Sweeney is coming. Quit smoking. Long, quiet catch-and-release fishing trip with his father and brother, one-hundred-fifty miles off the Atlantic coast. He is flying in next Tuesday.

Found tiny old neighborhoods protected by the 405 on-ramp, and milk-man backroads. Liberty Hall, instrumental show. Ragtime piece at the end. Dustin and the old boys in the parking lot. Hot, blue. My gyno was pregnant. Dancing in the backyard with vaudeville musicians, next to I-5, Maggie’s sweetie shows up from Humbolt unannounced. Coming up against belief differences I’ve never even had to think about before: my friends, our tribes. On a rollercoaster. Mckenzie is sick. The moon was in Scorpio until yesterday: all about intensity, from the way you eat to the way you fuck. This is a time of discipline. The astrologer said that it was time to be a warrior; this is a time to be courageous, disciplined and vibrant as I can. She said, “You’re romantic. The night you were born Venus rose high with the moon, and it was so beautiful, so beautiful.”

Made rainbows with Naomi at a party with a garden hose.    

The Willamette Valley is plentiful. Sleeping long nights, eating fresh greens, baked eggs, coffee roasted by cheerful women in the Andes. Lazy rain, Swedish breakfast, old neigborhoods and old sweethearts. Junk hauling service with my mother as a way to pay for college. Searching curbsides, dumpsters, bins.

Sitting on warm rocks with my father, above the river with Naomi who is alive, thrived, and drumming, with sticks, bubble trails inked on her forearm. We walked around the trainyards and said Wow a lot, Woah, and Romantic Relationships, her head in my lap. (Allergies, she still can’t lay in the grass, six years later.) Went to Cirkus Pandemonium with Maggie, and we walked through paved and unpaved neighborhoods, saying Wow, and Oh My God, and Exciting a lot: we’ve mirrored each other’s growth, and are going to Eugene to get our charts done next Monday.

It’s gray then sunny then lazy rain. My little sister is four inches taller than me, and her hips big enough to fit my purple pants. This happened in one season. We’ve been watching the sixth season of Sex & the City, ten years too late–but here I am. Working on my long poem about scaling Oregon with my mother, writing love letters to Sweeney, frenetic, hyper, reading the footnotes of my friends’ swiftly tilting lives in Brooklyn, and beyond. 

Two days before I left, Sweeney stayed up all night with me packing up my room and at dawn, we walked barefoot around the perimeter of campus, and up onto the roof of North Hall and he said, “One of the most frustrating things abotu you at first was that you didn’t seem to have your priorities straight. Reliable and compulsive are two different things.” He talked about watching this change for me, and I realized it had changed–one of the most important shifts I’ve ever noticed and he pulled me to sleep in the early light.     

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home (As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner).  

It sure is gorgeous, this coast. It’s like returning to a doll’s house. How much cuter can it get before no one can afford to live here any longer? There’s a man running for mayor who funded the dispersal of 60 yellow bikes for communal use about ten years ago. This may be the only thing that made the primaries mean anything to me.

Within thirty days of the dispersal, the bikes were found in places as far as San Francisco.

This is how the conversation started with my dad, about politics and the Adams’ of American history, and then two-hours of affirmation at the Paradox Cafe that I, despite my concern over nutritional yeast and broccoli, am not repeating history–my parents or their generation–and that I am already in a place that they never were at twenty. A new place.  

Call it the ole’ bait & switch.     

The end of the year: Amber and Katie moved into an old building on Willoughby Ave. whose foundation is slipping. Instead of repairing the rotten floors, the landlord built directly on top of them. Now if you stand against the farthest wall in Amber’s room (with red walls, one lovely window, and a Tennessee flag) you can see how the floors slope to a central point in the livingroom, a Dr. Seuss blueprint. If you sit on Amber’s office chair you roll all the way to the kitchen.

 The end of the year: In Amber and Katie’s kitchen, Amber said, “For a long time I wanted to do some kind of social work. But I know I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’ve always felt bad about not being a do-gooder.”

