Crust

It was a green block of – something. I discovered it in a closet and was drawn to it powerfully, inarticulately. I pushed a finger into it and it felt like something that would spring back – it resisted with some spirit – but it didn't spring back. The dent remained. And it gave with a faint crunch, like crusted snow. I didn't know if I had ruined it, whatever it was. I hid it where I found it, upside down, hiding the finger-dent.

My childhood is full of such hidden transgressions. It's strange, because my parents were mild and reasonable people, and I was a willing and obedient child: a quick confession would have liberated me from many quiet miseries! But I was unable to confess, then or ever. And I crept back again and again to take the stuff out, and to stick my fingers into it. That strange snow-crunch; that feel of breaking flesh; and an odor of post offices and attic rooms.

I suppose it was floral foam, of some sort. I'm sure it cost less than a dollar. Soon there was no way to hide the fact that I had mangled it. I kept going back and crunching it, craving the sensation, wondering what it was, wondering if it was poison, wondering if my secret transgression would end up killing me. “I had no idea he was going into the closet for that,” my tearful mother would say. Everyone would say there was no way she could have expected it, why would any boy do such a thing? And behind her back they'd note that I had always been a queer boy, no accounting for me. This at least was quick. Perhaps it was a blessing.

You could lodge things in it: paperclips, toothpicks, straws. It would take the imprint of a key, of a coin, of a knuckle, though not very finely.

Like almost all the stories of my boyhood, this one trails off into hypotheticals, variants, perplexities; it changes locales and characters. I'm five years old, or ten, or thirteen. I can remember my sin being discovered, in various ways, but I doubt any of them happened. My mother found the mashed up foam and clucked at me. She discarded it without a second thought. It disappeared and I never knew why. I was challenged as to what on earth I had done it for. Who knows? At most one, perhaps none of those things happened. I will never know.

Tonight I find myself longing for that block of foam, for its unearthly lightness – like balsa wood; for its malleability; for the burst of strange tactile information it sent pouring up my nerves. And above all for its secrecy, and for the alien countries it hinted at, where this was the stuff of soil. The moon rose in cold backwash of fog and fir bough tonight, contending with the streetlight, and all of it, even the streetlight, was too far away to touch.

String

Kiki loves a good string to chase as much as any cat: to lurk, and pounce – “aha!” – and almost get it, as I tug the end past her flickering paws: a quick frenzied pursuit and then a pause, while she studies the terrain, pretends nonchalance, and then – suddenly – pounce, again!

But when she tires of the game she turns, tail twitching, and cuffs my hand. Usually, though not always, with her claws sheathed. Just letting me know that we're done pretending, that she knows it's my hand pulling the string, and that she'll tear it to bloody shreds if I don't quit. Kiki is not one of your mild-mannered cats.

Sometimes, after an illness, I have a similar sense of impatience with appearances, impatience with having my instincts trifled with. I don't know what hand is pulling the string exactly so as to capture my attention: but I know it doesn't move of itself, and I'm tired of the game.

What I did for Thanksgiving

Sick, like I used to get sick when a child: nothing but fever, burning merrily. This is the second time I've managed to sit up in the last 36 hours. Kiki adores this new temperature setting, and this new propensity for staying in bed: every time I come to consciousness she's nestled in some blazing crook.

There's no suffering to it, not even when I find myself giving little moans, every fourth breath or so. To suffer I think you have to be lodged in time, and I'm free of all that. The moans are just the obvious thing to do.

At first spreadsheets were in all the background: I was working some complicated data transformation, over and over. “I need to save this,” I would think. But gradually that burned away too.

Back to bed.

Personal Space

“I don't want to be a widow,”

you said.

The leaf that shivers

over the wire:

in her green interview,

no one told her

about the jump

in November.

---

And I, with my coffee precarious by my thigh, and a white upland morning contending with the lamp: about to turn to my Spanish, and to leave aside a poem that won't quite set. Death is turning up everywhere these days: he is one of those loud, intrusive strangers who uses your first name in your face and is too familiar with your wife. – Did you never hear, Mr Death, of personal space?

