For My Poet Friend

This week is my birthday. Steven in NYC sent me a package: two beautiful chapbooks, State(s) of Flux and (Ir)rational Animals, two journals in which his poems were published, and another book he mentioned in one conversation (I think last year).

Steven and I have known each other for four years. In the early days we spent a lot of time grooving around with words. Sometimes we talked about literature and writing; other times we drifted off to the sun seeping through his windows and the night outside mine, dreaming of a time when we would sit on the grass in a park, read and eat some fruits in the breeze.

There was always drama going on in my life against the empty spaces in his at that time, though his spaces suffered occasional intrusions. I imagined Steven walking down the streets with a black umbrella and a soon-to-be stranger by his side, or him typing away on a computer at a cafe. Steven means coffee--espresso, a strong and thick smell in the morning against his foggy senses and sleepy eyes. There he was in his kitchen or lounge room.

We both made our shares of complaints. For some reasons he found my response very funny, like when I said, perfectly serious: 'Don't blame your ex. for being troublesome. She's a girl after all.' Steven's concern for me was more eloquent: his thoughts were concrete before I finished my lines, and I kept on talking to let him see the shape of my being. These days we do not get to connect as often though our dynamic is the same.

In my drama-ridden mind, I thought I must look like a character in a movie to him, an ungrounded woman of sort. Steven has different opinions. Looking at me from afar he still sees the best of me and protects it with his words, when I am ready to lie down, ambivalent and sticky like a dead starfish. His rationale is simple: This is what I think of you and there are others in your life who think the same. Those who do not have no right to judge!

In one of his books Steven wrote that I move through the pages. I found it in my memories--yes, there is a song for me, notes from my life and little anecdotes we shared, like a failed arthouse film from Taiwan and the gleam on collarbones. Other traces I am less certain of. Did I have this conversation with Steven or did I hear it from him? I was there, in between his spaces, even when I had no inkling of my own presence in his world.

One thing I have always liked about Steven is his sense of poetics: I like his work, I think he is a good poet. Now and then I read a poem of his and feel, 'This sounds like me thinking', except he is able to give it form in a way that I cannot. A few years ago I showed one of his poems to my friends and they asked if I wrote it. 'This is very you,' they said. My answer was no, I could never have written it. I do not have his language.

Reading his chapbooks the other day, I came closest to wishing I was a poet and that I could bring joy to someone else with such pure, succinct expression, because nothing--not money, not fancy holidays or objects, not pampering or promises of future comfort, nothing!--makes me happier than this kind of understanding and chemistry put into words, elusive and intangible as they are. If I ever write a poem again, it should be for Steven.