Change happens:
On the morning the day after my wife and I return from a local honeymoon of sorts at a cheap hotel masquerading as a nice hotel in Williamsburg, our bathroom ceiling falls in. I remember the sound: first a slight crackle, then that crackle but louder, then a resolute, definitive crash.
Then, developers tear down one of the single-family houses behind our building, the house on the far corner, and erect in its place an apartment building, the kind of monolith sure to one day define a certain enshittified era of New York City architecture: tall, thin, concrete, windows on the front edifice only, both side walls left empty as if the developer is sure of additional monoliths to come, shoulder-to-shoulder, all in a row. What that would mean for the other single-family houses behind us, the ones that remain, with trees in their backyards, trees where I first identified migrating warblers from my bedroom during Covid lockdown.
Months after that, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a nor’easter, one of those trees falls down, right into the other apartment building, the one right behind us. I remember that sound too, the way each pane of glass blew out as the tree fell into windows on the top floor, then the floor below, then the floor below that, explosions in a Spinozian sequence.
I haven’t published here in a while. A long while. The impetus was this: sometime in late 2023, I read an article about the two remaining pairs of Bonelli’s eagles living in the West Bank, and I stopped being able to write this way, in this voice, this tone. I grew weary of embedding all the links, of making all the statements. All around, people were sharing vehemently held beliefs about Gaza and Israel on social media, and everyone was so sure; more than that, everyone was sure about this public unfurling of sureness; no one seemed to stop and wonder if there weren’t other effects in addition to, ostensibly, the unmitigated stating of one’s values? the changing of minds? I posted too. I too was sure about being right. I should say I am sure—there is no writing about wildlife, habitat, climate, capitalism, fossil fuels, the U.S., the state of everything, without Palestine. Palestine is the container in which every conflict leaves a part of itself.
But how to write about Palestine? I should write about developer greed in my neighborhood and the need to protect micro-habitats like backyards. Something local and productive, to try to offset the global multi-crises. Something I witness firsthand. Something I actually know something about.
But what do I know?
When I started this series I felt like I was digging a needle into the seams linking what is known and unknown. I felt like I was exerting some kind of influence over that distinction. I felt like I was making arguments, or sometimes, in less thoughtful moments, giving lectures. It’s embarrassing to me now. It’s like I woke up, looked around, and, suddenly, the world I had my feet planted in was gone, had utterly disappeared in the night. I watched in real time as someone I had come to call a friend began dissolving his own lines of knowing and unknowing, posting conspiracy theories about how the stats about dead and displaced Palestinians were juked, faked, in order to brainwash all us leftists into supporting terrorists. With every instance of someone in my life becoming unreachable, something in me did too. The conversation with another friend about using AI to make music. For all you know, I could’ve used AI to write this essay—the fact that I feel an impulse to mention it, to quickly and effectively reassure you that I haven’t, or maybe you don’t care if I did.
The truth is that I’ve been grieving these past few years. I cried when the tree came down, I cried when the monolith went up. I cried on the phone to the repairs office when my landlord continuously evaded responsibility for the bathroom ceiling and other necessary repairs in my apartment. I cried when someone unthinkingly chopped the entire top off the second tree, leaving a headless trunk in its place. Once a robin jumped on top of its empty wooden face, prone to the sky; he looked so out of place. I cried when a hermit thrush hit my window. I’m a literal wildlife rehabilitator. I make literal powerpoints about these kinds of things. How can anyone be expected to keep anyone else safe?
And I’ve been grieving the early life of these essays. Yet strangely enough, in the time that has elapsed since I last published, I’ve gained new followers here, like finding shed snake skin on a long hike. Like those flowers that pop up every few years in the desert.
Hello, new followers. I’m sorry about all of this.
These days, poems feel better. They’re less weighted with narrative, with concerns about navigating the distance from point A to point B. I don’t feel the need to be right in a poem. A poem doesn’t need to keep anyone safe.
FROM BALTIMORE
Your wayward tooth hurts
You’re brought to tears by a true V of geese
Your windows are foggy with a supposedly harmless mist
The train’s forward motion keeps you from writing clearly
A billboard claims Protecting America
You wonder From What
From Baltimore street lamps illuminate each cross street
A passenger eats his steaming meatball sub
This train once offered its own writing residencies
Romantic to trace poorly-maintained tracks with your pen
Something has happened to us, collectively, in the last few years. It’s hard to look up from our phones. It’s hard to look at the person in front of us, looking at their phone, and feel that pinch of anxiety, that feeling of being cast out alone into the ocean. It’s hard to be a part of this spiritual abnegation, this rupture between expectation and reality. This moment where we have stopped seeing one another.
While writing this essay (prose poem?) I googled “the plural of nexus,” trying to come up with an image about Palestine-as-container, an image that never quite materialized. The internet told me that the plural of nexus can either be nexuses or nexus, given that nexus itself already contains a plurality.
It’s also true that now that the tree is gone, the other trees and the plants on our fire escape are growing rampant with all the sunlight.
It’s true that the other day some mallards tried nesting in the backyard of one of the houses, where the owners put in a little artificial pond. Then they went somewhere else.
I wish I knew what to tell you. But maybe it’s better if I don’t.
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