Saturday, July 04, 2009 :::
 

Almost July

Almost July. A fallen cherry
clings to the burning hood of my car,
its skin dark as a plum's, vein-purple,
its oozing flesh blood-red, and
the stone showing bone-pale
in the compound fracture of its heart.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 10:30 AM
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Friday, July 03, 2009 :::
 

Glory

In the middle of taking a Facebook quiz
(which damned soul are you? Everyone hopes for
Il Miglior Fabbro, of course) I pause to
pull the curtain aside.

Light pours from the white wall opposite.
Light pours from the top of the window, where the sun
finds flaws in the glass and rushes through,
overwhelming the silica levies; light rises
from the blinding sill, light courses
through my phantom, fading skin and makes my bones
burn like white phosphor.

At night, among the old yellow headlights,
a pair of new ones, blue-white as Vega, rise,
blasting my night vision, turning me sightless,
making me old in a splintered second.

And when I fumble
into the refuge of the darkroom
I find the floor has gone, the tiles fallen away:
and below me is only the endless glory
of uncountable clustering stars.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 3:09 PM
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Thursday, July 02, 2009 :::
 

Friday Quotidiana

The romance is back.

Yesterday I got my bike back from the shop. Maybe you remember me complaining about it a month or two ago? With the vague idea in my mind that it was a year, maybe two years, old, I was unhappy about how many things seemed to be going wrong with it. A new bike shouldn't have only half its gear range viable, a chain that slips, brakes that won't hold tension.

Searching back here, I found that it was actually three and half years old, with no maintenance beyond my clumsy attempts to adjust the brakes. So I took it into the nearby bike shop -- the Bicycle Repair Collective -- for a tune-up. And my miraculous flying machine is back. My noiseless, weightless brother of the wind.

Yes, I know bicycle maintenance is not rocket science. I know I could learn to do it properly myself. I also know I'm not going to. For the price of one of my massages (the basic unit of exchange, in my mental economic picture) I got my wings back. Walked to the shop, picked up the bike, and flew downtown to work. It's true that coming back up home from the river is not quite flying, even on my little blue Trek, but it still beats riding the bus by a wide, wide margin. And it takes about the same amount of time.

Actually it cost two massages, because I had managed to destroy the wheels by riding so long with bad brake pads. I will treat it lovingly from now on. The guys at the repair collective are going to be my best friends.

Still to figure out is how to ride in the rain, so I can keep doing it in the Fall. I suspect that the best solution, here in the maritime Northwest where it's so seldom really cold, is just to accept getting wet, and to bring dry clothes to have at the other end.

---

The blogroll. I really must do something about it. Blogrolling.com was taken over by pod people, who, after a long incubation, during which you couldn't update your blogroll at all, re-emerged and put ads on top of the blogs linked to, without consulting their subscribers. Not cool. They've completely forfeited my alliegance. So I need to fiddle with my template. Blogger has some kind of blogroll infrastructure now, I think, which I can probably use. I just need to get around to it. It's rather like fixing the bike. And after all, my template's been broken for ages. The corners of my border outlines went all funky years ago (no, it's not intended to look like that.) But this is probably like getting my bike fixed up: expect action in three or four years. Though I am anxious to get links up to some of my newer favorite blogs. Where There are no Chickadees. 20th Century Woman. Tejana Poet. Box Elder. (Box Elder isn't even new: she's been a favorite read forever. Why she's not on my blogroll is a mystery to me. I think the gremlins who get into bicycle brakes get into blogrolls, too.) Now that I use Google Reader, the blogroll has become a poor cousin, but it's still an important element of the blogosphere. I know that people sometimes click dead links over there. Sorry.

---

I have a backlog of five or six drafted posts which I hesitate to publish. This happens to me, every once in a while. The posts just seem wrong to me, and I can't figure out why. Is it that I'm afraid people won't like them? It is it because there's something genuinely wrong with them? Is it that my brain has gone the way of my bike and my blogroll, and I will never write good posts again? How could I know, and why should I care? It's none of my business.

