Out of Sorts

I have no idea how these people can stand to go on talking. This is wrong! They say, and they gather a big flock of people to bleat “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” together. And this is supposed to be a conversation.

No matter how wrong it is, and how many people agree with you, it's not a conversation. A conversation happens when you try to talk with one of the wrong people, or at least to imagine their point of view. A conversation happens when you figure out a time that you did the same kind of thing for the same kind of reason. A conversation happens, basically, when people discover that they're mistaken about something. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of primates getting together to fuss and make a lot of noise, like crows gathering for the night.

I find it increasingly difficult to talk to most people. Their moral vocabulary is so limited, and they have such black-and-white views. For them there are only two moral categories: right and wrong. It's a stretch for them even to get so far as to distinguish between “wrong” and “should be illegal.” When you get to something like “wrong but not as bad as the alternatives” they get panicky, and long before you get to “wrong but only because it injures your own heart” you've lost them completely. They want to be back in the comfort of the flock, bleating “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” together again.

The depth of ignorance displayed is staggering. A person asks, as if it was the most reasonable, answerable question in the world, “don't you think the Koran's effect on the world has been mostly negative?” The ignorance that makes it possible to ask such a question shocks me. We're talking about the foundational document of thousands of critically important institutions and scores of states, a document without which whole literatures and arts would not exist. In each and every case, you would have to investigate to find out -- what would probably have replaced it? Zoroastrianism? Byzantine Christianity? Some other cult? Would it have been better or worse, and in which ways? Where would world culture have gone under these other systems? Where would we be if, just for instance, arabic civilization had not preserved so much of Classical mathematics and natural philosophy? Would medicine as we know it even exist, without Galen and Avicenna? The questions are endless: I could fill pages with them. And each one would be rife with imponderables. Someone-- and this is a college professor we're talking about -- calmly undertaking to evaluate such a thing as a yes or no question in a Facebook comment thread makes me unhappy and nervous. Maybe civilization has ended, after all, but we've been too polite to mention it.

When I write something like this post, I'm usually a little physically under the weather: in fact the very earliest symptom of a viral infection that I get -- before I'm aware of any physical symptoms -- is a tendency to carp and blame and find fault, in my writing. I am, at any rate, short of sleep. I've spent this afternoon dozing at whiles in bed, listening to the rain tapping, reading the last chapters of a biography of Wodehouse. (Almost always a melancholy thing, reading the last chapters of the biography of someone modern. You already know it's not going to end well, and there's generally twenty or thirty pages of depressing medical history to wade through.) Crows complaining outside, justifiably, of the interminable rain. Perhaps I'll doze again.

Oviduct

As eggs move down the oviduct
they’re smeared with calcium gel;
before they can be untucked
they will be sealed with shell.
A hermetic, airless nativity:
all birds are born in captivity.

In response to this Morning Porch post.

Ghostery

Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart,
You quoted from Deuteronomy.
And no wonder you feel ghostlike, you said,
when the convenant at the root
of the three great monotheisms,
which you can't accept and yet
can't leave alone, concerns
a body part that you don't even have.

And I said -- made stupid by anger --
are you really all that anxious to join
the genital mutilation club?
I don't think it will fix being a ghost.

I don't think it ever worked for that.
I hear you, but the whole
slaughter-your-son-for-God's-approval
business, even
watered down to a bris, is a piece
of self-defeating self-ghostery
if I ever saw one.

And you said “Am I speaking Klingon?”
And that was that. No conversation to ensue.
Fair enough. It's not my faith,
not my gender, not my business.

One does soon start to speak Klingon
when one picks up the terms of another's faith.
I've seen it often enough, the bizarreries
of karma misconstrued as justice,
or selflessness as nihilism; it might be better
if we all just bit our tongues. But

this I am passionate about, this business
of ghosts. Once out of your body
you will do no good: no pope, no holy lama,
no blood-ritual however tender the part
to be torn, can change the ghosting
into something good.

And it's not so hard to lie down naked
and let a servant touch you humbly
(I'm lying, it's the hardest thing of all)
And know that you are nothing, nothing
but some scraps of flesh, until that
homeless, wandering thing,
is called back by the oiled hands,
the lavender or sandalwood,
of some quite ordinary creature:
and the scraps themselves begin to talk
or possibly to wail: ghost made flesh,
or flesh made ghost, it doesn't matter,
never mattered, never will.

My Poem-a-Day

There are several NaPoWriMo, or poem-a-day, sites, for people who are celebrating National Poetry Month by drafting a poem every day. I've been very kindly invited to participate in some of them, but I don't think I'm going to. I know I don't have time to read that many poems: I may not have time to read the poems I already know that my favorite bloggers are going to produce. April gets kind of nuts.

I'll be going along as a freelancer, or a fellow-traveler. I'm not doing it as a discipline. I have lots of anxieties, but the one about not producing enough poetry has not yet bitten me. I don't think I should write more poems. Probably I should write fewer.

But I like writing poems, and I like the way everybody gets a little wacky and loose when they have to write that much, and I don't want to miss the party completely. So I'm in, more or less. Happy April!

The other April poetry thing I'm doing is the Via Negativa book club. It will be tremendous fun, and I'm looking forward to it very much.

Advice from the County Extension

Consider the Eater of Hope
How he lingers in the dark threads
of water in the cracks of old concrete

How he crawls head down, like a nuthatch
on the trunk of the world, searching
for plans and little grubs

How his translucent eyelids
flutter pinkly in the midday sun
that causes him such pain.

Consider how he edges backward
along mildewed porch railings,
inviting memories to take his place.

He prepares a honey stick
for termite mounds and
hairstyles that don't work out:

No one has ever claimed
he is not clever with his hands.
A pamphlet from the county extension

advises not leaving your laptop open
with affectionate emails displayed;
not kissing in public,

and not reaching to stroke the
delicate involutions
of the ears of the stranger

sitting in the seat
in front of yours, who
is reading Middlemarch on the bus:

once the attention of an Eater
has been attracted, they say,
it is very hard to shake.

Egg Thieves

Snow for April 1, fine, but I want something crazier: egg thief in a tree, yellow dwarf for a sun, a message in lights from every false god. -- Dave Bonta, Morning Porch

There are so many egg thieves.
It may be how we began
our own career of rapine,
and we still like to start our day
with a stolen Icarus or two,
some children of flight, yoked
to our gratification.

Something crazier?
A yellow dwarf for a sun,
who only hints at evening
of her rage for destruction,
how she intends to swell, and redden,
and snatch us from the nest.
Not now, but soon; soon,
as she reckons it.

Gods are never false. You can hear them
intoning the lines of Polonius:
“... as the night the day
thou canst not then be false to any man.
So there.” And then they hawk and spit,
a bit of April snowfall for a joke.

Still, there's always someone
cracked enough to climb
the legs of Tonans, trembling in the dark.
Crawl up and hide behind his eyes,
(after leaving a terror-pile
of steaming scat behind), thinking
that in the morning, when the marketplace is full,
he'll think of something -- something,
somehow, for his god to say.

Blunder and Peel

There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. -- Tolkien, The Hobbit

. . .

How gently you ask me
to peel back my ribs

and reveal what's inside.
To really believe

I'm a reflection of the one
who will never cast me away.

-- Rachel Barenblat, “Beat,” 70 faces


No, there is no magic about me, despite your kind words,
what I have is the ordinariest human kindness, and the gift
of holding still. When the blundering is past, the love remains.

The light pours, sticky sweet, through cherry branches,
putting me in mind of cordials and liqueurs, apéritifs
that only promise opening. Crème de cassis as drunk

by the great Hercule. How gently you ask me to peel back my ribs!
There are two layers to the pericardial sac
(the packaging is worse than what you find at Walmart,

also referred to as the cod or scrot);
but what we find, after all this shying and sidling
is that we were naked all along, and loved

in all our awkwardness: not in spite of,
says God -- not in spite of, but because.

Less Clear

less clear, less cold: here comes
the muddy murmur of Spring,
the gleam of my glassy rival:
who shaves believing that lovers
arrive in April, that omens
never cash out, that the
knotted fist of my heart
can hold its clench forever.

---

in response to this Morning Porch post. I forgot to post it here, till now. I'm thinking a lot about alliteration, these days, and this poem maybe mirrors the thought: I start deliberately in the northern style, with alliteration on the pounding syllables, and then ease off to unstressed consonants. Influenced maybe by Carolee Sherwood's brilliant backstitching with internal rhyme.

---

I did think of titling this poem "Miserable Clench": A miserable clench, in my opinion, for Horace to record; I have heard honest Mr. Swan make many a better, and yet have had the grace to hold my countenance. But it may be puns were then in fashion, as they were wit in the sermons of the last age, and in the court of King Charles the Second. I am sorry to say it, for the sake of Horace; but certain it is, he has no fine palate who can feed so heartily on garbage. --Dryden

A Season is Announced

The rabid stipple of
squirrels painting with their fingernails
the scrabble tiles of last years nuts
the rapid barber pole spin of
water in quivering pipes:
O Spring! Is it left to me
the last of your servants
to announce your coming?

in response to this Morning Porch post

Cattails

Thirteen cattails, each holding its shot glass
nod by the bar. They almost have faces. If you try hard
you can see them. (Try another drink.) They grow here wild,
immortal, in bronze corduroy jackets with thistly collars.
Round about six they begin to appear, displacing
the water lilies and the more exotic growths.

