Morning Light

Yesterday evening I walked west, toward the city, down from our little upland, across the 82nd Avenue gully, and up the slope of Mt Tabor, high enough to see the dark hills farther east. No mountain: a low cloud cover hid it. But I could see across to Mt Scott. I just wanted to walk, walk forever, hilltop to hilltop. But an hour was about what my knees would do. I turned back for home.

Always this ache, this longing to find some path out. I am so tired, and I can't keep up even with my daily tasks. I have tried to simplify, but the formula eludes me. Too many things too fast. I become duller-witted with each passing day: and even in my prime I was unable to untie these knots. What chance do I have now? Each mistake leads to the next, each waste entails more spending, every sleepless night leads to another. The taste of defeat is on my tongue. A deep breath makes me cough. I've played my bets and lost: why am I still at the table?

I know what's wrong: it's all these days without rain. Feeling sad and wan. Our neighbors aren't watering the tree they planted last year, and it's dying. 

In the morning, the young crows wake first: those strange, bleating caws of the very young corvids, demanding to be fed. They pursue their parents, begging, begging even as they forage. They forage quite competently, but they're still driven by the habit of need, even now when the need is gone.

Morning light filters into the house. I could try to sleep again, or I could wander out into the day. Sleep, I think. Or at least lie down on the couch, and imagine the paths out, and the cold rain. It will rain again, someday.

The Secret of my Success

Stepping very carefully, here. There is so much that I have gotten wrong, so many twists in the fabric. I am wrapping my knee in hopes of convincing this bursa to disburse, and it's like that: desire has a tendency to bunch and cling to itself, and if you don't get it smooth, you'll end up cutting off your circulation and doing more harm than good.

But. I am remarkably alive and well. My sheer animal vigor astonishes me: I feel wolfish, intent, unburdened: the picaro of my own novel. The crow is strong in me: endless curiosity and indifference to pain, jeu d'esprit and a desire to mess with other creatures just to liven things up. I am neither tidy nor kind, but there is a gloss to me. Adding my bit of blight, as Kay Ryan would say:

briefly swaggering the

swagger of his

aggravating ancestors

down my street.

And every time

I like him

when we meet.

Still -- or, rather, because -- carefully, carefully, walk carefully here. Never make precisely the same mistake twice, that's my motto: always introduce a variation. That's the secret of my success.

The Day Begins With Women

A brave concourse of crows,

asseverating something,

and beyond a clotted mess

of branch and wire begins

the thaw of darkness; light

in the standing pools of the sky.

I would not begin to say

what raw, scraped arms might circle me,

what lips might brush my ears and

tell me this or that, take up maybe

the selfsame topic that so moves the corvidary:

but I know the day begins with women

heaving red earth

and hauling themselves out of quick-dug graves.

Their skin is painted with the clay of sleep,

but their eyes are licked clean:

they glow like flaws

in the glass of old windows catching the sun.

Morning, with Crows and Snowflakes

Snowflakes gathering to the streetlights, and falling away. A blue morning, dark and quiet; the radio is playing softly: some melancholy country/soft rock crossover crooner. I can't quite recognize the tune, but the obsessive repetition of the refrain, and the anxiety conveyed by the ragged voice, feel quintessentially American. We can endure neither our ills nor their remedies, it says.

But it grows lighter, nevertheless. I can see the snowflakes now outside the spheres of the streetlights, drifting down, striking a repelling layer of air some three inches from the parking lot pavement, and bouncing up off it once, even twice, before settling. The flakes aren't dissolving immediately on contact, now. This may stick.

A dozen crows cluster in the air, and drift over to the tallest and nearest of the doug firs, settling on its crown. In all the mornings I've sat here and watched them, I've never seen them settle there, though it seems, to this ignorant primate, like the obvious spot. Is it the snow route? Half a dozen more join them.

The streetlights go out. The snow turns back to rain. Or are those fine flakes? More crows come to the moot: all the highest boughs of the doug fir have black ornaments bobbing at their ends. And then they all launch off and move over to the telephone wires northwards, along 62nd, where they get coffee and and joke and network and exchange business cards. Crisis averted. They've negotiated to discount the loans with the French and German banks.

And now, it's real morning. There are colors: green hedges, blue awnings, red cars. A surprising flood of light, now, coming through the thick cloudroof. Over there, our new white Honda Civic – new to us, of course, not factory new – glows as if it was the real source of all this light, the whitest thing in all this white world. We got it last week. We've become increasingly anxious about Alan driving the now ancient, can't-get-parts-for-it '85 Honda Accord, so the idea of getting the Civic was to give him the Ford, once we've spruced it up a little, replaced the struts and so forth.

