Happy Birthday Meghan!

Happy birthday wishes to my dearest Meghan Gordon - my best friend, creative compatriot, emotional soundingboard, a most-impressive visual artist, and this year’s youngest artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Meg, I miss you more than most anything.

For Meghan, On Your 22nd Birthday

Long before we learned that art starves, we wanted a world
where they hungered for us. How long, my dear, since that summer by the lakeshore?

Before we loosed our heads from long hair, unlined our eyelids, learned
how to move these awkward, animal bodies. Now you are autumn at the ocean.

Dipping in the bay at night, salt stings your eyes. Somewhere
in the landlocked distance, chimney swifts thicken the twilight like darkened dust motes

and I cannot show you. I am still not used to this.
Toughened by distant time zones, we rarely meet in town or tillage

but couple in pain and in practice.
How lucky to have even one lone escort through this heavy life, and yet –

Once, where I live, I gathered objects – bent photographs, books
of Wittgenstein and Bidart, the t-shirt with your baby picture on it – things dear to us both.

I thought how many sick years now we’ve lived like this?
Alone with my pile of stuff I worry you are simply an idea. From an opened envelope,

“Nothing is perfect now, but I love you.”
And you say you’ve forgotten how to write. O, sister of mine.

How many times I have dreamt for us a life without letters –
have scorned postage, ink, and even paper. Then again, in our feeble, faded pages,

how many times I’ve found my lost self in your charcoal marks,
and you, my heroine, hidden in my manuscripts.

Aside from Meghan’s birthday, other things I am currently into include:

- Seeing poet Albert Goldbarth read (and sing!) at Converse on Tuesday night
- The Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin
- Right Livelihoods: 3 Novellas by Rick Moody
- Autumn vegetables: squash, beets, kale, etc.
- Oxford American’s 2007 Music Issue and accompanying CD (which includes a rockabilly track from Sparkle City natives Joe Bennett & The Sparkletones)
- Purchasing In Rainbows, the new Radiohead album (which is pretty beautiful, by the way), for the price of “It’s up to you. No really it’s up to you.”
- Streaming NPR’s All Songs Considered
- Skype (free international internet phone calls!)
- Planning a backpacking trip on the 200-mile, mountainous John Muir trail with Edward, hopefully in 2009 when he GETS BACK FROM UKRAINE ALREADY!

“I think I am bored with being hip. I think my new thing will be standing on top of stuff.”
– Edward Decker