And moving forward in time a little bit,
a poem from Palladium.
This is a poem about adolescence, a time of life
I've written about quite often.
I'm drawn to it I think because it was such a painful time,
and I think it often is a time of change
and a difficult time to go through,
which makes it interesting.
Things that are very terrible or very wonderful
stand out so in memory that I think
we tend to write about them.
And there's a persona in this poem, very strange kind
of a person actually.
You'll see.
Fugitive.
Stars, though famous by definition,
are anonymous in spirit.
Unlike boys, the star did not demand
a certain level of response.
She could flip through rows of him without feeling blunt.
She imagined that he imagined her
and that was how she could exist.
Like a captive crisscrossed from room to room across a nation,
she had trouble telling one place from another.
For instance, she believed the same class
had been going on for years throughout her school.
Priests were mixed messages.
Their words formed a gray frost on her face like breath
on a windshield.
You haven't a chance, they seem to say, so take it.
In their black casks, most of the sisters
listened like women who had been killed several times,
nuns she thought.
In class she wished up gardens off the straight
and narrow toward water events, stone holes
spouting, cherry trees that drew things to them
and disposed of them, a mildly active perfection,
hundreds of goldfish flitting like polished nails in ponds.
Her mossy house with walls of water, so risky no one
would stay for long.
The days were held breaths let out with irritation
when she got home, as if someone there had
clamped a hand over her mouth.
At night she clipped articles about the star and read.
Books understood her.
She read how you could lose a limb
and still feel it reaching, but her experience
was, as ever, opposite.
You could keep a body and feel you'd lost it.
She had long nails and always did everything with them,
but to play the star's songs on guitar
she had to clip the white tips.
The strings left pink incisions backed by fugitive stings,
surprising after years of not touching.
She began to dream the auditory dreams of the blind,
to read in the dark and with her hands like them.