Tim Gilmore dabbles in words. He likes Lawrence Ferlinghetti, T.S. Eliot (the poetry, not the politics), The Lyrical Ballads, Aimé Césaire, Walt Whitman, Martin Espada, Cesar Vallejo, Robinson Jeffers, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver, weeping willows, the Pacific Northwest, goats, Coltrane (Alice even more than John), dreams, ghosts, and Baudrillard. His writing has appeared in such places as Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse, Jack Magazine, Thunder Sandwich, Fiction Fix, Eat, and various Jacksonville publications. His collections of poetry are Flights of Crows: Poems, 2002-2006 and the upcoming Horoscopes for Goblins: Poems, 2006-2009.

I hear the fog dripping out of the trees in the purple late-night glow.
I hear the fog dripping out of the trees.
I hear the fog in the purple glow dripping out of the late-night trees.
What would you begrudge me?
The thing about a tree is the fact of the tree.
Soldiers hung Christ on a tree.
Adam and Eve sinned through a tree.
The tree would seem to sum everything up.
I hear the ghosts dripping out of the trees.
I hear the purple glow of the ghosts dripping out of the trees,
forgotten as though they had never lived,
but their lives are as lived as yours and mine, also
forgotten as though we had never lived.
I hear our ghosts dripping out of the trees.
“I so deeply love you,” I hear us say.
“I love you like nothing else exists.”
But it does. It has always existed.
I hear the ghosts of us dripping
from the purple fog in the trees across
the earth as seen from space,
from the earth dripping into space and deep-time,
and the cities down on the earth at night
are lit up like the constellations in the sky,
and I am amazed at us from so far away,
and I am amazed at us beautifully blue in space,
but I miss you out here,
and I love you like nothing else exists,
and I hear the fog dripping out of the trees,
and I love our ghosts in the fog at night,
and I love our ghosts in the trees tonight.
The thing about a tree is the fact of the tree
and the open spaces between the lights,
and I love you the distance of earth from space
and the open spaces between the lights.

And who are you
to imagine you’ve made yourself a home?
In what style of architecture
have you shaped the shape
you picture containing your life?
Have you shaped yourself to career?
Shaped yourself to a skill,
a talent, a vision?
Or have you shaped yourself
for so long
to constant change of identity,
so that even change
has become monotony?
At what pace and rhythm
do you birth yourself,
bring yourself to bud,
and kill your old selves off?
You might feel your dry eyes
blur and crease and tire,
and think you are the same old man
and the same weary woman
whom you’d believed for so long
to be so young, so young,
and you might feel then
you have shaped your life to a sleep.

You’ve been carried away by your body.
You’ve been running in zone.
You’ve been awake so many days and nights,
you feel you haven’t awakened in years.
Where does one’s youth go anyway?
It was here. It must have gone
someplace. But the question’s always asked
of the lithe young body
you’d presumed to assume your shape,
and not of the youthless body you can’t,
or won’t, convince yourself to know.

Somewhere in front of you,
in that bulbous bottle of cheap Sangria,
swims the end of time
and the origin of the universe.
Take your pick. Everyone must.
He described the Big Bang sounding
more like a long hiss,
a leaking sibilance,
a universal lisp.
Someone else said we live in a sound,
a bubble in an echo of the original moment.
You think of that.
You have the origin of space
embedded in your fingerprint.
You echo your own echoes
of the echo of origins.
And you see your choices.
You kill off an old self.
You open your legs, hold out your palms.
You bring a new self out.
You breed further selves for your next lives.
You make damn certain
you'll grow old
and die
and live an eternal life.

You grow,
tall, spiked and green-stalked
at a rakish angle
from the steep bluff on the inlet.
You have taken this whole last year
to slowly fall,
and out of your dying torso, grow
two new stalks, flowering, upright,
new lives of the old life,
allowing yourself to die,
allowing yourself
life.

Each time you discover a new one,
you feel something marked in your life,
like another birthday,
like another point scored,
another silver hair,
or a line on a résumé.
And you didn’t even know one was here,
yet here you are,
you and another Flatiron Building.
A girl mimes a statue on the corner.
She’s painted silver.
When someone drops a coin in her bucket,
she bows to them,
taps out a drumroll,
then resumes her original position,
all without opening her eyes.
You eat Greek food on one side of the Flatiron,
get drunk on the other.
You’ve been to its brothers and sisters
in New York and Toronto,
Atlanta and San Francisco,
but you’d no idea this one was here,
on this corner on this hill
in the middle of downtown Asheville.

And who are you
to imagine that home is home?
Every place where roads cross,
every crossroads in the woods at night, yes,
but every city intersection, no less,
traps…souls. Roads
lose their momentum here,
and ghosts and the angry past
bog down in the loss.
The people buried witches and heretics
in this same crossroads
where you have built this odd
small rectangle of a room.
How do you sleep at night,
when the ghosts in the planet’s rings
come and hum at your windows?
But you know your choices.
I’m not going to tell you what to do,
but I’d pick the origin of the universe,
if I were you.

I ask them what
they think could possibly await them here.
They don’t know whether to think of me
as private detective, priest,
fortune teller, or shrink.

