Some Say

…Ice entombing my truck.

This is me, eleven o’clock in the morning, dressed for the gym, slamming my elbows into the sheet that covers the door. Hearing the crack and seeing it spread and thinking: Jesusgod, that was the fucking window…

But no, just the ice.

Chipping at it with my keys. Beating at it with cold hands.

On the road, the great sheet of ice that covers the hood lifts and hovers, becoming second and distorted glass through which I must try to see, and then it shatters. I yelp, half duck. The pieces fragment against my windshield.

Some say the world will end in fire.

This little false emergency.

Nobody on the roads. Nothing to wreck into.

Ask my son what is water and he will tell you: it is warm ice.

…And Bally’s, it’s closed, the bastards, and I scrawl a note on a piece of paper: If I could make it here so could you.

And I chew gum and spit it on the paper and with that glue stick the paper to the door.

My DNA, but no real crime.

…And I remember that a girl I know some months ago gave me an extra hotel key card because with that key card one can gain entrance as a Sub Lodge guest to the Gold’s Gym.

Which is open.
So I steal their services.
They’ve stolen enough from me.

…Full on work out, back to what I used to do, trying to get back to what I used to be.
Three other people in the gym.
We look at each other: the obsessed, or the simple, or the undaunted.

Those who don’t know better.

Thinking, This ice storm not all that it’s cracked up to be. Is it?

…L Cohen writes:
An Eskimo showed me a movie,
He’d recently taken of you,
The poor man could hardly stop shivering,
His lips and his fingers were blue.
I guess that he froze,
When the wind took your clothes
And now, he’ll just never get warm,
But you stand there so nice,
In your blizzard of ice
Oh, please let me into the storm.

…XXXXS I XXXX

And somewhere in the NE, K, she tells me her husband has had her followed, men with cameras, not just locally, but on her travels, cities in other states, evidence of secrets that are not so secret, the pain and relief with which we [not she and I, there is no she and i] are really found out; and KH, she wants me to meditate with her, she’s always trying to heal me, and her motives are pure, not one of those people that fixes you so that they can own you; and FJ, she says she’ll not marry again: she has her own house; her own career; good friends; when she wants sex, she knows where to get it—for what does she need a husband? and C, the internet porn girl, she moved to California where she thinks she belongs; and J, she comes home from California, another home for her, that divided heart; and AP, I don’t know her since she left California, but she sends me cryptic messages “where are you” as if I’m the one who moved; and JA, she says she’s suicidal but not really—there’s a sort of glee in this conversation and by the end a sort of ease, and all these conversations, they’re about love and lesser desires; and M, she offers up a funny story about a visit to the gynecologist, that mask of comedy, and like FJ, she says she’ll never marry again, that she’s learned from her own marriage and from mine and all the marriages she’s known, from Brad and Jennifer and Tom and Nicole, that it doesn’t work; and in my office yesterday I open not entirely innocently a video from a far away friend, this twelve second biting bite, something to send me in a blushed smile through the halls; and KU, she says she keeps busy enough not to think about it, a certain kind of end, and busy enough not to think to much about beginnings, how necessary they will become, this dead space in which she knows better and knows worse; and MT, she’s wearing underwear or not but you’re thinking about it either way; and D, she’s wearing boots like mood rings; and H, she’s hearing incredible things from a child, and noting that it’s all incredible, what we hear from children; and halfway around the world, A, she writes me to tell me that her mother needs to leave her father so that he knows what it is like, and then it will work out, that strategy the only flaw of which is that for a woman to make a man believe she is really gone, she really goes; and in Montreal, M is busy, these work until five in the morning undays, but sends kisses; and these are the girls I believe I know in some small ways, with which I have some small conversations.

And I realize there are no brother’s in arms. That I belong to no fraternal order.

But then I remember a recent conversation with my high school friend, B, that surface thing we call keeping in touch and do from time to time, how we say we ought to get together this year, I should meet his wife, he should meet some girl that’s willing to drag around with me, and blaa blaa and woof woof…

And then, after we say goodbye, his voice comes loudly, before I can click the phone dead: Hey, he says.

Yeah?

We should really do it this year, we should really find a way to get together.

And he means it.
I know that because I know it is hard for him to say.

…And here, in Kennesaw Georgia in the Greenhouse Patio apartment complex, icicles hang from my window and people call me on the phone and tell me that I must know what to do in this kind of weather, having grown up in the West, having know the mountains of Colorado, the rez of Montana, and I tell them: No, this is new to me.

The places I’m from, it snows. It doesn’t rain and freeze.

It’s pretty here, whatever it is, not a winterwonderland.
This place muted by cold.
Everything so still you might not be aging.

The pine needles in the twelve yard stretch of forest on the other side of my window, the lie in a sheet of ice, looking brittle, the ice and the needles.

I’d hate to see someone walking there.