Riff on September 27

9 a.m. and thinking I had been awake some hours ago, but that wasn’t right, I had simply been thinking about lines about lions for hours, right before sleeping and just beneath waking - so I rose, like a lion I thought, lionlike, and I yawned a big-cat yawn and sat down at my desk in a pair of boots and a tawny sweater, lion-colored, and wrote my poem and was very late to class. It wasn’t quite the assignment either – DO NOT BEGIN WITH AN IDEA AND GIVE IT FUR OR WINGS – but I toasted my pumpernickel bagel proudly anyhow and thought well doesn't everything begin with an idea and listened to stories about communists in cold places and then an economist shouted at me and a lot of other people about unknowns and relationships, so I headed to a bookstore in the rain for some refuge – the walk cool like a season I had been wishing existed but had forgotten the tune to – and I damply stood vertical and read Frank O’Hara and wished I could speak to the sun on Fire Island and could list things the way he does with such joy here let’s see I’ll try – chocolate milk! library books! Godard, Truffaut, protest marches, scarves, wet leaves, and the rest of our lives, holes in sweaters, street puddles reflecting colored lights at 2 am, poems, bright young presidents and ambassadors avoiding nuclear war years and years ago for me to read about – and it was coming down harder as I loped back to the dorm, to my orange lamp and scuffed laptop, and I passed a boy who said why are you running, don’t you like the rain and I said I do I do but I have people to meet and we made plans to get lunch as he walked, sopping, squelching amiably, having abandoned philosophy to take a nap because we are at that age when we can decide what to do with ourselves. So I listened to more stories, these about flocks taken and huts burned and trials for things like truth, then spoke with a man I’d seen pictures of and admired – he had crooked teeth and spoke densely like this paragraph only more so. And dinner was Tchaikovsky and Chopin, instruments we gave up, childhood ballet and gymnastic lessons recounted (how we did flips, when we were small) and split pea soup and plans to escape to the mountains where there are bears and the cold is colder and more precise. Then home for lusty talk of men and boys and wanting until off to the sainted room with more poetry what a day how overflowing! Finally the library crew and too much coffee and discovering you two at the end of the night as if the day had all along been meant for holding sandwiches wrapped in paper and bags of chips and conversation about whether we want to be buildings or movies or poems or all of these at once forever always at least until tomorrow CDL