I know/I forget

I know when you smoke out the window. I know where you park your car. I know your phone number and I cannot forget it. I know you are laughing with other people. I know what you are drinking tonight and can suspect where you will go. I know what you look like in the morning, the matted parts of your hair, the red chest and fire skin. I know you are less than a thousand feet from me at most parts of the day. I know where there is hair on your body and where there is none. I know you wet, cold, hot and sweaty. I know you in the car, on the streets that were ours. I know you would love this rug but you are not at my side. I know your smell. I know your hug. I know your kiss.  I know you because I wrote about you. I know you because I am writing about you. I know you because I have loved you for so long. I know you I know you I know you I know you but I am forgetting. I am forgetting it all, quicker by the day. Why have you died? What took you and was it my own device? Forgetting, forgetting, the years are evaporating. Come back before these holes close, come back before the soreness fades. Come back because I will wake up. I will wake up one morning soon. Soon I will wake up one morning and find. And find, I will find, that you. You. I will find that you were never there. Never there. Never here. Here or there. Not anywhere.

Bike Ride

I wheel my bike from the back of the house twenty till nine. It creeks and clicks past sleeping bedrooms. I carry it down off the porch and mount after walking it over the crags in the sidewalk. Always the awkward initiation of feet meeting peddle...after a few cycles of peddling, I have momentum. The sidewalk, back entrance to Walgreen's. Is there a car exiting the in? The boy across the street sits on the stoop outside his house, waiting. I will see him again this afternoon when he knocks to be let in. The sewage cap, bump every morning. Nelson and Carrolton. No straggler on my path but the fire station. It's car washing day. The fire truck is pulled out in its front driveway, blocking my turn so I throw my life into oncoming Carrolton commuters late for work but wheel back onto the sidewalk, dip and rise over red ribbed concrete and blaze to a stop at Carrolton and Claiborne. Tik tik tik tik the traffic lights monitor the rhythm. A computer has already been telling us what to do for years. White light walking man, the red palm disappears. Hills in the street that give me a push, I cross the intersection, dodge around the city bus. Cleaner better transit, gluts and gluts of tourists in khakis with cameras wait to board but the driver, aloof, has not opened her doors. Dog and man woman and stroller. Green ribbons of park. I snap into the bike lane, white parallel lines. Cars whoosh past, my reflection runs backwards on rolled up windows. Construction crew, yelping mutt behind gate. A mannequin, a woman?, frozen still standing on a balcony. Tree cutters trimming the oak branches. Guess there is a new mayor. An acorn strikes my clavicle. Ouch, legs burning. This cruiser won't go any faster. Give me speed or give me, the streetcar tracks at Oak. I lift from the seat and am not thrown. Drinkers of coffee outside Rue, the restaurants are whispering with beginning, outside tables still padlocked. SUV pulling outside of bank, I stare stare stare don't! She stops. Do I need a helmet? Get the hell out of the bike lane you Pontiac. Oh and the second set of tracks I have to cross at the corner where the restaurant is always changing. They bounce me, jiggle the bike, rattling bones. Hold tight sweaty palms. Where is the cold? Muggy, sticky hair, lotion melting. I need to pick up toothpaste. No bike racks for my U lock at Walgreens. Chevron. The cycle shop. Will they make me buy something? I whip my hair back and forth so the sweat dries and cools my head. WillowPlumOak ZzzzzzzimP!le  Freret I turn back to see traffic, need to make a left turn. Too many I stop at Burthe, wait for swoosh. Swoosh swooosh swoosh it's clear and I cross, streetcar driver rings his bell, I slow, it charges to the riverbed that no driver knows how to use. Anything resembling a rotary just doesn't. Smooth smooth one way Burthe. No rattling shaking or holes, craters, tunnels to Inferno. forgot! My sandwich, sitting in the toaster oven. Just an apple! A car rides behind me, come on! There's room, don't be afraid, get going! Quiet Burthe, dads have left already, children are learning colors. Sweat on my back, glands gush. Workers at Broadway. A new frat house? Holes and cars and patchy street work. I dismount. Look both ways. Wait for a cessation, ccccrrraawws. Mount and turn onto Audobon, two way but no cars, I ride in center. Students come from all directions, weave between them, Freret. I sink down on the unlevel street on the right side. Another bus. More students, bikers pass I pass bikers. Crosswalk Freret sidewalk at Tulane.pastel shits, denim denim denim denim. Exits and entrances, do you see me? I see you. I wheel into Loyola 's back entrance, avoid the speed bumps and ride in between them. Feel fast passing slow walkers. Pedal pedal dip at the slope, children in playground screaming from the cage. Drip down into the library bike racks and scan for a spot. There, free! I stop, fumble with the key into the lock, and walk away.

Morton lecture

The weather is the quintessential neutral subject, a topic for strangers and filler for awkward silences in conversation. But as climate change becomes more and more apparent to the masses, can the notion of “funny weather we had last week” in the pedestrian sphere endure while the reality of global warming refutes accident? Perhaps, the now not so unbiased hyperobject of weather can prompt colloquial discussion of climate change through musings on weather. But there is a point at which, and it might not yet have been reached, when scientific evidence overwhelms human want for order, making it impossible to ignore the larger physical realities.

