Quintin, our gray cat, went on an anabasis:

“Xenophon, the Greek writer, wrote the first anabasis. accompanied the Ten Thousand, a large army of Greek mercinaries hired by Cyrus the Younger, who intended to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II. Though Cyrus’s army was victorious at Cunaxa in Babylon (401 BC), Cyrus himself was killed in the battle, rendering the victory irrelevant and the expedition a failure.”

And thus the anabasis: having to come home. An anabasis is a journey outward and then home again. Quintin had been trying to escape for weeks, and one afternoon we all realized he’d been gone since the morning before. Our friend David Bernstein, who left for Amsterdam today for two seasons, and gave Chanelle a teepee he designed that she is living out of in the corner of the Gates Apartment common room, was having a going away dinner last night. We ate a mash of beans and pasta, a spinach salad, and the next door neighbor Carol who is a stone’s throw from Maude (of Harold) invited Chanelle, Sweeney and I into her herb garden and we shared cigarettes. She repeated herself a lot, certain words, phrases, hand gestures, and she used to be a photographer for the National Geographic.

Sweeney and I left before everyone else, kissing David goodbye. Outside our gate we hear a cat yowling from the rooftops. We yelled, “Quintin!”

The yowling continued, louder now.

“Quintin,” we tried again. And then we saw a tiny cat head peering down at us. The meows were loud enough to burst his furry chest, and when he saw it was us, frantic. With every call of his name the crying increased. Sweeney and I climbed to the fourth flight of stairs. Sweeney jumped onto the railing, and with a swift swipe of faith, had him by the scruff and passed him to me. Quintin, lost for four days and covered in tar.

Helen and Phillip the cats were disturbed by Quintin’s homecoming. It was a prodigal son moment. Helen hissed, and yowled at us, like, “Are you really going to let him come back?” She hissed and swiped, but after we gave him a bath they were sleeping in the closet bunk beds together again. Phillip, the youngest, slunk around and looked to everyone else for how he should feel about all of it.

Then we, us and all the cats, watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A Gates Avenue breakfast: Plain tuna fish on a piece of dry wheat toast. Zucchini fried in a pan on lat night’s porkchop Season-All grease. Old black tea in a filmy mug. There are some mornings that I wake up, not having any idea what to do with myself. It takes me a long time to leave the house. I stare at the wall, chewing the end of a bobby pin. This happens. Sometimes.

Sonic Youth was playing in Battery Park for free on the 4th of July, and we stood to the side and listened for a while before boarding the ferry. This happens. Sometimes. It’s the same childlike ambivalence that kept Diane DiPrima from getting pregnant as a young woman (Memoirs of a Beatnik.) It’s the same kind that landed me at a large, round dinner table with Bill Murry at Tavern on the Green. And then yesterday afternoon, Matthew invited me to a Laurie Anderson concert at the Lincoln Center, where it was whispered Lou Reed may appear. We bought the only two tickets left, maybe an hour before it started, for student prices even though Matthew had no proof. Where does this put us? We asked the proprieter. Right between Lou Reed’s legs, he said.

And we were. During Laurie’s shoegazing and orchestra, came a feathery old man, sunk jawed, and we were sitting six feet from the stage. Lou. Oh, Lou. He accompanied her in “Lost Art of Conversation,”and shuffled away. We were right between his ancient knees.

We watched Broadway go by from the 5th floor, and then noticed a crowd of people dancing in Columbus Circle. We descended to street level for investigation, found a boom box and people who meet every Thursday to Tango. We removed our shoes and joined, dancing, and as the evening grew later, almost midnite, the feet had multiplied, and the Tango roared on as taxis and limos seared the dark.

I am learning: hard work does not earn days off. You look away for two minutes, and weeks go by. Be generous and discerning in your leisure. Be constant in your vision.

(Somewhere just outside of Baltimore, Lily Herman is saying, “Stop tellin’ me what to do, Adrian.”)

During the week that Chanelle and I were setting up Poem Shop near the Bethesda Fountain and by the handball courts in Thomkins Square Park, we met a man named Moon who taught us a term called, ‘aspecting.’

“It’s everywhere,” he said. “It’s why men should eat cucumbers. It’s why your last name is Shirk. It’s why one so often sees somebody on the street who looks like an old friend shortly before actually running into the old friend. My bike is locked up on Second and Fourth Street; I wandered here because of the rainbow and found you two.”

“What rainbow?” I said.

He grinned.