We sit across this plywood table
from one another, distant
shrieks of birds with things to say
somewhere outside my
small square footage,
and always they say they never knew
this marina would be this
alternate reality,
a city floating
deep in the margins of the city.
Then I tell them I deal in dreams,
that what I have for them
can be nothing or everything,
that all their comings to me
have made this boat-slip brigadoon
the capitol of the planet,
that all they will walk away with
is their own spiritual travelogue,
that I can’t tell them what it means.

The stars will come out bright in a clear sky.
The water will lap lambently against this
shotgun shack of a boat.
You will put your fingers in my beard
and look me in the eye.
There are so many ways of understanding.
You needn’t understand them all
in order to experience them.
The waiting of the world is patient.
Dreaming is a way of thinking.
The only conclusion will be a lack of conclusions.
You will choreograph an impressionism
of the way your children
look at you when you disappoint them,
of the way your mother looked at you
when she disappointed herself by disappointing you,
of the panic you will feel when they tell you
you are dying,
of the great deep joy you feel
when strangers like what you have done for them,
of your sliding off the rails
when you have no choice but a change of plans,
of your loss of self when you have no choice
but to have no choice,
of nights you thought you’d not survive
that time has since
rubbed to a powdery distance.
Everything was supposed to turn out differently.
None of this was planned.
You are moved against your will
by outside forces much greater than you.
What you believe in most
does not square with what’s happened to you.
One moment you think your life has passed you by.
One moment you think you are not you,
not an undivided individual I,
but a house divided,
a hung jury,
Six Characters in Search of an Author,
an orchestra pit cacophony
15 minutes before the show begins.

Yes, I tell you,
everything you say is true,
so celebrate!
You have lived.
You have been alive.
You live. Now.
You are living this very life.

Glance at the tapes
of all the other oral histories.
I have been recording them
since before the technology allowed me.
I have been here on this boat
since long before the marina,
the city, the arrival
of Europeans. I have been here,
collecting stories.

You have certain things you’ve learned.
You have proverbs, aphorisms.
You have distilled certain periods of your life into
tight kernels of recyclable wisdom.
You would like to state some of these truths now.
I am happy to have them,
even if tomorrow,
new truths come
and slowly edge out, live out, last out
today’s truths until
you and I both forget
the truths you, right now,
originally,
would like to set down absolutely.

Should probably take a short break.
Have a glass or two of cheap sweet wine.
People are always bringing these bottles by.
Others are always drinking them.

It will soon be later
than you had intended to stay,
but that hardly matters to me—
I am always here—
and I have a way
of sleeping with half my brain
while prodding the other half continually awake.

Your mother set you up for 33,
said that was some quintessential age,
something you couldn’t quite grasp that had to do
with that being the age
Christ was crucified,
so all your life you wondered what wonder
was fated to happen to you when you
were as old as Christ,
but in place of vicarious atonement,
life slipped back
to the children you had when you were a child,
in whose stead you blamed
yourself for not
achieving more than children,
though of what more you should have done
you were not sure,
though of whom else you could have been
you couldn’t know,
and now,
your children,
your accidental achievements,
had begun to turn their backs on you,
and since you didn’t know
the whereabouts of your babies tonight,
and since the stars had come out bright
in this all too clear—
because infinite—
sky,
of which you saw but the horizon
at a distance of not even three miles…

The horizon always curves away.
The horizon always curves against you,
limits and delineates you,
and lonely, you think, tonight,
the horizon does not
include you with your replacements.

But what achievement is any achievement?
If now, right now,
your head should fall to this table,
your head having suffered a stroke
(how lucky would I,
this oral historian, be?),
then shouldn’t you need a different formula
to discern your horizons
and whom
they would then include?
That’s the point
at which all things become
mystical soup,
the point at which
everything becomes [period]
:Emersonian, Whitmanic,
Vedic, Biblical,
planet chowder
of all elements interacting,
yes, but thus,
you and your daughters
and the sons you did not have
and the trees and the boat and pelicans
and Audrey Hepburn dancing in Funny Face
and Julia Butterfly Hill
living way up in that 600 year old redwood
for just over two years
and the way you have just determined
to dance and climb tall trees
and the nights after nights you lay awake
replaying
everything that ever made you ashamed
and the way your father looked at you
when he disappointed himself by disappointing you,
when all the goddam begats
of all the goddam bibles
have begun to flow backward as well as forward,
it’s then you think you can live
with understanding without understanding,
with apprehending without comprehending,
with connoting far more than denoting,
and it’s then you think you can live.
It’s then you think you have been alive.
It’s then you know you’re alive.
You are living this very life.

Let them know this about you
33,000 years from now.
Let them know this about you tomorrow.

I know this about you now.
I know this and I know you.
You’ve come to me for nothing more.
I have your words
in your moment
in my archives.
I will prepare myself to miss you.
Having come to me tonight,
you’ve given me an always having known you.
The marina will float in the margins.
The boat will rub rickety.
You will leave the way you came.
The sky will return to gloaming.
It will all have been a small thing.
Then, it will be morning.
I will stay here.
I will miss you.
I will not know where you have gone.
The horizon will curve away from me.
The horizon always curves away.
The horizon always curves against me.
I will not know where you have gone.