– No, hum a few bars and I'll fake it! – he grins, with a mouthful of teeth, and you realize you'd better leave well enough alone. Buffoon he may be, but he's not one to trifle with.

Close of Day

The hem of the cloud cover

does not quite reach her ankles:

her toenails are polished with silver,

but tarnish remains in the seams of her feet.

Slow and ancient

marsupials are there

in the pools of light.

You can't see them but you can feel

the hesitation of their wrinkled paws,

the tremor of their slow hopeless grope.

They arch their backs

and their blind snouts

nose in the skirts of cloud.

Coming to the edge today,

I looked and saw dolphins

playing in the deep, drawing

clusters of stars behind their tails:

spurts of darkness

rose above their heads.

I set one slender spike

and raised the sledge.

Catlike hisses came from

the unseen watcher

as if from some steam engine

afraid to die;

but oh, the sting of the haft

as the hammer struck home!

It's ringing still

in the great bones of my enormous arms,

and their shivering light filled

the hang of the emptiness

where the dolphins played.

But nothing

holds back the evening for long

and the creatures that nose for night

are older than me,

older than my kind;

and the even the light that still runs out

through flaws in the shell

is forced by the irregular beat

of this dear deep beast, my heart.

Cloudwash

A strong impulse to withdraw, to head for the hills, to wander in the oak savannas of the central Willamette Valley: I want nothing but the sound of running water and sight of hawks high up in the sky. Too much. I'm tired of cajoling people out of bed to face another day of disappointment, tired of washing other people's dishes and cooking other people's food, tired of buses and trains full of damaged people and halfwits, tired of obscure struggles with rules that slyly shift so that they always favor the Haves and keep us off balance, so that we're always running and never catching up, and so that we always blame ourselves and not our masters. Tired of it all. Tired of trying to maintain a spiritual equilibrium at the same time, a compassion that recognizes that our masters are just as frightened and wanty as we are, that they're cruel out of panic and desperation, just like we are. That we are, globally speaking, ourselves the Haves, clutching more than our share. I just want them to be bad, so I can hurt them and enjoy it, or anyway spew poison out on my blog, or on Facebook.

So. I breathe a few times, touch the ceramic of my coffee cup for its warmth, think of Carolee coming to Portland and of Antonio Machado's verse. I think about the light falling slant across the table. I think about the thick glasses of Christopher Luna and the way conversation roils around you, when you can't hear well enough to understand any of it, but you are rocked in the warmth of it, at a party. I think of a coworker coming into my office every evening to give an the end-of-the-working day's hug, something I find stupefyingly improbable, and for which I'm terribly grateful. Touch, you know, is all I have ever believed: the words just rise and fall, crest and ebb, like bubbles around a boiling egg. They don't mean anything. They bobble me back and forth; maybe they crack me, if they're hard enough; but they never reach my heart. A strange thing for a writer to say, maybe, but it's true.

Hands, flesh, breathing, the knocking of a heartbeat against my fingertips, the arch of the small of a back that's covered with ribbed fabric, so that my fingers run up and down the rivulets, the lines of force. Have you ever thought about the relentless verticality of the human body, its up-and-down-ness? Like a sunflower; like a poplar tree. It's a queer thing, and I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse.

Still: the air I breathe into my nostrils is cold and dry, and the pale light that falls across the table is a winter light. Barely a month to the solstice. The trees across the street are despojado y deshojado, despoiled and unleafed, and their branchlets are yellowish whips in the cloudwash. November.

Poor Judgment

I'm afraid I had to giggle when Petraeus solemnly averred that he had shown poor judgment in having an affair. Does anyone actually use their judgment when they have an affair? Weigh this with that, take one thing with another, ask their staff for second opinions? If he actually used his judgment, sure, then it was pretty damn poor. But I would guess that he was just tired of using his judgment. He used his judgment all day long, in life-and-death decisions, and there came a point when he was sick of it, and told it to go take a hike. All of us do that eventually, but most of us, fortunately for the world, are exposed to fewer temptations of lesser moment. The fact that we ate two entire bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies doesn't make the front page of the New York Times, and we don't have to tender our resignation about it.

