This was my first nationally "published" poem, though it only appeared online. The poem consists of sentences and phrases collected from a trove of diaries, decades and decades worth of diaries, that I bought at the White House Flea Market in Schenectady. I was out of college, back in my hometown, barely employed, and doing things like wandering around flea markets with my friend Mike. When we hit this pile of diaries, we knew we had to have them -- though as I recall, we didn't buy all of them. There were that many. As I recall, we went back to my apartment above Tam's Tanning and Laundry and pored over pages of history in the hand of a steady, reserved, diligent mathematician and family man.
We loved everything these diaries revealed: that the world really did exist long before us in all its minutia, and that someone was there to preserve it in a way we knew we could not -- clear-eyed, free of ornamentation or wisecracks. Of course we tried, in the weeks and months after, to render and research and explicate every line and reference we could, and of course it mostly failed. The diaries' gift to us was the mystery of their existence.
We split up the pile of diaries, as I recall. We both returned to the White House to try to buy up the rest, and of course they were gone. I sent this poem to LOST while living in Akaike, Japan. Since then both the town and the magazine have ceased to exist, but the diaries have followed me to every apartment and house, and still live in a shoebox on a closet shelf.
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