I tried Match and OKCupid briefly in the oughts. I sent questions to men who never replied. No one sent me questions. Apparently I’m an acquired taste.

I have a special appeal for dairy farmers, I heard from 2 who messaged me or maybe the same person twice. Could be the manure I spread behind my ears.

I sent you a message or questions and either you didn’t reply or told me you weren’t interested. You lived in my neighborhood.

One night I was ushering at The Annenberg Center at Penn and when I handed you your program I think I said you looked familiar., I couldn’t place you. Eyes engaged, reciprocal smiles. You greeted me as librarymonkey, the moniker I used on dating sites. Must have made some kind of impression, it had been a year or more. Saw you several times after that while ushering, Learned to look for you. Your season tickets were a pair on the main floor. Easy to spot from the balcony where I was typically posted.

I was taking tickets and you came through my line with 2 tickets, only you. We chatted. I had bought a pair of tickets in the past only to find I didn’t have anyone who wanted to join me. You stopped and wrote your name and number on the back of a ticket I still have.

Thus it begins.

You once told me that you were good at things that required discipline. You turned 67 on Friday and died on Saturday. No coincidence.

A month ago you were hospitalized for pain. The last message you sent me was that you intended to fight this.

Too little, too late.

Save me a seat on the hell bus, I’d like to see you again.

He speaks my name over and over,

this is not the first time,

but my breath catches as he does

He runs his fingers though my curls

all of this is new to me

Grateful

I frequently experience lucid dreaming, especially shortly before waking. This morning I was dreaming about my first grown-up love affair. I was about to tell him how to to avoid dying as he did in a fall on a staircase. He was living in San Miguel, where we lived in 1970 briefly. Now there permanently with his second wife. Many casas in older colonial homes have open staircases placed against a wall, no side wall or hand railing. He fell and hit his head and bled out within a couple of hours. Late 60’s, didn’t make it to 70. His wife told me that he had also mistakenly taken too much of a blood thinner.

I’m haunted by the fact that his first wife died in a fall with too much alcohol and or medication in her bloodstream. They were drinkers, maybe alcoholics, who knows.

I thought I could warn him away from dying. Instead I woke up. Lost him again.

After his first wife died, he told me that he had had a great life and he was reconciled. I don’t know if that changed after he re-married and moved to the place he loved so well. Rest in peace, in my heart.

“She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn’t mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else—doorknobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time—was interference.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

You are a cold drink of water, slaking my thirst

At the onset of the pandemic I chose to shelter in place with Toni Morrison. Previously I had tried to listen to her novels on CD on long car trips, driving solo. Each time I tried, I failed. Rewind to catch a word or phrase, rewind again.

In order follow the novel I would have had to pull over, I would never have gotten anywhere! Thus reading from her last novel, back in time I had the quiet and solitary space I needed to focus, read, listen. The stories are dense like a thicket, untangling roots  and limbs, the rhythym and cadence of the language drew me in.

Head back, push off, hands in prayer over the mons

up the mid-line and out over nipples, just brushing them

arms fully extended, like wings that have just dried,

pull down, make snow angels in the water

Simultaneously, legs come up, open, out flat, knees bent, snap together and down like a piston,

driving the body forward

Pull and glide, eyes closed, I think of you

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