My first thought, when I saw Paula Broadwell on the Jon Stewart Show, was, “Ah, now there's trouble!” (Well that's not quite accurate, my first thought was “my God, what lovely arms!” Trouble, that was my second thought.) But Paula Broadwell is not quite my type, and she would never adore me, so I needn't congratulate myself on my perception. The fact is, mutatis mutandis, I might have done exactly the same thing as General Petraeus. Which I'm not particularly proud of, but not I'm not especially ashamed of it, either. Titanic feats of will, white-knuckling one's way against temptation, are not a special interest of mine.

David Petraeus did show poor judgment, but it wasn't when he decided to have an affair – if he ever did such an improbable thing. He showed poor judgment when he had the first inkling that such a thing was possible, and he kept the door open: when he let things set themselves up so that more and stronger temptations would keep on arriving. He's the only one who knows when that was: but I'm guessing it was long before the first email that would have interested the FBI.

para dar un alivio a estas penas

I give. I've been working all morning on translating these simple lines:

Para dar un alivio a estas penas

que me parten la frente y el alma

me he quedado mirando a la luna

a través de las finas acacias.

... and I have nothing to show for it. I think this is the hardest kind of poetry to translate: simple, obvious, almost childish, resting its weight on the language itself rather than on the cleverness of the poet.

The problem boils down to two words: pena and frente. Pena means grief, pain, punishment. But the “punishment” sense has vanished from English pain, except fossilized in legal phrases – “on pain of death,” for instance – and the “grief” sense, it never had. Both are crucial here. It's not just pain that the poet is undergoing, it's loss of a loved one, and the loss of a loved one is a punishment, a punishment for some unspecified transgression.

The marvelous ambiguity of the next line is perfectly translatable. “que me parten la frente y el alma,” can be rendered exactly with “which divides my forehead and my soul,” preserving the the doubt about exactly what's being divided. Is it his forehead that's being divided from his soul, a standard flesh/soul dichotomy? Maybe. Or is each being split? Maybe the pain he's talking about is a splitting headache? And maybe the soul is being split because some of it is remorseful and some of it is not?

So far, so good: but the real translation problem is the word frente. It is a forehead, and that is probably the strongest literal sense here. But it's also “front,” as in the line of battle; it's also “front,” as in what you present to the world, and it's also “face,” as in what you prepare to meet the faces that you meet. So this:

To gain some relief from this punishment

that divides my face – and my soul –

or this:

To relieve this pain

that splits my forehead and soul...

or even this:

To find some respite from this grief

that tears the front from my soul...

But the more farfetched you get, the farther you wander from the directness of the poem, which is perfectly colloquial and straightforward: Jiménez is saying nothing outré or forced, and you do violence to the poem if you create a translation like the last. It's not a poem that's trying to startle you: it's a very quiet, gentle sing-song.

To relieve this pain

that splits my forehead and soul,

I have lingered, watching the moon

behind the slender acacias.

There is something in the moon that suffers;

something, in the halo of silver

that kisses my eyes,

and dries – weeping – my tears.

I don't know what the moon has

that caresses – lulls – calms –

and silently watches the prisoner

with a saint's immense compassion.

And tonight, as I suffer and think

of freeing this flesh from my soul –

I have lingered, watching the moon

behind the slender acacias.

Massage in Winter

Cold air from all sides. It stirs the hair on my forearms and tickles my scalp. Delicious when I push my hands under your shoulders, between the heated flannel and your skin: warm oil; glowing flesh; the massage table and its trimmings an enfolding rose of warmth.

Prayer for a Winter Kittening

Let all that is whole be broken,

let all that is true be false,

let vanish all premon and token,

let the cord unwind from the halse.

Let me see by the light of winter

new muzzles that gleam and chirr:

let the sleep of my dreaming sinter

in the stroking of newborn fur.

Lift

They have all had one thing in common: amusement at a half-secret joke; a characteristic lift at the corners of the eyes. Some have been sad, and some cheerful, but they all have had a keen quizzical glance, which says, “can he really have said that, and still be taking himself seriously?”

