This series features first drafts of poems found in my notebooks and journals that go back to the 1980s. Each poem in this series is accompanied by some notes—memoir, context, craft, etc. As you read, bear in mind that the text is a largely unedited draft lifted right out of a notebook—This series is more about process than perfection. Enjoy!
He tried to find the curative powers of the ocean. He lay on the sand and tried to find the curative powers in the ocean. He lay on the sand and tried to relax, to open himself to the ocean, to let the ocean heal him. He walked down the wooden steps to the beach, and as he walked towards the shore he prayed for the ocean to heal him. He walked down the wooden steps to the sand, and as he walked towards the shore he watched the numberless points of light dance on the corrugated surface of the ocean, and the sailboats drifting in the peaceful sun, which the few (soft) puffs and (gentle) wisps and (delicate) feathers of clouds did not obscure, and he prayed for the ocean to heal him. As he lay, the clouds thickened and blocked the sun, and the ocean changed from a brilliant sparkling sapphire to a dull, corrupt jade. And yet its dignity and integrity were not diminished. It merely presented a different face, but a face no less its own, no less true. Its breakers still rolled unassumingly to the shore, inviting and welcoming the children who played at its edge.
Notes
Wow. This one was quite a discovery. As you will read in the next edition of Poems Found in Notebooks, I consider my first non-juvenile / adult / “grown-ass” poem to have been written in December 1991 (when I was 30 years old). What appears to be a prose poem above was not—as far as I can recall—intended to be a poem. I’m not sure what I thought I was doing; but I think I may have been engaging in a little impromptu exercise where I started the same sentence again and again and tried to “ring changes” on it—as Merriam-Webster says, “to run through the range of possible variations,” or at least some of them. Whatever I was doing, this paragraph written in August 1989 looks and sounds and feels suspiciously like a poem—Don’t you think?
While I have not read Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1957 novel Jealousy since college, this whatever-it-is reminds me of that book, or at least of how I remember that book. To paraphrase an uncredited but, it seems to me, accurate description of that novel in a Wikipedia article, the third-person narrator, a jealous husband minutely surveilling his wife, continually replays his observations and suspicions to the extent that it becomes impossible to distinguish actual observation from mere suspicion.
It also makes me think somewhat of Rashomon, the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film, in which a number of characters recount the murder of a samurai in the forest, but none of their accounts match up. (It’s the basis of an indelible episode of All in the Family, in which Archie, Edith, Mike, and Gloria sit around a table having dinner at a restaurant as each recounts a vastly different version of the same disastrous encounter with a pair of refrigerator repairmen in the Bunker kitchen earlier that evening.)
And it makes me think, too, of what is probably the most—I’m going to use that word again—indelible passage—and I mean that only for me, I’m not claiming it for anyone else or for Literature Writ Large—in all of modern American fiction, the last three paragraphs of The Great Gatsby.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed to close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….and one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
☞☞☞Here comes the autobiographical stuff☞☞☞
At the time I wrote this, I was living with my 67 year old mom in the apartment where I grew up, in that Mars-colony-esque high-rise middle-income co-op complex in Coney Island. There had been an ugly falling out, the details of which I will not go into here, the result of which was that my mother and I agreed I needed to have my own apartment. She gave me the down payment for a studio in Brighton Towers, this fabulous pair of high-rise apartment buildings that I’d fantasized about living in since I was a child, because the one building abutted the boardwalk that I loved so much. The apartment I bought was in the other building, but I nevertheless had a balcony that overlooked the boardwalk, the beach, and the ocean—all of which were no more than about 100 feet from the lobby of the 1963 tower. It was heaven.
In addition to an apartment, I needed a job, and I got one, as an executive assistant at the Legal Action Center (LAC), a non-profit law firm at 153 Waverly Place in the West Village that was founded by the Vera Institute for Justice in 1973 to provide free legal services to ex-offenders with histories of drug conviction. Based on the demographics of its client base, LAC took a lead in providing legal services to people with HIV and AIDS, largely around issues of confidentiality and employment discrimination that overlapped with the issues this same population faced around their rap sheets.
It was truly God’s work, and I felt privileged to be there. I reported to the director, Peggy Brooks, and I mostly wrote grant proposals. I also edited a newsletter for donors that focused on the firm’s then-new policy office in Washington, DC, where they had a significant hand in drafting and lobbying for the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Ryan White CARE Act, both in 1990.
My work on those newsletters taught me a lot about those two pieces of legislation, both of which were critical to ensuring access to health care for people with HIV and AIDS. When I got fired from that job right around New Year’s 1991 (long story for another day), I took my six months of unemployment insurance and launched my freelance journalism career, writing primarily about HIV and AIDS for community newspapers, gay publications, and policy-oriented publications like City Limits, which dealt with housing issues in New York City, and for which I wrote articles about AIDS-related housing.
When I wasn’t doing AIDS-related freelance journalism, or working as an editorial freelancer (including fun times as an indexer for Collier’s Encyclopedia and a fact-checker for Collier’s Year Book, both at Macmillan Publishing Company at 866 Third Avenue), I wrote in my journal and my notebooks, took walks on the beach, and had lots of sex with men and boys I met on the boardwalk, under the boardwalk, or at sex clubs in the West Village (The Christopher Street Bookstore at the intersection of Christopher and Hudson Streets chief among them, until the historic Club 82 reopened in its sex-club incarnation as The Bijou on 82 E. 4th Street in 1992).
In other words, I became Beachcomber Mike.
As you can tell, there’s a full-on memoir brewing in these very same notebooks with my unearthed poems and stories. All in due time, Dear Subscribers, all in good time.
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