Brand New Spacesuit

THE NEW FORMALITY

You approach the world from a great distance. "If I should

love you more, you are to say, then I shall love you more."

Such things are elemental, like how the failures of a country

are to be repeated, because there’s a center to things.

Approach the backyard as if the backyard were a sudden

appearance. Approach the car as if you were one half

of a medallion broken in antiquity by a mystical king

to stop some great, evil power, and you’re forever now in search

of your missing twin. "A car should never have this power

over one, you are to say, then I shall love it more." The road

is a kicked up veil of fallen leaves, and this incantation

you’re in, where you’re driving, and your thoughts unspool

beneath you. There are these two ideas, that one grows

through nurture and that one grows through strife.

They’re in identical boxes on a shelf in your garage.

Say you’re thinking, "There are no things here but in the ideas

of things," wanting to bring back the 20th century

from a hole in the yard. You’re a king of things. "Bring back

that time when my child was six," you ask the road

ahead of you, driveway after driveway. For love,

there are things you must say. The stripe in the road glistens.

It rises in front of you, floating in perfect orange, the best orange

you’ve ever seen, an orange that says, "You’ll never see

orange this orange again. This will be the definition of orange

that will continually rise before you and behind you

down the road. Unbroken." I will love you more.

AND THE MOON ON ITS STEM WILL STEAL YOU AWAY

That’s a good one, the idea of the moon having a stem and somehow

stealing you, whoever you are, kind of like Persephone or Orpheus,

portrayed or alluded to in countless forms of art and popular culture

including poetry, film, opera, music, and painting. And it kind of fits

my mood this morning, something vaguely cartoonish and devoid

of real gravitas, but still, a kind of realism, even so. And the area

around is the void, outer space, nothing, because explaining things

is never as interesting as wanting them, the desire to know, set against

a backdrop of black velvet and rhinestones. Let’s say that you wake up

one day and realize you don’t remember anything that happened

yesterday. Maybe for five minutes or so. And for those five minutes

you’re thinking, as I was thinking this morning, that this is it. Car keys.

The word for when you really want something and work for it.

Your dog’s name. There are not enough blank pages for all this

forgetting, like debris falling back to earth, you and yours hiding

in the underbrush with hopes of your own, of rescue or escape.

When you don’t remember why you’re hiding in the underbrush,

you’ve been hiding in the underbrush forever. This whole other

existence leaps forward in possibility. And then the five minutes

are up, and it’s oh yeah, eggs, Saturday. Some day that was.

A chemist once told me luminol was her favorite color. It glows

a beautiful greenish-blue when it comes into contact with blood

by reacting to the iron in hemoglobin, looking a bit like the sky

this morning. It’s a kind of truth of blue, that uncovers, that

remembers. It’s used by investigators to detect blood at crime scenes

where no blood is visible. That’s what I need, the beautiful blue

morning of remembering, as there are so many things to forget,

to lose, and in so many different ways. But even so, one can be wrong

about the past, and deduce from error, but still be right about

the future or the present. And when you don’t remember what day

it is, happy birthday. Despite all our best efforts, there’s a wolf

on the horizon making a movie of your approach, and it’s

a shipwreck playing across me as I’m pouring sugar into my cup.

PLUTO ELEGY

I have also lost much. I’m your summer boy, I would have said.

I believe in a lot of things, I would have said. The movie of my life,

for instance. The one we always talk about, the one with Kevin Bacon

and Audrey Hepburn playing the guardians of Hell. We proposed it

as Elegy for the Next President, and the blink comparator slides

came back with forms of building something within which we can place

ourselves. Everything’s always new in this way. The writer of Ecclesiastes

proved it with a camel and a cigarette. We were thinking of Canada

again, and people on balconies doing cocaine. It was their summer

movie. They could see the orbit of Uranus pulled in several directions,

from priests to killers, to all the slivers of soap I should have saved

and maybe carved into a sculpture of a Glock 19 and then covered

in black shoe polish to help in my daring escape. This palace we all want

to step from. The clouds are soft and the stars reach out to be held.