Observation

The afternoon I found myself drawing a fine reproduction, in scarlet pencil, of a small splatter of ketchup: easier than facing the shrieks of desolation that would have met an attempt to wipe it up & leave no record of its beauty. Or the dread of walking out on a rainy morning, and knowing that six blocks would take half an hour, because every drowning worm on the way must be rescued. There might be twenty such, and each must be lifted tenderly: they are easily injured, especially when waterlogged. At two years of age, she suddenly comprehended that all the dinosaurs had died. She grieved for a year.

She grew somehow to be a young teenager. I sent her out one day to pick up the windfall apples in the backyard. She took a bucket readily enough – she was always a willing and obedient child, when she was not in despair for the loss of life and beauty – and set forth. From time to time I looked out the window. For an hour she worked, with great diligence. Every apple had to be inspected, lest a wasp or spider or ant be troubled. If it had such residents, they must be coaxed gently out, and new homes found for them: then common humanity required waiting to see that they were settling in, and to make sure the new place exposed them to no predators. When she finally wandered in, with the bucket one-third full, and the yard still full of windfalls, I thought, “She'll never find work.”

---

Yesterday morning her phone reminded her, at 6:30, that she had “an observation” at 8:00. She typed up a full lesson plan, arrived on time, improvised brilliantly with a large stuffed horse (unexpectedly presented to the class by a parent) & generally shone for the observer. You would think the worm-rescuer had vanished. Until you see her tenderness with the kids hitting sensory overload, and her uncanny ability to head off tantrums in autistic ones.

Erasing our Necessity

After my reading, my partner poet asked me, on-stage, during the question and answer period, why she could not find me in my poems. I said something inadvertently, unthinkingly, which has been reverberating inside myself. And I think it must be true.

I said, "I write so that I will not be needed."

     - Ivy Alvarez

Just so, parenting. Just so, living in general: in some fundamental way, our task is to erase our own necessity.

Yellow Leaves

I'm at the window of the Virginia Cafe. Most of the leaves outside are yellow, but towards the hearts of the trees, some are still green. I've seen this a few times this year. There's one especially striking ilanthus near my house, showers of yellow on the outside, and inside, all brilliant green. I don't know if this year is different, or if I've just never noticed it before. Do a tree's leaves usually turn from the outside in?

In any case, the leaves are wet and glowing yellow, and they fall one by one, rocking as though they were the visible ends of ghostly seesaws: back and forth, up and down. They are all bright and yellow. The semantic fields of autumn are pushing me to say “gold,” but there is no gold there, not a hint of it. It's yellow, painfully intense and pure. Some of the trees have a dusting of lichen that answers to the colors of the leaves. But there is no gold anywhere.

Something wary and feral wakes in me on wet, glowing days like this. I want to wander and climb: it's a restlessness that makes me want to trace lines on the faces of strangers, to read their features like a text in Braille. The whole world seems like a faintly glowing cipher, a letter in an unknown script. My kinship isn't with stupid, obvious human beings: it's with whatever demiurge created them, with the hand that painted both the faces and the leaves. Not God the Father, but some slighter, flickering deity in love with curves and oblique lines. There is something being said that neither the faces nor the leaves ever understood. It's neither happy nor kind, but there's an alien delight in it, and I'm tempted to forswear my humanity and follow that delight instead. As if you might open a notebook and shake it so that all the written letters fell out of it, like thin wire confections and curlicues, and drifted on the floor: or as if you might take the print of a face, on one of those golden leaves, take the delineations, and leave only a glowing blur behind – a shapeless mute nob on a neck-stalk, not even aware that the lines that used to make its face have been taken away. How, after all, could it ever know? Who would tell it?

And now the light drains away, and the rain picks up. The leaves fall faster, and the glow is all gone. A dull and sodden world supervenes, and my imagined kinship with the demiurge makes me frightened and ashamed. Time to wrap my coat closer around me, and walk back to the office. And hope not to meet myself on the way.

