After work I met Alexa because we were trying out the idea that we could be just friends. Together we walked to Barnes & Noble where they were having an event for Dan Dashiell, author of a celebrated sad novel about a dying husband who spends the last month of his life teaching his wife how to cook the family’s favorite meals. Every chapter is a different dish and life lesson. Alexa knew Dan from the internet and I think they read together once, before he became a successful young novelist. Also I believe he was at one point fucking Yvonne. After a store employee introduced him he read an excerpt from the book, an early chapter dealing with regret and spinach lasagna. Afterwards people lined up and Dan sat and signed books for them. I went to look at magazines while Alexa hovered around waiting to say hi.
Upstairs I found a couple of literary journals I’d recently been rejected from and read their lists of contributors. In one I only recognized a few bigger-deal poets but the second had like ten people I know, including a popular new Irish poet who had recently read at K Bar. I remember a bunch of highly-emotional poems involving a lot of muck and root vegetables. I flipped to his page and read the fragment “plough nigh / upon aching furrow” and closed the magazine and put it back in the wrong place and tried to leave my body for five heartbeats.
Alexa and Dan were chatting when I got back downstairs. Dan and I shook hands and he kind of leaned in and half-patted, half-hugged my shoulder even though I couldn’t remember us ever being friends. I told him congrats on the book.
“And how’s your writing life going?” he asked me. I told him I was chipping away. He sighed in a way that I think was meant to convey affinity or professional understanding and then steered the conversation to his book tour, so for a while we all compared notes on the people he’d met along the way. Alexa told a good anecdote about the organizer of a longstanding Seattle reading series involving a Top Gun-themed party and a bag of angel dust. I tried to think of quotes from Top Gun while Dan listened intently and laughed. Eventually a bookstore lady stepped in and started to kind of politely corral Dan towards the back of the store.
“Let me know whenever you have a reading,” Dan said to Alexa. “I really want to hear your new stuff.” Alexa made a mock-shy, flirtatious expression. “You too,” Dan added, swiveling part-way towards me as he was swept away by the bookstore lady. “Love all that stuff you do. So great. So great.”
I had three good poems and maybe two hundred starts of things, dumb ideas, abandoned drafts. God keep me from ever completing anything says Moby Dick but I’m pretty sure that’s meant to cover stuff that’s already pretty much finished. E.g. Moby Dick is like six hundred pages, not five lines and a working title.
At home after the platonic bookstore outing I opened a file where I’d started collecting physical descriptions from profiles of dead writers: Ted Hughes has a huge face; Simone de Beauvoir is clear-eyed and rosy-complected; Borges’ features are vague, as if partially erased. Adrian was online and I messaged him to say I was considering rebranding from poet to “text-based artist.” “Ok,” said Adrian and I waited for him to write more but he didn’t. I added some line breaks to the dead writers document then clicked away and read a NY Times article about a recent outbreak of violence in Central Africa. The phrase “crucible of war” popped into my head, somewhat melodramatically, I felt. I searched online for “crucible of war” but couldn’t find a satisfying answer for why the phrase seemed so ancient and indestructible. I cycled back to see if Adrian had written anything then scanned through my chat contacts where recently people I didn’t know had started appearing, maybe via a technical glitch or some runaway algorithm. I recognized the name of a successful early-career artist and briefly considered messaging her about her recent show in which everything had been extremely black. Instead I opened a new document on my laptop and wrote “The worst thing about being the darkness must be knowing there’s no darkness coming,” which, for the time being, seemed good and sad and true. I stared at the page and wrote “Black” then deleted it and wrote “Black” again, then closed Word completely. On my laptop I put on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which there’s a C plot involving Riker falling asleep at Data’s poetry reading. Midway through the episode Data asks Geordi for feedback on his poems and Geordi, whose first impulse is to spare the android’s non-existent feelings, ends up advising Data to focus more on what he wants to say with his art, and less on how he says it, which struck me as good advice for an android and very bad advice for everyone else.
I put on the end of a Knicks game and idly scrolled through old pictures while drinking a poly-vegetable juice for I guess dinner. My phone ran out of battery just as the Knicks surrendered and emptied their bench. Mourning doves strafed each other outside in the darkening space between buildings. I sat very still and, while everything grew deep blue and gelatinous, thought about an iron plough tearing through the deep black earth.