God,

If there is no God/If you are not there

I am just biology

And must engage in numberless indiscretions.

God,

If you are not there and there IS no God,

I must be half-solitary and half-bare,

Even more aloof, irresistably cold

Rather than vacant and starting.

God,

Are you more cloud or temple?

Are you not there

Indiscreet

or Is there a God in the flesh

or seed in a shadow.

God,

If there is no God because you do not care

And biology is soul-less

Then I should be laid on the rocks under water

That drools with red and brown

And be sexed and temporal

Abandoning as much as abandoned

No need for sneakers, just water

and mouths.

For this reason I shriek.

In this temperature I shake.

Scene 20

While in the jaws of quiet, high-strung adoration for his sixteen month old daughter, he ruminates on the near absence of his father from her life.

He had seen her only on two vacations: in Halifax the week of her birth and for three weeks in southeastern Pennsylvania two months later.

Somehow he knew the term “genetic memory” and while he was not certain of it’s meaning, he felt it must describe the information that makes gulls fly south, salmon swim upstream to true love.

He wondered after all the unnatural evolution of humanity if there were still some secrets pass on to successive generations.

In those non-verbal, yet lucid moments of exhaustion just before sleep, he sometimes envisioned things happening. Mostly they were everyday events, but due to the sacred clarity of the scenes which, to his knowledge were foreign to him, they were gravely significant.

Could it be that we have all some vision of our ancestors, episodes, none too trivial, of human history encoded dreadfully to our brains?

Have we differentiated too specifically for any of it to became unravelled to us?

Alone, for once, he lay on the corner of the couch. It is hard and aged, but familiar enough to provide comfort. He wraps a small fleece blanket around his forearms so that they are bound together, something he does when he wants to feel cocooned.

He imagines our happy-haired chimpanzee brothers, that he is actually leaning into the soft-solid chest of one, and that he holds that chimp’s child in his arms.

They are all linked. There is nothing to unravel or communicate in speech so they do not need the mental barrier of language, but only the breath between words, the molecules between fingerpads to be humming electrically.

Scene 19

After each of us has backpacked, solo, across southwestern Europe

After all of us have lived recklessly for a 2 to 228 month period

Once we’ve all carried a sleeping child to their bed when we, ourselves, are half-asleep

Once we’ve all moved in together in Arizona.

When the time comes to change our clothes

and rebuild the trees

and put the continents back together.

Christ will come.

Scene 18

It was just as you were walking into this groundbreaking film that all the hype said you just had to see in theaters to truly appreciate. You were with your friend with whom you’d never been to a movie. Engaging in the very polite, oh, it doesn’t matter, where do you want to sit?, you reached a settlement. A half-row empty before the two of you and you thought of all the films you saw with your father always wanting to sit on the end. And what does your older friend say?

Do you mind if I sit on the end?

No, not at all, you say freaked out so that it takes you extra long to unwrap the scarf from your throat.

And you proceed to see it all and hear it, too.

His thin face, bespectacled, and his long fingers clawing into the popcorn or forming a splitter grip around the lid of his mammoth soda to drink from the straw.

How during each preview he’d give you his thoughts on a movie’s potential. Usually, “that looks good,” or “I’d see that.”

And he had to sit on the end because he drank the soda desperately and usually needed one or more bathroom breaks. Slouched in his chair, you can see him turn to the side and back, dipping slightly his head and whispering “I’ll be right back.” And often you didn’t actually her exactly what he uttered, but you know anyway.

And also because he sometimes would be paged to the hospital for an emergency C-section or because of a baby he’d been following who’s hemoglobin was low. And you will always hear, you suppose, a faint beeping when you are watching anything with the lights out for fear that you will be interrupted. And any time you are interrupted you will see him balancing his popcorn between thigh and armrest, laboring to remove the pager remove his hip, holding it back from his eyes a bit as he got older to read the number that scrolled in black on the green field like the digits of an alarm clock awakening one from a dream before sunlight.

So he’d sit at the end to slip out without bothering people, to make a call in the lobby, and return with the verdict; either, we’re going to have to go, or what’d I miss?

You are still cloaked in weary memory when you hear your friend’s phone vibrate against his keys in his coat pocket. He answers it quietly, says “soon,” “okay,” and “goodbye.”

