From The Pillow Book

Rebecca Lindenberg

Things One Might Discover Amid Large Buildings.

There’s a dumpling shop on Eldridge Street. In winter, steam from the dumpling shop billows like hot lungfuls of breath from the door’s mouth. You emerge from the steam with a paper bag full of dumplings. The bag shows soy sauce and oil, and it is warm in your cold-chapped hands.

New York has the best gardens. They are all secrets. Sometimes they are behind bars, sometimes there are tables and candles. Sometimes not. If you sit in a garden and look up, ivy spills from a fire-escape like a sleeping woman’s hair from the edge of a bed.

If you look amid buildings, you might discover the hiding place of the man who followed me home from the subway one night.

People paint things there, like RIP Celia Cruz or RIP My Homey Isaac and a last name illegible under other graffiti of who loves who, or who to look out for, or just the tag to say, I was here. Amid all this, I was here. I stood here, where you now stand gazing.

You might find a small window full of glittering things. You might think, how can these glittering things afford their own window? And you might be heartened by this display that you are not the only one in this city who can still be dazzled.

If you look amid buildings, you might discover pavement aglitter with fish scales, and dumpsters bulging with restaurant garbage. You might discover the secret to happiness.

Reasons One Might Want to Leave New York.

You remember, suddenly, to wonder about the rest of the world.

On Salt Lake City.

To stand amid buildings beholding mountains. To stand amid mountains beholding the sky and the sky above that.

The library is beautiful. The temple is also beautiful but I am not allowed in. I prefer the library, which looks like what a building would look like if made to resemble the wind.

Mormons do not pay close attention to worldly things, like driving.

One can find many savory things here: pork loin bursting with figs and pine nuts and pooling in pinkish almond mole, cool Albacore sushi confettied with shaved scallions, Peking Duck whose crackling browned skin is all ashine with sweetness, chowder brimming with fat pink clams and flecked with thyme. There is much good coffee, and a farmer’s market on Saturdays.

Things That Might Be Found at a Farmer’s Market.

Oh, such tomatoes! Giant tomatoes I can only hold in my two hands together, so red as to be almost purple, great red skin-sacks of tomato flesh and essence and seed.

Onions, onions and eggplants. Deep purple eggplants the color of a Spanish night, lithe lavender Japanese eggplants that make you think of bodies, and white eggplants that look almost sacred.

Lick a split melon, lick the dew off of the morning.

A child places a raspberry hat on each of five fingers, shows his mother, then puts each, one by one, into his bright pink mouth.

There is a man who sells lamb’s meat. I buy two pounds of leg and take it home where into the visible grain of meat I crush pale yellow garlic and slender rosemary leaves. The raw lamb is soft, soft and perfumy and gives and gives in my meatslippery hands. As it spits and sizzles in the broiler, the house fills with the smell of holidays.

Ways of Knowing Who You Are.

Some people know by where they are from. Some people know by whom they have power over. Then some know by whom they understand, and have compassion for.

The body tells you who you are—it tells you that you like tabasco and dislike pickled ginger. It tells you that you like jew’s harp and viola, and dislike harmonica and accordion. The way the body flushes and cools tells you who you can imagine falling in love with. And someday, it will tell you how to die.

You know who you are by how you respond to bad weather: Either you imagine yourself inside, or you imagine yourself outside.

On Hurricanes.

A woman being interviewed on the radio: “Why are you staying,” the host asks, “if you barely survived last time?” She has no response to this. Someone else tells a story of an apartment building being washed into the sea.

People speak of the eye of the hurricane. But the hurricane has no eye. The hurricane is blind, and flails blindly across the world.

Some suggest blasting the hurricane with nuclear weapons. A scientist wisely responds that the storms are bad enough without also being radioactive.

A man is quoted in the newspaper as saying, “We stay to prove God’s mercy.”

Things That Should Be Large.

Very few things should be large. The sky should be large, for holding large ideas like God.

Poems should be large. Think of a map of the world the same size as the world.

Things That Should Be Small.

Reminders of my mother, in that love dotes upon details, such as the sound of a metal whisk scraping a metal bowl, the sound of someone whistling by breathing in, and the light pitter-patter of someone typing with all of their fingers. Also, any time somebody bites down on an ice cube, the sound of ice being broken in the mouth reminds me of my mother.

Wounds. Wounds should be small, and should leave very small scars. I have one on my thumb where the knife kept going through the tomato and through my skin. It was so sharp I didn’t even know until the cutting board was dark and shiny. It required no stitches, but I had to throw away my sponge, and the tomato.

The heels of women’s shoes should be small, like Audrey Hepburn’s. Women’s undergarments should also be small: Dorothy Parker once said, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

Things Emily Has Said in Restaurants.

At a Taco Bell one morning, after a party: “I can’t eat this tortilla—it’s as big as a sail.”

“This is not a salad,” she said, sitting at a wooden table. “This is a National Park. I can’t eat this—there could be people in there.”

“I don’t eat things that smell like people,” she said at the Turkish place in New York.

Other things my sister doesn’t eat include: things that jiggle, things that are green but have never photosynthesized, beets in any form (because they taste like dirt, which she also won’t eat), and seaweed.

On Our Visit to Spain.

The gypsies closed around us, thrust red flowers under our chins. “Watch your bag,” I shouted to my sister. “Leave us alone,” I hissed at the gypsies. “Come to the flamenco show, come to the flamenco show,” they intoned.

The scent of the ocean was sometimes the scent of vinegar.

Standing in the tower of the Sagrada Familia, you can see the sun glinting off the roofs of small, brightly colored cars on the streets below and wavering in rooftop swimming pools.

