Adam’s at the altar telling tall tales. I am awash in this inky atmosphere, strands of wistful mystery, a rhapsody of revision as it happens. He has a wizard’s earworm, famous mouthfeel, and his sights set on the apple fell from that dead tree. Can you see him: twenty-something, counting syllables in bed, biting on bottomless coffee, skywriting behind wired eyelids. Now: handsome and charming in Cambridge, mussed with a crush, crisscrossing the country, amidst our mythical American ampersands, on a morning commute through mountainous emptiness, conjuring a family from the whirling ephemera of the world’s memory. There are lyrics to commemorate meals, seal purchases, capture love, offer prophecies. Letter sounds stretch from the heart-of-the-matter to the farthest satellite electron and then are accordion squeezed into an impenetrable Parmenidean One. It’s all a blur, obscure, gone in th’blink’v’a’twinkling’i. Voice Notes by Adam Golaski (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023).