Everything okay? you ask.

To which he responds, “It’s Cynthia.”

You don’t worry too much as the teenaged Cynthia is always involving his wife, a mentor of sorts, in some kind of drama.

It is slightly more alarming when the vibration returns 30 minutes later and he excuses himself to the lobby to talk. When he returns he says,

I’m gonna have to go.

Okay, you assure him. What’s up?

She’s at the hospital. I don’t really know what happened, but she and her boyfriend got in a fight. Jackie’s with her and I’m gonna go stay with her brothers so her mom can get over there.

-Oh no, you think. This keeps getting worse.

Do you want me to come with you? Do you need help? I can stay with the boys so you can go to the hospital.

Every offer is refused.

I want you to stay and see the rest of the movie. This is when it gets really good!

He leaves (the friend, who you forget is two decades your elder,) and you stay to watch the last 45 minutes, wearing plastic-framed 3D glasses, alone in the dark.

When the heroics are finished and the credits roll you stay until everyone else has gone. “I enjoyed it,” you admit, “but it was mostly for the visual stimulation,” you stipulate, “and I don’t think I’d pay 13 bucks to see it again,” you are certain. But you keep all of this to yourself as you are alone except for the middle-aged couple that you see now, standing before the corridor, clearly looking for some specific piece of information in the credits. (“Do they know someone who worked on this?” you wonder.)

You stop in the bathroom and then amble out into the false lights that surround only you and the concession workers. Into the cold, wind, and-

is that rain or snow or what?

you realize you’ve been doing that thing again, that you got over five years ago and thought you’d never need to do again. When you had anxiety and were unimaginably depressed and couldn’t help but have uncomfortable red eyes that looked freezing or allergic, and DEFINITELY awkward. You didn’t think you could control it and eventually when the first good summer came it was gone.

But it’s happened a few times this week and you are just as helpless against it.

At least with this wind there is a reasonable cause for it. You walk the several hundred meters’ distance which you chose to park from the theatre. You open the door and start the car and , just like turning over a record, you start seeing and hearing everything that’s ever happened to you. It is an arterial, pulsing, genetic memory. Because you imagine it as such you can’t help but see a heart stop and turn blue in a museum and an airway close or be emptied or whatever.

You end up weeping on the highway. By the time another song comes on and you reach your apartment the lights are out and everyone is sleeping. You walk into the dark bedroom where your wife is sleeping and hear extra breathing. Knowing it is your son asleep on your pillow, you feel gently around your side of the bed for him.

When your wife startles awake, you ask, “should I take him back?” just to be sure.

After she says “yeah” you scoop him into your arms, like a bride or casualty, and walk down the hall to his bedroom where a small light is on. You pass by his racecar bed, and sit on a folded futon. It has a bed sheet over it because there is no cover on it. It is old, handed down, and you figure someone has had sex or at least ejaculated on it. You hate this, but it is a decent place to sit and read to him and now you want to hold him for a few minutes.

Supporting his skeleton in your lap you lean back and are comfortable. You look at his face and lengthening blond hair and worry. You worry that all the problems you encountered as a teenager that had no solution will come upon him and there will be nothing to do but watch him struggle.

You know that there is no point in the fist-clenching, tongue-biting, unbridled swearing.

Eventually, it is time to put him in his bed. You place his covers over him, kiss the forehead that is sweating (because his mind is racing?,) and leave the room.

Just like putting on a new record you allow yourself to dig up more memory like you are going through pictures or an old notebook with scribble and single sentences.

You decide to stop indulging in whatever this is and try to sleep.

This won’t work, you fear, not yet.

Scene 17

Oh If only

If only I could trick somebody into thinking that my characters were fictional

like you do.

I do not listen to “roots music”

But I am now unable to form emotional bonds to new music just like the neuroscientist who used to know my wife insisted I would.

Therefore I only listen to music that is firmly rooted. There is no pleasure of discovery and certainly no enlightenment though I swear I have disciplined myself in remaining open minded.

I could kill him for pointing it out like I could smash the things in which I can no longer detect beauty.

I can learn to identify which plants may be edible

We can shutup about poets and “get a real job.”

Or maybe get a tan and take a nap.

