Joan Didion

Six a.m. & I was the only soul in the English Building.

I wore blue socks and walked around.

Stretching my hands high above my head,

I thought about Joan Didion

who lived in tropical places, was born

in California, wrote about the hippies, smoked

a little, ate white fish, was chic, had a husband,

somehow was a little ironic about that, wrote

coldly about red-hot things. I love that bitch,

I said to Fiona who was reading Slouching Towards

Bethlehem. Who wouldn’t want to be a cool writer:

black shift dress, ink stains, house in Brentwood.

Time keeps taking me from California, where I’m

sure I belong in the long shrug of palm trees

or at the beach or empty headed or happy or

rained on. Who said the coldest winter they ever

spent was in San Fransisco? When I visited in high school,

my dad took me to the Italian neighborhood,

we had chicken parm, oily eggplant, walked around in shorts,

saw people swimming outdoors in November.

The hills were beautiful. You couldn’t talk walking up them.

Just breathing. My dad and I put our hands on our knees.

And then at the top like we’d be talking the whole time:

Could you believe that red sauce? Or the fish at the table over,

those real eyes. I remember sitting on a park bench

and smelling white flowers. My heart felt like the needle on a record player.

Pink houses, an irrepressibly rainy bike ride. I told my dad I could be a writer

there, under a green awning or at a crumby chartreuse table in Berkeley

with weak sun. I could drink green tea here. Maybe I’d be as cool

as Joan fucking Didion. Life is a window seat for women like her.

I just read her book on grief which ended with a sentence about God

being dead. God was dead, said Joan Didion, because childhood was dead

because war was horrifying and everyone had long hair in San Fransisco.

Reviews said: Brilliant. Reviews said: Cold. I suspect she never felt anything,

she just collected. It was her way. Her husband died, protesters disappeared,

she wrote a packing list. She wrote what was on her plate. A list of names

in her Rolodex. Reading her writing is like a medical professional saying:

name three things you can touch, three things you can see, three things

you can smell. When I read her writing I smell: eucalyptus; I taste: branzino;

I see: girls in corduroy pants sitting in a park. Why? All Joan Didion asks

is why. All her books do is say: God is dead. There is no why. Somehow,

You keep living. You keep looking. All day, I thought I was going to throw up.

Horror is the least of what you owe the suffering. The least. I keep living;

I keep looking. I see: inedible mauve cherries on a stark white side walk.

I see: a flyer stuck in a tree. I see someone catatonic on a bench. Look.

I understand a little of death because it moves over me in portent clouds;

I see the wind because a girl walks by

and her hair softly dances.