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  • Which Is to Say, and: This Life
  • David Graham (bio)

Which Is to Say

I’m nostalgic for my thirties, which is to say, it’s all a little fuzz-edged now, where we lived, how it felt, what we said to our thirty-something pals at those long parties we’d throw, everyone all glistening, getting gin-and-tonic’d out on the unburned lawn, maybe some sweaty volleyball or Frisbee, for we were quite young, which is to say, we felt old. We’d stock each other’s fridges with Carlo Rossi and Old Milwaukee. We’d live on nuts and chips. Sure, we’d wake all cottony and throbbing, but that was a sign of intensity. Our bones were strong. Which is to say, they were not. We maybe guzzled too much too often for clearly remembering how great it was to be thirty-something, with, yes, the yearning urgent flesh, and of course some major flirtation, not all of it harmless. Which is to say, there were long, loud, torn-scab breakups, there was shrieking in [End Page 95] backseats and bedrooms, which is to say, we mostly lost one half of each breaking-up couple, you had to choose, you needed to say wise and sympathetic things, but only to her, or only to him. You had to vote. And once you’ve sat handing tissues to a grown man who hasn’t left your sofa for ten days straight, and heard of every kinky regrettable thing, well, you get a bit weary, which is to say, you remember all this imperfectly at best, this rosy amorphous feeling now being a vast oversimplification based on the inscrutable holy mystery of time, and yes, perhaps a tad more vodka than was strictly helpful. So those were not simpler times, not happier, they were just twenty-something years ago, which is to say, precious as any lost gem or bent key. [End Page 96]

This Life

Somewhere in daydreamery I’m pedaling my furious bike down a street that isn’t as steep as I think it is, pedaling toward nothing as big or fascinating as I hope it might be, and don’t you dare smile at that, or understand. I don’t yet fathom it myself, see? And I was there. The grit of last winter’s road sand washes down in April rains, forms street-corner deltas for a boy to sideswipe at full tilt, then wipe out spectacularly. What he was pedaling toward turns out to involve a hip cast, bandages, and lots of morphine. Bad caseof road rash, he’ll call it in his later, cool phase, but then it was apocalypse now, bombs reducing daydream-land to smoking rubble. There is no self-pity like his. Or maybe there is, but he’ll never know, locked as he is in his cowboy bedroom with Get Wells tacked to the cork board and a mess of comic books splashed across the bedclothes. [End Page 97] He’ll remember it all, but vaguely, quite possibly wrongly, those being the days before sex, before Thoreau, before roach clips, before Hendrix and The Doors of Perception creaking wide. Long before his glee that Hot Tuna is really Hot Shit, and that Steely Dan’s a dildo. It was all quite previous and hitherto, yet also shifty as to tense, as you’ve seen: akin to dream or daydream in that regard, yet otherwise brutal and gritty as no dream can be, this ongoing vanishment, this once-only show, this life.

David Graham

David Graham is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Stutter Monk (Flume P), and an essay anthology coedited with Kate Sontag, After Confessions: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf P).

“If literature is news that stays news, what will remain of the Boomer generation, after all the dust settles, are the aches, complaints, joys, hopes, vanities, and uncertainties of any generation. I don’t think we’re special at all, just numerous.”

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