‘Aspecting,’ then, seems to be the belief in worldly symbols with literal signifiers. Aspects of objects and words correlating to prophecy or truth. When we were in middle school, we used to call them ‘glitches.’ A glitch was similarly serendipitous (having thoughts verbalized by register clerks, certain models of cars appearances, certain paper products etc…), it’s name denoting a kind of mistake, something the common person was not supposed to have seen. Though a ‘glitch’ is a single event, past-tense, whereas it seems ‘aspecting’ is all the time: life as a rebus game.

This man Moon spoke Northwest language, Aho, energy, Alex Gray, spirit, which I’ve never come in contact with in such full force in New York. It was liberating, this blend of elevated spiritual speak and the warm stench reckless spill splat elegant monster dance of the city. I felt like I could be myself in both worlds, wholly. He said, “The presence of serendipity lets you know that you’re close to the source.”

The Correspondence release at the KGB Bar was swift. The room was hazy, like a speakeasy. Greg made up intros on the spot, speaking to each reader’s secret sensibilities: he got them, all. Dave read a new monologue from the podium next to the tap. Sweeney’s dad grabbed the mic when all was done and said, “If I could do it over again, I would do it like you guys.”

Now Sweeney’s parents are duking out divorce terms, restraint orders, and the two of us, and Dave, drove through the wet, green Northeast coastal range talking about how divorce must make people do crazy things. We drove through Delaware, small verdant towns, and cornfields, and miles of arched trees strangled by the Kudzo vine: I thought maybe it’s not that the land is alive in summer, and so therefore pretty; or that it’s dead in the winter, and so therefore ugly; maybe in the winter we are too slumped to see pretty things, just can’t, and it’s not the season’s doing but our own; the individual’s.

Like how we blame a poor economy for a nation’s low morale. Like how we blame gentrification for the inordinate amount of daytime baseball bat muggings in Bed-Stuy as of late. Like how we blame divorce for our parents’ poor behavior.

We visited Lily in Baltimore and it was very hot in her attic apartment. Lest I say she was smoking a Camel Light when we arrived, just after I’d finished relaying her Get-Rich-Quick quitting smoking story to Dave. I said to her on a firefly walk, “Maybe you don’t need to go back to Brooklyn; I know I want to be there for its aggressive affection, but maybe you already have that here.” We sat on a boat tow and listened to the cicadas, Sweeney, Dave, Lily, and I drinking Bud and talking all night. We cooked spinach and mushrooms, pine nut coos coos and chicken legs. In the morning we made coffee in a Costa Rican coffee sock.

In Cape May, Sweeney and I sat on the beach and ate sandwiches, Arizona Iced Teas in juice boxes, ice cream in sugar cones every night and we were Brooklyn green next to Jersey tan, half-bathing suits and snaggle-toothed, trying to keep up on Latin studies. Long drives, talks about decades, men who can’t grow up, World War II, St. Paul, the ways in which we’ve changed. Double-Stuf Oreos. We watched movies, Braveheart, Goodfellas, and had big dinners with his cousins and siblings. He said, “I think my family has mistaken ‘good table conversation’ with ’spectacle.’” I said, “I think most families have, and so let’s not.” I ate lobster one night; I can’t imagine what kind of marine predator can chew that dinosaur. But what sweet, tender pulp inside. What meat!

Sweeney gave me a single driving lesson in a wide empty lot on a big empty compound somewhere upstate. A stick-shift. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, I wasn’t afraid at all.

Something I forgot I knew about New York summers: fireflies. As soon as the sun goes down. Everyone is used to them except for me.  Somehow it doesn’t phase them, the fluorescence of a tiny, magic bug that seems simply to be flying about, for reasons outside of survival. They’re not eating, hanging around toilets or garbage cans; they’re not biting you or your cats; they’re just flying,  illuminating your back patio, sharing their turgid Christmas light. I saw them first in Staten Island, at Dennis’ house, two nights after I got back. They were hovering under the street lamps. Shrieking and pointing, everyone sort of laughed at me. It may have been like a transplant on the West Coast making a big to-do about Doug Firs. Sweeney said, “Everyone on this side of the country spends their first ten summers collecting them in jars; you’ve got some catching up to do I guess.” They make the East a mystical place. In the dark recesses of Bed-Stuy, leaky garbage et al. the glowing bugs show up, like fairies, every night, hovering around the heads of drug lords and hipsters and babies alike. Animals are like that here, maybe: I’m in Cape May right now, on the Jersey shore, and the dolphins come right up to the sand to play.

News & things from The Corresponding Society;

Many of us involved in The Poem Shop have collaborated on a publication called Correspondence, whose first issue comes out this Tuesday, July 15^th. We would like to invite you to join us at The Corresponding Society’s inaugural reading and release party, that evening at 7:00 PM at the KGB Literary Bar (85 East 4th Street, NYC 10003) for poetry and double-whiskeys.