Scene 16

After finally watching the film, released two years before, he cannot help but ponder the importance of leaving a record, a letter, a photograph. He remembers times when he himself unsettled the dust in the wings just offstage in his high school auditorium and shivered under the enormity of the act.

On such evenings he had returned to the half-vacated childhood home and stayed up too late because of the need to sentimentalize with a different movie. The need is the same, but the object of the sentiment has changed or been changed and it is ironic.

He reconsiders his budget, his need/want continuum and how many books he should have and how long he should be allowed to keep the ones he still has not read.

On the bus he was carried across the state and he thought it was some huge coming of age. In the notebook he wrote about himself to romanticize his disappointment.

Months before his dad had told him, pulling out of a parking lot that he understood. He wanted what was best for him but hated the thought of being without him.

These years later the young man is reminded of that and thinks of all the times he saw his father pause, while driving, to breathe and form a gentle sentence. All the things he was sure of and all the things that seemed melodramatic at the time.

He remembers the day his trumpet was bought. For two years he had played his uncle’s old instrument and for some months his parents had been planning to get him one of his own. Initially his dad insisted that there would be a contract. That the boy must “repay” them in the form of hours spent practicing. Nothing concrete had been agreed to, or rather, imposed on him.

After the final selection was made and the brass-in-case was in the back seat of the car his dad stopped. With a long index finger to his lower lip he began (staring forward):

There are no strings with this...

W-what do you mean? The boy asked, knowing full well that this was not a string instrument.

This is a gift. It is yours because I love you. You don’t have to practice, though you should. You don’t have to earn it and you are not indebted to me.

This last part was said while dropping the long index finger to the bottom curve of the steering wheel and turning his head slightly to the side to look at his son. His eyes were blue enough to be called pretty and twinkling beneath a moistened gaze.

The boy, no more than ten, understood that there was something profound happening to his father, but had no idea where it was coming from.

A young father himself, he now wonders what exactly motivated this concession. Was it the same love that moved God to part the clouds, drop a dove and boom “This is my son whom I love. Be careful with him?”

He will not ask for and receive clarity over this. It will not be known to him. He will not steal the show again. Instead he will pause in the driver’s seat of an automobile that he despises and puzzle at how to speak to his son.

Scene 15

Open Letter To A Friend

You wouldn’t believe what I heard today.

After a day of considering the greatness of Neil Young and the end of the line of Buckley .

I spoke, quite naked, with an old man who kept insisting “No, aging isn’t for sissies.” He went on and on. Not only did I not have the heart to cut him off, (“I really should be going,” ) but I didn’t really want to. He had, it seemed, some things he needed to say.

Benign tremors, he explained, were what prevented him from solving the code on the keypad into the 18+ section of the men’s locker room. It was after he mentioned his shaking that I began to notice it. Toweling off, he needed many tries to dry the small of his back.

I indulged every vague piece of information with a question that would give him the opening to tell me what he needed to. After about twenty minutes on the effects of aging, he stunned me.

“What I’m getting at in all this is... I’ve got a yearning for a young woman. I will never be able to have one again. And that’s hard to deal with.”

There he was before me. Leonard Cohen. But older. Perhaps heavier. Aching the way we all do. He was having difficulty looping his briefs around his right foot. He struggled because of the tremors and I had great compassion because of that. For a moment I almost asked if I could help him, but thought better of it.

Nothing good can come out of asking an old man if he wants help with his underwear.

Scene 14

While she is upstairs asleep in the heaviness of the first trimester, he begins to lose hope that she will wake up in time to make anything of the evening. He thinks of the family members that he has been meaning to call. His aunt, his uncle, his sister. He considers making an effort to call them all right now, but figures he may end up talking for hours to any one of them and really why not just do something for himself.

He should write, he knows, and creates a new word document. He considers some facebook fodder as material. An elementary school friend, who’s face he can’t picture offhand, is moving to Florida this weekend. A girl he worked with one summer has been awake for three straight days with her infant son who has a cold. A friend who just moved with his band to Toronto got a city permit to play guitar in the subway.

None of them sparks anything and he remembers a friend who wrote a story about himself having nothing to write about. What a luxury it is to write... he realizes. While it is possibly the most terrifying thing you can do that won’t kill you, you can always just write nonsense. Throw a fistful of magnet-words onto the fridge and see what happens. Switch some things around. Add a couple of cheat words and VOILA! It’s poetry.

