I Do Know Some Things - Tapa dura

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Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Lannan Fellowships, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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6 HEARSAY

They say that I was born in February, in a hospital in midtown,

while it snowed. It is legend. There are photographs. They say

the blue bathing suit with the little green frogs was my favorite.

They say that those are my mother’s sunglasses, pointing at a

naked boy wearing nothing else, in a poloroid, laughing. My

first birthday and the big stuffed dog? I remember that dog but

I don’t remember getting that dog. It seems like I always had

that dog. She would sleep in bed with me—endlessly vigilant,

black plastic eyes flashing hallway light if anyone opened

the bedroom door—along with a real cat named Good-For-

Nothing Layabout Cat. That’s you, they say, pointing at a

photograph—a little boy at his first rodeo, in a baby blue

cowboy outfit with suede fringe, standing awkwardly and

squinting into the sun—but they aren’t pointing at a photo-

graph, they are pointing at a story, how this and that and

something something. What does it take to own the myth? Why

build a self from this? It makes me uncomfortable, my story—

part insight, part anecdote—started by unreliable people at

cross-purposes. And which photographs didn’t get saved? And

which photographs didn’t get taken? I never figured out who

named the cat but everyone took credit for it.

10 COVER STORY 

My boyfriend did not die in 1991. I told a lie and it turned into

a fact, forever repeated in my official biography. He died on

Christmas Day, 1990, when his family disconnected the

mechanical breathing machine. He was a composer. We were

working on a piece for voice and strings. I liked writing the

words under the whole notes, hyphenating them to make them

last. I liked sitting on the bed in his apartment, writing on the

sheet music—bigger paper, thicker, how it sounded when it fell

to the floor when we got tired. It was winter break, friends in

town, we hopped from party to party, catching up but

separately. We hadn’t told anyone. It was late, the night was

clear, the roads were empty. The four of them were sober, the

driver in the other car was not. I was a few miles away, in a bar,

waiting. When the bar closed, I left him an angry voicemail for

standing me up. A few hours later, a friend called and told me.

He suggested I break into the apartment and start removing

things before the family arrived. For several minutes I didn’t

understand, then—evidence. He hadn’t told his family about us.

I drove in the darkness between the accident and dawn. I

climbed through the window. I couldn’t figure which things

looked suspicious and which things would be missed. I was

sloppy, felt rushed. I grabbed the wrong music. It was a piece

had already performed. A few days after Christmas there was a

memorial. I sat in the back. As part of his speech, his father

mentioned the missing music, made a metaphor out of it, made

an appeal for its return. I couldn’t give it back. On New Year’s

Eve, in a black velvet jacket, at a party in the lobby of a

downtown hotel, with a drink in each hand—one for him, one

for me—I kept asking where he was, if anyone had seen him. I

had his passport in my pocket. I shouldn’t have taken that

either. It was the only picture of him I could find.