A Landlocked State

In “Texas Reznikoff,” Mitski sings that Texas is a landlocked state, which means it must be true. Yet I can hear the ocean from my balcony—smooth crash of surf on sand, rush of wave-smooth stones like infant sea turtles tumbling over each other in the light of the moon. I wanna be still with you, Mitski says, I’ve been anywhere / And it’s not what I want, and I imagine she’s talking to herself, as I have been. It’s a little bit far away / From the water, from the home / That I’ve wanted to make and yet You’re the breeze in my Austin nights three times over. New York City was my anywhere, I’ve been realizing, was the home / That I’ve wanted to make. Until I left, I thought what I felt for it was love.

“Texas Reznikoff” seems an odd name for a song unless you realize that the lyric The trees’ shadows lie in black pools in the lawns. is the entirety of poet Charles Reznikoff’s one-line piece, “Moonlit Night.” I, for one, did not realize this. In my search for understanding, I stumbled, as you might, too, across Mitski’s 2016 interview with the A.V. Club and Paul Auster’s essay “The Decisive Moment”—having read them, I am richer.

“Charles Reznikoff,” Auster writes, “[was] a poet of the eye…Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech…The act of writing, therefore, is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it. It is a process by which one places oneself between things and the names of things, a way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen—as if for the first time—and henceforth to be given their names.”

“A way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen—as if for the first time—and henceforth to be given their names.” That’s beautiful, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s limited to the seeing we do on the page, either. In my last post, “Alone, Definitionally,” I wrote that in finding myself, only myself, in my apartment for the first time, “I [would] understand the urgency of naming”—imagining my own “interval of silence,” unaccompanied by writing until much later. One’s “discovery of [the real]” can be as simple as breathing a moment into one’s lungs, finding that “interval of silence,” and exhaling to discover what the moment will name itself. I don’t think Auster would disagree, believing as he does that, “The poem, in all instances, must be an effort to perceive, must be a moving outward. It is less a mode of expressing the world than it is a way of being in the world.”

Texas is a landlocked state and of course it isn’t. The ocean I hear is the billboard between 6th Street and me. It’s made of slats like old-fashioned shutters: a motor closes them towards 6th to reveal one image, then flips them all like dominos falling south to show the other. From the street, I imagined this would be irritating; instead, standing on the balcony in the morning, it’s soothing.

Coffee is more precious outdoors. Beans gifted by my parents, mug gifted by a treasured friend—“a piece of me,” she calls it—sky’s dark grey becoming less so as some Painter adds dabs of white to the palette. Clouds appear and disappear as the colors blend.

I am thinking of It’s beautiful out today immediately followed by I wish you could take me upstate / To the little place you would tell me about / When you’d sense that I want to escape. The emotions conflict, and yet—

I am thinking of You’re the breeze in my Austin nights and words I wrote months ago: These mountains are a place for quiet crafts and conspicuous mending. I am thinking of the words I have liked best, recently. The ones that have found me in an “interval of silence” and have named themselves. I have written them down out of order:

Effervescent

Ensorcelled

Lagniappe

Numinous