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After Mark Leidner’s ‘Having “having a coke with you” with you’
We had been walking around the park for some time before I realised I had been wanting for a rough and promising image, and I wondered how best to situate ourselves among these modes of speech—a childless couple among families, children and pets, among park signage, among private religious education, the clipped speech of surveillance—what register can I speak best in, I thought but didn’t say to you, although the image yields more to our mutual understanding than any words I can give to it, so I ceded my choice of register to the bright and strange muteness of the image, the mound of green wisps, longer than the surrounding grass and rising up out of it to take on the appearance of a scalp of transplanted hair that is yet to take root, that was the image, rough and promising, ‘so much depends upon a green mound, etc etc’, this was a joke I made to you as we passed it, which you appreciated, although you attributed the poem I was referencing to Frank O’Hara, which I couldn’t help but love so completely because, for you, that poem exists in a wider frame of reference, a melange of all your previous readings and our previous conversations, a body of mid-century American poetry about love and art and the city and the country and post-war anxiety, which I said to you recently seems relevant again in this age of early-war anxiety, an early stage always necessarily implying a post- stage, so that if atrocities in Palestine and Iran etc come to a close and we’re left stumbling about in the aftermath with all these new feelings about new events but without an appropriate language through which to frame these feelings, we can look back at certain other poets’ looking-back, and forward, and then use our own looking-back to look forward again, and so it is that I look at this green mound and I see the fraying hair on the head of my father as he bends down to roll a ball across a green, and if I follow this image, which I tend not to do because to follow the image of my father is to wind up gasping for air, I see his dark and calloused hands around the small, delicate torso of every child in this park, and I think that I should call him soon, and I thought about telling you this, but we were walking in the park, and that line of inquiry would be no such thing, and so instead I threw myself upon the mound, arching my back and splaying out my limbs like a victim of comedy, and the sky was that kind of awful, nauseating grey-white that it always seems to be here, the kind of foggy blanket of grey-white light that makes the whole city feel as if it is inside a light box or some kind of incubator, but despite that awful sky, which you call ‘anxiety sky’, you laughed, you laughed with that brilliant, blinding smile that, every single time, seems to promise so much and still deliver on all of it—▼
Image: Changhee Kim - Pexels
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