The raw tincture of potato is not for them.
It tells too clear a story, Too cold and fiery.
No, they’re drinking seven and seven, or rum and coke,
and by morning they’ll be sober as a board.

In response to this Morning Porch post

Application

I am writing to apply for the position teaching Old English, Middle English, and the history of English that you advertised in the October MLA Job Information List. My fields of specialization are Old and Middle English literature, and I am particularly interested in 1) the representation of relations between men and women in Medieval literature, and 2) the ways in which 19th and 20th Century writings (both literary and critical) re-invent and deploy "the Medieval" to further their literary, social, and political aims.

I am a graduate student completing my Ph.D. in the English Department at Yale University. In September 1989 I expect to submit my dissertation, titled "Painting the Lion: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women."

---

Among the papers I'm throwing out: a draft of an application. I'm struck by the listlessness and pomposity of it -- do all academics sound that way? It goes on for pages, of course, describing my dissertation and the books I supposedly envisioned writing. Including, I was surprised to see, the dissertation I had just abandoned, the book -- that was to establish at one blow my literary theory and historical linguistic chops -- about metaphor and metonymy in Old English poetry. Ay me! I loved to play the bad boy, and I was such a pandering lickspittle. I didn't believe any of that crap, but I was still offering it up to my masters for approval.

In the same notebooks, which are mostly journals, the endless litany: I can't get myself to work, I can't get myself to eat right, I can't get myself to stop going out to taverns. And yet I never get my head above water long enough to say: this is clearly wrong, I'm clearly embarking on the wrong life, I won't work for any of this stuff because I don't actually want any of this stuff.

---

Throwing away these papers makes me very, very happy.

Eve of the Living

Frustrating day at work, not getting things done, anxious about outcomes I can't influence. I get on the elevator, trying to shake it all off. A piece of good luck: it's the leftmost of the three cars, the only one that goes clear down to the basement, where the bicycle racks are. If you get one of the others, you have to go down to the Lobby, get off, push the “down” button and wait all over again for the leftmost elevator to show up. I swipe the magic fob (not just anyone can go to the basement) and press the 'B' button.

9th floor, 8th floor, and there's a hesitation. Ah. Picking up somebody on the 6th floor. The doors open and a lanky, bearded, sandy-haired young man steps on board. He has a wide-open, fearless face and an engaging smile. As the doors close again I press the 'L' button for him.

“Oh! Thanks.” He takes in my bike gear. “It's so lucky when I'm going to the basement, and I get this elevator! I feel so blessed.” He grins. I say something about wishing you could call this particular car, he agrees, we get to the lobby, and he wishes me good night and disappears.

In the basement I take my bike down from the rack, check that my patch is still holding air -- it is! -- and take it back up to the lobby. The night guard, Mike, is already on duty. It takes a while to do all my bike stuff: I have two jackets to do up, the “camelback” cover to secure over my backpack over the rear tire, the lights to adjust and turn on, the reflective velcro doo-dad to put around my ankle to keep my jeans out of the chain. Mike, meanwhile, has been gazing at the painting that dominates the lobby.

“What was that?” I always have to ask him to repeat himself; he's even softer-spoken than I am.

“So much work went into this!”

I go look at the painting with him. It's a landscape, a stream at sunset in autumn woods, trees and water and soil all orange. I usually grimace at it as I go by. Lobby art.

But I join Mike and look at the stippling. It's a big canvas, and he's right, it must have been a lot of work.

“When I was a boy, my parents used to take me to a stream like this. I'd play there all day. You don't care about anything, when you're a kid. No bills to pay.”

Not me, I thought. I worried about things all the time when I was a kid. I bet you did too. But I don't say that. We're not dealing in fact here, we're contemplating paradise. “Where was that?” I ask.

“Oh, in the California mountains.” Then he adds, in a different tone, “The Other Side of the Bend.”

“What?” I heard him this time, actually, but I couldn't make sense of it.

He gestures to the little plaque on the ostentatious frame. Sure enough. “The Other Side of the Bend,” that's what the artist titled it. “Kind of mysterious,” says Mike.

“Did you hear that Elizabeth Taylor died?” he confides then.

“Yeah, I saw that.” We both sigh. “I saw a little clip of her on 'What's My Line.' You remember 'What's My Line?'” He nods. “She must have been twenty,” I added. “So beautiful.”

“I used to drive her maid to work at her house,” he says, unexpectedly. “She said she was a wonderful woman. She gave a van to guy she knew who was hard up. And probably some money, too, I guess. Just gave it to him. She was just like that, they say.”

A few more desultory words. She almost died five times, he says. Really did die once, they brought her back. Another pause to contemplate the painting.

“You ever see this, right here?” Where the stream winds of out sight, there's a little whiteness, as though, out of sight, it comes out of the forest into open country, and a light that's relieved of all that damn orange comes through. “You kind of wonder,” he says apologetically, “what's there. Is that 'the other side of the bend,' where that light is? Kind of mysterious.”

Outside, an oblique light is scattered by the light rain; the sun is shining, but the sky makes a dark, bruise-colored backdrop. The passers by look at me, their faces lit up as though they were on stage. People always get a kick out of seeing a white-haired man on a bicycle: they smile at me benevolently as I wheel it off the curb and onto the street.

All so alive, I think, as I pedal up towards the bridge. The opposite of the zombie fantasy that's so rife these days, the sense of living in a world of dead people. “Dawn of the Dead.” This apparently is the Eve of the Living. Everyone is human tonight. I don't mind, don't mind that work is frustrating, don't mind that I need to remember to change the rear inner tube. Not if I can live in a world where people are alive.

Two Milk Bottles

Two poems I left recently on the Morning Porch.

---

In response to this:

Implacable whites, unappeasable skies:
the saturate shell of our wandering eyes.

---

And in response to this:

Mt Hood, DST

Cold and dawn-dark
(they’ve been messing with the clock again
who knows what time it is?)

The ridge disappears into cloud,
cloud into mountain, mountain into sky:
here at the raw crude

edge of the world
we need no pretending.
A fastness? No, a slowness.

Turn the wheel and the sunline,
taut and glimmering,
God’s garotte,

pivots on Hood’s shoulder
as slow as an impalement stake,
and the mountain,

a scabied ragged hungry eagle,
turns its tufted head.

---

The Half Inch I'm Not Throwing Away

So here, stacked on the table at Tom's, five inches of paper headed for the recycling, and half an inch to keep.

I'm going through old boxes of files, getting rid of them at a great rate, so as not to have to move stuff I don't want to keep. It's easy to dump so much of it, now that I'm sure that a) I will never write fiction, b) I will never be a literary scholar, and c) I will never be famous. I'm only keeping writing of mine that I actually like reading, and what that turns out to be so far -- to my surprise -- is some of my old graduate school papers, and some of my unpublished dissertation chapters from the 1980s.

I heard myself say to someone the other day, to my own astonishment: "I was a good literary scholar. I was as good as they get."

It was so out of character for me to think such a thing, let alone say it. But looking at what I wrote about Chaucer, I have to say I still think it's true. It's not an important genre of writing, of course. Academic literary writing, like journalism, is inherently ephemeral, whether it's printed on expensive acid-free paper or not. But I did it as well as it's ever been done. Nobody, as of the 1980s, understood and explicated Chaucer as well as I did.

How strange. It was the worst period of my life. Everything in upheaval. I had -- for the first time in my life -- unequivocally failed. I was a terrible teacher. I had the classroom presence of a soggy paper towel. I was drinking a lot, hanging out at taverns, scribbling a bit here or there at whiles, exiled in Portland: I had given up all my literary friendships with people at Yale -- or maybe they had given up me -- and I found no literary connections here. I had no vocation, no direction, no hope: I had two small children and a life to invent from scratch, and my skills were fluency in Old English and Latin, and a visceral understanding of what it felt like to be an English poet in the 14th Century.

And yet, I wrote this wonderful stuff. Not much of it, not even a whole dissertation's worth. But there it is, glowing in its nest of yellowing paper. No: this half inch I'm not throwing away. This I keep.

Breakfast

I needed this day,
this time. Grieving
takes a long time.
Not getting over it:
that doesn't happen at all.
Listen.
One tap on a hollow wall,
one glimmer ghosting
off the gray mottled
choker of cloud,
can echo for years,
maybe for lives.

I will be listening for your voice
as I die and the syrup fills my ears;
as the brightness flares
and fades on the
knobbly shabby
emptied pincushions
back of my eyes.

So. Make fun of me,
I've earned it;
but the world rolls over for you
as it does for me,
and the lurch
of that buttery warmth into our laps,
that spilled delicious breakfast,
soaks us all.

Lengua de Señas

A seña, then, is not a sign
nor yet quite a signal;
neither quite a gesture
nor a code.

There is more lost
in flattening the tilde
than the breasts of mourning,
or the sehnsucht of heimweh:

it is signed but not sealed
set but not sent;
silent, unseen -- an
unpictured scenery,

an encipherment
of zero.

