It Happened I Had No Coffee

It happened I had no coffee
And I had already fallen back asleep once
But I put on my shoes and went to catch my bus.
I was the last passenger before we went express
And I in a window seat felt the sun
At eye level across the lake
Its prod and soothing palpation,
I fell asleep and had a dream.

        I was on the street, surrounded by smells
        And increasing numbers of Joni Mitchell
        Suspiciously tan, inexplicably scatting.

                “Why say you’ll join me in the fields?
                Tonight I am with my oar, alone, and can do everything
                Yet waver, not willing to return.
                I am involved in rose clouds of the sunset. I always say:
                The way you spend your time is the way you spend your time”

Edit out all the parts where I’m on my phone or talking about my job
And it sounds so nice, to laze on the river, even with wet socks
And I guess I’ve lost my way.
Even shepherd boys know the Tao, but
I fear I will lose this refuge forever
So at daybreak remind me to fix it in my mind.
So many fish long for bait and I wanted to be hot this summer,
The way gruel in the orphanage is.
The way smells in the brainpan are as placeless as possible.
I have been pooling myself into the flood —
Do you live in that way, with jaunty organ?

        Lifestyle smell molecules crawling up noses and throats.
        On one side was the present and scars
        On the other, names and commands.
        I had a knife, a goat, a mountain, a son.
        I have many relations. I have killed a boar.
        I’m the man on the street whom Jay Leno humiliates.
        Out of the bus a ramp unfolds naturalized bullshit views and
        I am unable to abandon habits of that life
        And I am sometimes recognized by people of this world.
        My name and pen speak my former being
        But about all this my heart is ignorant.
        I’ve found no good way to live
        And I brood about getting lost in my old forests.
        I’m sorry you travelled the stone path for nothing
        Bearing objects incomprehensible to people ten years ago
        Bearing objects incomprehensible to people ten years hence.

Just when you think things can’t get any stupider
The sewer smells quarrelled and rose
Though I’ve spared you both sides of the argument.
The Loop is a coffin, empty as hell.
Congregate cops accost both nostrils and demand of you:
Whom would you like to impress?
When you are on the beach
You can’t negotiate as well
Nor access all the things you saved
And stored to never look at again.
Colors leap into clarity, staining sadness,
Nowhere for mist to dwell.
Sun stuck in moss, as talk on the mountain
Floats into the human world.
No one knows when I will see my friend again.

        A party insists in the night that
        It costs money to pass the time,
        A steady crunch of assessment appeals
        Mostly held by insiders and index funds
        And the train overhead
        And overhead moisture of dubious origin.
        No complaint in my face:
        I will bevel my nose.
        I hate my job and also
        No longer have a job.
        The wind does not ache with departure;
        Who else will live here after me?
        But now I am aimlessly grieving like how rain dawdles in mist.
        My heart is beyond the clouds.
        We are living lazily as the medians blossom.
        You know, I turned down a great post.
        I was too unpracticed in silence, rigor, and doing.
        I only have the one life to despair with.
        We are unfortunately beyond the symbolic

You can see that you can’t help the people you see.
It is everyone’s horror: It’s safest to waft,
that’s always an option.
I had no idea you were so knowledgeable and superstitious
Command and control acting almost organic
Nobody wants the way things must be
With banks building streets
And Ceres enthroned.
The mayor should smell what Icarus smelled, and indeed
There’s piss in the pedway, as always shall be.
It takes so long to be pregnant, we both are on islands.
I ask that you open your chest, fold your clothes,
Shape sentences in unfolded books,
Sometimes chant,
Ask hermits to visit.
I plod. How hard to find what dereliction discovers hour by hour.
When geese come back, I will too.
Sadly 100 new worries assail me.

                No need to lodge in the bright world
                Always fearing punishment for going against the time.

        You once talked of living beyond mere dust.
        How the year barrels like a solemn Mercedes,
        A daybreak in the void.
        Don’t blame the official who won’t fade away:
        All creatures are resting.
        Likewise be lazy and in the dark about human affairs
        You can gather things smaller than you.
        Tao is hard to reach. Act alone.
        I’m ashamed about my work and in the way
        I abhor what they did. I denounce harm.
        I am so sick with incompetence
        My melancholy reaches far beyond the inlet.
        My melancholy is clothed in blue shirts and khakis and gray vests,
        It moves from the trains from Union Station and
        Moves towards the lake dropping
        A different secret in every ear and dumpster
        And hatred of the weak and inadequate.
        I just want to ask: I can’t tell if you’re OK.
        You know that’s not real theology and
        This morning my own life is nothing.
        The dead city intensifies our grief
        But only I can know this.

No one texts me all day.
Our time together is not a few lost days,
Unbearably finite,
As Steph Curry gets to the rim
With an overhead finish.
Will we meet again? In these people I see strange customs.
Before me is vagueness. What am I doing?
With each empty day I am older.
It’s definitely stupid but it explains the cosmos.
It makes me angry that you object.
Did your reverence do much good?
Often our talent blinds us.
We can look at each other with the good part of the eye
Because we share a cranberry bog in our hearts.
I drag my body to work in the bar, I hand in the documents
I wrote out for the Son of Heaven.
I’m not going anywhere, I’m just sweaty.
I don’t care. Could you just answer me?
I knew at that moment I said the right thing.

                I awoke in my bed, again, late for work.


***


My Friend Had to Bail on a Performance We’d Planned to See Together, So I Sat In the Audience Alone and Found Myself Surrounded by Overlapping Conversations Which I Wrote Down to Share with Her Later

Remember those women we ran into in the hotel in Grand Rapids? This huge hotel,
and there were thousands of women and they would just break into song,
and when they finished another one would jump in.
It was a jamboree, yeah.
I don’t remember my parents ever dancing, not even once.
They ate porridge and dried meat and sucked the juice of green corn.
That’s why you don’t hear that name that often anymore, Martha.
The men ate their bowstrings, lacking strength to draw the bow.
I wanted to contact you years ago, my advisor said I should, but I wound up not
doing that,
now I’m a medical secretary. It means I send out faxes and e-mail doctors.
Anyway I don’t have much to talk about, I just want you to know that I’m excited to
see you.
Your name is Chris because that’s what happened. I just read your book,
I really liked the ending, I felt a distinct lack in my vocabulary.
That’s the aunt you were telling me about,
did you go into the district and hang out?
It’s a little bit odd in my opinion.
I have a picture of the Lincoln memorial when it was built.
It’s just a seat in the swamp, in the middle of nowhere. And his version is just so
tame.
They should have left it that way.
There was a cast-iron colonnade,
you had to drive down a dirt path to get to the cleared area
and there are the pillars.
And it’s older than Washington, it’s really early and it’s all there.
And the food is phenomenal, and there’s a cast-iron library, my god,
google it and see what the images are there.
I’m too embarrassed about...
I don’t actually remember.
I took the doors out and it makes a cool niche,
and the wall of books will disappear, and we’ll have the room we never had.



Author's note: a substantial amount of "It Happened I Had No Coffee" is either direct quotation or paraphrase of Wang Wei translations by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, and Xu Haixin.