Surely, it is as mindless an activity as giving a sound-bite to the sports media. He appreciates this, but still has no motivation.

Tonight he will eat something, or take a bath or masturbate and hopefully fall asleep.

VOILA!

Scene 13

After listening to the old man in the locker room talk about how his NHL hall of fame father led Montreal in scoring for three seasons in the early 30’s... he walk flip-flopped to the shower area. Towel securely around his waist, he hangs his goggles and bathing suit on the wall. Turning around he sees a middle-aged man, fat and naked, in the right most shower stall. Evidently fat-and-naked doesn’t consider closing the black curtain- there for all to use- a worthwhile task.

The younder man has always accepted with poise the fact that there is going to be some nudity in this setting. But 40-something here- Mr. Fat-and-Naked - crosses the border from just-changing-my-clothes to the People’s Republic of Exhibitionism boldly.

Awkwardly avoiding eye-contact with the man, he enters the left-most shower, pulls the curtain, and considers how the legacy of his own grandfather does not give him much to admire.

Scene 12

It is the end of the day at the end of the week. Being a stay-at-home dad Monday through Friday makes him love going to work on the weekends.

He is strung out on longing and frustration, over what he doesn’t know. He thought he had traced this recurring aggravation back a generation and determined a root event, but this doesn’t quite explain it all; the cursing, the object-punching, the tongue-biting and the under-breath muttering. And the shame when it is over.

Having suffered through dinner time with an attention deficit and a sensation of weeping. Having cleaned up and relaxed enough to read two picture books, both on ladybugs, to the kids. It is time to go.

He comes up with an errand that he has attempted (and failed at) twice already. This is his escape plan for the evening. While he once resorted to late nights out and not calling home to explain his whereabouts, now a trip to Wal-mart is the most he gets on a semi-regular basis.

“I’m leaving,” he reminds her and heads out the front door after he is acknowledged.

He drives, without his gloves to cover his cracked, bleeding hands, to Dartmouth Crossing. A place for mass shopping where there once was nothing but tall trees by the highway.

He parks, enters Wal-mart. Goes to the back of the store, the automotive center, hoping to get a key cut. His key to their apartment broke off while he turned it with one hand (the other was securing the baby to his left hip) on a -15 C winter’s night the week before.

In his two previous attempts to have a new key made, he was told to keep the receipt and forewarned that it may not work. Neither of the two keys did.

It is nearly eight o’clock and no one is in the auto-centre. He figures that perhaps this portion of the store is closed. He does not want to find someone who may be able to help him, so he just stands there... at the counter... waiting, blank-faced. After a while he returns to his car.

He drives through several maze-like parking lots and gets out at a gourmet coffee shop. He enters and orders a tea and a cookie. The comfortable seating area is quiet, but crowded, and on this night, like many others, he wants some space.

He goes back to the front of the shop wheres a small counter with tall stools sits in front of the window looking out into the parking lot. The scenery doesn’t matter, as he takes off his coat, and removes a book from a large interior pocket. It is by his favorite writer. He has been reading it since Christmas, having been hard-pressed to find more than ten minutes at a time to read.

He sips, takes bites and turns pages until a group of people come in talking loudly. Just his luck, they sit at the table closest to his private counter. They put their coats down and order. He considers making for the door, but still has some tea left. He enjoys it more than he expected and figures it would be a shame to rush through it or finish it off while splitting his attention with driving.

But then the noisy people come back. He heres constant chatter, but a girl who’s speech is less than refined rises above the others. “My boob is buzzin’.” She says. “Must be Colin.” He infers that her jacket is still on and thinks, that’s great, shutup.

She continues talking about who is or is not texting her for a few minutes, interrupting herself periodically to announce that her boob is buzzing again.

Why do people have to talk? he often wonders. This girl is from Newfoundland. While he has learned to tolerate the accent, the strange foreign sounds, it tears away at him tonight with every syllable she speaks.

This is what he cannot trace. Why has he learned to be so bothered by people he doesn’t know, by someone he could tune out if he just tried a little harder? There can be no event in the history of a family that would dictate his emotional response to this.

