Green Linden Press

I Put This Moment Over Here

after & for Kate Bush

I first heard Kate Bush in a smoky dorm room that one could
put on a postcard and send to their favorite god
on this planet or another planet or any of their favorite places
at the precise moment they’re driving up that slick-ass road
over the river and through the woods (kidding). I’m afraid of icy hills
here, there, and everywhere, the slick simultaneity of building 

confidence and fear, to get from here to somewhere, from one building
to another over labyrinths and holograms, oh, if only I could
freeze the best moments into “all the time,” toss shit ones over the hill
like this worldwide one that seems to have enlisted every dark god.
A friend put “Wuthering Heights” on a mixtape for me before I hit the road,
and I replayed “The Big Sky” for 6 hours driving to Wyoming and other places

I’d always wanted to go and places I stumbled upon travel weary, places
put on maps by people hellbent on populating and cyber-building.
Does it all come to this: a lonely body in a scratched-up Ford on a twisty road,  
the moment of rescue so far away (like lights on a bridge). I could—
I wish—step heart first over the bruised earth and hold the face of God
right here where there is so much that needs explaining, cities and hills

and telephone lines slicing the sky. Here, God, let’s make a deal: this hill
overblown with dandelions and high with children is one of those places
where you, God, just for a moment, can strip off your mystery. Okay, God?
This is your chance to step up and perform at Woodstock ’22, to build
an epic, symphonic encore in the bottom of our faithless guts. You could. 
I would. If we swapped places. Me: You. You: a big old queer. The road—

my road—would sparkle like horses dipped in glitter and sequins. Your road
would put the whole lovely world back on the map, not plummet down the hill,
but if we can’t have this (and we can’t) do you think that maybe you could
take a moment to explain a few key things like why are all the beautiful places
overrun with un-beauty, or at least eclipsed by it, and why are we always building
here, there, everywhere, and up, upper, uppest as if trying to reach you? Hey, God,

we’re down here. Why don’t you reach us from your spaceship? Finally, God,
if you’re ever over this way—between oceans or stars, or down the road 
and you have a moment. Well, never mind. When I think how we’ve been building
it up, then tearing it all down, this gorgeous world, from mountain to molehill,
there’s something I want to put in your god-sized ear: of all the places 
you and I have co-created, this is the one I’d love for us to heal. If only we could.

All Things Go

after & for Sufjan Stevens

Carrie and Lowell. Is it terrible to start with an album considering all
the ways Sufjan interacts with the various gods and the way things
live both inside and outside us? But that is an album that always goes
flying off in death songs like lullabies or songs alight with death, and all 
I want to do is just make out in my car. Remember those days when things
were the same as they are today (shaky) (wake me), yet we seemed to go

ahead with arrogant vulnerability, like a rock song strummed on a ukulele, go-
ing oblivious and playful one minute, cranky and hardass the next, all
etched on perfectly pressed vinyl or microphoned into everything?
I always wanted to sing myself but lacked the right hat and that thing
called talent and the ability to write perfect rhymes and melodies. I’m all
sung out today on the lip of Sufjan’s sweet sound, itching to play or go

to Illinois and see all the sites that Sufjan names and serenades and then go
sign my name on one of three stars while playing the flute or maybe go 
to Target or Walmart and buy feather pillows to make wings for us all.
The best part about Chicago after New York was going around gay, all
things gay, things gay friendly, things gay adjacent, things gay sexy, things
spread out like wings made out of pillows for a bunch of angels. So many things

can make a mortal man immortal and make love feel permanent, feel like things
are just ducky and as long as we’re queer we can get through anything, like going
to the supermarket or hearing Sufjan sing about John Wayne Gacy—two things
any straight human being would be shocked by, slain by. But there we go:
queers craving the complicated, the undersides, the genuine and terrifying, all
living on the sharp edges of a life we’ve been written into as if all things (all!)

concerning the UFO sighting near Highland, IL, are more important than all
the movies with R. Gosling or baby geese in them put together. (Sorry.) Things
Sufjan sings about: Tonya Harding, Ativan, video games, Vesuvius. Reall-
y, imagine you love Illinois, or any state, for that matter (he said he was going
to make an album for each state, but then changed his mind). If I were going to go
to Illinois, I would sing about Uncle Fun on Belmont and all the kitschy things

the owner discounted before he shut down and moved to Baltimore. The more things
I can fit in my floor-to-ceiling bookcases, like Gumby & Gangsters & Ghosts & all
the Guerrilla Girls art, the more I can high-note the love up from my toes, so it goes 
to show, to say, and to hope that there are at least a gillion gorgeous and glitzy things
to make a person happy, okay if not happy, maybe joyful or awake or able to go  
to the Sears Tower with Sandburg on Pulaski Day. We’re done. Finis. That’s all. 

Also by Maureen Seaton: "Patience of the Light"
Maureen Seaton & Denise Duhamel: "Death Is Not a Riddle," "Yes, And," "13 Lines about Walls"

Also by Aaron Smith: "Thermopylae," "The Rest of It," "Living," "More to the Story,"
"No Apologies," "Fame," "Six Boxes from Frank O’Hara’s Archives," "Monday"
Interview: a conversation with Aaron Smith on his book Primer