Image of the painting “It figures,” by Fiona McMurrey (image courtesy of moi-même)
We live with ghosts, irremediably.
We can try to erase or subjugate them to the confines of indifferent memory rife with narrative familiarity but stripped of the feeling. God knows that’s what I’ve been trying to do yet each attempt is another tally in the record of daily seances of personal torture. I had been needing to write a poem for my grandmother’s funeral as there had been a memorial coming up in three weeks and I hadn’t gotten my shit together to send one along so my aunt could print it on a card, but I had no platitudes to give, no resuscitative incantations to pronounce. What could I possibly have given you but a fumbling for grace while trying to patch a bleeding heart? Why don’t you wake back up and tell me what it felt like to die? I know I’m just asking for an excuse for you to never die again ever at all.
I was writing from my usual place, Hotel Providence, my nerves jittery from the stress of concocting a poem out of thin air - what was there to say to save you? I impatiently sipped my café allongé as if I were waiting for somebody or something as if a drink could count as a person, if a ghost could inhabit one too.
What is a poem at the end of the day? I could write for hours, bromidic verse and inconsequential elegies that confirm I know my way around language but it wasn’t like there was any more of you here in the rest of this, these banal words and insufficient syllables wholly unsaturable with pure emotion. That’s all I have and I couldn’t put it to paper, not even if I tried, not even if I wanted to.
You see, a poem is a wail, you dreamed it out of me - if I let this sentence go on forever, then you will too. I want to see you in everything because I don’t see you at all.
I paused my furious typing to sip my coffee once again, the lukewarm liquid coursed through me like a bolt of lightning, fulgurant and anxious. I kept writing until the light began to disappear from the sky, until my fingers didn't know what they were touching and the blue light of my laptop was all consuming. That night the sunset reminded me of you again, absolutely gorgeous wouldn’t you know it?
It reminded me of one time fifteen years ago when I was cradled in your arms while my brother was being timely ripped from our mother’s womb after refusing to come out and we watched animated movies about the Iditarod and you told me that death wasn’t real - not for the spirit at least - and after the sun went down you read me something called the book of the cosmos. How funny it is to know that I ever held you and once it was for the last time. Well I keep on talking about you as if you’ll spontaneously appear and I know you won’t right now but there’s something in our ancient Celtic mythology that promises metempsychosis - but when and where will you be? I don’t count myself as particularly spiritual, so I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll stop referring to you in the present tense.
I once prayed that you’d outlive me knowing that you never could, but didn’t you know that death is unworthy of you? I’m still listening for your heartbeat, but I’ve heard that it’s a difficult part of your body to hear when it doesn’t exist anymore.
“Un cosmo?” Roman, the favorite waiter turned friend asked, his smile bordering on flirtatious as it always did.
“Non, merci, seulemente une verre de Chablis,” I replied as he took my menu and I lit a cigarette and tried to transform scribbles in a notebook into poetry.
A poem makes finite the infinite.
A poem makes faith an easy service: a poem can be a carcass of a long forgotten dream speaking on the precipice of a reckoning. A poem is what I should write for you but all I can think about is how I want to see you in everything because I can’t see you at all. A repeated line of verse, the moon slick over you, the moon sick over you are you up there or anywhere at all? I’m just curious for a glimpse please, please, please, please! Death is another word for war. I’m sorry for the violence in that last little bit. I’ll chock it up to a hereditary urge for a painstaking interest in detail, yours, mine, perhaps of this world (can you tell?). Is it better to know the ending so you will know how to live?
I finished my drink and slapped a 10 euro bill on the table. Under the glow of late rising street lights, I walked home from hotel Providence, passing the hair boutiques, neon-lit nail salons, and scores of men holding out leaflets and middle aged Asian prostitutes that sulked and strutted glumly in stilettos, tight dresses, and bright lipstick from Strasbourg Saint-Denis to Grands Boulevards. The bobos think this arrondissement is avant-garde, cool (although that is an unacceptable word to use because if you are cool you can never call yourself cool, that just defeats the purpose) and there is a pre-gentrified griminess and desperation to parts of this arrondissement which amplifies the coolness to the aforementioned bobos but the myriad immigrant populations and the homeless here know that 1this is just a lack of intervention on behalf of the government for better but mostly for worse.
