Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities

Carlisle

Carlisle Because what I think is that this tender beast, brown-skinned animal grotesque and lustful, is me and my immortal soul besides. In Carlisle I have two writing desks on opposite sides of the room, one the pecan-wood desk with the nicks on the thin legs, the deer legs. The other the butler-desk with grill-covered bookshelves built into the sides. Both of these I bought with money from my first real job when I moved north of the city to Rhinebeck. A part of the story I haven’t gotten to yet. Though it was already years ago. Always in the broken story there is more to tell. Mornings I rise in the cold and walk two blocks down to the old colonial graveyard to read history in the broken stones, names sometimes worn away, the stories of first wives, second wives, dead infants and unmarked whose. In this way read the history of the place. The history of any place for me is simple: a route between my home on South Bedford Street, across the main intersection to the coffee shop on the corner of Pitt and High Street. The other compass points are the independent bookstore, the used bookstore, a house on Hanover Street where Marianne Moore lived, and a strange park that was once a graveyard. On the north side of town, a place where the land was broken and bones disturbed. 8 | Details on the display plaques in that park are sketchy and will lead me into shadowed places—the town records, rooms I’ve never been. But I don’t discover this small park near the railroad tracks with its distressing history until I’ve lived in the town more than seven months. In the body of a tree I hear a resonance. While out in space between planets lie cores of planets. An iron fence grows through the heart of the tree; I pass it every day in the morning when I walk. You were saying something. You hardly pass a night that winter without sneaking out into the hallway and turning the thermostat up four or five degrees. Eating baked beans out of a can with couscous for dinner nearly every night. Not because you live alone or don’t have the time to take care of yourself better. But because you like the taste of it. What I learned is that each asteroid is held in careful place by a partner in space. If such a body didn’t exist the orbital patterns of these same can be extrapolated graphically. A discovery which pleases me almost as much as when I learned that every cubic equation actually has an associated modular form. But is the reverse true. And what has all this to do with. Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Once a frontier town. But constructed at the frontier with specific intent. | 9 To push the boundaries of the state out to Cumberland Pass. I wrote an autobiography once in letters. To someone. In which I found myself unable to actually say anything so I tried saying it in two or three or four different versions. Eventually leaving all the various versions in. Called it The Historical Need for Music. Or was that Hysterical Need. Repeating the chapters in different variations so I could speak out of both sides of my mouth, not because I wanted to evade but because I didn’t know what really happened. The County Jail, gothic, redstone, still stands at the corner of Bedford and High Streets, though is offices now, the insides completely refurbished with industrial grey carpeting, drop ceilings, and fluorescent lights. You have to squint at it to be fearful, though death it still tells—a white man crushed in riots when he tried to sue for the return of two of his slaves that had escaped north. Needing to check whether or not he won his case. The question of “law” vs. “morality” being what interests me. To live in a frontier town at any rate or a town that was built on what was supposed to be the frontier. Later all the promises were broken and the settlements spread into the territories. It’s always the broken that holds the universe in place. That’s what I would say about poetry and prayer. That god or audience—the intended direction of both of those— we wish and wish are...