38

the pavement is slick beneath endless sheets of rain
shy stars are grateful for thick clouds and
I am looking out my window
at 11
I miss you

all the schools are closed
the night is happening outside
something in me is in progress, too
I miss you

what is exhumed from all that I remember
sits idly in the worn treads of my mind
crack me open and some ancient happiness is found
I miss you

but which is the you that I miss

[it takes vigilance to not idealize someone beyond recognition
when you are clawing at the falling of your love]

is it the you that Can’t Try for This, the you that is Pretty Different From Me

please show yourself

I miss something in the shape of you
I miss your shape and parts of the you that constitute it
I miss being under you and
I miss being over you
I am far away and next to you
wishing you to fill out within yourself like a rising tide

and now you are under me
and you recede from my surging forward
so that I chase you even when I am with you

so that I am tired
I am so tired

34

you’re gone, your goneness
fills me, even though I don’t understand it

I have consented to a hypothetical understanding, but the understanding won’t come.
my brain twists towards a working interpretation of your goneness,
but the interpretation devolves into surrealism,
and your goneness takes the shape of a non-sequitur,
and I will try again tomorrow, try again the next day
and I will keep trying until the surrealism becomes the understanding

it is three in the morning and there are infrequent sounds issuing from route nine,
the cars like sparse waves crashing and their lights lay quick shadows on my walls,
and the shadows fall onto me and the shadows are with me here and I am lying awake

crafting your permanent memory with a thoroughness I rarely achieve,
your hot pink backpack and your boots on your Physical Body

I wish we were still working at the dining commons together, eating at a dirty round table,
covered in other people’s discarded food and listening to the Pixies blare from the dishroom radio.
I lay awake and watch my brain attempt to trick itself into flawed but comforting
belief systems and modes of thinking
and I wish it would succeed 

I ask myself over and over “if the modes are comforting, then why should I care if they are flawed”
“what is the incentive to privilege logical belief systems over comforting ones,
if logical ones make me miserable”



dan I have a confession, I am a lousy atheist when I remember you

tonight I sat in my car in the rain in downtown Amherst eating pizza at midnight.
I drove around for over an hour.
I played my music at a high volume and I stopped at a red light
and then a street light in front of me turned on. my first thought was “it’s you”

my brain is inventing a grace period for you, a grace period during which the remnants of you are so strong that they are permitted to yield a temporary spirit that can communicate with me,
can watch me cry as i struggle to remember what food we brought on our picnic at the pond last summer. these small details seem so necessary right now and when I finally remember
your bread and fruit I feel enormous relief, like I have fought hard to win back that moment
when you opened your hot pink backpack and said “I have bread and fruit,”
and now that I think of it there was beer too

and now that I think of it we went swimming as the sun sank
and now that I think of it it was cold but we never said so

and now that I reread these letters you wrote to me in the summer of 2010
my eyes grow heavy with a novel exhaustion, and the return address on one letter is
“unnamed dirt road in California” and on another “gas station/domino’s in Wyoming”

and I nod off to your cross-country musings on the best moments of your life
and your admission in one letter that you’re bad at transitions.

can I admit to you now that I am also bad at transitions,
that your return addresses make me laugh

that I’m asleep beneath your letters, remembering your smile
in pond water and on the modest shore,
asleep beneath the quick shadow of you



[this is for my friend dan haley who was hit by a drunk driver two weeks ago. read at the rao's reading on 4-27. no title]

28

26

i have a twitter account


https://twitter.com/#!/h_a_gardiner

24

(from the reading at Rao's in Amherst on 1-27)

greenland

I want to move to Greenland, which is the largest island that isn’t a continent

We can live in the lipstick-red house I saw by the sea in the dream

A psychic in Pittsfield once told me I would travel to Scottland and instinctively know my way around because I lived there in a past life, but I think she must have meant Greenland