I passed the crepe stand where they are generous with the fillings and always offer gratuitous sweet mint tea while you’re waiting, I continued moving past the theatres of Grands Boulevards, the costume shops, the throngs of people flooding down from Montmartre through the rhizomatic network of streets that slope upwards towards Sacre Coeur. I went uphill on Rue des Martyrs, a moveable feast of flesh and tired bones, an immoveable beast this intolerable grief that I am loath to own.
I’m scared I’m going to forget what her voice sounds like, how she smelled, how she felt the last time I hugged her in my arms because there are limits to the possibility of retaining the dead. With us, the living and confused, they would remain caught up in the wrong type of world. Loss is a subsidiary tax of being, loss is a subsidiary task of living. But I hear you wanted to be here, those were some of the last words you spoke to me, “I’ll meet you in Paris,” I’m still waiting for your plane to arrive.
Instead I bought cigarettes at the tabac closest to my apartment, waited in line behind some Brits who had pre-gammed a little too hard and the same old grousing French people I spotted there regularly. Finally it became my turn, I asked for vogues - expensive I know but I can’t stand any others. My accent must’ve snagged on a syllable because the cashier suddenly changed his tune.
“Tu eres español,” the man working the counter said with a hopeful smile and a thick French accent, his heavily lined face hesitant to frown.
“Non,” I said with a bashful glance.
“Pero tu pelo rizado no es francés,” he replied and winked at me.
“D’ac, merci,” I thanked him confusedly and returned to my apartment. I threw open a window that opened onto a quiet courtyard, stripped down to my underwear and made myself another coffee. I perched on my bed and opened my notebook with the intention of forcing poetry out in organic, tactile, analogue form but the block was imperturbable. I lay back and imagined you at my age dancing on a stage somewhere, admired, beloved, were you ever terrified? The bombs had only ceased ten years earlier, the wounds were still wet enough to viciously remember or was it the kind of agony glossed over by necessity, by the utmost imperative to keep calm and carry on. I forgot how old you were when you first went to Spain, Barcelona, your home of seven years. All I knew of the city were your sacred stories from your mid twenties as a maths teacher hiking Mount Tibidabo, devouring pan con tomate because you couldn’t afford anything else, and your liaison with a Spanish Doctor who could’ve been my grandfather had he not broken your heart from every possible angle.
I thought about calling and asking you to recount a few more stories to me, but it was only after I rang you number several futile times that I remembered that it had been three months since the last time I heard your petrified voice, and that it was the last time I ever did. The entire world suddenly felt violently oppressive and strangling in an abyssal decline towards hysterical grief – there is no such thing as being comfortably numb. Come back, I can save you from your sleep. I could’ve held you forever and then some.
I coughed you up like blood in an attempt to write you back to life, I was amateurish tearing my hair out in the dark, pleading for the right words to come to me and I supposed they would sporadically and spontaneously wholly out of my control, the crucible of catharsis as of yet vainly unachievable.
How can language produce the wretchedness of ever conceiving of a world without you, such a place doesn’t exist, never can, not as long as my words can bring you back if only on paper.
Publicly distraught and embarrassed, I was glad to have returned home on foot to the 9th instead of taking the 8 to Concorde then the 12 to Saint Georges, a carelessly timed long way around. I sat up on my bed and watched the vicissitudes of life passing below my window as though I were extraneous and merely an observer peering through a partition of glass into an unreal world.
Maybe I needed to take some time sitting back with a shrink and talking it out, talking about how loss occurs, how it happens, and how we accommodate it and how death is always astonishing.
This is something my parents had asked me to do on numerous occasions but I also believed that if I didn’t mourn her properly with my entire soul and for the rest of my life then I was not demonstrating adequate penitence, then she won’t know how much I love her. I fell asleep and awoke the next day at noon flushed with blue2 and my guilt at having wasted so much time and having so little to show for it.
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
Blue of Noon, Georges Bataille