Corey Mesler

Coming Down from a Panic Attack

Coming down from a panic attack
I read Jim Knipfel’s essay
on Henry Miller in Context.
Sometimes the door is in a place
as common as a wall.
Sometimes what opens it is as
simple as biography, words, just
words about a man who
used words like an incantation.
Now, as calm returns, slowly, like
nausea leaching away, I
think about Tropic of Cancer and
wonder if, in my first reading of it, years ago, when I first discovered
books, I missed something
essential. Not just to my
simple understanding of the book,
but to my not-so-simple
understanding of my self, my true,
raw, hungry, angry self.
I am whole again, if only for a while.
I appreciate the lemony sun
coming in the front door, the children
asleep in their rooms, which only
a moment ago filled me
with foreboding of a deep failure in
myself. I appreciate the
stories that men tell about the real
things, how messy life is,
how eating, shitting, fucking and puking
are human things, as human
as the reaching out of a hand, or as
the desire to try to limn it all on paper.

David Markson and a Bottle of Regret

“Blank minds think alike.” —Tony Invergo

The night light is a bruise.
The way the singer talked between songs.
That actress, you can’t
remember her name, but you love her.
Her face is a window.
You open a book of regret and begin
to drink. The waiter
says, you gotta buy something. You
ask him if David Markson
ever comes in here. He says he doesn
‘t know David Markson.
A few hours later the music seems
to be congealing: you
can’t hear it for the book’s weeping.
You think the actress says your name
to the singer, who winces.
After you leave David
Markson enters like Baily’s Beads. He wants
to collect all the empty books.
The management, in reverence, closes
early. The books, you think
once you get home, the lonely, helpless,
vacant, meaningless, nearly extinct books.

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