She wore many rings which led me to believe she knew what she was doing, and ironically she also told me that my boyfriend, who paid for the reading and was sitting to our left across the cafe, was not my soulmate, and I looked at him looking at me, sipping his coffee and I thought “this lady is an asshole”

The only way to get to Greenland by air is from Iceland or Denmark, or we can charter a ferry from Newfoundland

We can forget all our statistically suburban pain to the fjords, ride the earth to our respective deaths, eat seals for breakfast and be cold but happy in the evening

I had forgotten Greenland existed until fairly recently, when Wikipedia reminded me that it did
and I wondered if Greenland gets jealous for being so big and so unrecognized as a continent

And I wondered if I could feel at home in such a barren place, and then I decided that home can be any pre-felt land

The only way to feel at home anywhere is to leave a place after having spent some time there, learning subconsciously  the way the sunlight lays or doesn’t lay on its most important streets, its least important houses

and then when you return your spatial memory is activated  and you say “ah, good old Greenland” and you really mean it this time, you are home, you are in Greenland

22

I.
i send him flowers in the dream and i go into the woods to pass away,
the winter laying me down to sleep.

i awake from the dream only partially and hallucinate that i am in the middle of a customer service interaction, but my body is paralyzed so my mind experiences extreme anxiety as i struggle to tell my invisible bedside customer “THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO FOR YOU, I CAN’T EVEN LIFT THAT BANANA. OH GOD I’M GOING TO GET FIRED”

II.
i weave pale hands beneath the empty thrill of indirect sunlight,
i take the leaves into my hands and render from them
a memorial for every tree.
a tree is never thoroughly dead.
the leaves come and go but everything else looks and stays the same
provided there is no freak storm or a movie couple carving some freak shit
in the side of the tree.
imagine if humans were never thoroughly dead.
imagine if the bodies of humans remained intact and our hair just fell in and out,
in and out, threading through the follicles “like woah” and “for eternity”

III.
a graveyard could be a place where our feet are cemented into the ground
and we are like sturdy scarecrows forever, our hair collecting in piles across the land,
blowing across the street.
we could choose to donate our bodies to farmers to cut down on scarecrow costs.
people would come to mistake our hair blowing across the road for something else,
as they do with leaves.

for instance i often think a leaf blowing across the road is a large spider or small animal.

more importantly, people would come to see the piles of hair as beautiful, as indicative of something great and heavy with meaning.
they would rake the clumps of hair into ambitious piles and encourage children to play among the piles.
they would take pictures of children playing in the piles of hair,
and then their children would show their children and say “i too was once young”

IV.
i drive home from work and eat chocolate covered pretzels,
my thoughts heavy with delicious and
i am addicted to this reflex.
it is almost impossible to have a meaningful interaction at work because my being is so thoroughly steeped in

screaming children / repetitive tasks / every type of chef and non-chef shithead you can imagine,

that it is hard to shed the customer service skin in a timely manner.
for instance i said to a man “how are you” and then immediately after i said “good thanks” before he even said anything, answering my own question and feeling uniquely horrified. it is like that moment in every movie where the protagonist catches himself saying or doing something that is diametrically opposed to some value/idea of self, and he goes “OH GOD not this, what have i become, i am becoming {my emotionally distant capitalist dad, etc.}”

not that i am subverting some value or idea of self {always in flux}, but i am being compensated for pouring my mind into the mind-mold of the highly efficient and therefore not entirely present customer service rep, whilst becoming immune to comments about my name and how it’s spelled and how it’s the name of a famous politician lady and did i know that.

K comes through my line with wet hair, with an eight dollar bar of chocolate.
i know he doesn’t like chocolate and i know that the chocolate is for me.
i slide it across the counter to him anyway and then he slides it back, smiles
and leaves my place of work

V.
when i was a kid there was a game where we would close our eyes and imagine we wandered through a large house, encountering religious imagery and creepy things on the way
and the point was that the scenery would actually begin to unfold vividly behind your eyes.
my mother thought this was witchcraft but we were just entertaining ourselves
with elaborate phosphenes on the porch