The plants are growing. Playing cards flutter from city park chess tables to my walk routes home. Seven of clubs. Nine of hearts. Queen of spades. Classes start soon. Autumn arrived about ten days into August and even if another heat-week struck, it wouldn’t change the state of things. You see, the light has changed, and that’s the true indicator of the equinox.

After dinner [spinach, chicken, brown rice, potato curry dumplings, Dominican beer, and a pot of garlic & lime tea] Chanelle and I strolled to the bodega for toilet paper. It was late. Upon entering, we faced a circle of men at the counter, fighting. We retreated and waited outside. The yelling quickened, grew louder, and we could see the shapes of their bodies through products in the windows, moving towards each other in battle. All at once, the sound died and truces were exchanged. We made our way back in. The men were dispersing and shaking hands. We set the toilet paper on the counter, and one of the owners leaned toward us and said, “That guy tried to steal something. We had to deal with it. It happens; you know how this neighborhood is–” and if he meant that I know how people in this neighborhood spar and then get over things, like the way it storms here, then yes, I know. But if he was trying to soothe me, a white girl he doesn’t know, and “you know” was more of a “you know the stigma of this place,” then, no, I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Sweeney and I have been waking up early and eating breakfast specials at our local diners. There are puddle near the sinks in our apartment, and we kiss and slip and do our work. We’re finding that it can feel alienating sometimes, to live around each other so wholly, and experience the parts of our lives that don’t overlap. We’re reading Moby Dick together. No one ever tells you when talking about that book, that the first part is all about men hooking their legs around each other in bed and getting married.

Robi arrived home from his soujourn across the country last Wednesday at dawn. He’d been gone for two months, and knocked loudly on the door. We smelled him and hugged and he looked around at us, me, Sweeney, Chris, Chanel, and said, “Wow; this is house is in high spirits.” He looked around and saw how we’d been living. He said, “Adrian, I wish you would stay.” The sun, just barely risen, filled the cellar apartment. Chris suggested breakfast, since we were up.

Later that night we drove to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and sailed around for a couple of days, spending a night in Philadelphia where Robi’s parents live.

Don’t forget about the newly-pressed Correspondence No. 1 ($8), available from this place, and also from this one: thecorrespondingsociety.blogspot.com.

And just a reminder; we are accepting submissions until October 1st. Send work to thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com as .rtf or .doc files, and be sure to indicate “Submission” in the subject.

I remember Cindy Maize explaining, in a measured tone, why she would gladly die for her children. I was seven, and spent most weekday afternoons in the back of her baby blue Ford Taurus, running errands and playing Miss-Susy-Had-a-Tugboat with my friend, falling asleep in the sun. I remember her parking in their driveway, and getting out of the car and the three of us being halfway into a conversation about parents taking bullets for their children. And Cindy, walking ahead of us, jingling her keys, said, “I just would. It’s something you don’t think about, really.” I pictured all grown-ups as battle shields. “Would my mom?” I asked. “Of course,” she said.

Who takes bullets for whom? I was thinking about this today. Chanelle and I started a garden in our patio, and things are growing by the hour: squash, spinach, lettuce, peppers, morning glories, strawflowers and onions, spilling out of three clawfoot bathtub planters. These are like babies, but it is not the same.

There’s an Olympic-sized pool, abandoned and sea-green paint peeling, in McCarren Park that people have been using for concerts and outdoor picnic movies all summer long. We saw a new production of Hamlet called Twelve Ophelias, which took place somewhere in Appalachia instead, and used the darkness of the night and four spotlights for all the world’s mood. What with that buttery summer wind and the jug band battling-banjo accompaniment. Ophelia called Hamlet, The Rude Boy. “That rude boy done me wrong.”  They mixed Southern drawl with Elizabethan sentence structure.

We’ve had many guests, in and out, big family dinners, long work days; we let the cats outside as they please, these days; Robert and I worked on our play for twelve hours; Sweeney has almost finished teaching himself both Latin and French. We went out on the Hudson, cloaked in thick, green hills. Went to the house where his mother was a raised; an old inn under a red freight bridge. We jumped from the back of his uncle’s boat. If I stayed perfectly still, and looked away for only a second, the current had taken me fifty feet from the plank, almighty: at dawn this morning, after a cautionary tarot spread that gave me an inverted Ten of Staves, Chanelle and I debated whether or not it’s OK to “float away from the boat” sometimes, and of course it is. The lesson lies in learning that you can, and taking heed accordingly.

You can choose, I suppose, to swim back to the boat, but there are a thousand other forces at work. With one choice, a thousand other seeds germinate on the back of your neck, and they grow with or without your watering can.