He does not leave though. The conversation continues and is then dominated by a guy’s voice (also Newfy.) He repeatedly refers to Nikki, an ex maybe, or maybe just a hopeless crush. The content of his mostly monologue, however, is drunkenness. Shots. Shots of jagger, Jack, tequilla, “no, that’s too girly” and “yeah, I was so drunk that night I passed out in someone’s garden on the walk home” and he couldn’t leave out “My worst drinking experience was when Nikki got ridiculously hammered. She was just so drunk that she was real upset- and, so... that’s why any time Nikki is too hammered is always- automatically, my worst drinking experience.”

Is he drunk now? his mental battering of this table of people resumes. When I don’t have anything to say, I just DON”T TALK!”

He tries to cut this guy a break. He must be my age, or younger. Unmarried, of course, and childless, as anyone would expect of someone in their early 20s. I am sure I was loud and obnoxious before, and it very well may have involved stories of alcohol and hopeless crushes.

Well. He tried, but he’s had enough. The relief of the warm tea and the dim lighting and the thoughtful evening decor is outbalanced by the stress that these people are causing him. Again, he cannot explain this away. So he just leaves.

While throwing away his trash he decides he’s got to get a look at the people he’s been eavesdropping on. So he turns and goes to the door in a way that puts their table in view.

He is surprised. They are actually much older than him. Mid-to-late thirties. They are all overweight, except one guy, bearded and wearing a ball-cap. The exception guy looks closer to his age and, oddly enough, looks vaguely like him.

That’s it. He thinks, feeling justified in his judgements. They really shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

He returns to his car, scrolls on his iPod until he finds some francophone musique. He wants to hear something, to feel some emotion, without having to hear the words that will remind him of how difficult it is to truly communicate with other human beings.

Scene 11

He hopes tonight to do some things that he has been wanting to in his downtime; namely to read and watch a movie. Tired and sore-eyed, he quickly gives up after a few paragraphs of his novel.

He hangs it all and makes microwaved popcorn, which he promptly covers in melted margarine.

Back to the living room, he turns on the TV. Before turning on the DVD player he is distracted by the French CBC. There is an eight-piece band playing a beautiful pop anthem beneath lights of red, orange and white.

It’s songs like this that remind him of his wish to fly, or at least to be shot out of a cannon.

Everyone in this band sings but the two horn players. He overwhelmingly approves. The hipster who stands out as front man is subdued but captivating with a voice amost velvet.

He listens to several songs, including one called Saskatchewan. He remembers having heard it on CBC2. It is sung by a guitar player (less than hipster) who delivers the last syllable of the title province in a nasal Quebec drawal. It is grating on the ear but has it’s appeal.

He is moved enough by it all that he writes down the band’s name when it appears at the bottom of the screen. He plans on looking them up and sending them off to his friend who spoke fluent french by the time he was 16.

He is always skeptical about reading literature in translation. He wonders if he would feel this way (flying, or just shot out of a cannon) if the lyrics were in English.

He looks down at his greasy left hand, the kernel and popcorn shards left swimming in margarine.

He hears a woman’s speaking voice. Because it is French and he is American, he immediately turns his head toward it. The young woman on the screen, the host it seems, says “merci” to several of the musicians. She has light brown skin and is the type of beauty that must be hidden away in late-night-foreign-language-public-television.

She makes him feel something unreasonable, like he wants to watch this stranger from the corner of the room.

The band strikes up as the credits roll. Back to the kitchen, he rinses the bowl in the sink. Returning to the tv, there is a shot on screen of perfect blue water, and overhead of an island scene. It switches abruptly to one of drear and grey.

There are no musicians. There are no topless French women.

The TV is off and he is gone to bed.

Scene 10

Dear Andrew,

It is so unpredictable, he thinks. He can’t help but think.

It’s simply a matter of having a pen when you need one.

Scene 9

He is uncomfortably crunched in a white, plastic folding chair in the reserved seating area at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. It has been dark for over an hour now and he was bored by the last performance and amazed by the one before that.

While his wife has gone to the bathroom, he waits anxiously for the main event. For the reason they bought tickets for the reserved seating area. They planned to make this trip home, in fact, to see in Iron and Wine live.