I ran at the gypsies, yelling, “You took my sister’s money–give it back,” in Spanish. They said I was wrong, they said I was a racist. “I saw you take it,” I pointed at one of them. “I saw you put your hand in her bag. Give it back or I’ll have you arrested.” I wasn’t going to have her arrested.

We kissed the ceramic lizard at Parc Guell, its tiles cold with rough edges. I wondered if a real lizard that size would also feel clammy and sharp under lips.

The gypsy acted as if picking something up off the ground. In her hand she held a wad of cash. I stormed over and slapped it out of her hand, then picked it up. I counted it, all the money was there. “Buena suerte,” she said, and flicked me off, kissing her middle finger. “Good luck.”
On the Ramblas, a man resembled a statue of Christopher Columbus. She dropped a coin in his jar, and it rolled around and around the bottom for what felt like forever while the wind ruffled the unmoving man’s hair.

That night, we dined where Picasso designed the menus. It was full of bright, pink Germans, but the food was savory and a violinist played fin-de-siècle café tunes. My sister paid with some of her rescued pesetas. We raised glasses of Ribera to the gypsies.

The night my sister left, I sat in my room watching Spanish television and shaving waxpaper-thin slices off a haunch of Serrano ham with my Swiss army knife.

Things That Are Hard to See.

The limits of one’s endurance. The bounds of a friend’s generosity. What your kidneys are doing. How you may have opened yourself to critique.

Beautiful Things.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
—Ezra Pound, in a Paris Review interview with Donald Hall

Rock beaches at Nice, unsteadily walking over pebbles I keep falling on your arm. Villon. Salt crusted into shores along our bodies. Lemon ice cream thickening our tongues on a bench by the deserted nightclub. A moped in the distance, being grumbled awake.

Modigliani’s nudes wear their faces like masks of themselves. But they are not demure, they rest in their bodies as if no one is watching.

You rummage in the trunk, unbend revealing a bouquet of Thai basil. I lead the way upstairs. We sit in the cool of the roof and whisper as though we can’t speak louder than the city can twinkle, and you drizzle candlewax on your palm so you can peel it like a sunburn. And when your wax-warm palm absently surprises me between my shoulderblades I take in a breath that fills my body all the way out to the skin.

Because milk can only be the adverb of itself or go undescribed, it is beautiful.

Colette is beautiful. Bow-lipped and bowed over a fountain pen. 1911. Mina Loy is beautiful, trying not to tear dress patterns with the poems she etched on them, dreaming of Futurists and boxers. Gertrude Stein is beautiful, shooing the past out of a poem like pigeons out of a flat one is about to inhabit. Denise Levertov is beautiful with her fine lines and organic forms. Sylvia Plath is beautiful, too, blonde as a pastry and full of death.

The little glass vials, their little gold and silver caps, the slender bright needles passing through skin without so much as a shallow pucker of flesh, the insulin that glides into the body as clear as the waters of Arcadia. The first time you watched me do this you said, “It’s like a dance you do.”

The way light slants through the brownstones of Brooklyn, making architecture. You do not pass through as through street-level air, but as through a door, an arch, a colonnade.

I have been brought to the brink of collapse by the ringing I’d waited and waited for the phone to do.

Eucalyptus leaves, for the way they look like beaten copper tarnished silver-green, make me think of other beautiful things. The scent of juniper gives the impression a perfumed goddess has just passed by. Magnolia has survived all the eons because in the beginning, in the gardens of paradise, it was laminated.

On Kenneth Koch.

Kenneth Koch takes a usual poem and breaks it like an egg. Light comes through the cracks and that light is the Kenneth Koch poem. When he says there are empty cars of absolute beauty waiting for him beneath the dress of the day he means everything that is there and none of it comes from behind his thoughts. The best poems outdo their best explanations.

On Reverence.

Belief is laundry. Reverence is a creased fold, a drawer liner, potpourri, it is a cedar closet.

This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Methods of Rejoicing.

Run, race the turning earth forward as it heaves into its next moment. Exert yourself in some way that makes you aware of gravity holding you here, in the world.

Drink wine, keeping its red film suspended in your glass. Pay no attention to the clock. Tilt your head back when laughing to better reveal your throat. Sigh.

Destroy something—yourself, maybe. Who needs a self when there’s truth to be had?

On Dreams.

Einstein dreamt relativity. A woman in Virginia dreamt the location of the crashed car where a broken teenager had lain for eight days. A woman in New York City helps people access past lives through dreams.

Ships as enormous as skyscrapers filling a horizon. Looking for you and finding instead a river full of hats, all manner of hats—cowboy hats, fedoras, baby bonnets, panama hats, berets. I dream and dream and wake up unsure for a moment if the world is real.

Freud thought everyone in your dream was some version of yourself. Freud didn’t know anything.

There is a white wolf in my dreams. He is beautiful and watches me, and I know never to ask him questions.

I knew a man who said he never dreamt in images, only sounds.

You once told me you had nightmares about infinity, numbers that kept getting longer and longer and were unbounded and you feared you couldn’t wake up until the number was over but the number was never over. Wake up, wake up.

On the Margin as a Frame.

Be in love with margins, they are free spaces, and there is no such thing as a text without margins. This gives one hope.

The text loves the margin; its margins make it classical and orderly.

A margin is an invitation.

The Spiral Jetty has no frame except the Salt Lake, mountains, sky, the frame of the world. This poem has no story except the one you are making by reading it, like which bus you were on reading this or that part, in which crease there are crumbs of a bedtime snack, in which margin you wrote—a stranger’s phone number, some thought you had about some thought I had.