Rasping a Glint

Pedernal yesca
tinder and flint
hafted and skinted
rasping a glint

moglie sposa
woman of nest
Jael the Carpenter
hammer in heft

ferliche and fairly
driven and drone
lifting the gold spike
driving it home

Serpentine

The spiritual equivalent of altitude sickness: the mix of awe and compassion is too thin for me, and my soul lies gasping on the pebbly ground, while the hemlocks throb against the twilight. If I could just catch my breath –

You might have to go on without me, and pick me up on the way back.

I was given a massage tool when its owner died: a white serpentine in a shallow 'S'-shape, smooth as jade, which warms quickly to the hand. I've never used tools in my practice, but I keep the serpentine on my bedside table, and I toy with it sometimes before I fall asleep: it fits into my hand in various ways, and seems always on the point of conveying something of terrific importance to me. I fell asleep one time, holding it, and hoped it would bring me a dream, but it remained silent. Dreams aren't sent like credit cards. You have to earn them.

I am failing, failing some important test, and I don't even know what it is.

The Life of Emily Dickinson

I'm reading Sewall's biography of Emily Dickinson. It's a really wonderful book, and I highly recommend it. He is at war with what he calls, with a capital 'M', “the Myth” – which is the story that Dickinson, disappointed in love, and really too fragile for this world, withdrew from it and attempted to vanish behind the masks of poetry, as a way of escape. He sets up a counter-story, of a woman finding her vocation and simply dropping the obligations of an intensely social world (the typical life of an upper-class New England lady was a mass of social obligations) that would have eaten all her time and pulled her away from her life's work.

You can practically feel his longing: he wants very much for it to be true. But he's too disciplined and conscientious to skew his evidence, and I don't find myself believing his story much more than the the story he so successfully shoots down. I'm not convinced that Dickinson believed in her own poetic immortality, or that she was easy in her skin.

I'm aware of wanting to make a third story, to co-opt her and take her for my own. I would make her endlessly restless, a person of deep religious feeling but impatient with doctrine and suspicious of religious professionals. I would make her disappointed in love, in a drastic if unspecific Shelleyan way. She flings herself at people (in writing at least), and leaves them uncomfortable and bewildered by her enthusiasm. Nothing quite works out, and she moves restlessly away, having been failed – somehow – she doesn't even know how. But person after person moves out of her orbit, unsatisfied and unsatisfying.

All the while, I can see why I'd try to make this the Dickinson story: I can see the tendentiousness of my own mind, its eagerness to co-opt her, to make her play out one version of my own psychodrama, to find a way out or around or through this baffle. Nothing will come of that.

Again and again, I come to the baffle, the stone in the tunnels in Cirith Ungol that I can get neither around nor through nor over, though I can hear the voices of my enemies, carrying away what I love. What was all this for, then? That is probably not a question that means anything, but it is an insistent one.

I grow more and more wary of this sort of thinking, thinking of purposes and destinies and the fate of character. I looked at my recent poems, though, because someone else was looking at them, and I thought, my God, what a bitter and resentful person wrote these poems! And all alike. Flinging himself at the baffle again and again. It's time to stop and think, instead: time to back off.

In the meantime: sun and rain in a complicated dance, and the grape leaves – whatever they really are – phosphorescent in the mist, and hugging Deb Scott on Mississippi Avenue. An arc of color where the rain was sorting the light, and photos of robed Rinpoches on an office wall. I wait for November, and the healing dark, and the recovery of touch.

The Torn Edge of Autumn

Morning lifts its shoulders, trees crane their necks and gape at the sky, a crow pounds its way through the thin air. Everything's a bit raw and ragged.

Here at the torn edge of Autumn. Looking backward and forward: longing for the long oven, the flare of heat and light; longing to have my bones and flesh eaten by the fire, and my breath set free to ripple in the air, up and away. I love that I don't know which way the wind will be blowing: whether the vapor will wander up over the Cascades or run south with the rain, up the valley toward the southern hills and the oaks. Or even run east with the cold stiff wind from the Columbia Gorge, and out to sea: I'd like that best of all.

