Something Solid: Aughts Philly: The Wilderness Sequence
Crowned
The routine social maintenance
of our domain— another drunken night at McGlinchey’s,
eyes & ears to the ground as usual, broken
then only by your arrival. It must’ve been Nick
who met you first, I don’t remember, but I saw you
were fixated on him. Hannah: novelist,
politico, of course, but looks which teetered ambiguously into
divisiveness for those who knew you— heavy brows, wavy
hair, tall, a bit tomboyish, also, but
articulate, a charmer, & yet I registered the sense that if I
ever got you, it would be something gratuitous, a
surprise, because closed seemed to be the fortress,
& choosing Nick seemed to betray a masochistic streak.
That night, his front swelled visibly with your
arrival— I stepped back.
You were, must’ve been, I later
realized, underwater somehow, surveying currents,
examining the wildlife, surreptitiously & invisibly
carving a watery path to me. I had only what the male of the
species always has— the equipment to complete your
circuitry, potent or impotent in any time or
context, waiting latent to take our moment, make it
crescendo through the reef, weed, rock, as though destined,
written into ocean’s records an eternity ago, when
all life dwelt in the ocean, all encounters occurred in
resplendent semi-darkness. And all this still sitting with
the gang at the Glinch, holding your own with a bunch
of macho punks, who were taking something in
Philadelphia by force, me selected silently, the tomboy
an Ocean Queen, crowned—
Undulant
I’d made plans to meet you in Bar Noir on 18th; you
were there; we drank. What happened after that, in the Logan Square flat, is that in defrocking you
knocked over an antique lamp bequeathed to me by my aunt in Mahopac. Serendipity, I
thought, stunned then into silence by your
bedroom élan. Outside, a sultry night
simmered; this night of all nights, scattered green
glass littered my bedroom floor, & I finally got
taken, past liquor,
to what eternity was only in your mouth— as though you’d jumped from a forest
scene (ferns, redwoods), a world of pagan
magic, into a scene still undulant with possibilities—
Denouement Of all possible resolutions, I
remained innocent, transfixed by your sexual
power. I naively hoped we’d hook up again, bolstered
by soul material which took you seriously as
sister & lover. As I unveiled the public highlight
of our Mid-Aughts run (actual press attention,
significant amounts of money involved), I was undone
that you’d already latched onto another, not
against any grains of what we’d established, which
was just cacophonous frenzy, heavenly but inchoate,
but still painful as I swam some very worldly waters,
sleazed & slimed. Was it even you anymore? You
took the podium, began your screed: here’s what
Philadelphia could be. For me, we’d already realized
an ideal Philly, limpidly set as an expression of the
ecstatic, in an enchanted grove in Logan Square. The
night proceeded from act to act— our enemies were
taken aback— I now had an economy of big-boy
curating entanglements. I knew that place— the wrong
kind of underwater, piranhas hungrily looking for
what might be real to tear it to shreds, offal
everywhere— was not for me, just as (to be stern) you were
not for me either. All the politico moves were about
barnstorming fortresses set against you, ravishing them
through pure force majeure. You were pure
angel/demon, Hannah. I’d have to retreat to the back of
your consciousness— an old conquest, not especially
vaunted, burrowing down into holes to find reality,
missing the beauty of unreality’s dance—
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