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If he can make it through February, he’ll be all right. That’s what Joel thinks, all during the wintertime. If he can make it through December, like that old Merle Haggard song David had loved. If he can make it through January. But February is the hardest of all.
The day before you died.A wildebeest chewing on grass. The sun the only thing in the sky.The sky is gray and wet.The moment before is now the second to last moment.The phone is ringing.There is always a closer moment.A rustle in the tall grass behind it. A bubble from the watering hole.I say I love you. You say I know.Every moment leads to another.
I am sitting on a blue chair in a New York City public school classroom in The Bronx staring at a Chromebook screen on a student desk caught in the chilly cross-breeze between the ceiling-high open windows and the open classroom door and I am waiting for my students to show up online and I am trying not to die.
We were in the jacuzzi when Speedoman entered the pool area and our lives. There were five of us, all sitting spaced apart, the warm water bubbling up to our hairy chests. Outside, it was gray and snowing, the roads icy. We came to the Ford Community Center in the heart of Dearborn, Michigan, every Saturday afternoon to work out—intense cardio followed by weight training—and
[Las Meninas, Velázquez, 1656]When I finally got there let’s say it didn’t matter that on the way over as I was crossing the streeta woman offered me flowers, and I didn’t buy, and she hit me with them, shouting, and the light changed and I fled; didn’t matter whether Madrid felt cold and severe and rainy or cold and magnificent and rainy; made no difference, even, that on New