XIV
We live in multiple tenses at once.
Out of time yet hopelessly tied to it.
Like a damsel to the train tracks.
If you rebuild a city
stone by stone, moment by moment,
is it still the same city?
Je te veux whispers Satie to the errant pianoforte.
Lace-cloaked threats, peacocked cajolements.
The century turns before the mirror.
The past hundred years
have dulled and blackened the glass
but don’t worry,
it will be clear as crystal
at the stroke of midnight,
wiped clean by unseen hands.
One is bound to feel a certain patriotism
toward one’s native historical moment, to defend it
against the invading future,
the annihilating past,
against rival presents.
Thankless work.
LXI
Once I was in Auschwitz.
This time next year the Eiffel Tower will have been built.
Right now it’s just scaffolding,
a black skeleton above the Seine.
Once I crashed a Cadillac on Sunset Boulevard, high on peyote.
I’ll get a sex change as soon as they invent it.
Once I had a homosexual affair with Al Pacino.
Soon someone will invent the word homosexual—
not me, of course, but someone.
Once I lost an eye in a duel.
Jews don’t fight duels, they told me.
Movies with sound are another thing that hasn’t been invented yet
but I’ve been in several. Will have been.
VI
When I first read the script for this episode,
I admit I was confused.
The timeline made no sense to me.
Eschew abstraction was what they’d always told me
back in Moscow. Identify the real things,
the real reason you burst into tears
at the same time your character does,
the real fire that singes the hem of your dress.
I cling to real things.
Tomatoes in a wooden bowl.
The softness of linen on skin.
Hairpins, pearls, combs, paints
scattered on the dresser at which I sit
silently before my reflection
accepting her dispassionate judgment
her scrutiny of jawline brow ridge clavicle
trying to become the real thing.
XXVIII
Time passes
credits roll
a train explodes into darkness
the moviegoers are desperate to get on board
but they’ve all got the wrong tickets.
Sometimes the damsel falls for the scoundrel
who tied her to the tracks.
We are shooting a documentary, a period piece,
playing versions of ourselves we’ve never met
except in history books or prophecies.
Film reels stitched together.
The republic of slow clocks
borders the kingdom of fast clocks
and in between them is the neutral demilitarized zone
of stopped clocks.
Time telescopes.
You’re looking through it from the wrong end.