Do Over
When you move, dark bits of your life are shaken into light. A Polaroid, receipts from a place you’ve “never been,” a marble— the midnight attic of your choices. Such labels sink me like a stone so I drive away with you to “work on our relationship” as naked as the law allows. Still, the spiral narrows deeper in flaying me of adjectives. Being not myself confers strange powers, only a couple of which I ever discern. But I can see at night. That’s one. All that is created can be barely understood. They say the big bang happened when the devil told God to go fuck Himself. Be that as it may, I need to find a fiction we can agree on. This bridge, this lonely crossing that I build for us. You can’t leave home unless you have one. And if your home is assembled poorly, you will be defined by what clings to you in your worst moments: your anger your anchor. It’s freezing on the Avenue of the Giants. The lightness I thought would free me does no such thing. Only desire returns me to a semblance, only desire, like a tab of ecstasy, stamps a smiley face on oblivion. I worry your skin like a rosary. Momentarily, even the seals make sense and are in tune. They sing: “As you learn, you teach.” The past suddenly seems rife with possibility. In the future, I shall let my wordless heart do all the talking. On the drive home, I record the new names— Arcadia, Eureka, Ukiah, and I remember riding the LIRR when I was a kid, hearing the magical spells chanted by the conductor— Montauk, Patchogue, Massapequa— And when the train sometimes slowed, I imagined jumping off unseen between stations and walking into these strange towns, leaving my parents behind, a ten-year-old city boy knocking on a Long Island door, saying, “I am a citizen of the world, take me, rename me; I’ll mow the lawn, do the dishes, wear the hand-me-downs, whatever.” As each second passed, geography would change my fate. Every moment brought new towns, new families. New lives. Those were the days. But I never did step off. No, I don’t think I ever did.
first published in About Time: Poems (Akashic Books, 2025)
Read our interview with Poet of the Week, David Duchovny, wherein he discusses writing beyond words, humor as survival, and the strange logic of mystery. About this, he says:
“…something feels like a poem when there’s a mystery there. A spiritual mystery. Something feels like a story when there’s a plot mystery. Something feels like a song when there’s a melodic mystery.”
Wow, this poem is so full. You get a sense of the dislocation and how it reverberates back to childhood. This is so hard to do in a poem that is imagistic, suggestive, not filling in the blanks as prose would, but certainly filling in the feeling. I've learned from it.
The way the last line repeats yet modifies the previous line makes the whole thing cohere.