So grateful for my work: for skin and flesh, for the beating heart and the blood flowing, the sweetness of palm and sole. The quiet breath, the invisible catch of a almost-snore, the lift of a chin when my thumbs rise up under the suboccipitals. Twilight, night-time, streetlights; the deft way I've learned to swing my table up on the pivot of my knee and toss it into the floor space between the front and back seats of the car, moving all that weight with almost no effort, feeling much younger and stronger than when I was, actually, young and strong.

Grateful for a warm bed and chill air, for the pad of Kiki's paws, through the covers, on the backs of my knees, at three in the morning. For unexpected bare skin, for hair settling onto my forearm, for inquiring sounds that never rise to words, and are met with equally inarticulate reassurances. For the sound of Tori rising at six thirty, and getting her breakfast. For the shuddering gasps of the garbage and recycling trucks as they trundle through the neighborhood, coming faithfully, every week, as evidence that we are a settled and prosperous people.

The autumn spiders are enormous; when you walk into their thick strands they break with a palpable ping. “I always feel bad about breaking their webs,” said our neighbor. “They work so hard!”

Against Democracy

I'm not convinced that democracy is a good idea. It's an idea that I love, but in practice it can become terribly poisonous and discouraging. It just requires too much grown-up behavior. We're not up to it.

I was reading Sapolsky's memoir a couple months ago, and he talked about how stress levels shot up in all the baboons whenever the alpha was challenged, and the lines of the hierarchy became unclear. I see the same thing at election time: the human beings all become anxious and fearful, and liable to outbursts of rage; their intelligence, individual and collective, seems to drop several notches. I'd prefer to think that we're capable of a non-hierarchical society, but I wonder if we are.

One of the signs of this is the disinclination to vote for anyone imperfect: the longing to vote for a perfect human being, rather than for an ordinary party, run by ordinary human beings, with a list of things it would like to do. I was puzzled by the responses to Obama until I understood this. He's a good solid center democrat, way over to the right of me in many ways, over to the left in others. His voting record in the Senate was clear and consistent, if short. He's as good at trying to do what he said he was going to try to do as any president I remember. No surprises. Standard Democratic Party stuff. But the excitement that surrounded him was intense, and I think it's best understood in terms of primate psychology: we had had a weak alpha for a long time, who couldn't speak persuasively, and made many obviously bad decisions. Here was a confident, persuasive one. And he was a different color! Maybe that would make a difference! I really think much of the excitement, and consequent disappointment, is as simple as that. We're not really very complicated critters, in a lot of ways.

And instead of blaming themselves for electing a Democratic president, a divided Senate, and a Republican House – a configuration which our constitution pretty much guarantees will prevent any significant legislation – Americans are preparing to do exactly the same thing again. And again, they will blame the subsequent paralysis on Obama and on Congress, as if anything else could happen. The marching orders of the Republican House are – present right-wing legislation. The marching orders of the Democratic Senate are – quash it.

I've always been irritated by employers who blame their employees. You've got the power; you set the rules; if they're not getting the work done, it's your fault, not theirs. I feel that way about the American public blaming congress. If you want them to work, you have to give them consistent orders that make sense.

I see no sign that Americans, generally, take their responsibilities as a democratic people seriously. They don't take the time to do democracy properly: they won't learn about the issues, they won't engage with the Americans who disagree with them. They seem to me childish, petulant, and irresponsible. They have no idea how to solve the problems of the country, and yet they're eager to blame congress for also having no idea. The constant bleating pleas for “leadership” are ominous. This is a democracy. We are supposed to be the leaders. That's the whole idea.

It's only this situation that has enabled the lobbyists for the large business and corporate interests to gain their ascendancy. They do take the time to learn about the issues, to work out long-range plans, and to engage with people who don't agree with them. I don't like these people – they're political mercenaries: but the fact is they're behaving more like citizens, by and large, than we are.

