This is the Time
1. I have my dad’s nose. It sits like a sundial across the constellation of my face, the same right triangle that ends his dignified profile in the waxlike shine of digital camera photos, and if, with my middle finger and thumb, I push my glasses up its bridge in the same way he did, he never found the words to point it out.
2. Out of the narrowing reservoir of a sad dream, images breaking from my eyelids, I awake the way I always do: perfectly still on my back with my arms at my sides. By the time I roll to the right and pick up my creased Moleskine the dream is far away, and only the words “folding stones” are left reverberating in my skull. I add it to the page where I keep the smallest fragments—
high heels - your parents house balloon sound folding stones
—and settle again onto my back. An ex once said I look like a corpse in a coffin when I sleep, that she would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and be deeply unnerved to see my head so squarely in the center of the pillow, my nose pointing so sharply to the ceiling, convinced I was either awake or dead until she heard me snore. My dad snored louder than me, big crescendoing snarls from the other side of the room in his old apartment, but we slept in the same position. He said it was best for the spine.
3. The spines of dad’s books rest neatly and visibly on the shelf by my door, Post-Its flying from their yellowing pages. It’s the shelf people set their drinks on when I have them over because it’s one of the few surfaces not covered with hats and horse chestnuts and collaging materials, and probably because their glasses look ultra cool next to his copy of Charles Bukowski’s horrible book Love is a Dog from Hell. Dad gave me that one in high school after I told him I’d been writing poems. The rest I crammed in a cardboard box in his Tía Rosa’s sweltering garage, where he’d left them cluttering the space among Rachmaninov box sets and once-meticulously dry cleaned dress shirts. It was a dry summer for grieving and she wanted her garage back. Most of dad’s annotations are situated in the shelf’s densest theory, populating Foucault and Lévi-Strauss with wispy half- cursive etchings. They are rigid and to-the-point, the notes of a researcher, not like the wiggly maps I draw in the same margins. I read them over and over because his number was blocked by the time I knew those names.
universality? pomo.= no universals. for thesis - Marxist notion of immanence ruptures vs. continuities
4. At the used bookstore I make myself nauseous tilting my head to scan titles. I’m scouring the shelves for the most marked-up pages I can find. I do it because a stranger’s annotations make reading a two-fold interaction, or a three-fold act of creation, and because an opening takes place at the moment their markings turn from a record to an alibi. My left wrist is getting full: a copy of Remarks on Colour with bits of the German circled and bits of the English underlined, a copy of Pale Fire where some charming hermeneuticist scratched a “!” or a “?” or a “!?” at least once or twice on every page. I’m thinking of my dad holding my tiny hand to walk down the block. So close and there and guiding for the time-line-less glistens of a childhood afternoon, for the non- continuity of a first time seeing hyacinths. After paying for the stack in folded cash, I get in my car and put dad’s Laurie Anderson CD in the stereo. “This was revolutionary when it came out,” he’d said while driving me home from 8th grade, his car’s faint sweet smell burning at the back of my mind. “Everyone was like, ‘What the hell is she doing?’”
Put your hands over your eyes.
Jump out of the plane.
There is no pilot.
You are not alone.
Standby.
This is the time, and this is the record of the time.
This is the time, and this is the record of the time.
5. 8pm on Thursday is bright and heavy at the table because my roommate’s friends are over and all clamoring to teach a supremely complicated card game, breaths hot from their mismatched cups of cabernet. Your goal is to get rid of this stack. I blink slowly and without implication, mug rising to my lips with automatic hand. Right, but you also want as many cards in this middle part as possible. Really that’s more important. When I have red wine I don’t swirl it under my nostrils; I don’t pick out the stonefruit and leather from its scent, I don’t have the sense for those kinds of metaphors. I wince looking into my cup, thinking of the hundred horizontal bottles dad kept in the basement, the spreadsheet of their value he compiled after the divorce. Dad’s nose was the star of the history department parties, proving his elegance and intelligence with each placed note, The Brown Man With The Wordy Palate. Also remember to look out for Jacks. I hold scents and senses away from the prison of being understood. I hold my breath and keep count of the diamonds. I keep my ear to the pause between sentences, writing a haiku on the edge of my napkin and dancing toward a whirring sleep.
i have faith in breeze to carry my impression: snowing, snowing, cut
6. For December 12th, 2021, my dad’s 52nd birthday, there’s no entry in my journal. The only photo in my camera roll is from 2:38 a.m., a grainy smudge of blacks and grays and greens marking my hopeless attempt to catch three incredibly bright lights that had mysteriously shone beyond the trees outside my dorm window. I made no phone calls.