In response to Luisa Igloria's response to Dave Bonta's Morning Porch for today

Religion and Science, and What People Really Believe

Religion and science gave me much of what I treasure in my life. Religion gave me a meditation practice, within a frame of cultivating clarity and compassion. Science -- broadly speaking, including history, held to scientific standards of truth -- gave me information, and ways of evaluating information, which I use all the time. And to me they are simply the inner and outer versions of the same thing: the discipline of seeing, not what I want to see, not what I expect to see, not what I've been told to see -- but seeing what's there, whether I like it or not; and testing what I think I know by experiment.

More. In my own life, religion and science are correctives to each other. There are errors of the mind and heart that are characteristic of religious people, which science corrects. We're given to all the variations of the pathetic fallacy. We perceive persons where there are no persons, intentions where there are no intentions. We want to make the world into a mandala, an outward emblem of our inner life. We rework the outer world, not as we want it to be (that's a slander on religious people which has never been true) -- but as it makes emotional sense to us. Science rescues us from this.

Likewise, there are errors of the mind and heart that are characteristic of scientific people, which meditation and comtemplation correct. We tend to hide our motivations from ourselves; we tend to take our thoughts at face value. We tend to put our energy into answering external questions, and to forget the very first, fundamental question, the question before the question: why are we asking? There is always a reason why we ask any question. Often enough it's not a very pretty one, but we had better know what it is. That's where the techniques of rigorous introspection -- which have been worked out in various religious traditions, through struggles just as difficult as Gallileo's and Newton's -- are indispensable. If you haven't learned them and practiced them, I can pretty much guarantee that you are deeply deceived about how your mind works and why it asks the questions it asks.

---

I said something like, “There are tens of thousands of religions, and very few of them make a big deal of subscribing to a laundry list of assertions about cosmological reality,” and he answered, “I think almost all of them do.”

It wasn't answerable in the space of a Facebook thread, so I dropped it, but I understand why we were talking past each other a bit. Some of the difficulty is just in how you count. One way to think about religions -- the way I was thinking -- was to take each one as of equal weight. So a shaman practicing way up the Amazon counts for one, and Catholicism, with its hundreds of millions of adherents, also counts as (only) one. Moreover, historical religions, which we know about but which are no longer practiced, also count in this census. Most religions, counting this way, are animistic or shamanic: they are not organized, and have no power, even if they had the wish, to enforce subscription to articles of belief. You might call this the Senate of religions. But you can also think proportional representation -- a House of religions. In that case, Catholicism, say, ranks as a sort of California. There are *lots* of Catholics, and they have a lot of weight to throw around.

But there's still difficulty with the definition of “religion.” There's a lot of different ways of thinking about what Catholicism is. You can ask the Pope what it is, and get one answer, and that's the basic approach that someone writing a Wikipedia article would take. And so go read the article, and you'll find out exactly what Catholics believe: all about God the creator, the trinity, transubstantiation, and so forth.

The problem with this top-down approach is that it gives you a wildly inaccurate idea of what most Catholics, most of the time, believe. Most of the French, for example, identify as Catholic. A large proportion of them also identify as atheist. There is a huge disconnect between the official position of the church and what its members actually think and do. You can airily dismiss the Catholicism of these atheists, and say that they're not really religious -- and in fact my interlocutor took this route, and averred that I was not religious, even though my religious convictions and practice are the center of my life, and give it such meaning as it has -- but that doesn't really answer any questions. What is an atheist doing in church, then, and why does he do it? If it's not out of religious motives that I prostrate in front of a little wooden Buddha statue in the morning, then what exactly do you call those motives? A definition of religion that excludes such a large proportion of what most people think of as religious activity may not be a very useful one.

When Christian missionaries encountered a new religion, they investigated what they thought was important about a religion. The first thing they asked is: what do you believe? Who made the universe? What happens to people when they die? How does one become saved or damned? Because those are important questions to Christians, at least to the sort of Christians who become missionaries. But what they didn't ask were questions such as, “how important is the creation of universe to you?” or “How much do you care about what happens to souls after death?” A Buddhist, for example can come up with a creation myth -- with several, in fact -- but these myths are trivial in Buddhism: they're superstitious bric-a-brac. The Buddha explicitly and emphatically declined even to entertain such questions. Buddhism is simply not interested in the origin of the universe: a common phrase in Buddhist liturgies is “since beginningless time...” But look at a Western encyclopedia about Buddhism and you'll probably find one of these creation myths trotted out as if it was a core belief. I was mildly surprised to be told recently, that since I am a Tibetan Buddhist I believe that the center of the world is a vast mountain, Mount Meru, ten times higher than the Himalayas. Of course I've heard of Mount Meru, I know prayers that mention it, mandalas represent it all the time. But as far as believing it? There may be monks in very remote monasteries who believe it, but I've never met anyone who did. You want to be careful when you're told that people of some foreign faith “believe” this or that.

And still more. If you have an argument with a zealous Christian or Muslim, they will present as sublimely confident and secure in their belief. Of course they will: they're on their mettle. But they're lying through their teeth. If you think they don't sometimes wake up at three in the morning, feeling utterly alone and sure that they're going to die dead as a doornail, then you're much more naïve and credulous than they are. The atheist nightmare of hordes of happy untroubled true believers, who never asked a question or had a doubt in their lives, has nothing to do with reality.

Unshaven

I take Saturdays and Tuesdays off. So yesterday being Tuesday, not needing to present myself, I didn't shave till late in the afternoon. And so this morning I didn't feel any pressing need to shave again. When one has a beard, the shaving bits, the upper cheeks and the throat, are not that noticeable. what's a half-day's growth?

But now I'm wishing I had shaved. I had a flat tire in the rain, coming in to work. Equidistant between bike shops. And no patch kit with me, like a tyro. So I locked the damn bike to a stop sign and caught a bus, feeling clumsy and enormous in my rain gear, like someone impersonating a Japanese hazmat worker. And when I arrived at the office, Juli looked at me in a puzzled way. I couldn't hear what she said, so I went closer. She said: "Oh! You have grease on your face."

And so I did, a great big smear of it, from examining my flat tire; I looked as though I'd blacked my face for a commando raid but only gotten halfway done. So I washed it off. 2:00 in the afternoon, and just starting the day: the omens were not feeling very good. My birthday, and I was excited about 53, a prime number, a number to conjure with: but now I was feeling rather seedy and used up. Maybe, after all, 53 is the official age of washed-up-ed-ness. The birthday greetings piling up on Facebook are lovely, but a little daunting. Who am I, after all, really? What are we celebrating? What is this thing, that wanders through Portland and up and down the net? Does everyone know but me?

I woke at three this morning, fretting about a whole long list of things, things I needed to remember to do. No sleep in me. And then this morning I drank too much coffee and indulged in disputation. Entertaining but hollow: I was playing a convinced Buddhist, for some reason, and we all know that I'm never convinced of anything, particularly if it has to do with me. I bump along the ground like a wrinkled balloon. I keep touching my face to make sure I'm here. I'm here, all right, but I'm not shaved. And I feel old and shabby, just something sketched in. A day's growth: you can sprinkle dots to represent that, each dabbed with one sure poke of the pen. Easy.

Then if thou are the food of worms O virgin of the skies
How great thy use, how great thy blessing! Everything that lives,
Lives not alone, nor for itself...

I try some Blake, but my voice dries up, vanishes. Online, I keep pulling up my blog, and there it is, but powder blue and not quite right. I click on this and that, and finally realize that, not quite consciously, I'm waiting for the old comfortable template to load again, and tell me everything's safe and secure. But everything's topsy-turvy. At the turn of the stairs are a couple hundred books ready to trundle off to the Powell's book buyer. I have to force myself not to handle any of them, or I'll pull them out of the "go" pile and put them back in the "stay" pile.

I'm like a cat: I don't really care what my surroundings are like, so long as they're warm, but I don't like them to change. (Is that what I am? Like a cat?)

I'm going to slip out, go to the bank, cash a check, maybe get a patch kit, and go pick up a library book. The siege of Constantinople, 1453: traditionally, the event that marks the end of the Middle Ages. Guns. The Ottomans must have had guns by that time? In fact I vaguely think I've read about them, enormous ones throwing stone shot. Maybe I served in the Varangian Guard, once. (Is that what I am? Like a Germanic mercenary? They were at first Vikings, later on mostly Anglo-Saxons. They probably looked pretty much like me.)

Saturday night Martha and I are going to see Brenton's Bloody Poetry at the Shoe Box Theater. (Shelley. Is that what I am, like Shelley?)

Remodel

I know. It's blue. I expect I'll twiddle the color eventually, but I'm sort of soaking up this template, and playing with the tools. The last time I remodeled was probably five years ago, and I'm reminded of the houses we've been looking at. "They did a lot to this place" is not something we usually say in an approving tone: mostly we look at their improvements -- dark wood faux paneling in the bathroom? How creative! -- and wonder how long it will take us to rip them out and replace them with something civilized.

But the two important things are in place. I have comments and a blogroll again! When I started blogging, in the Pleistocene Era, Blogger did not offer comments or blogrolls, so I imitated the cool kids and added comments, by way of Haloscan, and a blogroll, by way of Blogrolling.