And I thought, The hell does it mean to do good?

Every once in a while I feel like a lightening rod, like I’m conducting thoughts, and I can’t stop talking. To the roomful of people I began to throw my arms around: What we are doing is one of the most important realms of study that exists. Language! The complete history of communication! Nothing can change or grow or move without language moving first! We are the basis of sociology, anthropology, theology, philosophy, business. What we are doing is vital.

a moment of truth.

 The end of the year: Amber was reading a book by Angela Davis about gender roles between African slaves on American plantations during the 18th century. I asked, Who’s Angela Davis? A feminist, activist, scholar, former Black Panther member, ran for the communist party ticket in 1980.  And then woah–unbeknowest to either of us, Davis showed up at Pratt three weeks later and gave a series of lectures. 

The end of the year: Got everyone excited about the fortieth anniversary of 1968: May, Paris, Columbia University, San Francisco, Venezuela–things were happpening everywhere. And then they didn’t. And for some reason we have spent the last few decades trying to recreate something that worked only for a second. 

Maybe language has to change first.

Davis said, “I can’t even say ‘Black Power’ anymore without sounding naive. What does ‘Black Power’ mean? We were naive before, but our naivete may have helped us for a while.” 

The end of the year: Language is changing.

Before someone can address an audience, they have to have their finger on the pulse. A place between what people want to hear and what the speaker wants to say: therein lies truth. Preachers, psychics, CEOs, artists, motivational speakers, and writers alike. It’s larger than intuition, the pulse-taking. It’s a physical act. Bu-bum, bu-bum, bu-bum.

Some people do not have it. Is this subjective? Maybe. But can’t you tell when a speaker, reader, presenter doesn’t know what needs to be said?

I suppose some people have their finger on stronger veins than others, and that once you’ve found the pulse, no matter how faint, you can spend your life trying to find it’s loudest point. But in the end: you’ve either found it or you haven’t.

Robi had his play Sleep   Shit performed at The Ontological Theater last month. He had asked Sweeney and me to help out: “Bing a ball gown,” he said. “At first I’ll have you sitting in the audience with a tuba in your lap, and you’ll be blowing into it, intermittently yelling ’I am a man!’”

Sweeney and I got fried chicken po’boy sandwiches and Guinness at the Five Spot. We knew we’d be late. Is it better to rush or nurture? Unsure, we took our time, gathered a group together and headed to the theater.  

We arrived an our before curtain. Robi told me my exits, handed me a piece of paper ripped from his notebook, three lines scribbled onto it: “This is your script,” he said. And within minutes, Sweeney was wearing lipstick and a garbage bag with leg holes. Chanelle and Fareed, standing in their respective bags, had come from Connecticut to visit and help. I was wearing a floorlength sequined dress, dripping with water because Robi had instructed me to dunk my head in a sink before entering. The audience was positioned in a ring around the center of the room.

Sweeney and I stood backstage: his hair was in a pony tail, and his lips bright red, his legs bare to his upper thighs. I noticed the bag’s tight squeeze, and asked him if he was wearing anything underneath; he was not. And he didn’t bat an eyelash: stoic, willing, flexible, naked.

This is what you do: You just. Do. He knows this.

The play was an extension of a novella Robi’s been working on called The Lake Michigan Stories. We performed a dream sequence, in which the mother, resurrected from drowning, looks for her daughter, who is being chased my demons. Robi’s litte brother played piano.

This was during Lyndel’s sleepless fortnight, and she sat in the audience terrified. 

After the play, we had a party at the Gates apartment. But something snapped. For some godly reason, everyone showed their true, crazy colors that night. It was unreal. Robi painted everyone’s lips black, and it bled to everyone’s teeth; and those who are normally quiet, soliloquied; those who were usually cynical, got soft-hearted and demanded we start treating people like humans. Those who were usually pillars, wouldn’t stop singing no matter how many times we asked. We found ourselves on the roof, dancing, kicking, talking in accents, dancing again, again, singing the along to ”Space Oddity”: O! that’s what it felt like.

