what scientists call the space-time continuum

what scientists call the space-time continuum I call my life.

take, for example, a couple days ago when I looked up from stuffing

my signed withdrawal receipt into the drive-through bank’s time capsule-like container,

and saw, across the street, a place I probably pass without a glance

once or twice a week, the run-down hacienda-style façade

of the old k-records building, and, perhaps because of the direct view

provided by the drive-through’s horse race starting gate set-up,

which was new to me as I’d until recently only used the unmanned drive-through ATM

whose approach runs parallel to the street, I suddenly realized I was staring straight

at the place where ace investigations use to exist,

only the feeling I had was that I was looking into the past

as plausibly as clearing the hurdle of optical distortion

to recognize an everyday object on the other side of a tall, full water glass.

I was looking at something magnified with salience yet banally familiar.

there was the rust-colored door we’d open before ascending the echoing stairs.

there, on the second floor, were the five windows our voluntary monthly dues

helped pay to keep lit: three for the L-shaped room where our

artists’ collective would meet each sunday night

and where we’d occasionally put on shows for the public

that were mostly just attended by us and our friends;

another for the little office where we kept our logbook of attendees and minutes;

and, beyond that, separated by a curtain then, one for the room

where amber bell, our unofficial secretary, had her spartan, bed-and-desk abode.

for a year I circulated there with them, against those panes of glass,

one of the town’s colorful fish in our self-built aquarium.

I wanted so much for those people and that place to stay in my life

fundamentally, like infrastructure that doesn’t need to be tended to in any way.

but nothing is like that; not even rocks keep their shape for long.

one sunday instead of at night we met in the afternoon

and, because the weather was nice, we gathered across the street

on the concrete expanse of the car queue part of the drive-through bank,

which, during this time before washington state employees credit union

bought that property and put it to use, was just one of the many

abandoned commercial structures downtown,

an example of the urban ruin we unspokenly favored

because it facilitated the way we approached everything as either

a stage or a canvas or a children’s playhouse.

a year after this, in fact, I joined forty or so people gathered under the roof

of the drive-through’s still-unused carport

to watch miranda july and other local, and quasi-local, lo-fi stars

perform the free “punk-rock-pee-in-my-pants”

part of the yo-yo-a-go-go music festival, as a slight summer shower

pissed on the shoulders of those at the edge of the crowd

like punk rock weather showing us artists and art connoisseurs

that there’ll always be a medium of expression inaccessible to us.

spreading our artistic influences over the edges of new horizons

actually turned out to be the theme of that last ace meeting there.

standing in the pre-dusk sun, I was taken aback when I heard khaela

say that shannon, the collective’s founder, whom khaela had just returned

from visiting in hawaii, had suggested that we end ace investigations.

“as it exists now” was the caveat passed on by khaela; or perhaps

she put it or something like it forth of her own accord.

in any case, I was further surprised when others quickly picked up the baton,

saying, in essence, that it would be less that we’d be disbanded

than that we’d shoot off like spores, continuing to germinate creativity,

but now, gone to ground, doing so in the wider and wider concentric circles

of the adult world, instead of in our backyard fort-like, insular enclave.

I knew, though, that it also had to do with the fact that increasingly

fewer and fewer people ― not me! ― had chipped in to help amber pay the rent.

I would have paid for it all, by myself, for a year, if it had meant I could keep

seeing those people every week, and I could have, too, but that’s not how it works.

you can’t force friendship into a sack, with money or whatever, any more than you can a cat.

you can chase it and get scratched, you can trap it and starve it and feel guilty,

you can train it with much effort to obey as well as a dog, but what have you got then?

not the elusive spirit you’d hoped would stick with you, like a daemon, of its own free will.

that’s magic, friendship, what “any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from,” according to arthur c. clarke.

friendship is the once and future means for accomplishing

that which computers and all our reedy regent-like, adult knickknacks can’t.

it bends space and time with a weight that is greater

than the eventual, singular condensation of all matter.

that anachronistic, new band of black paint

with the white words “OLYMPIA KNITTING MILLS”

girding the middle of the old k-records building over there,

where no such business has existed for decades and decades,

is worn by that site like a mourning band, in my black hole eyes,

is worn by it like the cuff of the king’s raised glove, in my big bang gaze.