Blogrolling died first. They were bought out by somebody who had the genuinely atrocious idea of turning this free software into a paying proposition by placing ads -- not on my blog, which would have been a morally justifiable quid pro quo -- but at the top of the blogs I linked to, which was simply evil. I nevertheless left them grumpily in place, figuring that on the net links are always better than no links, and I'd get something different eventually. But then they were hacked, and they clearly weren't keeping house, so I just yanked them off of mole. For a few months now I've been that abomination, a blog that doesn't recognize its friends. Hated that. But now I have a blogroll -- imported, smooth as butter, from Google Reader -- and though it has some dead links in it that doesn't matter much, since by default it just shows the ten most recently updated, along with snippets, which really is almost what I would have done if I'd ever gotten around to writing such a thing myself.

Haloscan was an altogether more civilized experience. Echo, which bought them, tried. It made it easy to export all the comments into an xml file, for one thing. So I haven't necessarily lost the comments for good: in my spare time, say in the late 2030s, I might figure out how to re-import them. The trouble with Echo was that it simply tried to be too clever. It just had too much stuff, most of which I didn't want. It tried to piggy back on all the other social media, which meant that -- if, like me, you wander around the web with different names and avatars and logins and passwords, according to whether you're on Google or Yahoo or Haloscan, sometimes logged in and sometimes not -- you never knew whether you were logged in or who you were logged in as. And if you were new it officiously tried to tie your identity down and get you to say what your other social media affinities were and by the way what your passwords were on them. I'm kind of surprised anyone commented. Echo also offered a million ways to link and add media; and it also offered, or rather forced, threaded comments. I don't like threaded comments: I like mine flat. I want everything everyone has to say to jostle together, so that the juices swap around, as Huck would say. In comment structure, to my mind, less is more. Threaded comments are like a party at which, as soon as you start talking to someone, your host pushes the two of you into a private room and slams the door. I like my parties a little more sociable.

So here we are. Brave new world. It's possible that I've lost some links -- if you were on my old blogroll, and you're not on it now (you can check by clicking the "show all" thingy), please let me know. My subscriptions to Google Reader were always ad hoc, and I might have missed you.

Killdeer

Species of North American ring-plover,
the name imitative of its cry

a lost shorebird circling the waves of the hills

in the Outer Hebrides, a rare visitor

what I hear in the dark
when the stroke of the umze fades

ring-plover, shorebird, visitor (and photo source)

Aren't All Poems Love Poems?

But there comes a lift, a bluff of wind from the west,
an intimation. I have nothing to offer but this: a lull --
a softening -- that, and the discipline not to speak
when opportunity arises. Follow
the bunched extensors up the ulna,
asymptotically approaching
the knob of the epicondyle, a well-known road
to fingers scarred with grief
and swollen with disappointment: fingers
that have brushed lips and drawn a thousand times
the Chinese character for “squander,”
fingers that hold a razor in the blue light
of mornings so far away that calendars
inspire silent rage. But hush. They walk
steadily, for all that, like a drunk
who can walk a straight line for the sheriff.
I'll be able to do massage up to the moment
I pitch face-forward in the grave.

But what, you asked, about the deeper
massage of the spirit? Those hungry ghosts
that have been hounding you
for more than twenty years? I have to stop at that,
And look at my enciphered hands.
What, indeed. My pockets come up empty.
If I had an old butterscotch
wrapped in cellophane, I'd offer it to you,
and you'd sit up
with the blankets around your shoulders
and we'd suddenly be best friends,
the last awake at the slumber party,
and tell each other secrets. We didn't want that much:
a kiss from that boy with the soulful eyes,
a word of encouragement from Mrs Tyler,
a ride on Evelyn's bike when it was new.

And I would sit on the floor, and
catch your dangling foot, and kiss
in passing the outside malleolus,
and hold your toes against my chest.
It's time, time that's the enemy,
time and wanting more. Just let this moment
linger. Faust was trying to cheat: he knew
that if ever we could want just this, just now,
we would vanish:
leaving God and Devil, empty handed,
gaping at the air.

(See more poems in this conversation in yesterday's Morning Porch comments.)

Spring Mutiny

It's a Spring morning, as we know Spring mornings here: Spring shuffles into the Northwest casually, all but unnoticed, rumpled and sleepy: a few crocuses here, a fruit tree trying out some buds over there. Not a big fuss. Sure it's green, but it's green in January too.

I dream of the days when everything will cohere and make sense: I'm scattered and confused. One thing at a time. We won't be settled in our hearts until we're settled in a new house, and have accomplished everything that it will take to get from here to there. The biggest difficulty, as always, will be negotiating all the changes in family and social relationships that it will entail. We are such intensely social creatures, and so much of our sense of belonging and hierarchy is wrapped up in place. Moving house puts everything into play: who really belongs? How much territory do they get to mark, how much do they freely traverse?

The life of dogs is so enviable. They need to belong so much that the dog rule is simply everybody belongs: just find your place and stay there. So you establish dominance and submission once and for all, and from then on you just roll with it. But cats and human beings never really settle. Who's boss right now? Who belongs at the moment? No dog ever asks those questions, but cats and people ask them all the time. Forget tool-using and language: the really distinctive human trait is a constant social uneasiness. (Yes, I understand that I've just defined cats as human. That's because they are.)

I can't find the quotation from Samuel Johnson, but he once said something like -- no two people can be together for an hour without one establishing a clear superiority over the other. This is nonsense, of course, but it's fruitful nonsense. There are dozens of overlapping spheres of capability, each having its own importance at its own time: at one time we may be painfully aware that someone is physically stronger and quicker than we are, at another we may silently congratulate ourselves on being emotionally hardier than someone else: at a public meeting a person who can speak forcefully and cogently suddenly becomes a person to be reckoned with, despite his incompetence with a hammer.

We are fascinated by combat and contests: those who don't go in for football are likely enough to be fascinated by academic disputation or political contention. We follow these things avidly even when they're of no real concern to us. I have no conceivable stake in the Green Bay Packers winning the Superbowl, and I have far less stake in the outcome of the political races I follow than justifies the eagerness with which I follow them. (Ireland shall get her freedom, says Yeats' Parnell to a laborer, and you still break stone.) No: it's the drama of winning and losing itself that is perennially gripping. Our ache for winning and our dread of losing attaches itself to any passing conflict. Some time ago there was some spam-ish ad that invited you to vote for Coke or Pepsi: some clever person correctly perceived that a preference as trivial as that for one flavor of sugar water over another would engage people's competitive instincts and get them to click something.

Moving house will be such a visible marker of dropping in class, that I'm abnormally sensitized to class and status just now. My friend Teju Cole has hit the big time with his novel Open City -- rave reviews in the New Yorker and all that sort of thing -- and I doggedly, rebelliously, have not read it yet. There's envy mixed in to that refusal, I'm afraid, but mostly its stubbornness. Several of my friends have books just out, or books I'm reading in draft, and I'm resolutely keeping Open City in its place in the queue. Famous or not, one friend's book has the same importance to me as another's. But I can feel the undertow, the impulse to let it jump the queue because it's more important, and the impulse to drop his name. It's a deeply unpleasant feeling to me, and its resonance with the house-downsizing is more unpleasant still. I feel mutinous, and my socialist convictions have re-engaged. These days, the image of subadult orangutans, jealously tagging after the patriarch orangutans and their multiple wives, keeps coming to me, unbidden. It's not a comfortable image, and it doesn't bring comfortable thoughts.

Calf

Above the beardline
I stroke the half inch of stubble on my cheek,
and below, the loosening flesh of my throat
is all prickle and fuzz:
half emery board, half peach.

I am an overripe and jowly kiwi fruit,
An incipient but failed Tolstoy, a patriarch
shorn, domesticate, yet run to seed.
No news from the mountain here.

And anyway, I'm Aaron, not Moses.
The one who stayed behind, the one
who looked after the little ones
and tried to make everyone happy.

---

Well, sure, I said, I can make you
a calf, if you're sure that's what you want.
And so I made it as beautifully as I knew how,
and put the love of real calves in it,
Their awkward plunging for the teat,
Their great dark worried eyes.

And I said to them, “Israel, this is your God,
which brought you out of the land of Egypt.”
Not because it was, you understand.
It was their earrings and bracelets:
they knew that as well as I. But
it was what they wanted me to say.

Ah, well, you know the story.
My brother came home in a temper,
and I told a wicked lie and said
that when I threw the gold in the fire
it just came out that way: a calf. He
burnt it and ground it to a powder
and mixed it up with water --
he was kind of nuts --
and made everybody drink some.

My sin, the way he tells it,
was in representing God at all, and
in letting the people pray to it,
letting them make offerings.

Well. It's a long time ago;
least said soonest mended.
But that's not what I asked forgiveness for
when I prayed in my own tent.

Tundra

In response to this Morning Porch entry

As Spring begins to fill the cup of Summer
and everyone else rejoices, I feel
the longing and the loss of Winter,
the craving
for a truer North and
a more lonely tundra
where grooming swans bite their feathers
and pools of meltwater sway
the black strands of last year’s grass.

Whiteness

Whiteness, sheets washing out with the tide,
rain sweeping windows with light,
the swash of white headlights below in the streets,
white coiled within white like a shell

just turning to blush. And
a flush begins at your throat, and slowly runs
over your collarbone: angelfood
breathing what seeps from

slices of strawberry,
or the last light of a clouded sky
rising on white walls farther away
than the chance of seeing you ever ever again.