During the wee hours, an angry neighbor brought a steel bat to their door, saying that “somebody is going to get hurt, real soon.” Robi waited to mention this until later, telling us she had also asked, “Are you crazy?” and he had responded, “Yes.” And for the first time in their negligent tenancy, Chris cried: “Things have got to change!” (Maybe he was on painkillers, I don’t know; but I began to enjoy him. And since then.) 

In the morning, the woman, this neighbor, broke into the apartment. She started marching up and down the hallway, tapping her steel bat against bedroom doors, threatening to break people’s legs, bash people’s heads. I was shaking Sweeney, hissing, but he wouldn’t wake up. No one would. Fareed and Morgan were huddled on the livingroom floor, playing dead. 

Lyndel pulled on her dress, took the woman to the door and calmed her down. And the boys at Gates had a family meeting. If it takes life or death, than so be it.

Forgodsake, sobeit.  

I’ve been having vivid dreams from lite sleep. They’ve been light hearted, and I wake up laughing. The other morning, it was bochilism. I had it in my hair. I had buildup on my scalp. I scratched at it, and loved the way it felt; scratched away my bochilism and then was worried about washing my hands thoroughly enough to eat lunch.

The senior thesis reading took place in the sculpture garden. Vero Gonzales and Gabe Sorell were stunning, on-pulse; all of the poetry-emphasis students were. The cherry blossoms were at their heaviest, and we listened until the sun set. A lot of the prose students were not so on the money. Convince me that there’s a reason to be writing about this scene, or this girl, or your boyfriend, I thought. And that’s when the pulse occured to me; maybe they’ll never find it. Or rather, school has nothing to do with guiding you toward the pulse: they teach you, assuming you already have. (Craft & experience aside.)

We ate snacks in Thad Kiolzowski’s kitchen, and he talked to me about my identity as a writer, summer plans, his winning the Guggenheim. He hadn’t been able to make eye contact since my program think tank and our meeting.  A couple of my professors, Robert, Sweeney, started to join the conversation and there we were: like teenagers standing around the kitchen sink; a community.

For weeks I slept hard, wrote papers, read some, put together two portfolios. Always returning home to Sweeney, or him to me. All-nighters with Lyndel, grab-bag poetry, blind-countour drawings at dawn. Sleepovers at Amber and Katie’s new place: baking, wine, breakfast, astrology. Robert and I hosted our last Making Skeletons Dance of the school year: Fifty people came, ate our goods, enjoyed their words; the work was really strong: Asheley’s serial story, Grace’s oral geneology, Matthew’s carnival poem. Robert held my hand, kissed my cheek, and we thought: Wow. Look what we’ve created. Hallelujah.

***

I am back in Portland. It is fresh and blue, and it smells sweet and wet and fertile. We watched the season turn at the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, and missed my flight to rush hour traffic and romance. We rolled around on Sweeney’s mother’s front lawn, ate dinner on the veranda. 

When we arrived at JFK yesterday, round two, an hour to spare, not only did I realize I didn’t know which airline I was taking, but also that we were supposed to be at LaGuardia instead. On my Top-Five Worst Behavior Ever list.

Bless his heart for being so cool.

Gathering speed, picking up slack: Last night the sky was bright violet, far after the sun went down, like a tornado warning. At The Karrot, Christian and I listen to ’90s Billboard Hits on Saturdays. The customers ask us if we’re happy. “You seem happy,” they say, and we digress about family, stand-up comedy, the first time we snuck out. A recap of the year: who knew this would happen? My voice has even changed, my tone, the way I say certain vowels and words that end in “s.” All I want now are simple things: tall glasses, good burgers, a desk, time to myself. Sweeney and I have been going through a weird Snickers phase: the craving comes every night, three hours after dinner.