Being Here
“Be here now,”
My friend tells me on her way to yoga class,
sipping green tea.
And I wonder if she knows just what I’m up against,
How many places other than here I am,
How many times other than the present
are demanding my attention,
engaged in furious battles,
issuing a rousing call-to-arms.
How even as she speaks in her serene,
first-grade-teacher voice,
trumpets are blaring,
summoning every neuron in my head
into that unreal, unraveling future,
into the what ifs and possibilities,
inevitabilities and just missed-
almost-might-have-been-sliding-door
alternate realities.
And how at the same time, bagpipes are
pulling me backward,
toward Gatsby’s green light,
Faulkner’s red and dying evening,
Foucault and his labyrinth:
everything we already–so many years ago–never meant to leave behind.
How I am no match for that unruly past,
the one that, like the engulfing sun from
a 1970s NOVA special, will one day
grow tired of having given so much, for so long,
and swallow up those ungrateful orbiting bodies,
in a splendid, brutal swan song,
a supernova blast of gravitational collapse,
and then, finally, that longed-for quiet air.
How there is a jittery, flailing creature inside,
clumsily chasing memories with a fly swatter,
succeeding only in keeping them airborne
and constantly in the way.
Memories at once microscopically precise:
(the smell of crushed blackberries, a homemade
lily-of-the-valley bouquet, the lonely sound of a departing train),
and other times a maddening optical illusion:
I tilt my head to get a better view,
and they slip off,
then taunt me again,
like children who want to be chased in a night-time game of tag,
but who are older now, and run too fast.
All the while over the horn section,
a stubborn voice is holding forth
in patient recitation:
what happened last year at exactly this time,
three years ago or ten.
(“Can you believe we were just now arriving on West 87th?”)
And another one, shrill and stuttering,
panicking over the buildup of birthdays and New Years,
endings to eras that were themselves already too late.
The keeper of that shrill voice has a ruler
she keeps slapping against the desk,
Sternly counting the overlap, the around, and in between
giving me only a second as I pull down the shade
to think how strange it is
that Grandma and her great grandson were
on the planet at the same time for only five months,
before a reedy, listing pastor
bemoans the falling apart by degrees,
and an overdressed soprano—makeup already starting to run—
belts out Olympian nostalgia.
Here comes a friendly, nondescript neighbor,
marveling in the prosaic as he shuts his car door,
“I can’t believe I get home from work
now and it’s still light out.”
Well,
of course.
That happens every year.
(No need to mention the tilt of the earth,
the rotation around that resentful sun.)
That has happened every year now for…thirty-three years.
Haven’t you gotten used to it?
Thirty-three years, the ruler is whacking,
three years older now
than my grandfather’s age when he died,
Keats, Morrison, so many others,
already long dead.
Stop wallowing in that.
Be here now.
Listen to that gentle voice,
one suited for vespers,
or to murmuring lullabies from across the yard.
That voice is noticing the scenery,
tasting the hint of lemon
in the Blue Sky Vineyard wine—
And that is what I miss most about my dog,
(besides the pressed-up, warm little body snuggled under the covers,
or the ice cold, iron dark, we-are-the-only-two-creatures-alive
midnight walks along the edge of Prospect Park)—
The endless, unflinching, be here now of her life.
Dogs are Buddhists, without green tea or lotus positions.
She was here then, equally happy to come in or go out,
take a nap or take a walk,
for five years pulling hard against
the leash every time;
not “tomorrow we will run faster”, but today.
Maybe it’s okay to be here now,
thinking of her there then.
And to picture myself catching my breath behind her,
Maybe we are both still there,
In the space of the until already behind us.
