Borders

Ricky Ian Gordon and Marie Howe and Jean Valentine and I all shared a common space in public last night at Border's Bookstore in strange monolith known as the Time Warner building (I think that's what it's called) to celebrate a new CD of Ricky singing songs that we all wrote the poems for. It was a great reunion because I think the last time we were all in the same room together was, maybe, at a birthday party I had in Provincetown one summer when I turned 200 at the home of a friend that is no longer the friend that he was the summer I turned 200.

The fullness of time, Marie said during a pause.

And it was: the music out of poems and the music put into them. And thinking back to the last time Marie and I and Jean were all in the same room: Staten Island, I think; Snug Harbor; link in the long chain of AIDS inspired poetry readings. We smoked cigarettes then -- Marie and I -- and were far from walking into the most crucial and heartbreaking times of our lives.

Ned Rorem was sitting in the first row and all I could think of was reading those diaries of his when I was in my 20's and thinking, my God, how do people have lives with so many people in them? And now, in my own life -- never as many as Rorem's, but if you add the ghosts to the ones that are living the number may be close to Rorem's.

These events are strange because a piano is hauled in from somewhere musical (a bookstore is many things, but musical isn't one of them), and somebody who has other tasks, I'm sure, is assigned to present an evening that -- you can see the soft mystery flicker across their face -- they don't quite know the reason for. And it's a crowd, mostly, of stragglers and a few real fans here and there.

My favorite sight -- and this always happens in seemingly perfectly measured intervals of time -- is the person looking for a book in the section right there while you're reading or performing.

My favorite sound was hearing Jean say: "bullshit" in one of her poems through the microphone which -- as it is at every large bookstore reading -- was being carried all the way over into the children's section.