L.B.

I went down to St. James Infirmary,
Saw my baby there.
She was stretched out on a long white table, so sweet, so cold, so bare.

Let her go, let her go, God bless her.
Wherever she may be,
She can search this whole wide world over,
She ain't never gonna find another man like me.

When I die, I want you to dress me in straight-laced shoes
Box-back coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty- dollar gold piece on my watch chain,
So the boys will know that I died standin' pat.

Sometimes my breath disappears.

Dear Allon,

Why does it seem that separation haunts me?

Cigarettes are so often just little sticks of solitude that I smoke on the side porch in the wee hours of the morning, sitting, shivering before the light that floats above the entrance to the Annex.

(There are people I know who have eyes just as harsh and just as comforting as that light, but I can never hold onto them for long enough.)

I used to write to a make-believe boy named Jack. Then, over time, over adolescence, he disappeared.

Marvin Frankel is having me write a piece on why The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter resonates so deeply within me. I don't know where to begin. It's grown into such a vital organ, into such an attached entity that beats and charges and jumps in its lately claimed home that my body can't begin to recognize any surrounding without it. It's as though the book gave me a new set of vocabulary through which I am now able to better understand and articulate a feeling I had been having and needing to express for such a long time beforehand.

(Maybe we can come to know each other, Allon. Right now, I would like nothing better than that.)

I went through a period of time during which I would begin a new journal every few days, abandoning or ripping out pages from the old one. I was so frustrated and so desperate for a clean slate that it became something of an addiction. I purged my notebooks like an anorexic purges her body. I hated the disdain and the restlessness that I harbored. (How could I have created a place of peace when it felt like everything was jolting and lunging and shaking. It felt impossible to steady my hands, my pen.)

I left you "The Sunflowers." The first book of poetry I ever read straight through like a story and in its entirety was a collection by Mary Oliver. A very wise and wonderful woman gave it to me when I was thirteen. I read it religiously. ("You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on. / Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, / over the prairies and the deep trees, / the mountains and the rivers. / Meanwhile the wild gees, high in the clean blue air, / are leading home again. / whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things."

Or, "Last night / in the fields / I lay down in the darkness / to think about death, / but instead I fell asleep, / as if in a vast and sloping room / filled with those white flowers / that open all summer, / sticky and untidy, / in the warm fields. / When I woke / the morning light was just slipping / in front of the stars, / and I was covered / with blossoms. / I don't know / how it happened-- / I don't know / if my body when diving down / under the sugary vines / in some sleep-sharpened affinity / with the depths, or whether / that green energy / rose like a wave / and curled over me, claiming me / in its husky arms. / I pushed them away, but I didn't rise. / never in my life had I felt so plush, / or so slippery, / or so resplendently empty. / Never in my life / had I felt myself so near / that porous line /where my own body was done with / and the roots and the stems and the flowers / began.")

I haven't read her in a long time.

I remember a time I went walking with the woman who gave me her book. It was early fall in Maryland. It was my first time visiting since having moved to the city. The flatness brought back nostalgia. So did the darkness at night--that there are no nearby lights to keep the sky always slightly glowing. It was quiet, and Naomi shuffled her feet through the dead leafs, telling me there will always be times she returns to childhood, telling me she wishes me lovers that love me, telling me she has books to give me, telling me things I'd have thought she'd only share with another adult.

I haven't talked to her in a long time.

Once I was walking with a kid named Will Bruce. I didn't know whether or not we were on a date, but I liked him. We were just leaving a lovely used bookstore named "Wow! Used Books!" when he asked me, "So, Lexi Bell, what's your story?" And he later revealed that he was surprised when I answered seriously, telling him a very abridged version of something like my life story.

I'm not sure what made me think of that one. This has taken me to a strange route.

I'm sorry; I've lost my stamina. Maybe I will add to this letter later.

Always,
Lexi

P.S. How are you? Where are you?

"In a few minutes something emerged from the tree line, a black heavy shadow that tossed its head several times and then bounded forward. After a second she saw it was the bull. He was crossing the pasture toward her at a slow gallop, a gay almost rocking gait as if he were overjoyed to find her again. She looked beyond him to see if Mr. Greenleaf was coming out of the woods too but he was not. "Here he is, Mr. Greenleaf!" she called and looked on the other side of the pasture to see if he could be coming out there but he was not in sight. She looked back and saw that the bull, his head lowered, was racing toward her. She remained perfectly still, not in fright, but in a freezing unbelief. She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip. She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.

Mr. Greenleaf was running toward her from the side with his gun raised and she saw him coming though she was not looking in his direction. She saw him approaching on the outside of some invisible circle, the tree line gaping behind him and nothing under his feet. He shot the bull four times through the eye. She did not hear the shots but she felt the quake in the huge body as it sank, pulling her forward on its head, so that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear."

fathom
sleeves
candle
blogging
sweet
frailty
phlegm
matrix
grotesque
expression
laughter
clouds
pot
belly
gym
raw
nose
chocolate
nap
i
made
that
one
up
rocking
content