When I finish my coffee I'll head on over to KCC for the morning sit. I went last week, too. It was nice to see everyone.

New snowflakes, daytime snowflakes, coming down now. A man hobbles past the windows, white flakes pasting themselves to his red coat. He comes in and takes his place at the special booth where Tosi ordinarily sits, the imperial seat, right by the door, between the old and new dining rooms. He's one of those men with ageless faces who forgathers with Tosi, talking in resonant confident voices in endlessly flowing Greek. Probably, like Tosi, in his seventies or eighties, though you'd guess fifties or sixties. All these men have strongly marked faces, and there's not one of them you'd mistake for American. They don't smile at strangers, for one thing, though they laugh and tease freely among themselves. Not even a flicker of recognition for me, though we've been sharing restaurant space for thirty years, and I must be as familiar to them as they are to me.

Off to KCC. Good morning! xoxo

God's Work Habits

I try not to criticize God, it's a big job and all, but it does irritate me the way that he lets everything pile up in his "Dale Favier" inbox and then deals with it all at once. So that we are knee-deep in buying and selling houses at the same time as I have terrific ideas for no less than three books to write, and I'm going first-timers through the thrilling process of revising and proofing a book for the best editor in the world (how can one book of poems be such a complicated enterprise?) and am snowed under at work while everyone else is busy with the Russian delegation (since when do local Library Foundations deal with Russian delegations?) and Martha has a job interview today and massage business abruptly picks up from the high summer doldrums and I have three books to review that each deserves a really thoughtful treatment, and a conversation about the high philosophy of massage that I desperately want to participate in suddenly ignites. If I owe you email, don't give yourself airs and think you're special: I owe everybody email.

Here's the cover of the soon-to-be poetry book, by Robin Weiss

A Brief Snow in Portland

A response to Dave's Morning Porch for today

Portland pretends to snow — very pretty!
but it’s frosting and frippery.

A single crow calls for company, her low cough rising
to a shrill confident shriek.

The byways are already black, the eaves already running,
a whisper of water gushes in gutters:

the hard hot pulse of Portland
will not pause for a moment.

Yet Another Crow Poem

a crow in glossy black knickerbockers
snicksnops over the asphalt's yellow lines:
he has business with the blowing cellophane.

Angel in the Whirlwind

I'm reading Angel in the Whirlwind, a history of the American Revolution, by Benson Bobrick. I particularly liked this sentence about John Adams. “In religion, Adams was a Congregationalist of the Unitarian school and as such lacked an aptitude for paradox.” It's something you could say of many of my countrymen.

---

“How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?” asked Samuel Johnson, in re the American discontents.

---

Dazzling, dazzling, the white church spires:
across the bay, dark ships fret at their wires.
The smell of a slaver can never be scoured from the plank;
we sanded and scrubbed and still the living wood stank.

(This verse is what got me started writing in rhymed couplets, yesterday. Do other people get railroaded by forms, like that? I just had to write something in rhymed couplets. Fourteeners will take me that way too: when I need to write something in fourteeners it's no use trying to write anything else.)

---

Private note to historians of the American Revolution: you don't have to tell me which side you're on. It's not really the done thing, among historians; and to tell the truth, it's not that hard to guess.

---

So I stand by a pile of rubble that used to be my house, and try to imagine building again: but there seem to be no beams left, only clapboard and shingles and broken sheetrock. I pick through the wreckage without much hope. I do turn up keepsakes from time to time, but I don't have anywhere to put them.

---

I don't know what you call that color, where the pale blue of the dawn sky picks up hints of orange from the the sunrise. The disheveled doug firs are almost black against it. Twenty or thirty crows suddenly scramble up from the shrubbery and flap their way up into the firs. They settle there like perfectly designed accessories, as ragged and unpredictable as the fir boughs. If you don't like crows, you probably don't like doug firs: they're not seemly trees. They're assymmetrical, quirky, and defiant, with long sweeping boughs that are always a little out of true, like cowlicks on a kid who can't stay out of trouble. They don't know how to be orderly, any more than crows do.

The Two Most Important Crows

Two crows wag their way
side by side across the asphalt,
their thumbs in their waistcoat armholes.
They think they will build a new store here:
sell hamburger wrappers to starlings.
Big plans. For crows, you know,
crows are very important, and these
are the most important of all.