Thursday, May 31, 2018

WHAT I LOST WAS THIS:




            “You said,” you say, but I didn’t say, and you reply, “You did,” but I didn’t do. Where does this leave us, but in love? And what’s love but a neighborhood of stoops (crumbling) and (artisanal) aimlessness.  
            A kid ran out of the park at 3:00 o’clock in the morning only to strike a taxicab. The kid bounced, without a shirt, the rent fabric of his breath in the freezing air. A passerby gave him socks. It wasn’t unkind, exactly, but ill-fitting, emblematic of the post-industrial wasteland that saddens our generational critics.
            There sat the kid, untying his shoes (still shirtless) beside the flashing hazard lights of the taxicab, tossing his own socks into the gutter, and replacing them with the warm, sweaty cottons from the donor. I had little to do but watch beneath a loud lamp. I’ll never forget the bunch of agitated blue jays, four or five of them, stabbing the cold with the metallic tone of their vocabulary.
            “Word, comma, your mama.” Did you clarify? Yes, you clarified.
            We were never happier (you and I) than when we were lying to each other. You texting me selfies on windy afternoons and me pretending to receive them an hour later. If I stood somewhere other than where I purported to stand, I did so out of fear, and in losing you, okay, what I lost was this:
            […] the bus stop is empty when the bus arrives. Instead, a worker sweeps old leaves into a dustpan. Why is the sinoatrial rhythm of our hearts keyed to the murmurs of thunder?



This is part of a double issue. If you don’t like stories, you might like a song. See trying to teach a mockingbird the bebop song “salt peanuts”

6 comments:

Ted Zook said...

hale & hearty & well & wise indeed!

hthr said...

Cruel old cardiac weather. Sd the sky crack, the failover pacer - atrioventricular - has yr back, or heart, if you will, before the impulse mandalas thru the myocardium. Then we speak of forecasts (prognoses): stable rhythms, net gains.

DAN / DANIEL GUTSTEIN said...

Hey Ted,

Thanks for having a look, Good Sir. We can only hope to be relevant. Most days, I wake up, have a look in the mirror, and decide to be relevant. May I be so lucky!

All righty, BA

DAN / DANIEL GUTSTEIN said...

Hthr,

Nobody sez it like that but you.

My own heart is knocking around at about 56 or 60 beats, and I sure wld like to see it less than that! Why so many beats?

Why the metals in blood and electricity in our veins?

We are of course mineral, at heart, (so to speak.) Ah, kindliness: You. And much more. In thine words and thy ways, great beauty.

xo BA

hthr said...

56-60 beats bespeaks a conditioned heart, whereas mine tempers at 90, ever overstepping the mark - I wonder, & not infrequently, wd the mean justify the means? 75 bpm would propel the unanchored myocardium thru miles of ions. xo

DAN / DANIEL GUTSTEIN said...

for the mean to be anything more than theoretical then the two heartbeats would / ought to be pressed together. then the average could be assessed properly. left fits to left, no? or the radial pulse to the radial pulse. does one sinoatrial rhythm compel the other? the band u2 made a big mistake when they sez "two hearts beat as one." i doubt that one heart could sustain two people on 60 beats, 90 beats. even as make-believe, meta-fur, it fails. perhaps they should have said together in anglo saxon -- togaedere, i believe. two hearts beat together. imagine the stouts, the blind dogs, the southern drawl, darlin'. --b.a.