We got bagels from Babka and walked to the meadows. I had a small yellow notepad in my right pocket and a cigarette carton which bore the countenance of an esteemed doctor, blue-masked and scrub-capped, holding a flask of blue liquid marked with ☠poison ,an already-empty carton because I was on holiday, so I had three-a-day, and three-a-day-coffees too, or more, because I, you always offer when you make tea because I have yet to drink too much tea so the taste of tea, other than breakfast tea, sometimes bothers me like teeth against teeth or like, a strange image I had as a child that would make me convulse with daemonic teeth-gnashing and bright-red winces, biting into metal prongs of a fork or the belly of a spoon. Thank you for making me coffee. I have my coffee black so as to say, I love you. Thank you. You exist. You make t h i s | a l l | very beautiful, Lucy. I’ll have it plain please. I’ll have it with you sat beside me in bed or on the couch or at the table and
It had rained I think, or the dew just made the bench a bit damp, or the God was saying, As you are so you sit: so if the grass is wet, so we sit in grass, so we are grass, so we spread without prejudice, amongst poor folks and rich folks, or as the uncut hair of graves resists being braided.
I think—and that’s everyone’s favorite and, I, hope for another everyone’s favorite, to belong with everyone in His Holiness Beard, another of his poetic potato skin strings to get caught between my twisted wisdom tooth—that’s my favorite Whitman line: the uncut hair of graves. Like fingernails, and even more persistent: encompassing forests, embracing every foot without disdain, stating the property tax used to be paid with permanence and non-being, and now non-existence is non-existent for those of us who sleep in his unfolding infinite roots. The grass is green. The grass has persisted. The grass is a sharp blade: it has kept shape for so long a time, and, Lucy, and—Lucy:
There was a crow waddling around us. You ate your pastrami bagel and drank your tea. I ate my pastrami bagel and drank my americano. Little crow, or raven, or whatever makes its difference, kept up his waddling to the point of, THE DOG IS TOO CUTE TO NOT THROW A SLICE OF CUCUMBER. It squawked. I shook. It squawked. I didn’t feed it. I couldn’t bear it near. It squawked. A baby boy fell and scraped his knee and squawked. I tried to think, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL MR. CROW. It only said Nevermore Nevermore Nevermore and, poor Poe started off twirling at the bottom then washed down with the rest of the americano into my tobacco-throat and you never see him Nevermore except for in the grass. Things, they’re always getting eaten, or drinken, or smoken, or waddlen, and, you were sat beside me on that bench, Lucy. I looked up to find a magpie warbling. I looked at the tree and its branches. Since I’d gotten amongst British folk I had been trying to figure out what they looked like to me. Then I thought, They’re nerves, spreading out against the sky. Like grass roots. It took me an entire month. I wrote it down on the yellow pad. And you were still beside me, Lucy.
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