Not Looking at March

never make love at sunset never
leave strands of hair behind in your comb
always avert your eyes when march
that gawky teen on olympus
fumbles trying blue eye shadow
for the first time splotchy unskilled
we try so hard but not hard enough
to stay out of trouble with the gods

Thanks to Uma for Better off Unborn and Jean for Trying to be March.

Thatch and Penfish

A French chaumière, it turns out, is a hut or cabin, specifically a thatched cottage, from chaume, thatch, deriving ultimately from Greek kalamos, reed. (Yes, the same kalamos that becomes Latin calamus, pen, extant in English as “lapsus calami”: a slip of the pen, a typo.) The riddle, then, is “why is a thatched hut like a typo?”

I'm not sure why the pleasure of such simple excursions into etymology is so intense for me. I meet the word chaumière (new to me) and until I can connect it with the words I already know I feel a lack, a yearning. Everything, I feel, should go back to words as simple as “reed” if you follow them back far enough. I think the reason I stalled out on Chinese and Tibetan was that there was no way to trace them back to common ancestors of my own language. It was turtles all the way down, and tonal turtles at that. At the end of the road was not a picture of a shrewd Greek sitting by the riverbank inventing a pen by slicing a reed on the bias: it was a faceless bing, or mao, sung in a tone utterly strange to me. At the lowest stratum, it all dissolved into the chirping of alien birds. Perhaps for some people all foreign languages are like that.

And yes, calamus is related to calamari, because the squid, or by some accounts the squid's beak, reminded some Italian body of a pen -- and of course it squirts ink -- and so he called the squid a “calamaro,” a penfish. And if this doesn't make you wriggle with delight I don't know what I can do for you.

---

Fourth day back on regimen. As before, one of the first things I'm struck by, when I get my eating under control again, is that I sleep longer and more deeply: I didn't wake till nearly seven this morning. I wonder if the steadier blood sugar accounts for it, or if it's the fact that I only manage to get my eating under control when the other stresses of my life have moderated? Or for some other reason? Whatever the reason, I'm paying off a long-standing sleep deficit, and it feels good, although, as always when I sleep this much, I feel as though the air has thickened and my reflexes have slowed. It's a sensation I don't much like, although it does seem wholesome and restorative: I feel I've temporarily lost my edge. I wonder how people who live this way all the time survive it? Being pitched straight from sleep into the demands of the waking world, I mean. I'd go mad in short order.

In The Game

Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the mole
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod
Or love in a golden bowl?

A long, long time ago, the colors blurred, the voices unsteady, and yet, little in the present can compete with it. What are we playing for, here? The ante alone could break us. You know what they say: if you've been playing for twenty minutes and you still don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy.

Walk naked down the long cool halls, the polished butter-yellow fir wood warm under your feet, the light bending around corners, slanting across your thighs, motes rippling away from your turned hands. What did they tell us? Oh, story after story, none of them true. The bedclothes still rucked up and smelling of sweetness and almonds and sex. If one still smoked afterwards, this would be the time for it.

We thought, if all the stories were lies, we'd get to make up our own stories: but it doesn't work that way either. The stories run the show, true or false: they set the ante. They make the rules.

The part you really loved was rolling the cigarettes afterwards. Thin brown nimble fingers, and the smell of unlit tobacco. Then the spurt of a match, and the faint blue spiral rising up, climbing up through the bars of the the sunlight, until your breath catches it and it's all confusion and turbulence, light and smoke tumbling together like dancers, like lovers.

Well. You can't wish love never happened. You pay the debts you can, you rub sweaty hands over your hair, you hope for rain, and you walk, walk right out of the past into the future, where the colors are even more fragile

So far, here in the future, the imagination collapses as soon as it tries to rise. But we're still in. They ante for you, in this house: you're in the game whether you mean to be or not.

The Moon at Anchor

If I sewed two little connected flannel bags, each the size of the circle I can make with my thumb and forefinger (the 'O' of the “OK” gesture), and filled them with steel shot or small ball bearings, that might work. Little velcro-shut bags. I want something small and heavy, that will sit right on top of the eyes to block the light, but will stay put, so that I can do supine neck and shoulder work, and even scalp and TMJ work, without having to fuss with it. I have a client now who simply pulls the covers right over her head when I turn her over onto her back. But of course I have to pull them back down when I do what I usually save for last, the serious neck & shoulder & scalp & face work, and she grimaces a little, involuntarily, when I do. Every thing I've seen so far is a little light, or not properly washable, or drapes over the forehead and temples.

I could empty the balls into a dish, wipe them with bleach, and wash the little bags with the sheets. Or if a regular wanted one of their own they could just keep one, that would be easy. The metal balls would start cold on cold days, though. I'd have to smuggle the eye pillow onto a corner of the table warmer, so it would be nice and warmed up before I turned my client over.

---

I'm at the door, with all my kit packed up. Her daughter loms onto her, for a hug, and I ruffle the girl's hair. She flashes a smile at me. She likes me. I didn't give her away when first I spotted her, years ago, creeping down to get a glimpse of her Mom getting a massage, when she was supposed to be in bed. We have been secret sharers, ever since. “Now let me give Dale a hug before he goes,” laughs her Mom. The girl yields the floor with dignity, like a veteran senator. A warm terrycloth hug, and I'm out the door, into a cold night with flying clouds and the moon riding restlessly at its sea-anchor over the housetops. This part of my life, anyway, is right. I've found my work.

Red House

Always surprised by the pure bright crimson when they take the blood out of my arm: the life that can feel so feeble and dull, at times, is pulsing there, brilliant red, all the time. All the work that goes into making that fluid: spleen and liver preparing and purifying it, the lungs carefully oxygenating it to come up with that red -- the characteristic hue of oxygen working its Shiva changes: the rust red of corroding iron, the brilliant red of the radical blood -- it goes on all the time, under my drab pale skin, whatever the weather, whatever the mood.

We live in many houses, built and natural: we're so many intersecting series of hyperdimensional Russian dolls. Oh, but we believe specially in this house, the house of the red blood! Never mind that a clever researcher can convince you with ease that you've sprouted a third arm, one that you can feel and move just like your others. Still you believe the others are real, real as the cold pounding rain, indisputable. And we call this being hard-headed and realistic. Yah.

When we wriggle out of this carapace, in sleep, and wander into our other houses? Then we're dreaming. “It's only a dream,” we say. We could say that of many things.

---

A crow flies in the rain, cold, waterlogged, and resolute. I follow him and travel backwards into the houses of the past. I open my mouth and my teeth roll out like pearls, or like the pomegranate seeds of the fairy tale. (Find them all, before the Djinn comes!) I linger in the little red house of my childhood.

We tell a funny story about why our present house, the one we're selling, is red. One day when we were nearly finished painting, I came down the steps to look at the progress with Webb, our carpenter. “It looks pretty good,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I wasn't too sure about this red, but I think I like how it's turning out.”

Martha gave me a look. “You're the one who wanted this color,” she said.

I looked back at her in astonishment. “I thought you wanted this color,” I said.

Webb was not much given to laughing out loud, but this made him do it. He regained his composure, turned grave as turnip, and surveyed the two storeys of fresh paint. “Still time to change your mind,” he said.

---

I chose the color? Martha doesn't make mistakes about this sort of thing. I must have chosen the color. And I chose the color of my childhood house, though I didn't realize that till just now. What color should a house be? Why, red, of course: a good sober but powerful red.

My massage sheets? Red, blood-red: not the color they call blood red, which is the shade of blood that's darkened five minutes in the air, but real blood-red, the red you see spurting through the needle into the clear plastic vials. Chinese red.

To the Chinese, red is not the color of wrath. It's the color of luck, and the color of wealth: what we would call a golden opportunity, they would call a red one. I often wonder how much of the Western dread of Chinese Communism came, not from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and so forth, but simply from a failure to translate fully. “The Golden Army” -- how much less sinister that sounds, to Western ears, than “The Red Army!”

Out through the sleet, the traffic lights on 62nd Ave burn bright red, and the neon of Ken's automotive picks it up. Everything else is rain-dimmed and indistinct: but that glow goes to my heart and lifts it up.

The Suitable Girl in Portland, Oregon



In Tom's, a local reads The Suitable Girl. Rumor has it he's on the eleventh Way with Figs.

Four Reasons to be Nice to People

1) Something horrible may have just happened to them. Even lucky people have devastating events in their lives. The deaths of people close to them, for instance. A deep betrayal by a friend or lover. The suicide of even a distant acquaintance. Having to move away from a loved home. Losing a job or an opportunity that seemed like it was going to make a better life. Being personally affected, even tangentially, by a disaster of great scale or a crime of great cruelty. The worst of these devastate people for months, even years: and most people are going to have at least half a dozen of them in their lives. If you do some rough and ready math with this, you can reckon that probably several of the people you encounter today are going to be walking around in a state of emotional devastation. Of course they're not going to be chipper and accommodating and on the ball.

2) They may be ill or in pain. A lot of people are: as a massage therapist I've discovered that the number of people in serious chronic pain -- who usually successfully disguise it from coworkers and even family -- is very high. These people don't wear signs around their necks, announcing “I'm in excruciating pain!” or “if I bend over to pick up that folder, I may faint!” And if we can trust the popular statistics, a quarter of the people we meet are suffering from some diagnosable mental illness. The amount of suffering out there is immense.