Labels: Bicycle, Blogs and Blogging

posted by Dale at 9:10 AM
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Sunday, June 28, 2009 :::
 

Health Histories

I take health histories, which often turn out to be mostly mental health histories. The stories pour forth in neat connected narratives: this trauma which caused that bodily deficiency; a whole history of pains and debilities, in perfectly formed, self-contained fables; episodes in the epic of the realized soul. I know I'm listening with grave kindness, startled and grieved as I always am by the long story of pain, pain suffered, pain inflicted, pain held. I am astonished that anyone keeps it together and manages to present as normal, in this life. Heroes, all of you, struggling agains the rising of entropy, which eats all things anyone ever loved. It rises not least in ourselves, as various cancers of the body, as various dementias of the mind.

I listen with kindness and understanding and respect, I hope. I resist the impulse to lay a hand on your forearm and say, "but you don't believe any of these stories, do you?"

Because I know that you have no choice. Of course you believe all these stories. And who am I to doubt them? To think that the stories themselves are the worst of the debilities, and the greatest of the pains, you suffer? Physician, heal thyself.

Fortunately, I am not a doctor, or a counselor. I have no authority to inject myself into this stream of narrative and impose my own counternarratives, diagnoses from my own little black bag of anecdotes. Depend upon it, if I were so empowered, I would do it, and then I would believe my own stories; and where they diverged from yours, we would wound each other and feel betrayed. But fortunately I am a massage therapist, and my powerlessness is my freedom. I don't have to have a story. I catch bright little bits of hard information, here and there. What you fear and what you hope for. Enough to know that I can hardly be too gentle, that I must be scrupulous of boundaries even by my own standards.

As always, once the hands are on the back, once the slow rhythm begins, once we start talking the language of skin and heat, resistance and relaxation, the conversation changes utterly. Suddenly communications are charged with a full load of meaning. Feedback is rapid, accurate, uninterpreted. I'm in. Past the membrane of all those toxic stories. Finally we can start to really talk.

And of course, we talk about only two things: pain and love. What else is there to talk about?

It's all broken glass in there, you tell me. I go gentler, and gentler still. Just a whisper with the hands. And finally, when I'm moving away, you ask me to just lay my hands, unmoving, on your chest, and you weep. Just for a little bit. And then you're done, and we move on.

Labels: Massage

posted by Dale at 9:17 AM
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Friday, June 26, 2009 :::
 

Murakami

Reading Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, on Christine's recommendation. I'm enjoying it greatly. I read very few novels anymore -- it takes so long to read a novel! -- so this is a special treat. I'm struck, whenever I read a novel nowadays, by how my generation is now in the ascendent. I notice the same thing in crossword puzzles. The cultural references are to things I know about: the Beatles, Nixon, the Berlin Wall. It's not necessarily that the writers and puzzle composers are my age: it's just that these things are the common coin. In ten years, more and more things will be cropping up that I'm too old to have a feel for; in another decade or two I'll be groping, as I used to in my twenties, when I had to strain to catch echoes and guess what Fred Astaire meant or what the given name of Charlie Chaplin's wife might be; except that then the problem will be that the people referred to are too young.

Right now, I'm in the sweet spot, convinced that all of human life was lived specifically for my benefit. (Enjoy it while you got it, bucko!)

I suppose we have Garcia Marquez & his ilk to thank for the liberation of incident. Serious novels were so godawfully stuffy for a while: nothing actually interesting or diverting could happen, because that wouldn't be literary. God! Those agonizingly realistic novels, Irving and Roth and Fowles and Malamud and Bellows and so forth: dreary self-absorbed characters having dreary half-hearted affairs and shuffling sullenly along to their dreary suburban deaths. No wonder I stopped reading novels. It was supposed to be realism, but it was completely foreign to the real world as I experience it, which is rich, throbbing, brightly colored, absolutely improbable and absorbing, full of beauty and terror and wistfully funny. Murakami's world, now, like Garcia Marquez's, is like the one I inhabit. I don't even want to visit the world of those older novelists.

Thank you Christine!

Labels: Murakami, Novels

posted by Dale at 9:15 AM
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Thursday, June 25, 2009 :::
 

Missing

I have not a single answer: not one.

Some years ago I had to work to divest myself of opinions. Not anymore. Oh, I have them, of course: they come flickering up at moments of irritation or self-congratulation. But they flutter on their way again. Thank God. What a stupid weight to carry. The pronunciamentos of the Grand Junta of Official Daledom, Duly Assembled. I used to take the proceedings of that body dead seriously. Only gradually did I discover that nobody -- least of all me -- paid the slightest attention to its proclamations, strictures, and sanctions. That rather silly and pathetic governor of South Carolina is discovering that just now. But no doubt he'll figure out a way to save his personal Junta, at whatever cost to his career, his family, his spiritual yearnings, his lover, and his common sense.

