Cinema Verité

So much I thought was only personal, like poetry, like caring nothing for Caillebotte the man, like arriving in Chicago by bus one gray morning and having no place to go, going to the Art Institute and the rain outside became nothing next to the glorious gray of Paris, life-size. The artist dead and all my life, I thought, I've liked right things for wrong reasons. My sojourn among meticulous dreams continued. One summer I spent among smart children taking lessons and abuse from the famous mathematician who taught old words new:point, line, between. And the long nights of teaching each other other words, our fortunate failures. And the furious wind blew down from time to time among us, hurricanes which turned live oaks inside out like little minds, mine, for instance, finding its fervent mode. Remember that you, too, could live where men spit while watching you and your mother pass. That you want her for yourself alone. Remember that those men are tall as God at such moments, more mean. So walk among them, the afternoon cooling within its limits, the mosquitoes taking equally from black and white, true and false. But there was a peninsula of time I lived on when our family poverty left me the couch to sleep on, the great clock ticking terror through the night. Who can love through his childhood insomnia? Only rain could save me–those blessed gray nights of noise, when sleep, like Ali Baba's quartered brother, was sewn back together.