Warm Rain

Warm night: the rain has slackened, for a bit. the air is rich with the smell of torn leaves: tannin, wet soil, and ozone. I am not in sympathy with the rain, today; I am too full of doubts and hesitations. I vowed to dedicate my powers / To thee and thine -- have I not kept the vow? I wrote that down and then asked, well, have I? And only the dripping water from the tattered twigs answered. Intellectual beauty? Do I even know what that means? The clouds are pregnant with still more rain. There's more to come. Where the moon may be, behind all that wrack, I can't even guess.

I have been considering for days the problem of the letter 'y': my sense that its tail should be bold, flowing, and sinuous runs -- smack! -- into the fact that as I usually hold a pen, the tail runs exactly at the angle of the nib, making a line far too meager. And pulling to the left leaves the letter unpleasantly squashed, while pulling to the right looks affected if not innovative. I keep thinking there should be a simple solution to this problem, but none comes. I fear it will have to be innovation. Or maybe the tail maybe has to jack away from itself, at last?

Good night!

Laundry

High ceilings: a clean bare apartment, in the modern, comfortless style. The floor-to-ceiling windows, which might have looked out over the city lights, were covered with matte black shades. The books were few and serious: T.C. Boyle, Jared Diamond. The effect was elegant but lonesome.

So also was the young woman, who had no fund of smalltalk, nothing to expose or to apologize for. One of those rare clients who seem to go nowhere during a massage, who stay warily present and alert. You ask them if they're comfortable and they answer at once and clearly, with the same readiness and tone they would use in a job interview. I sometimes wonder if the pheromones are simply wrong, with such clients. Have I done something wrong, or failed to do something right? I'll never know, but I'll be astonished if she calls me again.

I pondered the massage, and my responses, as I drove home. I sometimes feel a little awkward with clients that much younger than I am. They come from a different world. When I was young there was much solemn discussion and hand-wringing about the generation gap, but it seems to me that the distance separating me from young people now is far greater than the one that separated me from my parents. My parents and I grew up dabbling occasionally in despair. But these young people grew up immersed in it, they live and breathe it. They believe in nothing, and they have never trusted anything enough to be betrayed by it. My heart aches for them.

Or possibly it aches for myself, and all this has nothing to do with her. I need to bear that possibility in mind, too. As I drove through the rainy night, I went methodically through my heart, labeling the potentially toxic responses and putting them up to dry. Here was my dismay at being treated formally and distantly; here was my anxiety about being old and fat; here was the millionth iteration of the story of my only being able to talk my game; here was the faint but insistent conviction that my body is awkward and de trop; here was the sense that my tongue is thick with some ancestral poison, which prevents me ever from expressing the kindness and generosity that overflows my heart. I hung them carefully, one by one, with the clothespins of the dharma. Let them hang like prayer flags, till they turn to powder and fly with the wind.

This, I feel, is my great qualification for doing massage. All of us who work along the boundaries of intimacy, doing massage or talk therapy, need this capacity above all others: to be able to see our own responses, and not believe in them – not ratify them – and certainly not impute them to the people we work with. Nothing needs to be done with them. They don't need to be accepted or rejected, evaluated or justified. They just need to be given proper ventilation: they'll disintegrate on their own.

Underneath it all is a floor of heat and fire, that ancient, inarticulable potency, the thing that all prayer invokes. We can't afford to smother that with damp laundry. Hang it up and let it dry.

Unscrawled Heaven

I find myself still softly searching

For my Delinquent Palaces –

Oh, me too, Emily. Myself the only prince cast out.

The rains have begun at last. I can see the tracers, pale gray lines against the faintly paler sky, as if heaven was a paper slant-ruled for forward-leaning cursive. I want to form each letter slowly, perfectly, each one dropping to dissolution. Incipit liber primus. Here beginneth Book One.

I crouch by the gutter and dabble my fingers in the clear water: I squint up at the sky, and my eye-sockets fill. Clear ink runs down my cheeks, streams into a thicket of beard. Down at the corner stop someone sneezes, and the brakes of the city bus gasp. Rain. It falleth as the merciful rain of heaven upon the place beneath. And I am the place beneath: my delinquent palaces seem to have deliquesced.

