Forgetful Glass
		Summer Was Winter
            	Ps(alm) for the Unspoken and Unwritten
            	



Forgetful Glass

There were glasses, pale green, filled with fizzy water.  Delicate bubbles, somehow 
smaller effervescence.  None of the glasses were filled very full.  Little boys were 
carrying them back and forth, and on trays across a lawn.  And they were being 
monitored as they carried.  And adults carrying water would forget where they were 
going.  Again and again they would recurr, begin again.  Nobody drank from any of the 
glasses and there was confusion.  It was as if everyone who was carrying a slightly full 
pale green glass of fizzy water did not know that he or she had  or was doing so and 
therefore had to return for another cup.   But arriving, already carrying a cup the person 
would then scurry away– but to where?  Things were lost, plans abandoned.  It was a 
single file enterprise which seemed innocuous enough.

Until –I was informed that it was carrying the glasses of water which caused 
forgetfulness.  With a glass in hand one could not remember where one was headed, what 
one was holding, or why.  And so there was an attempt to stop, to remove the glasses, to 
decipher the plot of forgetfulness, to retrace our steps and begin again with nothing in our 
hands.





Summer Was Winter

I visit S. in summer and she has prepared hot cinnamon drink and toast and pastries by 
candlelight. She has prepared winter foods in summer and therefore changed the season.

Summer was winter, though not in the way you might expect.  This is not any relation to 
weather.  I went to visit S. in New York City, though S. no longer lives in New York 
City.  As a matter of fact I'm not sure that it was New York City, though that is certainly 
as good a place as any for summer to become winter.  That is the city in which our 
friendship began, before I left the city and before S. moved to Oddly Connecticut.  

I went to visit S. in the summer and she was dwelling in a bower constructed of 
candlelight.  There was a winter table and the smell of a fire, and on the winter table was 
steam refracted from something which smelled like cider.  There were invariably some 
type of pastries which must have come from our traditional spot which might have been 
on 5th Street.  I could not see these delicacies but they were suggested by the candlelight, 
the aromas, the smoke from the fire and mostly by S's smile.  She  greeted me distinctly 
from within a winter frame. 

I wore no coat and there were not any coats hung or strewn about as there would have 
been in winter and the smile on S's face also lit or warmed the room and in the room also 
was a particular hovering promise that we would somehow revisit 5th street, or the purple 
walls of the now defunct yoga studio, or the warm soup of Kiev on 7th street, now also 
gone.  Or maybe S's one room apartment for which she lent me the keys when my 10th 
Street apartment burned down.  

But more than any place we might visit I think it more correct to say that it was a time we 
might visit by delving into the smile and the woodsmoke, though S. did not have a 
working fireplace on 5th Street.  In Oddly she does have a working fireplace.  The fire 
was not visible on this visit but that is because I never did get to looking about but 
remained riveted to the smile and the candle and the change from summer to winter. 

So when I say it was a time what I mean to suggest is that to visit a friend can be a visit to 
a particular decade, or several decades.  And time can change a season of course, but the 
winter S. constructed from summer was not a conventional winter.  S. always loved 
winter though she did have a spell of not liking winter in Oddly after she lost her father 
and took on the task of cataloguing and promoting his artworks in his former home which 
was now her home.  There was the smell of death which lingered in his car and I was 
consulted by S. in terms of smudging herbs.  White sage, I said or maybe francincense.

There is always regret from loss and loss from regret and this is another way that summer 
may become winter or winter may be spring or you may be someone unrecognizable.  
This happens through no efforts of our own and certainly we did not wish to be persons 
who must experience loss.

Yet that is the derailment of time and memory, not like this visit in which summer 
becomes winter as a delightful premise in which to secretly exchange confidences in the 
semi-dark, which  reminds us of a dream of a visit in which there was also candlelight 
and a narrow cot and confiding.  Somehow all of these visitations and unorthodox 
fluctuations of season or time suggest the desire to overtake the regret of having left a 
particular season or time.  In other words, why must we age?  And why must place and 
time be so specific so that it seems possible to walk out of one's very skin?  And that is 
why a visit with an old friend is similar to re-entering one's skin or body or a body of 
thought at once more confident or insecure or poverty stricken or independent or 
homeless.  Anything is possible when time is deconstructed and  you can deconstruct 
time at least for a moment if you go to visit a friend in a town called Oddly and if the 
season changes when you walk into the bower then you might be able to visit a place or a 
time which you had once thought irretrievable.
 




Ps(alm) for the Unspoken and Unwritten
Or: Entering the Other Stream of Time

The ingredients were either two or three.  Three including one that could cause heart 
damage, or only two, including the one that could cause leukemia.  The elder 
practitioners said three was safer, more years of data.  

The young boy poured out his grandmother's medicine, replacing it with a mixture of 
shoe polish, flea powder liquid detergent and brown paint.  Imagine, she said, injecting 
toxins into a body so pure.  The other ingredients could be found elsewhere, the 
ingredients which caused something unexpected. A lymphatic register.  Awaiting.  

We don't know anything, and we won't know anything, said the Kafkaesque woman in 
the meeting.  And we don't know who will answer your questions, and we don't know 
when.  

When is a summons.  To be occupying such a body with no answers, no blending of 
empathy, and to be large in a chair, in a time of slashed budgets and displacement.  When 
the grandmother drank the concoction she rose and hovered two feet above her chair.
  
She's walking around now, my sister said, but soon she'll be thin, she'll lose her hair, her 
appetite.  

No cap on pen, no finality, no night.  "Na" means please.  El na refa na la.