3) Then there's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow -- I learned this young and I've never seen any reason to doubt it -- people don't move on to higher-level things, such as creative work, real hard thinking, abandoning prejudices, etc. -- until their needs for love and esteem are met. Someone who feels unloved or un-valued is going to gravitate to a place where they can get love and esteem, at almost any price. Until they get it, you've got no hope of engaging them at the higher levels. It's just not going to happen. So if you want people ever to rise above themselves, your best starting place is to love them and value them. You don't have to be deceitful: you just have to find things to love and admire about them. If you look, you'll find them.

4) People are wonderful when you're nice to them. They're unexpected and madcap and delightful when they know they're loved and esteemed. So it's a self-reinforcing project. If you want people to be beautiful, then your best bet is to look for their beauty, not only because it's there -- it is -- but also because looking for it cultivates it and nurtures it. So ultimately, if you look at it this way -- I don't usually, but one could -- it makes pure greedy, self-aggrandizing sense to be nice to people. I'm surrounded by delightful people, and the main reason for that is not only because I am outrageously lucky in my friends and family -- though that's true too -- but also because I love them and value them and let them know it.

Purely Local

I pause at the landing and lift the window curtain to look at the dawn. Half moon due south: a pale blue sky, a dim rash of yesterday's snow on our neighbor's roof. The chances of getting more snow have dropped, but it's truly cold now.

On the street I glide, motionless, standing on the left pedal, the air burning my bare right calf. Sometimes the cold takes me this way, makes me want to be perfectly still. I will only really feel it if I move. And the faint downward grade of this street keeps me in motion: I stand still while the street threads past. It rolls by me like a film set. Scene: prosperous suburban neighborhood, early morning.

The moon tangles in the nets of bare twigs, struggles free, tangles again. The bicycle slows and I suddenly rediscover my will, as the cold ratchets up. Damn. It really is cold. I turn the corner onto Lincoln street and pedal hard: I'll have to get colder to get warmer.

But the distance to Tom's is short enough that I don't have time to get the internal fires really stoked. My gloved fingers fumble with the bike lock. The “Tom's” sign is not yet lit, but I glimpse Robin darting in the side door -- a few minutes late -- and before I have my lights turned off and my pants-leg rolled back down, the white and pink lights are running round and round the sign. The door is unlocked.

I sit down, still in my gloves and coat. In fact, still in my bike helmet, which is distinctly silly. I take it off, but the gloves I'm going to keep on till I have a full hot coffee cup to hold.

---

It's not all that cold, but after all these years back in Oregon, I'm not longer used to real cold. And I have no clothes for it, for one thing; I'm in jeans, a t-shirt, and a light jacket -- the same thing I wear year-round, except for those rare summer dawns when it's already warm, when I'd dispense with the jacket. I have gear for the rain, but not for the cold.

Martha makes fun of me for not dressing for the weather, but usually, who cares? When you live someplace where the lows are only 40° F away from the highs, it hardly makes much difference. It isn't worth the bother of having lots of different kinds of clothes. I wear jeans and t-shirts, or polo shirts. Simple and easy.

I'm fortunate to live in Portland, where lots of people go to work dressed this way. It's a rumpled and dumpy town, sartorially speaking. Kindly but unsophisticated.

---

Hot coffee, now. Bliss. And sun streams in through the east windows. Still a chill in the air, though. Everyone's keeping their coat on. As cars go by on Division, or or 39th Avenue, wild reflections and diffractions of sunlight whirl through the cafe.

Excuse me: not 39th Avenue. César E. Chávez Boulevard. The city council, in fit of political correctness, renamed the avenue, something that caused a certain amount of ill feeling, since -- for reasons best known to themselves -- they didn't follow their own procedures and railroaded it through without consulting the locals. It was a typical Portland city government move, these days: they've gotten a bit high-handed. This was a gesture of inclusion to the Hispanic community, which in principle I approve of, though I do wonder how many young Hispanics have the faintest idea who Chávez was, or why he's a hero to the aging WASP counter-culture heros who run this town. There's also the fact that 39th Avenue is not Hispanic territory, particularly: it's mostly poor Anglos here, and they resented having the outlandish name of a labor organizer they'd never liked foisted on their street. This resentment of course was declared racist by the proponents of the name change, and no doubt some of it was: but it was also generated by the knowledge that, this being a politically powerless part of the city, the council could do whatever they liked without stepping on any toes they minded stepping on.

I dislike changing names for correctness' sake in the first place, and I dislike top-down impositions like this. It made me want to grab some trendy part of town, NW 23rd Avenue, maybe, and agitate for renaming it Ronald Reagan Boulevard, or Dick Cheney Way. How do you like having your home streets named for your political enemies? There's the added irony that, in making this gesture of inclusion, they used a name that almost all Anglos, even those with a smattering of Spanish, mispronounce. “Go up and turn right on Sieze 'er Shavézz,” the locals will say, leaving Spanish speakers completely at sea.

Oh well. I'm a great admirer of Chávez, and, as his son reportedly said, he wouldn't have given a damn about a street name either way: what he cared about was people having decent lives.

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.

Palimpsests

In my building downtown, a man gets on the elevator and behaves very peculiarly: he does not immediately take out and check his cell phone. Is he dangerous? Should I call the police?

---

We sit in the Les Schwab store, inhaling the scent of new tires, listening to classic rock. Behind us a fountain tinkles. Not a little one, either. An image of Les Schwab in his ten gallon hat, gazing off over the brushland of eastern Washington, rises easily to my mind, burned in as it was by hundreds of repeated television commercials when my brain was young and growing. “Look for the sign you're in Les Schwab country...”

I'll be able to sing it on my death bed: that, and the theme to Gilligan's Isle. The fountain, and the spotless display room, jostle the cowboy uneasily. I am, like Miss Clavell in the night, seized with the conviction that something is not right. Is it the tire store, or is it me?

---

Alan tore down the back porch, mostly with his bare hands, in less than an hour. Now we have a small back deck, and stairs that go down to the driveway instead of to our neighbor's yard. It really looks pretty damn good. But strange, very strange. We should have some little ceremony for disturbing the balance of the world this way, a precautionary apology to the genii loci.

In the rubble under the porch we found a little white glass pot with a white glass lid: inside the lid, in raised letters, was written “Professor Hubert's Malvinas Cream.” It looks like it might have been buried there when the house was built, in 1913. The freckles it was bought to efface have been effaced in earnest, now.

Non Credo

Because I'm afraid, I start to write by saying “I don't believe” -- oh, there are so many things I don't believe! -- but the point is, I don't want to construct an identity out of a laundry list of things I don't believe, it's just the reverse of the medal, it's no different than pounding your chest and bellowing “I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ!” and thinking that's going to get you a little Jesus juju to curse your enemies with, and finally get the girls to eye you with a bit of respect. No, sir. Bellowing believers, bellowing unbelievers alike, you hurry by them on the sidewalk and avoid their eyes. Subadult orangutans, that's what they are, and everybody knows it. Nobody wants to mate with them.

Which brings me neatly to the first thing I don't believe, which is anybody's story about love. The other day a Facebook Friend (not someone I know at all well), the mother of a one year old, announced in a single sentence that she was now a single mother, because she'd found out her husband was cheating on her. People responded with a bit of shock and jaw-dropping, but mostly by furious imprecations and extravagant personal denunciations of her husband. This was from a wide enough collection of people that you could be reasonably sure that some among their number were adulterers. What stories had they made up for themselves? How did justify themselves? How might they have responded to being pilloried? And then a bit later my Friend posted a semi-retraction saying maybe this was only a flirtation after all. Which made for a somewhat awkward pause.

An odd thing to post about, surely, and I don't think I'd handle it that way myself -- not out of goodness, but out of vanity -- but I don't blame anyone for doing anything, really, under the stress of that sort of revelation. That's not my point. My point is that, for a large circle round about, everyone went nuts. I'm interested in when, and how, people go nuts like that. It signals cracks in the structure, weaknesses, places where people aren't really sure that what they purport to believe is in fact what they believe, or else places where they're determined to believe something no matter what evidence may arise: the weaker the shriller.

Now, when I say I don't believe anybody, that's exactly what I mean. I have never heard a story about sex and love that appears to me to “save the appearances,” to account for the variety of phenomena it produces. It's an absorbing topic to me, so I've read a great deal “about it and about,” as Omar says, and every book I've read seems to run inevitably to some central point at which I find myself bristling, shaking my head, muttering, “that's just not the way it is, though. That's just not the way it is.” There's that swerve where people start talking about what love should be, and they describe some wholly admirable frame of mind, some exquisitely laudable kind of relationship, something that makes deep and perfect sense, which is very nice, except that the question you come to after that is, why don't any of these relationships exist? And why is it that, if you're a betting man, you'd lay odds on precisely the people who present as if they were in these ideal relationships to be posting on Facebook next week that they've achieved single parenthood?

And then there are the various reducers: love is really only this, or only that, it's not so important, our culture magnifies it absurdly, erotic love was regarded as simply a joke among (whatever culture the speaker is not very well-versed in), it's actually friendship that matters, or Buddhist compassion, or Christian agape, and I bristle even more, because it doesn't really work that way, either. Not here and now in this culture, not in my heart. Love is the only thing that's real, to me. If I have a path to God, it runs exactly as Dante's did, right through Eros. Nothing else matters, not really.