During Poem Shop, we’ve had people teach us mamba, yoga, how to make Spätzle.  We watched a hawk land on an elm in Central Park, and eat a rodent. We stopped a crevice-faced middle-aged musician and pointed to the bird: Edie Bobe. He ended up giving us salsa lessons. Talked about a radio play he did with Debbie Harry once. And we wrote poems for adopted daughters and helpful mothers and trips to Egypt: the trick, is to just go.

My stepfather’s mother recently passed; the trick, is to just go. And seal your departure with five children, reconciled. They were all together for the first time in thirty years; maybe sat on overstuffed chairs covered in dog hair, drank coffee, and remembered how many bullets they took for each other, almighty: who did Ophelia take bullets for?   

We went to an opening party at the MoMa for Erich Kirchner; a German art nouveau.  Lots of high-kicks and prostitutes and people hiding their faces in the background. Sweeney and I went to Block Island to hunt for ghosts and myths, and all we found were quiet roads and secret beaches on rented bicycles. I felt defensive and squashed the first day.  We hugged in the Great Salt Pond and stayed in an old house. Got a beer at the Beachhead Grill, and as per request, Sweeney swatted my forehead as Defenso the Clown began to rise in my throat. Then, Defenso was gone. We dodged jellyfish in the tide and thought, well, let’s go home. Boarded the ferry and steamed through a storm: we stood facing West in the rain on the bow, alone.

I talked to my Aunt, a former island citizen, upon our return. She said, “Next time tell me when you’re going. I would’ve told you to get a cocktail at the Beachhead.” I smiled, told her we had. Told her the island’s first name was Adrian’s Island, and she said, “I know.”

Then she said, “So Sweeney’s your manfriend?”

Oh. Sweeney keeps the magic alive.

We climbed Bear Mountain with Dave and Chanelle a couple of weeks ago, barefoot and up rock faces. Everyone but me stepped in a yellow jacket nest on the way down, and said “ouch” only three times before moving on, riddled in welts. Chanelle even smiled: “I think this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said.

 Spätzle:

“All you need is flour, egg, salt, and a little bit of water,” he said in a thick German accent. “Then you take a very sharp knife and very quickly, slice thin strips into a pot of boiling water. It’s very difficult. They have machines for it now, but in the olde says, you would fail ten, twenty times before you made good Spätzle, and once you could, you could be a grandmother; you could buy a house, own a dog; the whole big mess.”

Quintin, our gray cat, went on an anabasis:

“Xenophon, the Greek writer, wrote the first anabasis. accompanied the Ten Thousand, a large army of Greek mercinaries hired by Cyrus the Younger, who intended to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II. Though Cyrus’s army was victorious at Cunaxa in Babylon (401 BC), Cyrus himself was killed in the battle, rendering the victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure.”

And thus the anabasis: having to come home. An anabasis is a journey outward and then home again. Quintin had been trying to escape for weeks, and one afternoon we all realized he’d been gone since the morning before. Our friend David Bernstein, who left for Amsterdam today for two seasons, and gave Chanelle a teepee he designed that she is living out of in the corner of the Gates Apartment common room, was having a going away dinner last night. We ate a mash of beans and pasta, a spinach salad, and the next door neighbor Carol who is a stone’s throw from Maude (of Harold) invited Chanelle, Sweeney and I into her herb garden and we shared cigarettes. She repeated herself a lot, certain words, phrases, hand gestures, and she used to be a photographer for the National Geographic.

Sweeney and I left before everyone else, kissing David goodbye. Outside our gate we hear a cat yowling from the rooftops. We yelled, “Quintin!”

The yowling continued, louder now.

“Quintin,” we tried again. And then we saw a tiny cat head peering down at us. The meows were loud enough to burst his furry chest, and when he saw it was us, frantic. With every call of his name the crying increased. Sweeney and I climbed to the fourth flight of stairs. Sweeney jumped onto the railing, and with a swift swipe of faith, had him by the scruff and passed him to me. Quintin, lost for four days and covered in tar.

Helen and Phillip the cats were disturbed by Quintin’s homecoming. It was a prodigal son moment. Helen hissed, and yowled at us, like, “Are you really going to let him come back?” She hissed and swiped, but after we gave him a bath they were sleeping in the closet bunk beds together again. Phillip, the youngest, slunk around and looked to everyone else for how he should feel about all of it.

Then we, us and all the cats, watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A Gates Avenue breakfast: Plain tuna fish on a piece of dry wheat toast. Zucchini fried in a pan on lat night’s porkchop Season-All grease. Old black tea in a filmy mug. There are some mornings that I wake up, not having any idea what to do with myself. It takes me a long time to leave the house. I stare at the wall, chewing the end of a bobby pin. This happens. Sometimes.