7. 27 days later, when I sat down next to his parents at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, his nose was the only thing I could see at the front of the room, sticking straight up from the metal horizon, pointing directly to some strange academic heaven. It looked so pale and plastic that I kept my head down for the condolences. I stopped journaling that night, because the silence at the front of that church was the least writable I had ever heard. My dad never had my ear.
1.8 maybe will stop this for now since today
was about ten books each in a different subject
and the pleading thought is i don’t need a record.
giftbuying i'll say, frankincense and pandulce,
cursed with the eye of the poet.
8. One odd yellow Post-It sticks up hauntingly from my shelf, between pages 120 and 121 of Borges’ Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952. In thick black Sharpie, handwriting slanted and sincere, dad wrote:
Back in
5 min.
As much as I’ve racked my brain and re-re-read the works of Borges, I can think of no sensible reason for a person to write this note in this book. I picture him in grad school, long hair and the upright voice of a nearly-completed success story, leaving it as a desperate plea to his future self before reaching for a cigarette. I picture him setting the book down on his regal desk at CU, leaving the note for a student who might come in with a question. But here, uncurling the note between my fingers, I want to think the most reasonable explanation is that he left it as a direct message to me, as a joke or a clue from his lucid self, to be found in my unshaking replica of his hands. Asking me to catch his scent on the staircase, echo his laugh to my new friends.
9. A friend tells me that when their grandmother feels lost and astray in life, or when she finds herself at a hard decision, she flips open her Bible to a random page and uses the first verse she sees as a piece of personal guidance. This act constitutes her direct line to communicating with God, since although He has no voice to speak with, He has at His infinite fingertips the flowing parallel mirror of text. It must feel so lonely to be the word.
10. On the one year anniversary of his death, after another mass in a different church, after the eucharist moon was a field of restricted sense, mom saw dad’s ghost when we got back to the motel. At the Apple Pan we’d talked about his favorite places and college routines, thank you please goodnight, hit the road in an exact figurative silence, and he was standing at her shoulder in the parking lot. “I’ve been invoking him all week,” she gasped in the doorway, clutching a framed photo of him from my Tío Ruben, “and then it happened again at the passenger door and I ran inside.” I was running my forefinger down the length of the rosary that abuelita had pressed into my palm, Google Translate open desperately on my laptop. “Did he seem mad?” “No,” she said immediately, then paused for a moment, as if puzzling one more time through their 10 labyrinthian years of angry phone calls. “Just telling me he was there.” I started journaling again that night.
1.2 the night mom saw your ghost
A. the coast is long and absurd, and a year is a
ridiculous fruit.
B. “just telling me he was there.”
C. i haven’t seen you since they closed the lid
on that enormous nose. even in my dreams i know
it’s not you, not your soul or your energy or
anything.
Most of what I write is lists, because I’m mortified by causes and effects.
11. I deleted every voicemail dad left me after he went back to LA because I couldn’t bear to hear the liquor on his skin. I listened to the first dripping seconds of one, Hhey its your dad, havent heard from y and knew that they had no place beyond the instant of his parents’ living room, no future in his or anyone’s ears. I didn’t want to know anything about his soft and measured grammar. Now the last correspondence I have isn’t his words but a link he texted me in the last September, a video of a David Sylvian live performance. Sylvian sits with guitar, all orange and literary in the shadowy analog footage, the long hair of a former pop sweetheart dangling into his verse.
When you come to me I'll question myself again Is this grip on life still my own? And there you stand Making my life possible Raise my hands up to heaven But only you could know
12. No one tells me how much I look like him anymore. I’m in a new state with new histories of faces. Professors know him as a register for my study, friends know him as a topic I avoid bringing up because it quiets the conversation. I don’t say anything when he appears in a candid photo of me, or when his cadence comes out in a joke. It’s April now, and I’m on a bus going under the Lincoln Tunnel, baguette in my lap and his copy of The Waste Land and Other Poems held tightly in my left hand. The right is tracing one quiet finger across the impermeable verses, searching.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair. Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
This book is completely blank. Nothing is underlined, no brief comments in the margin. Eliot’s words are left a dead and endless form, and they have no hands, and they make no tears fall into the halting screech of Port Authority, hurry up please, hurry up please it's time.