JARED DANIEL FAGEN
EG ELSEWHERE
Her profile eclipsing neon. Her hair weaving a garland of fireflies. She is the figment of a hum and I sweated under long sleeves. I was frantic not to let her into the ink I had scrawled across my skin. That moment would happen. When limbs would peak awash with our contortions. When I would press every kiss into adieux. But the moments were slipping and becoming illegible.
We are sitting across from one another in torn-up armchairs. She nannies for the upper class and I wait tables on weekends for Polish ale and Dutch tobacco. In my grief culture thrived. In culture my amnesia kaleidoscoped.
There was a lull in getting to know who we were. I persist by presenting who I wished to be and pluck the strings of a window blind haphazardly like a harp. In the glass her face is momentarily imprinted in the space between appearance and reflection. A diagonal streak of dust briefly disarms her eyes as they fall from mine onto the garden below. I spend six cocktails trying to grasp her in the framed transit. Trying to remember which threatened image I will fall in love with.
In the direction of the shore we stop to purchase a watermelon. Without a knife to make slices I perforate it with my keys. To the night above us she is soldered and neither of us were hungry. When we arrive at the bridge we telepath to each other what each will sacrifice to go on. The cables sway from an indeterminate gust and eight pounds of fruit fit clumsily in the bend of my arm. At the first cantilever I take into her hand my fear of heights. I wanted the fear to subside but another was reaching into me. It was the victory of an undressed moon creasing the optics of a numb diorama. She angles her head into the fray and I lose my balance eluding the nebula at my feet. Perspiration sets the preparation of tears. We’re still listening for the watermelon to alight.
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ENIVREZ-VOUS
after Baudelaire
I choose the virtuous hangover. I’m one-eyeing the clock and at once the choir. There’s not a sunrise so cognac as the one that speaks out to you spewing over the threshold and sprawled across the palace steps. Nor ever a time when half a day must slip by until the happy hour. History is burdened with different genuses of drunk poets—some with whom I trade cheers till the last call and might even call my mates—but most today rage with impatience for wildernesses.
There’s a masturbatory vibe to the room I would rather not be the one to ruin. But I prefer Symons’ “be drunken” over Varèse’s “get drunk.” To be drunken is a state always already taking place. An intoxication that remains operative and through which we slide and stagger (or drown in belabored sorrows). I’m a strong believer (after a glass or two) that the ocean is not an image but a condition. Just as the star has no compass of its own, the wave knows not an imperative. On the other hand, to get drunk suggests a destination at which we haven’t arrived or possibly may never reach (prose will close your bar tab but won’t pay the bills). Drunkenness is a sojourn of great expanses, a wandering at night through a forest where we live our best lives in the loins and at 102 proof. None of us, though, will ever be as slick as Dustin Hoffman giving a Hollywood reading, or look as suave as Isabelle Orliace reciting “l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue” in a wine cellar. Now it’s all coming back to me (puke and rally). Decadent elbows are dipping off the bar and spilling Buffalo Trace on the poet laureate’s Prada heels.
To be drunken is the endless return to being, to the originary slur of metaphysics. Buy me another round and I’ll tell you all about today’s axiological reinterpretations of Baudelaire’s littéralité that has last night’s lover dizzy with shame and mute swans flying in contrite circles over the Palaise Bourbon. Where shadows glide into the winds of chic dawns and over an array of inhospitable staircases, and les chiens released from their chains chase birds toward the rejoining trees that spirited our dipsomaniacal drifts. “Cheers to crowded solitude! Salut to the damp side of ditches! Here’s mud in your eye! And should you take the piss, promise us you’ll not put out the fires!”
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Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence (Black Square Editions, 2022). Other work has recently appeared in Keith LLC, Posit, the 1080PRESS Newsletter, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in New York.