She climbs the hill to the port-a-potties and he is nervous that she is not back yet and the MC is onstage killing time before introducing the singer/songwriter who is terribly appropriate for a folk fest.

Finally, the great southern, bearded man strides enormously from behind a curtain to the front of the stage.

Standing and applauding at his seat, about 10 rows back, he sees a few eager teenagers move to the large open area in front of the stage. Then a few more. Then a few more.

He envies their enthusiasm and wants to join them. But at 23, bespectacled- and himself bearded- he wonders if he will stick out too much.

He looks behind over his shoulder, up the hill and does not see his wife.

Screw it, he decides. I was probably listening to his music long before they were. And with that he makes his way to the front.

The gigantic figure in the simple white spotlight begins with a song that was featured in a highly-celebrated independent film five summers earlier.

Wow, he thinks, swaying to the melody. It’s been five years already?

He is relieved to see that many other 20-somethings have joined in the rhythmic, organismal swaying. When he feels soft, white fabric brush his leg unintentionally, he notes the girl moving (almost without knowing it) beside him.

This makes him uneasy and while the guitar intro ends he is looking over his shoulder again.

“I am thinking it’s a sign...” the man sings.

He sees his wife’s summer-freckled skin and red/brown hair through the dark. She enters the seating area and continues down the hill, and her strapless blue sun-dress flows as if it were made specifically for this moment.

She is gorgeous today, he thinks.

“... that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned.”

People are reverently singing along now. He sees her go back to their seats and walks up the aisle to where she is.

“Will you come to the front with me?” he asks her.

“No, I think I’ll sit.” she answers. “But you should go back.”

“You sure?”

“mmHmm!” she says, cheerfully affirming.

“Okay.” He is surprised that she doesn’t want to be together, but glad she has not asked him to stay with her.

“They will see us waving from such great heights...” the song continues.

Returning to the place he had stood, he wonders about whether it is better to be alone, with one very special person, or with a collective mass.

He sings along with the rest of them in the chorus, rocking left to right.

Scene 8

Grief from death/life

You think that you will

continue grieving

death

but

are surprised that

you will grieve

over

life

Scene 7

He plans on making her this:

Spinach and Black Bean

Quesadillas

1 tbsp. olive oil 1(15-0z.) can black beans

1 small onion, diced beans, rinsed and drained

3-4 cups fresh 1 tsp. ground cumin (optional)

pre-washed spinach

4 (8-inch) flour tortillas

2 cups shredded

reduced-fat Mexican

cheese blend, divided

(not knowing what on Earth cumin is, he will omit it.)

Scene 6

He first became aware of it while on the phone with his uncle. He was wishing his dead dad’s twin a happy 57th and talked with him for an hour and a half.

He mentioned to his uncle that his friend had just returned from Haiti. He was interrupted.

“Oh! Do you know about what’s going on there?”

“No,” he replied, assuming it was US-induced political upheaval.

“A huge earthquake. 7.5”

Later he is watching it on the news and remembers how September 11th happened on TV.

It started, for him, on the radio.

He picked it up an hour later on the Today Show

after they realized it was no mistake and the

newscaster declared, “This is an act of war.”

And all morning the video rolling in;

of the impact

of smoke plume

of the towers falling

of the debris tumbling through the

streets of Manhattan like a gray river in a blue canyon.

of the flying people

the jumping people

the falling people.

The on-looker gasping “Oh my God!”

All day long like that until he didn’t know what to do.

And at night, when the President was safe,

and the reporters and firemen agreed,

they could see it

A cathedral in Hell.

He left the room but couldn’t turn off the TV.

Exhausted, he slept like he never had,

but wondered, in the morning if he really did

have a vision of the master-terrorist the year before.

(Really, he had.)

And the next day, because his dad had the afternoon off, they went to lunch at a chain on City Line.

He remembers how three older men agreed that there were Palestinians on the planes.

But it was a relief because of the effusive sunshine.

So now, listening to the voice of his uncle-

At times it sounds so close to his dad’s, yet is

so discernibly different that the absence

is clear.

So now, he wants simply to remember

the details of September Twelve

so the effusive sunshine

can dry out the bleak mid-winter.

“Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday

Dear Uncle.

Happy birthday to you.”