Other than this point, the lecture by Morton was complex because of its discussion of object-oriented ontology. I had trouble focusing because of the switching between abstract and physical and not really understanding the connections between the two realms. Students left the lecture throughout, one by one befuddled and irritated.

Walking to Frenchmen

The IHOP manager on Canal accosts Kyle and Amy, one of his visiting friends from Kentucky after they use the bathroom. They aren’t paying customers. I watch the altercation through the window, and after buying a water, I return outside and the two other Kentucky girls have found conversation with two obese middle-aged guys from out of town. I stand a few feet down, embarrassed by the whole group. The two walk out of IHOP with giant plastic to-go cups of Coke. Amy is wearing a red, short-sleeved sweater with a pocket. Kyle shoves his Coke in this pocket and Amy is already holding her own as well as a liter of soda from the dorm that someone forgot to mix with whisky. The travelers brought Old Crow and Southern Comfort and everyone learned in the common room that the later is from New Orleans. I call the group together and lead us down Bourbon. Who invited all of these people and why are they wearing Mardi Gras beads? Bright lights do attract the inebriated. I weave between people, get bumped, and turn back to see the revelers who echo the choruses of classic rock songs blaring from some daiquiri shop. After St. Ann where some consider the gay clubs, I charge on and the party fades behind us. We encounter a street band, and we pet their dogs. They don’t look too unhealthy and I wonder if the kids have a Daddy’s credit  card in case the charade gets old. But their song is sweet. He sits on a stoop, leans back on a blue shutter and plucks his banjo. We all join in, stomp the concrete, clap, riff on the vocals as background singers. The musician offers his hot and I drop a wrinkled dollar. Kyle gives him a few pinches of tobacco. They tell us their name and where they will soon play, but no one remembers. We are almost to Frenchmen Street, and the wind of the sudden cold front pushes us down the sidewalk.

Adaptation

a continuation/elaboration of sorts from the previous post...

Every time I take the stairs down into the Hauptbahnhof, the smell of waffles and crepes overwhelms the air. Now, it is a scent that I know, one unique in my experience to this specific place of my train station. When the H-Bahn (the "hanging railway") is closed on the weekends, my 20-minute walk from my dorm to the main campus is more readily visualized than any daily walk I used to take back home. And though it is not customary for cashiers at the discount grocery store in my neighborhood to bag one’s items and will yell at me if I taketoo long to bag, the store is nonetheless my grocery store now. I know where things are,and I recognize the face of the efficient but always greeting cashier. Already, I have breakfasted with a few German friends in an apartment kitchen on Lippestrasse. German breakfast is steaming broetchen warmed in the oven and the octopus of hands reaching, grabbing, sharing and lending jelly, butter, Nutella, cheese and sliced tomato. I listen to Lisa and Sarah’s German, and one will translate when the tenses overwhelm any familiar nouns. I struggle to describe yesterday so I keep to the present tense or eat more bread. After a month and a half studying abroad in Germany, I am struck by how a sense of home is capable of great elasticity, how something so different like a new country can become familiar. Adaptation is a magical thing because it just kind of happens like homeostasis.

Arrival

After an eight hour flight to Germany, sitting next to a man on whom I had accidentally sneezed; after taking a train I wasn't even sure was correct from the Düsseldorf airport to the Hauptbahnhof (main station) of the city in which I would be studying, I stood at track seven with my 50 pound suitcase and cumbersome backpack.

It was 35 degrees Fahrenheit and cloudy. Though it was noon in Dortmund, I had been displaced from my regular time zone so it might as well have been 6 a.m. since my traveling began the evening before in the U.S. As soon as my train arrived, I scrambled down through the crowds into the station to phone my university contact, using the change I got from breaking a 20 Euro bill with the purchase of Tic Tacs.

The track sign read that the S1 had been canceled, though at the time, I couldn't understand it or the man on the loudspeaker explaining. But then I met the angel of sorts that my mother promised I'd meet on the way, who informed me of the delay through his broken English. Someone threw themselves in front of the train, he told me.

My helper was also a student at the same school, so, once a back-up plan was announced for the S1, he led me through a route of buses and trains that I would never have been able to maneuver alone. After he showed me another pay phone at the university, he walked away and said, "Welcome to Germany."

Scene from Trinidad & Tobago, June 2009

A body of ash smolders and a few flames jerk as a big-bellied man with shaggy gray hair shovels the pile: a body was burned earlier today. Three pyres face the water at sunset, and the park will be closing soon. The man with a wizardry beard in worker’s pants shovels the ash around, tosses the funeral bouquets out into the river. Stray, emaciated dogs lay on the concrete framing where bodies are sent into the sky. Some tug at hardened stickiness that might be food or curl up as if they’ve found a hearth, but they all lope lazily after the tenderer when he leaves his work, his long shovel-rake like a staff. Nearby, a Hindu temple floats, an island in the water accessible by a pier. The structure with its two garlic clove towers failed many times, but the priest persisted. Flags of red, yellow or black triangles lilt around the temple’s perimeter and are fixed into the soggy earth at the shoreline. Behind the pyres lay a few white graves, black crosses perching like Ospreys, and through the trees, across the street, a mosque dome peeks. I would like to walk the stone pier, lined with bushes and shrubs, sit in the chapel while the evening sun gilds even the ash, but the blue gate is locked, and I notice the old worker looking over.