I'm not saying this is good. I don't think it is. I think the Buddhist compassion and Christian agape people have the right of it, we should value that love most highly, and all the other loves should be subservient to that, which is, really, the love of God. I think the arguments are knockdown, water tight. That's how it should be.

But it's not how it is. I can't cram my heart into that jar. And I'm not sure how useful a theory is, if it accounts for everything but the facts. Useful if you need to trot out mottoes and slogans, yes. But what if you want to live a human life?

How much Time the Moon Loses, and what Math is for

The moon is higher, setting later, this morning. She loses time, of course. Every day she rises and sets later -- I don't remember how much, exactly: 45 minutes? Hang on a sec, I'll work it out.

I forget, sometimes, that the sky is not so legible to everyone, that many people don't even have clear in their minds the path of the zodiac -- difficult though it is for me to understand. It's the same path the sun and the moon walk, higher in summer, lower in winter: how can you live in the world, day after day, and not realize that the the sun and the moon appear only in a certain swath of the sky?

I know that learning the names and appearance of the planets is something only a few of us do -- and that only a few of us learn the patterns of the stars well enough to say certainly, that has to be a planet, it can't be a star, because there is no star there! -- but everyone knows the sun and moon. Except, apparently, they don't. It seems that at every full moon, I hear someone marveling over the coincidence that this moon happened to be rising right around sunset! or setting right around sunrise!

Um, yes. That's what a full moon is, it's the moon standing (vis a vis us) opposite to the sun. It's not a rare coincidence. It's been happening, every 28-and-some days, since our species was sniffing about on all fours.

Anyway, since the moon has to slip back to the same spot in the sky in roughly 28 days, she's got to slip 28 times through the 24 hour clock of the sky, meaning she has to slip about 24 28ths of an hour each time. 24/28 = x/60 -- let's say 51 minutes? Close enough.

This is what math is for. So you don't have to be helpless and look it up, if you don't remember something like how much the moon slips every night. It's not rocket science; it's simple arithmetic. They taught you this in third grade so that you wouldn't have to take anyone's word for it: you can do it yourself.

Don't let anyone push you around: keep your math skills up to snuff. Work little problems like this every day, take the extra couple minutes and satisfy yourself that you're right. It's a magnificently empowering feeling. And you can surprise and amaze your friends by telling them exactly when they're going to see the moon rise tomorrow night. This stuff works. It's real. You can bet your life on it, in fact, we all do, every day, because this the way the engineers who built your cars and roads and bridges figured out how much they could take. Simple physics, simple arithmetic, for the most part.

It's our birthright, as human beings: it's our inheritance. It maddens me when people turn away from math and science as disempowering. This is empowerment. It's when you don't know your math and science that people can lead you around by the nose and hoodwink you. You don't like your math teacher? He's a condescending sexist oaf with the aesthetic sensitivities of a roundworm? Fine. Hate him. But take what he has on offer anyway, because this, this is genuine power, this is the real stuff. This is one of the fundamental ways you get a grip on the world.

Don't give it up because you're sensitive aesthetic person. So am I. I'm a poet and a massage therapist, for God's sake, the very model of a pansy aesthete, and you'll take my math away when you pry it out of my cold dead brain.

Aubade

Black ice makes a pattern on the pavement
of negric circles reaching out to circles:
tatters of white frost hold them isolate.

As I come up over the rise an alien sphere
glides into view, startling the treetops:
an incongruous face

floating in the fresh untroubled blue;
an unshaven drunk on a dewy park bench,
bringing a reek of taverns into the day.

O, thou moon of misdemeanors,
outliving truth and trust,
why here, why now?

The real poets are all asleep,
and I only have escaped to see you
wandering along the West Hills

full of drunken song and imprecations,
ready to stumble into the river with Li Po,
oh! Drowning in your cleverness.

You will have set
by the time the real poets wake,
with their memories

of the chaste and solemn orb
that shot the shores of night with silver,
and glimmered and gleamed on the river.

And no one will ever believe me,
that I saw you shrieking here at dawn
with a musk of hops and malt around you.

Morning Porch Poems

If you haven't been following the extraordinary poetry flowering over at Dave Bonta's Morning Porch, you're missing something pretty wonderful. Luisa Igloria has been writing amazing poems, day after day, in response to Dave's tweet-length posts there. And there have been a few dances with other poets, too, including me. I've never been a good responder to formal prompts, but the prompting of the Morning Porch posts, and sometimes spotting a clever way to navigate between both Dave and Luisa's words, seems to work for me. Not that I'm in the Bonta or Igloria league: but anyone can play. They're very gracious. This morning I wrote a poem there titled Snowmelt at Tryon Creek.

The Survivors of the Wedding

I stand uncertain in the aisle, while
impatient brides brush past me,
giddy with power, anxious to make a promise
that even Jesus didn't dare.
Oh, they go off like bombs!
and the wedding guests drink desperately
in hopes of being a little less flammable
when the conflagration, congregation
begins. But wait. A solemn girl of nine
chooses me to dance with her.
She alone holds out her hands: understands
that this moment is all about clothes
and a measured twirling. It's you, who think
it's about love and family, who
have it wrong. You
have it backwards. I lack words --
I am glad for the first time today
that my shoes are polished. We dance
gravely, the girl and I: my bow
and her courtesy
are maybe the only things
that will survive this day intact.

After These Words

. . .

Actually the conversation was between God
and Avraham: God said take your son
Avraham asked, which one? God tried your only son
but Avraham said one is Sarah's, one is Hagar's.
Whom you love, God said, and Avraham said
so help me, I love them both.

When it was all over God said
I never meant for you to kill him,
I only wanted you to raise him up.
But Avraham had forgotten
how to hear God's voice
and he never replied.

Rachel Barenblat, “After these words,” 70 faces

---

Sometimes you wonder why you ever wanted to hear God, such horrible things He says, but what else is there to listen to? The human voices patter all day long, it's like when I drive to Salem and the only radio stations are the deep dull valley stations playing country music that sounds like rock (without rebellion), or rock music that sounds like country (without conscience), and you begin to think of human voices as the cawing of so many crows, quarreling over carrion on the road. If there was truth to be found in human voices, don't you think we'd have found it by now? We know you can't get what you want and every cowboy is sad. We knew that before the exit to Woodburn. The question is, what now?

Well, once past the little knot of the Ankeny Hills, you'll be in the broad flatlands of the Willamette Valley, some of the best farm land in the world, and at some point there will rise from the fields a murmuration of starlings like a glittering dust, twirling and falling, cascades of reckless and grieving birds. And you can pull off on the shoulder to watch their strange whirling, a cloud of beating hearts following God knows what passion. Now that's a voice that has new things to say: even if it tells you, as it will, things you never never wanted to hear.

Hearing

But listen, I want to tell you all about
the crustacean stubbornness, the
antennae that can grip like ropes, the mouth parts
working unceasingly: an Edisonian dream
of perpetual motion, a mother's dream
of careful chewing. I was always a good boy.

And listen: I want to tell you how the blue sky
came and said that stealing wasn't bad,
not when the sun is high;
that candy wants to be stolen,
that God made the tongue to
curl around theft in a special way.
When they cried “stop thief!” I was sure
they wanted my autograph, or maybe
a cure for the king's evil. I ran like the wind:

but that was just the delight of my heart.
And here, where the dark polished wood of the railing
matches exactly the police batons, where
jurors sit on uncomfortably pleated underwear,
not daring to shift, and the lights buzz
and wail like a distant Indian singer,
here I still remember the joyful lift of my heels

when I flew ahead of you all, and none of you,
none of you could catch me.

Sounding It Out

I feel about democracy the way that people felt about monarchy a hundred years ago: it has a certain quaint charm, but its chances of surviving in the modern world are minimal. I watch people express delight about the Egyptian unrest with incredulity. Have they never read a history book, or even a newspaper? It ain't over, buckos, till the fat army colonel sings.

The rifle, the saying was, made all men tall. It was the musket and rifle that ushered in the age of revolution. Cutting edge military technology in 1776 was a cheap weapon that could be wielded by a single person with minimal training. How many people do you know who keep an Apache attack helicopter parked in their back yard, ready at a minute's notice take off and defend their freedom? I see people pour into the streets, as at Tiananmen, as in Egypt, and I think of stock gathering at a slaughterhouse.

The communications, that so delight a certain kind of optimist -- the twitter-revolt in Iran, say, which, as you may have noticed, led immediately to everyone feeling free to exercise complete freedom of speech and assembly in Iran -- actually serve the purposes of counter-insurgency far, far better. Have you noticed that not a single major terrorist event has happened in the US since 9/11? And it is not, believe me, for lack of animus, planning, or funds. The fact is that the technology now in the hands of counter-insurgents is far better than it's ever been. Their job is easy now. If Thomas Hutchinson had had information technology like this, the American Revolution would have ended at the Tea Party. Even without helicopters.

The odd historical quirk we have lived through, of military power being subordinated to civil authority, is nearly over. No doubt the forms of democracy will persist for a while. Britain, after all, still purports to be a monarchy. But the conditions that made democracy possible, and even probable, have disappeared. Military and information technology is now much as it was in medieval times -- way beyond the means of an ordinary citizen, requiring years of training and specialization to master. We can expect political reality to catch slowly up to to the changed material conditions.