But don’t we all. It’s just another climbing wall where what goes on there

can’t hear you, going from a god to Mickey Mouse’s dog, which seems

small candles now, just a little joke on the fate of gods. You’ve got

to keep the faith, friend. Say the dog is the dog, the new dog, and the dog

is a footrest. Say the dog is three ships whose argument of perihelion

liberates around 90 degrees. We’ll let it slide into the white translucent

Yankee style we picture ourselves tracing that makes us feel better

for where we’ve been and what we’ve done. We’ll say the dog falls

from moon to moon covered in summer. It’s our summer dog. Maybe

that’s what we were talking about anyway with each other in that crowded

bar when we couldn’t hear ourselves. A: Would you like a drink? B:

Think about what? And so on, with the bouncers working the door,

long bored with weather and vomit, tugging away at the frayed end

of the 20th century. And then everything is red ropes. Like Pluto,

just some ghost you walk through unaware, a cold patch. And you’ve

no explanation why you feel so happy, free once again to mingle,

suddenly the largest thing you don’t need, that you’ll never need.

WHY DESSERT IS MORE MEMORABLE THAN DINNER

At what age is it when we realize we know much about diminished

things? I want it to be a real age. A real answer. And I don’t want it

to be diminished things, either. I want a list. I don’t want it to be

different for everyone. As the news makes a meaning, the landscape

makes a meaning, this moment, and this life, all the thises there are,

a unity of experience that forms a layer of solace over the truth

of diminished things, is a way to say I’ve passed through the veil.

But it keeps not happening. It’s veils all the way down. "Just

remember, Duckies, the ineffable says, everybody gets in rows."

And that’s supposed to be a version of an answer, saying we

have this common experience, misery’s company, but for most of us

it’s just company, a world of company, where I/we want more stories

of going to the supermarket, buying something, then going home

unmolested. Stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, where nothing

inevitable happens, nothing irrevocable. I want to call it "hope

for the future," a glorious hopefulness of orthodontist appointments,

soccer practice (4:15–5:30 Tuesdays and Thursdays), the promises

solid things bring. And I want color, bright, impossible color.

Jolly Rancher Green, Jolly Rancher Red, because color is happiness.

It’s first day, steeping in it, knowing it, the first one to open

the package, the brand new smell of getting to the future a bit ahead

of everyone else, because when else is it, that any of us is at our most

something. I spend a lot of time asking that. I’d sit with each one of you

and ask, and have follow-up questions. I’m sure I’d have follow-up

questions, as for each glorious hopefulness contender, each best,

happiest, there’s some fundamental thing that hasn’t figured in yet,

or has figured in differently than we thought, where we miscounted

the monthly car sales or the milk order, all of which goes into the mix

of phrases like "I didn’t know it then, but that was the best time

in my life." So if you were back there again, you’d need to bring

all the rest of your life with you, and if you did that, you’d drown,

or it would seem bland, unremarkable. And I’d hate to see

that happen to the most hopeful time in my life, when we

were at our best, standing in the full sun on the back porch.

STEP FIVE Is TO MAKE YOUR OWN HAPPY LIST

And then there are those days (Look! The sun still rises!)

where you have this feeling you want to love something,

or you want to say or do something positive, but you can’t think

of anything, so that the moment is lost in this search

for the what. The spirit is willing but the subject has failed

to show up. There’s this go fish quality to wandering,

but only if one is in the open mood, where whatever one

happens upon next is OK. There are many ways to make sense.

This morning, I’m remembering fondly the days browsing

card catalogues, as I imagine the landfills they now inhabit,

because browsing’s a kind of happiness, finding out new things,

purposeful stumbling. How many books are there with Elvis

in the title? 740,934 in our database. The solidity

of the card catalogue, oh happy furniture, proof of our need

for proof. To cultivate happiness, one must remember six things

while browsing, I’ve read. And I’m sure it’s going to be

the sort of thing you can print off or clip out, maybe crochet

into inspirational framed art for the refrigerator and send

to the randomness