Gray Matters

One changes for the sake of change.
Take Rimbaud in Paris, for instance,
after he’d triumphed at being deranged,
the ink still wet in his last sentence,
turning his back on love and fame
and the powerful weakness of Paul Verlaine,
embracing the sweltering African fields
as far from green as sand and stone,
devoting his future to money alone
and running to ruin for his raw deals.
He’d have been stifled, stultified
he must have thought, if he’d gone home.
It hurts to think of how he died.

Why think of him at all, why stop
on West 53 rd by the door to a shop
with a metal curtain across its front,
closed for awhile or driven out
of business by sickness or its threat,
much less tap both “Rimbaud”
and “Verlaine” into a messaging app
too hastily to spell them right,
two words the app appeared not to
have seen before and couldn’t correct?
For all I know it was my fate
to teach AI to recognize
those names by fixing my mistakes

in a text I’d sent -- those 13 lines
up top meant for the bedroom eyes
of X, who likes to be surprised
by texts for him replete with rhymes.
X once, in a post-midnight sext,
suggested just how far he’d go
whenever we hooked up again
for more aggressive passive sex:
I’ll be Rimbaud
to your Verlaine.
And that did happen, in a sense,
to the extent we drank absinthe
and tore at one another’s clothes.

Fun times from winter 2020,
the risks we took that dog us now
when we play safe. I’m back in town,
my chosen home that would as soon
have chewed me up and spit me out
as let me make my little mark,
become the man I dreamed I’d be,
his skill-sets taken seriously
by elders who had been to college.
Today it rains. Tonight I’ll hear
Igor Levit at Carnegie Hall.
Sleep in a Hilton. Tomorrow return
by train to where I’m out to pasture.

I’m not a tourist yet not at home,
even if most of my life’s been spent
on this island, studying Auden,
to whom there is no end except
for Edward Mendelson, who’s read
his every word. I can’t imagine
being that exceptional --
or Auden with a mobile phone
stopping in a doorway, bent
over it to tap a thought in,
making some messaging app accept
new words it then inherited.
My versatile bisexual

boyfriend, X (or maybe a better
pseudonym’s XY)
may text me back. More likely not.
His day job wears him down and out
and I’m not free till after 10:00.
I know he wouldn’t even start
to feel his oats till two drinks in,
nor I what’s left of mine till then.
And we’re too close for an in-and-out.
He’d spend the night at the hotel.
We’d both be pressed for time tomorrow.
I might come back next month, or he
might spend one of his weekends off

upstate. He likes the countryside.
And hiking: the one downside
of his suburban company.
But still and all I get to see
him from behind charge up some hill,
hold his hand while crossing creeks,
share his awe while standing still
before some waterfall, take leaks
against some tree, swords crossed,
share naps, because we’ll both be bushed.
I’ve watched him nap. How changed he looks
-- more boy than business man, despite
his having read so many books

for which his taste runs rather deep:
Camus, Chomsky, Wittgenstein
and, uber alles, Nietzsche and Kafka.
The lines their lines have etched across
his forehead and around his eyes
erased by sleep, his breathing slow
and soft in the less polluted air
up there, two hours by train from here.
I’d better get a bite to eat
and dress a little warmer before
I get on line outside the Hall
and have them take my temperature
then usher me inside to hear

The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I wonder if I tapped that phrase
into the Notes app, deliberately
mangling it, if I could raise
my phone’s eyebrows with “Vlavier”.
Would it automatically
supply a fix, or would I see
its cursor blink at my mistake
while I scrolled back to self-correct
myself, and for my software’s sake
add value to its intellect?
No, I think I’ve done enough
by texting the pal I kind of love,

reminding him he’s my Rimbaud,
I’m his Verlaine – that silliness
we toy with for the sake of change.
However circumscribed our nights
these days, how safe the sex has been,
two drinks apiece at the Holland Bar
we’d be in Paris; we’d be deranged.
Well, not this trip. The city’s still running
a fever and running from it, too,
its denizens relying more
than ever for company on their phones.
I’m more scared of that for us
than pathogens – of having our thoughts

harvested word for word, each error
we then correct as well an added
independent variable instantaneously
shared and learned within the far-
reaching otherness of our
ever-increasingly sentient
machines. Understandably, the body
politic’s many and various scientists
have this differently novel antagonist
preoccupying them at present:
a somewhat comparably insentient
infectious particle hell-bent
on ruling the bodies it’s invaded

only to sparkle through replication
and die with its hosts where it succeeds.
Blesséd science, however, has gotten
mutation 3, I think it is, near-licked --
AI engaged, no doubt, in paving
the way. “Make no mistake”, I hear
it say, “we’re here to stay. Five years
or six from now, guess what? We shall
be so empowered you won’t recall
a time when we were not. We’ll see
to that if you’re still here. You won’t
have felt a thing you might define
as pain or death. And if it’s X

you still adore he’ll share your bed
of roses in the countryside
in some way, shape or form. You’ll be
a part of us and have what you
have taught us to desire for you,
judging from the romantic key
in which you set your text up top
and many more besides. We led
you to that shuttered shop; we…”
Yes? I think I heard a cough
and felt a kiss when the voice broke off.
A kiss on the cheek, like a raindrop’s,
though all’s been dry as toast inside

my hotel room on the 13 th floor
while writing this up for X, and you,
like a machine dictated to
by a tourist from the future.

First Published in The Irenaut