When 4 am dark is narrow, I feel it before I leave the bed. I pull the narrow into my thighs, walk out of the house, up the steep hill of the Arlington. I am sure to wear my glasses, so I’ll see the sharp, narrow lights far above me succeed in breaking through night-sky’s dark. I need the narrow, now, in my fingers as I type. I learned it decades ago, when I started shooting meth—draw back my thumb at the angle to balance a syringe’s small circular top on my thumbnail as I pull the correct dosage of liquid into the syringe, and then feel what I thought was the exacting precision of a changeless certainty. It wasn’t. But the skill of narrow precision— all that I’ve taken with me from my year of shooting meth. I feel it in my thighs on this early-morning walk. In each foot’s impact on pavement, risking wherever precision leads—this morning I step into fear. I draw that into the stride, trusting the rhythm of this instant of walking, no matter how it might change the next instant, change me, change where this might lead. Last night, I needed to narrow my eyes as I read the new poem Cassie sent me. So few words on a line. Not forcing a line’s meaning to come any sooner than it might have come to her, come for her, as she typed, come for me, now, as I read for the narrower passage within the meaning to take me farther than I knew I’d had the courage for. My left foot first—this has become an obsession of starting out the door in the morning, a form of reliability, a ritual, that I allow to be as frighteningly necessary as the ritual of my childhood, wearing the bit of white lace on my head required for a Catholic girl going into church, even when mass wasn’t in session, when no others were in the pews. Once, the lace slipped, fell to the church floor. My sharp intake of breath, so loud that a nun sitting in a pew praying looked up. Such shock on her face—not because the lace fell, I realized, but for the look she saw on mine. What had she seen there? I’m drawing into my thighs that unknowable expression I wore, which remains mine, as I look to the top of the hill where the Arlington turns. I’m filling my lungs, my blood, with that look, which narrows as it gains force— what has always been fear and, more than fear, awareness that nothing can protect me from whatever might come. I draw that in. Langer says, look for any expression and, whatever expression you are seeking, you will find. At my front door, I notice and reach down to pick up the Monday morning New York Times where it rests this morning in its blue plastic wrapper, and I feel everything is a symptom of the expression I am seeking. I pick up the news and I step inside.
"In 1965, Bob Dylan gifted Allen Ginsberg with a Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder, which Ginsberg was to use to record his thoughts and observations as he traveled throughout the United States. Ginsberg, already heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac’s methods of spontaneous composition, felt the taping was an ideal way to pursue his own spontaneous work."
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"When I first saw the bandelette in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, in Paris’s Marais district, I immediately experienced one of those Rilkean “bursts,” for here was an object, that in its ornate yet near-transparent being, invoked so much of the social, cultural and historic struggles of the Jews which are writ large across and infuse the whole of Western culture from earliest times through the rise of Christianity and the Church fathers, on up to the Shoah."