Sonic Youth was playing in Battery Park for free on the 4th of July, and we stood to the side and listened for a while before boarding the ferry. This happens. Sometimes. It’s the same childlike ambivalence that kept Diane DiPrima from getting pregnant as a young woman (Memoirs of a Beatnik.) It’s the same kind that landed me at a large, round dinner table with Bill Murry at Tavern on the Green. And then yesterday afternoon, Matthew invited me to a Laurie Anderson concert at the Lincoln Center, where it was whispered Lou Reed may appear. We bought the only two tickets left, maybe an hour before it started, for student prices even though Matthew had no proof. Where does this put us? We asked the proprieter. Right between Lou Reed’s legs, he said.

And we were. During Laurie’s shoegazing and orchestra, came a feathery old man, sunk jawed, and we were sitting six feet from the stage. Lou. Oh, Lou. He accompanied her in “Lost Art of Conversation,”and shuffled away. We were right between his ancient knees.

We watched Broadway go by from the 5th floor, and then noticed a crowd of people dancing in Columbus Circle. We descended to street level for investigation, found a boom box and people who meet every Thursday to Tango. We removed our shoes and joined, dancing, and as the evening grew later, almost midnite, the feet had multiplied, and the Tango roared on as taxis and limos seared the dark.

I am learning: hard work does not earn days off. You look away for two minutes, and weeks go by. Be generous and discerning in your leisure. Be constant in your vision.

(Somewhere just outside of Baltimore, Lily Herman is saying, “Stop tellin’ me what to do, Adrian.”)

During the week that Chanelle and I were setting up Poem Shop near the Bethesda Fountain and by the handball courts in Thomkins Square Park, we met a man named Moon who taught us a term called, ‘aspecting.’

“It’s everywhere,” he said. “It’s why men should eat cucumbers. It’s why your last name is Shirk. It’s why one so often sees somebody on the street who looks like an old friend shortly before actually running into the old friend. My bike is locked up on Second and Fourth Street; I wandered here because of the rainbow and found you two.”

“What rainbow?” I said.

He grinned.

‘Aspecting,’ then, seems to be the belief in worldly symbols with literal signifiers. Aspects of objects and words correlating to prophecy or truth. When we were in middle school, we used to call them ‘glitches.’ A glitch was similarly serendipitous (having thoughts verbalized by register clerks, certain models of cars appearances, certain paper products etc…), it’s name denoting a kind of mistake, something the common person was not supposed to have seen. Though a ‘glitch’ is a single event, past-tense, whereas it seems ‘aspecting’ is all the time: life as a rebus game.

This man Moon spoke Northwest language, Aho, energy, Alex Gray, spirit, which I’ve never come in contact with in such full force in New York. It was liberating, this blend of elevated spiritual speak and the warm stench reckless spill splat elegant monster dance of the city. I felt like I could be myself in both worlds, wholly. He said, “The presence of serendipity lets you know that you’re close to the source.”

The Correspondence release at the KGB Bar was swift. The room was hazy, like a speakeasy. Greg made up intros on the spot, speaking to each reader’s secret sensibilities: he got them, all. Dave read a new monologue from the podium next to the tap. Sweeney’s dad grabbed the mic when all was done and said, “If I could do it over again, I would do it like you guys.”

Now Sweeney’s parents are duking out divorce terms, restraint orders, and the two of us, and Dave, drove through the wet, green Northeast coastal range talking about how divorce must make people do crazy things. We drove through Delaware, small verdant towns, and cornfields, and miles of arched trees strangled by the Kudzo vine: I thought maybe it’s not that the land is alive in summer, and so therefore pretty; or that it’s dead in the winter, and so therefore ugly; maybe in the winter we are too slumped to see pretty things, just can’t, and it’s not the season’s doing but our own; the individual’s.

Like how we blame a poor economy for a nation’s low morale. Like how we blame gentrification for the inordinate amount of daytime baseball bat muggings in Bed-Stuy as of late. Like how we blame divorce for our parents’ poor behavior.

We visited Lily in Baltimore and it was very hot in her attic apartment. Lest I say she was smoking a Camel Light when we arrived, just after I’d finished relaying her Get-Rich-Quick quitting smoking story to Dave. I said to her on a firefly walk, “Maybe you don’t need to go back to Brooklyn; I know I want to be there for its aggressive affection, but maybe you already have that here.” We sat on a boat tow and listened to the cicadas, Sweeney, Dave, Lily, and I drinking Bud and talking all night. We cooked spinach and mushrooms, pine nut coos coos and chicken legs. In the morning we made coffee in a Costa Rican coffee sock.