It's easy to confuse the love of wisdom with the love of having opinions. The two things can look exactly alike. But sooner or later one will kill the other. They can't live in the same house.

---

The Sun Gone Missing

At the solstice
splashes of light, the size
and color of apricots, made their way
through the slatted blinds. They glowed
on your skin, on your hair; they set
shadows that hooded your eyes.

Now on the vacant pillow
the cold light is silvered
like the back of an empty mirror.
Nothing hidden. Nothing shows.

The tastes of chocolate, of almond,
of cherry -- mixed on your tongue --
try to come back, but can't.
They are waiting for you, caught
behind shutters, lost like the sun.
Nothing will be right till it returns.

---

A sough of cooler air stirs the twisted cords that hang down by the window, makes them rock slightly. Unless the world is rocking, and the cords are still.

---

Two old men from the bible club keep talking in the parking lot, unable to leave an audience, however imperfect: they gesture with their books, they swell with vehemence, become congested with conviction. Their faces redden. They strain as if on the toilet. Not for the first time, I wonder how this bluster ever became associated with anything sacred or holy. The pale meek monks and saints of medieval iconography, humbly dressed, with their hands fluttering and their eyes cast upwards, are silly representations of holiness, but at least you can see what the artists are driving at; you can follow the associations. No chain of any length connects my ideas of holiness with these portraits of constipated outrage.

Labels: Poems

posted by Dale at 10:59 AM
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 :::
 

Sun

I have entered yet another new world: one in which all doors open to me. I'm not quite sure how this happened. Like all the most important turns of my life, I didn't know I was making it. I only glimpse it in the rearview mirror, disappearing, and I know suddenly I'm in a new country.

I've wandered a long way from Springfield. With a pang I remember a ring, set with cheap blue glass, scrabbled from the dust by the reservoir. You had to climb a chain link fence to get in, but the barb-wiring at the top was perfunctory, and you had all the time in the world to get over it: nobody ever checked on it. And then you could climb the steel ladder of the water tower, and look out over the northward slopes to yet other hidden worlds.

Just one of many empty places I cat-burglared my way into. Of course, I wanted to be able to go into inhabited places: but they were all closed to me, I knew that. So I found my way into deserted barns, fenced reservoirs. Some other kids' abandoned treehouse, with their moldering stash of girly magazines. I was as wary of human beings as a fox, and likewise as cocky: there weren't many places I couldn't get into. It takes only patience, and a gift for silence. I had both.

It would have taken only slight twist of destiny, at one point, to have set me on a life of burglary. I had all the skills and I would have enjoyed the challenge, the combination of patient research and sudden risk, the pleasure of entering places supposed to be private and protected. I loved to climb, to hide, and to observe. I knew just how invisible a still person is, how the direction of the light shows you up or conceals you. I knew how deeply habit-ridden most people are. They do the same things over and over, and their attention is predictable. It would have taken only a slight twist some other direction to have made me a hunter. Or maybe not. I've always hated hurting things. I don't think I could happily have despoiled people of their property either. Maybe not such slight twists. Maybe destiny wears heavier shoes than that.

But anyway -- my point is that now, suddenly, I am an insider, trusted with keys and secrets, with more invitations proffered me than I could possibly accept. I'm nonplussed. I never thought I could be a person on the inside and I don't quite know how to hold it.

The day promises fair. I'm flooded with tenderness, with a yen to make offerings at untended shrines. The sun is climbing up the eastern roads. I don't know who I am anymore, which I have to think is a good thing. Yesterday I looked at all the glittering suns bobbing in the dimpled river, worked out why they appeared in an elongated oval instead of in a circle. It's simple geometry. Pythagoras would have grasped it at once.

You recover from a swerve, having nearly tumbled from your bike, you glide easily along: you look the same as before, just as insouciant, but the adrenalin is coursing through your veins. You know, for a moment, just how precarious it all is. The sun is not quite as solid in the sky as you thought.

posted by Dale at 10:05 AM
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