart’s folly.

But you made such beautiful poetry together, they’d remark, and of course I am stung by the sudden occurrence of loss. Perhaps it was a mistake to keep such a tight record of everything I felt—it was stuff for fiction, things you stuffed fiction with.

When I first saw D’s room I turned pale from the utter lack of books. When we go to bookstores together, he goes straight to the heavy coffeetable compilations about the lives of rockstars and filmstars and stars, the astronomical kind— while I while away in the aisles of fiction and the classics and poetry. The pictures, to me, are less obvious than that, I pointed out to a Rolling Stones cover of Jim Morrison.

But we have not given up on poetry; we have only begun to understand it through different lenses and languages. He hears the languid listlessness behind chord progressions the same way I am devilishly delighted by alliteration. In the car, we are both mesmerized by the light-then-loud staccato of rain against a symphony of traffic, with the interlude of the windshield marking caustic breaks in the story, the song, our unwritten poem.

“Go ahead, fill my shelves.” D. said and soon enough I had a three-level fortress. I’d pick a book, he’d pick up his guitar, and I’d read as he plucked a tune about a girl who read on his bed and smiled from time to time.

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