1/8/2003, St. Francis

so you too have vanished at last, i write these letters in vain, on cigarette paper. you have vanished into the underworld, all of this is going up in smoke has always been going up in smoke.

or else it was i who passed the mouths of cerberus. when? at the passing of a certain strain of music, at the sight of the Andes or the muddy Isar, in some lust feverishly transformed? death somehow has learned my name and i am become a creature of ephemera, my brain rewired by music, smoke, flight. gifts from the not yet dead, metaphysical horses spun out like thread, rapunzel’s hair.

yet i just saw you in Portland. everything was nearly the same, the streets were mostly in the same places, the same shops were open, the women were beautiful, quirky, and independent. i bought two bags of tea from the Tao of Tea, as i have done every time i come there, and we went to the same coffee shop we go to every time. you live in the same house and work at the same job. i could not tell you this because i did not have the words for it, i could not place the sensation, until i returned to a place even dearer to my heart than Portland and found myself just as absent.

yes: that is the word i did not know: absent. dead, gone, vanished. nothing in the physical world seems to change; the only acceptable conclusion is that i am living in my memories, in insubstantial echoes of reality. a ghost. little by little the world becomes inaccessible to me. i remember people and can’t find them, either in my messy records of my life or on the internet. today it was Nora, a student in the ecology lab i taught, who caught me one wet morning writing a poem on a scrap of paper. something about the silent and confusing glances of nature. she was inarguably one of the most beautiful women i have met, eyes dark and tragic, and a forest of leaf-brown hair she tied in a ponytail in order, i must assume, to veil its beauty. will anything recover that moment of half-felt nakedness, will anything recover her eyes? only i, i alone muttering here in darkness, in love with the past, and i cannot find her.

an ocean of ghosts maintains our beauty. we will never cease to be what we were.

perhaps you do not write because i continually descend into these useless personal tautologies. what does Nora mean to you? my language is failing me; ir runs in these circles, and no quantity of portuguese can rescue me from this habit of giving verbs private meanings, of using proper nouns to represent concepts that I am either too lazy or too incompentant to express properly. but what can i tell you about my life? i wait, continue to wait, i can think of nothing better to do most of the time than smoke another cigarette. my only friend is the woman who made my false papers, a creature with no identity of her own. she has a guitar which i have been teaching her in exchange for meals and a place to stay every once in a while. we go to concerts and then walk around from streetlamp to streetlamp. i am unable to find anything in her that dissatisfies me though we refuse to talk about love. perhaps we are beyond it, two ghosts sharing memory of a single place, old lovers whose dreams at last have merged.

Ignore this nonsense. I hope you are well, and once i have worked all this mad blood out of my veins i will take a job and find a place to stay, and then you must visit.

johnny