Goodbye, Goodbye

by Joanna Penn Cooper and Todd Colby

If you put in three to four hours per day of deliberate practice,

within ten years the air around you will become firmer, making it

easier to stand upright, even in a wind storm.  Many friends accuse

me of being from Oklahoma, so this is something I know something
about-- wind and survival, funnel cakes and gas station tacos,  a strong

core. And the people, I forgot about people: How each person I met

seemed to hold a message of some sort that I would decipher years

later while scribbling in a notebook, the code revealed as quickly 
as it was extinguished. I love myself sometimes in my love for

the people, how noticing is like the whole world sitting up straight
and giving you a sad smile, or like taking off your own shirt and loving
your animal warmth apart from yourself.  But you can't just say that.

What?  I didn't say that.  Together we can envelop the news, and I do 

mean what we read in the papers, what is sprayed on the walls, 
or whispered in paneled dens over a sleeping sibling. Brother, I'll be 
over here, like Thoreau on a stalled Q train on the Manhattan bridge, 
scowling at the wondrous implicated sky.  Sister, let me illuminate

the electric green muck of the Gowanus Canal. I am all about

forgetting, even when memory comes trudging up the stairs in the form

of a poem I shall never write in order to simply say goodbye, goodbye.

OK, fine-- I remember you.  Goodbye.