That's the writing on the wall, as I sound it out. I could be wrong; I often am. And I want to be wrong. I'm an old, old fashioned Bobbie Burns style democrat: I don't in believe all this meritocracy and plutocracy claptrap. A man's a man for a' that, a woman's a woman for a' that, and as far as God and I are concerned one is worth as much as another, whatever marketable skills they may have and whatever they've got in the bank.

Still, I would be unhappier about my prediction if I felt that revolution and democracy had always yielded great results. But revolution gave us not just George Washington, but also Robespierre, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Democracy gave us Lincoln, sure, but it also gave us Hitler and Mussolini. And Hosni Mubarak, for that matter. The record is decidedly mixed. It's not the end of the world, nor the end of human dignity, nor the end of lives worth living, if revolution and democracy disappear.

Submitting to be Shaped

No more fingering,
pinching, pruning, bleeding,
every branch and twig wired,
brown and flexible, bent to the shape
of his fingers and thumbs.

Michelle McGrane, “Bonsai,” The Suitable Girl

---

How much do we want to be adored? Too much. And what are we willing to pay for it? Everything. But it's not a one-time deal: we renegotiate over and over, and get a worse bargain every time. And by the end of it, the price we have paid may have ruined us.

But. The know-it-alls (whose private lives appear to be just as disastrous as our own) talk as if you could refrain from selling. The truth is that if you don't go to market, the market will come to you. “Free” and “market” are two words that should never be used in the same sentence. All markets are slave markets.

---

So, what then?
when you raise the partitions
you'll run like new watercolor

offer yourself on the altar of stone
beneath the varicolored sky.

Rachel Barenblat, “integration,” 70 faces

---

Well! There is not much advice to be given, except to pay attention to the trend of payments: and if you're going to be refashioned better go straight to the top.

---

To Bleed at the Edges

I am old, older than the hills, older than the rain:
my fingers are stiff and nobbly in the morning,
and my knees carry scars of five decades.
I watch the veins on the backs of my hands
slowly rise to the surface,
coming like whales to breathe:
I watch the lines deepen in my forehead,
till I can make faces like a puzzled gorilla.
It's good to bleed at the edges,
to bark and screech and flutter. They say that Adam
gave names to the animals, but of course
that's the Pravda version: what really happened
is that they taught him to speak.

The Right Shop

After six months of being in a bad mood, it's probably time to consider the possibility that what I have here is not a mood to be shaken off, but a new mode of being. At any rate, any time I hear myself saying impatiently, “just get over it, Dale!” I can be confident that I'm trying not to see something that's plain before my face.

Night before last, unable to sleep, I sat up in the bed, murmured my refuge prayers, and meditated twenty minutes. The covers before me lay in a long pale question mark. At the corner of my left eye was the green spark of the clock on my side; at the corner of my right eye was the amber spark of the clock on Martha's side. Time's wingéd chariot. Not just drawing near: signaling to overtake.

---

. . .

Could the whole project be a wash?
In God's heart, regret bloomed hot
and a tempest of sorrow rained down

Still, some simple sweetness in us
roused divine compassion like milk
found favor in God's tired eyes.

Rachel Barenblat, “Postpartum,” 70 faces

---

In our end is our beginning. It is too easy to say such things, to forget the rancid backwash of the flood, forget the children terrified, terrified now and terrified forever, the certainties -- that houses stand still, that clean water comes out of the tap -- never to be regained, not on this earth, not in this life. Still, pick your way along the ruined levee, through the sodden heaps of mildewed clothes, barbed with flakes of broken china and glass. Of course God has a temper. Artists are like that. So are fathers. The wind comes again, gently this time, carrying morning.

---

. . .

Now,
the quickening breath,
the rapid heartbeat
as blood blossoms through the body.

How one woman
might turn to another
and with untried muscles, smile
before straightening her shoulders
and moving forward, slowly,
to enter the strange, mercurial light.

Michelle McGrane, “The Art of Awakening,” The Suitable Girl

---

Once again, a soiled and tired gray dawn, but the sky lightening at the horizons, pouring silver through the black ribwork of the firs. Smoke from chimneys draws the light down over wet asphalt roofs, and spray from the passing cars draws it up into the laurel hedges. There's no escaping the light: even at a whisper, it echoes and rebounds from street to wall, sings under the car tires, and worms its way under my fingernails.

If you're looking for anarchy, brother, you've come to the right shop.

Memorizing Poetry

This post began life as the beginning of my latest “Minding Words” column for the WTLP Zine. It ended up being way too long, so I chopped out the column for Sage (which became simply “How to Memorize a Poem.” and forgot about the rest. But a recent wonderful discussion on Voice Alpha -- Read or Recite? -- and the arrival of the WTLP Zine in my inbox reminded me of it. I am fascinated by various ways of intervening in mind and memory, and a bit baffled by people who aren't interested in doing it. I have similar difficulty understanding people who don't want to try unfamiliar cuisines: even if it turns out you don't like them, they're so intriguing, so ramifyingly suggestive, that it's always worth the venture. Even -- especially? -- something repulsive is interesting.

I started memorizing poetry because I panicked. I was in graduate school, working towards a doctorate in English, my oral exams were only two months away, and I couldn't remember a damn thing. I'd been reading for hours and hours every day: Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, you name it. And I couldn't even remember what I'd read last night. I couldn't tell you the name of the poet or the title of the poem. I was doomed. The panel of professors would ask me a few questions, ascertain that I knew nothing, and sadly (for they were all kind people) flunk me. They'd have no choice.

It was time for desperate measures. I took half the time I had for reading and used it for memorizing instead. I put together a program of memorization for myself. I'd pick a poem, or a passage of ten or fifteen lines, and every day I'd say it over and over to myself. After a couple days I'd have it down pat, and I'd move on to memorize something else. But I'd keep coming back to what I'd memorized before. By the time my exams came, my memorization time was mostly spent saying over things I'd already memorized. I was determined that nothing I'd taken so much trouble to engrave on my mind was going to wear away before the exams. That was the whole idea.

I now know, of course, that it didn't matter. They would have passed me no matter what; the blankness of my mind was an imaginary condition, the quite predictable result of anxiously trying to respond to every imaginable question about every poem, story, or novel ever written in English, all at once. When faced with a perfectly ordinary question about, say, Pride and Prejudice, I muddled along with a perfectly acceptable answer. Only once did I get to show off my memorization. I was asked something about Yeats, and found myself saying lines from “Lapis Lazuli”:

. . . their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.”

So memorization is probably not a very good way of studying for exams, at least not for exams of that sort. (Although as a method of allaying test anxiety it's not bad.) But the real benefits of memorization only became clear to me gradually, over time. My relationship with the verse I memorized changed profoundly. The poetry I memorized remained clear as time went by, while the poetry I didn't became indistinct, or vanished altogether. I reached for it and it was there. It was the difference between a marriage and a one night stand.

They were not always happy marriages. Byron was glib but untrustworthy. Wordsworth wouldn't leave well enough alone. Shelley, for someone who insisted so often on clearness and transparency, was irritatingly vague and gauzy. Whitman didn't know when he'd worn out his welcome.

But some of the relationships became far deeper. I had never taken Christina Rossetti or S.T. Coleridge entirely seriously: they both had, on first acquaintance, irritating affectations. But the better I knew them the less that mattered, and they both drew me into regions of thought and imagination that my apparently more suitable spouses had never dreamed of.

Often the way people who don't memorize much (or at all) speak of memorization puzzles me. It seems that they think memorization freezes a portion of the brain, or freezes your response to a poem. It does neither. Memorized poetry does not become inert. It becomes more vivid and more active in your brain, not less; it argues and couples with levels of your consciousness that once-scanned poems will never even touch. It invades your dreams and your daydreams; it rises at all kinds of times, opportune and inopportune.

It's true that, like marriage, it can't be undone. It is -- again like marriage -- a rash commitment, whose consequences are unforseeable. Don't expect a memorized poem to behave itself. It won't.

Not Going Anywhere

Back in September last year, Jupiter was suddenly in the news. It was coming close to Earth! Wouldn't be this close again until 2022! Newscasters told you how to look for it, and breathlessly told you that at present it was the brightest object in the sky, except for the moon! And maybe the sky would be clear tonight, and you'd be able to observe it!

This was all very entertaining to the sort of person who knows Jupiter by name and pals around with him nightly. Because while all this was technically true, it was quite silly. In the first place, Jupiter didn't look much brighter on September 17th than it ever does. It's often the brightest object in the night sky: only the Moon and Venus are brighter (well, and very occasionally Mars.) But the really amusing thing was the sense of urgency, as if Jupiter might suddenly dart away again: as if you might miss it, as you might miss, say, the Perseid meteor shower. Jupiter is very big and very far away, and from our viewpoint here on Earth, it doesn't move very quickly at all. In fact, it's been in roughly the same part of the sky ever since September, and when I began writing this post this morning I could still see it through the window at Tom's, blazing away in the pale blue dawn, off to the southeast. Your chances of missing it were very small indeed.

This animation by Brad Goodspeed is terrific for showing how big Jupiter is: he tried to give you a sense for how big different planets would appear to us if they were as close as the moon. Of course, if Jupiter were this close, our little Earth would drop -- plop! -- into it, like a pebble into a pond, and that would be the end of government health care, and Mubarak's presidency, and a number of other things.

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.