The Corresponding Society is a collection of close-knit writers, generally located in the New York City area, but extending from Paris to San Francisco to the Midwest-galore. Ringlead by a virile band of young artists from a cellar apartment in Bed-Stuy, we come to you earnest & doe eyed: This first issue is a 180-page anthology featuring work from 20 writers, including poetry, short story, dramatic works, and essays.

To purchase a copy of Correspondence No. 1 ($8), contact us at, thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com.

Sat on a bucket at 3:30 a.m. eating a hot pastrami sandwich with Matthew, and an Australian girl comes by in a gold studded tunic, sloshed and all smiles, looking for someone to talk to.

“I’ve heard things about New York City,” she said, “about young girls, and New York City. Can I sit with you a minute; would that be alright?”

And I’m drained at that moment. Matthew and I were hired to bring Poem Shop to a whirling-dirvish New Age rave in SoHo: blacklights and glowing gardens growing up the walls; music and tarot readings and two giant gongs that rattled to climaxes every few minutes. Was exhausted by the way people talked to me, leeched, argued about whether or not they should go to a Hindu priest. James Trimarco, though, took some mushrooms and sat in a corner: “The way I got out West was this. We were all drug addicts in Chicago, and I wanted to get away. So I went home to Florida and got in a car with two of my friends, and we drove really, really slow down Highway 10, until we got to California. It took three or four months.”

And I imagined all the people who’ve been whisked away this way, broken in the backseat under a blanket, trying to see things again.

The Austrailian girl looks at me, says, “You’re buggered, aren’t you?”

I sat, on the abandoned tracks of the JMZ, waiting to get back to my place in Bushwick. Every time the trains barrel past, I almost weep. Especially the ones that fly through center tracks and don’t stop. There is something about the tradition of it, this old system, so enormous and loud and esoteric, built out of survival to get the people from here to there. It just keeps going and going, disappearing into the black tunnels, and you can feel it like some kind of mythical beast every time it rumbles towards you. It’s like the way I felt the first time I saw a Lakota Sundance ceremony: people pierce to a tree, close to the source, dancing, hungry, like they have for thousands of years. It’s the witness that makes me kowtow, the practice and the ceremony over slogans and piety. Walt Whitman said, “Before one is a writer, he must understand at least the tip of his Nation’s spirit,” and it’s this understanding, if only for a flash, that makes my knees weak.

[By nation, he could simply mean “roots,” or “family.”]

I got home, played with the cats, Ruby and Agnes. They curled up in my shoes and on my pillow as the sun came up. I slept with the fan facing my bed, and woke up to a great summer wind in the morning.

Across the street from Pratt is a pizza place run by three aging Italian men, whose business is mostly conducted from a wide window that faces the sidewalk. While spinning crusts on their palms, and tying garlic dough into knots, they ask what you want. Whaddyawant? On our way to the library this morning, Sweeney ran into the bodega next door to grab some Drum, and set his computer and his copy of Being and Time on top of the garbage can in front of the pizza place. One of the Italian guys yelled to me from the window in a thick Brooklyn accent: “Martin Heidegger!” he said. “That’s ma’ man! Being in Time; that’s what its all about!”

I laughed. And he insisted, “Yeah, yeah! Heidegger. You know what someone said to him once? ‘Isn’t it a shame that no one’s been able to gather proof of the Outside World?’ and you know how Heidegger responded? ‘It’s a shame that anyone should.’”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think that’s what the whole book is about.”

He nodded indistinctly and said, “You should read Husserl. Edmund Husserl. He started it all; called ‘phenomenology.’”

He went back to his pizza dough. I watched. Sweeney returned and scooped up his things. We said goodbye. It was this beautiful morning, coastal skies and drowsy sunlight. I recounted the man’s words to Sweeney, and he said, “Husserl was Heidegger’s teacher. He actually dedicated Being and Time to him. But that was before World War II, when he turned Husserl over to the Nazis because he was a Jew.”

I arrived in New York sun burnt, congested. My sty exploded a half-hour before I got on my plane and my sister said it was because I knew I “was going home.” In the parking garage, Sweeney told me I looked frazzled but. I. just. wanted. to. get. back. To land, to crash, almost there: hot and early on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. We fell into late morning slumber, my skin purple from the burn and heating everything around me like a giant ember. I awoke at one o’clock in the afternoon, went to The Karrot, and arranged the groceries, drank a smoothie, had a shot of wheat grass. I went past the boys working at the barbershop next door and they waved, like always, as though I’d never left. My allergies lifted, never to return. I slept like a baby animal the rest of the day.