In Cape May, Sweeney and I sat on the beach and ate sandwiches, Arizona Iced Teas in juice boxes, ice cream in sugar cones every night and we were Brooklyn green next to Jersey tan, half-bathing suits and snaggle-toothed, trying to keep up on Latin studies. Long drives, talks about decades, men who can’t grow up, World War II, St. Paul, the ways in which we’ve changed. Double-Stuf Oreos. We watched movies, Braveheart, Goodfellas, and had big dinners with his cousins and siblings. He said, “I think my family has mistaken ‘good table conversation’ with ’spectacle.’” I said, “I think most families have, and so let’s not.” I ate lobster one night; I can’t imagine what kind of marine predator can chew that dinosaur. But what sweet, tender pulp inside. What meat!

Sweeney gave me a single driving lesson in a wide empty lot on a big empty compound somewhere upstate. A stick-shift. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, I wasn’t afraid at all.

Something I forgot I knew about New York summers: fireflies. As soon as the sun goes down. Everyone is used to them except for me.  Somehow it doesn’t phase them, the fluorescence of a tiny, magic bug that seems simply to be flying about, for reasons outside of survival. They’re not eating, hanging around toilets or garbage cans; they’re not biting you or your cats; they’re just flying,  illuminating your back patio, sharing their turgid Christmas light. I saw them first in Staten Island, at Dennis’ house, two nights after I got back. They were hovering under the street lamps. Shrieking and pointing, everyone sort of laughed at me. It may have been like a transplant on the West Coast making a big to-do about Doug Firs. Sweeney said, “Everyone on this side of the country spends their first ten summers collecting them in jars; you’ve got some catching up to do I guess.” They make the East a mystical place. In the dark recesses of Bed-Stuy, leaky garbage et al. the glowing bugs show up, like fairies, every night, hovering around the heads of drug lords and hipsters and babies alike. Animals are like that here, maybe: I’m in Cape May right now, on the Jersey shore, and the dolphins come right up to the sand to play.

News & things from The Corresponding Society;

Many of us involved in The Poem Shop have collaborated on a publication called Correspondence, whose first issue comes out this Tuesday, July 15^th. We would like to invite you to join us at The Corresponding Society’s inaugural reading and release party, that evening at 7:00 PM at the KGB Literary Bar (85 East 4th Street, NYC 10003) for poetry and double-whiskeys.

The Corresponding Society is a collection of close-knit writers, generally located in the New York City area, but extending from Paris to San Francisco to the Midwest-galore. Ringlead by a virile band of young artists from a cellar apartment in Bed-Stuy, we come to you earnest & doe eyed: This first issue is a 180-page anthology featuring work from 20 writers, including poetry, short story, dramatic works, and essays.

To purchase a copy of Correspondence No. 1 ($8), contact us at, thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com.

Sat on a bucket at 3:30 a.m. eating a hot pastrami sandwich with Matthew, and an Australian girl comes by in a gold studded tunic, sloshed and all smiles, looking for someone to talk to.

“I’ve heard things about New York City,” she said, “about young girls, and New York City. Can I sit with you a minute; would that be alright?”

And I’m drained at that moment. Matthew and I were hired to bring Poem Shop to a whirling-dirvish New Age rave in SoHo: blacklights and glowing gardens growing up the walls; music and tarot readings and two giant gongs that rattled to climaxes every few minutes. Was exhausted by the way people talked to me, leeched, argued about whether or not they should go to a Hindu priest. James Trimarco, though, took some mushrooms and sat in a corner: “The way I got out West was this. We were all drug addicts in Chicago, and I wanted to get away. So I went home to Florida and got in a car with two of my friends, and we drove really, really slow down Highway 10, until we got to California. It took three or four months.”

And I imagined all the people who’ve been whisked away this way, broken in the backseat under a blanket, trying to see things again.

The Austrailian girl looks at me, says, “You’re buggered, aren’t you?”

I sat, on the abandoned tracks of the JMZ, waiting to get back to my place in Bushwick. Every time the trains barrel past, I almost weep. Especially the ones that fly through center tracks and don’t stop. There is something about the tradition of it, this old system, so enormous and loud and esoteric, built out of survival to get the people from here to there. It just keeps going and going, disappearing into the black tunnels, and you can feel it like some kind of mythical beast every time it rumbles towards you. It’s like the way I felt the first time I saw a Lakota Sundance ceremony: people pierce to a tree, close to the source, dancing, hungry, like they have for thousands of years. It’s the witness that makes me kowtow, the practice and the ceremony over slogans and piety. Walt Whitman said, “Before one is a writer, he must understand at least the tip of his Nation’s spirit,” and it’s this understanding, if only for a flash, that makes my knees weak.

[By nation, he could simply mean “roots,” or “family.”]

I got home, played with the cats, Ruby and Agnes. They curled up in my shoes and on my pillow as the sun came up. I slept with the fan facing my bed, and woke up to a great summer wind in the morning.