And everyone came home at once. Greg bowed in from Paris that night, and slept on their kitchen floor for a week. Chanelle showed up in a black lace dress. Friends kept arriving: Carey, Dennis, Dave from St. Andrews. Robi met a young Belgian couple while doing Poem Shop in Tompkins Square Park, and invited them home. They stayed with us until Saturday. Yves and Lorin: knee-length dreads, deep voices, short-shorts, humored, weathered, fearful of the Appalachians and on their way to Alaska to catch wild salmon. We gathered on the stone patio, five chairs around an ironing board and a case of beer. Every night the creatures came out: stringy black ones, squiggly inch worms, centipedes with long bodies and one hundred legs shooting from their thorax used to undulate up the wall.

Sweeney and I sat on their private case of wrought-iron steps one night and saw the shadow, like Godzilla, of a daddy long-leg and one of these centipedes fighting in the moonlight.

Robi read from his new project, The Poverty Book, at the Lucky Cat Lounge, along with William Chrome and a sad Slavic man who read his Troubador poetry in a fine silk suit. A few days later he set off across the country with Jody: Thermals, boots, Whitman and a hobosack. I went to PS 1, an annex of the MoMa in Queens, for Arctic Hysteria: New Art from Finland: robots, silent films, lassos, wide charcoal drawings of infantile fat ladies wearing diapers, playing with dolls. Chanelle and I found each other by chance in a dark corner of one of the galleries. It’s a contemporary art museum in a seriously old school building, old stairwells and glass-door classrooms. We told stories and ate Dominican torte, talked about alfalfa and cities and head-over-heels. She said, “This is city is like a mother, a nursing mother, full of friendly bodies and friendly beds.”

Oh this hot shit balmy thick city. Since the Gates boys have moved into the cellar, the nights are cool, moderate. We stayed up all night writing one night when the Belgians were still around. Like a final breath, Robi wrote one line and turned out the lights, curled up on the couch and all the beds were taken: the cool, blue dawn light swept over all of my friends’ slumbering faces. It felt like a family, like we were all children or all parents.

Sweeney and I spend some afternoons working: reading, working on pieces, learning French. He’s started Latin and I find him under trees, reading. We rolled down the rapids in the Croatan River a few days ago; just our bodies and the rocks. We took Chanelle and Dave up to the mad cabin in the Catskills and read by candlelight for a few days, picked through treasures, slept in haunted beds. And now Chanelle has decided to move to Brooklyn, finally. “Everything is happening at the same time,” she says. “And when you try to use words to describe this feeling, everything that comes out is only a watered-down version of the truth.”

I just finished To the Lighthouse by Mrs. Virginia W. I would love to be her granddaughter. Like Chanelle, she said, “It was a miserable machine, an insufficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on (287).” Am also reading Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russel, The Spoon River Anthology, The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and The Great Divorce by ye olde brilliant moralist, C.S.

My burn gave way to a bronze. Cooked on grills. A reading, read. Befriended an alley cat. Went to Staten Island by ferry, twice in two weeks, for pulled pork and corn on the cob: this Italian-Irish family that throws parties, makes food, buys a box of coffee and lies to the guests, telling them it’s decaf because they don’t want to actually bother having all of that decaf left over in the morning. They wink. My little tree-house room at Tiffany’s goes on without me, except for the teenage cats that sit on my folded clothes. Tiffany makes smoothies and approaches the world without expectation or demand, smoothly, kitten-eyed. But sometimes, by my insistence, Sweeney and I make our way to my place, on the J train, debating whether or not one should be attached to their things, to a home. “I’ve always made sure to have everything I’d need for at least a week, on my back at all times,” he says motioning to his pack, “So home can be anywhere for me,” and I cannot decide what my stance is–

Robi got everyone in on The Poem Shop. Started by a man called William Chrome, so it has spread: we sit on street corners in Manhattan, typewriter on a milkcrate and a sign that advertises, Poems. Lovers, passers, tourists, teachers, bed-wetters walk by and give a word, a theme, a person, and the poet writes accordingly. We get anything from five to twenty dollars a pop. People have quit their dayjobs. For milkcrates. Making enough money from this to buy groceries and pay rent. We can use the things we write as drafts or continuations of current work. Or we can write slobbery serenades for homesick husbands. I worked for two and half hours the other day and made seventy bucks.

photo: Christopher Dickey, American Byways

You can find us at www.poemshopnyc.com