Blowing, sputtering, I reach the shelter of the porch. I want to extend my fingers so that a drop will fall on each fingertip. Thimbles of cold wet water; gloves of rain. O heaven, endless white unscrawled heaven, when can I begin to write?

Not Training to Injury

I've always exercised: that's pretty much the only thing I'll talk about in this series that I have always done right. And it's been somewhat by accident that I've achieved it, because once again, my guides were not great.

I used to walk a good deal. I loved walking. I took long thinking walks, and talked to myself, argued with myself, recited poetry, made plans. It was fun. When I moved to New Haven, walking was no longer fun. It was difficult and dangerous. People viewed you with suspicion: why were you walking? Streets were difficult to cross. Muggers were numerous and savage. In the winter, snow and ice made walking a struggle. It was a discouraging time, and I lost the habit. I was in graduate school and I felt I didn't have time anyway.

But I got back to Portland, and I took up swimming, which I had always loved: I swam at the old YWCA up on 10^th Avenue. I was doing it for exercise, by then. I had Kenneth Cooper's Aerobics in hand, as my manual, and I tried to train up, according to his guidelines.

Somehow it never quite worked out. I would always get sick (with what I thought of as a cold), at a certain point in my training programs, and spin out for a week or two, and have to start over. I documented my progress meticulously. Always that failure, and starting over, the gradual progression, getting more distance and more speed and then – failure.

I did the same thing with weights. I got dumbbells and started lifting. Daily. With elaborate systems worked out to lift more and more, with more and more reps, and no endpoint, no point at which it was good enough. Curiously enough, I never got very far before I hurt myself, my elbows or my shoulders, and would have to quit for a while.

I'm very grateful for the periodic failures and blessedly minor injuries, now, because I think they saved me from doing what I've seen many, many of my clients do: undertake a determined and resolute program of training to injury. They take up some repetitive exercise that is really hard on the joints, and up the ante, up the ante, up the ante, doing it longer, harder, and more frequently – until something gives. They injure a knee, a hip, or a shoulder, and – suddenly they can't do their chosen exercise any more. They can't do it at all. Any many of them, at this point, give up exercise altogether. It's deeply discouraging to them. Especially for those of them who were athletes in school, it can be a severe identity crisis. If they're not supremely fit, getting better and better – then what are they? They're nothing. Failures. Has-beens.

I don't exercise any more, as I used to understand it. I don't try to get better and better. Doing massage keeps my hand and upper body strength pretty good. I bicycle to and from my writing-cafe – three or four miles from home – most mornings. I'm always meaning to get my weight machine set back up, but I never quite do it. And maybe it's just as well.

The other bit of exercise I do every day is what I call my “back exercises.” Way back when I used to have a lot of low back trouble – in New Haven, curiously enough – I went to a chiropractor. The adjustments didn't do anything for me, but he handed me a sheet of paper with exercises on it, and I did the exercises, and they helped a lot. I think when I started doing them, they took about 25 minutes, every morning, which is a big investment of time. I streamlined them more and more, till now they only take about 10 minutes, I think. I do them every single morning. I'm convinced (caveat, caveat, caveat, sample of one, your mileage may vary) that these exercises keep my erstwhile back trouble at bay.

(I know now that these “exercises” were actually borrowed yoga poses. One of these days I'll document my routine for you. Remind me.)

These exercises helped my back dramatically. Every once in a while, once every couple months, maybe, I'll be pressed for time some morning and skip them. By afternoon my back will be twinging in that old, ominous way. If I skip them a second morning, I'll “throw my back out” that day, almost for sure. Even I can respond to feedback that clear. I don't often skip any more, and I never skip two days in a row. Life is short, and I don't want to spend much of with my back in spasm, gasping on my hands and knees.

What do these three activities – the back exercises, the bicycling, and the massage – have in common? I enjoy them all, they're knit into my daily routines, and they are not progressive. They're not a training program. I'm not trying to get anywhere with them. They're just the way I live. If I don't do them, I get grumpy, or my body starts hurting, or I can't sleep. It's become pretty obvious and self-reinforcing.

So. Why did I start with exercise, in a series about learning how to deal with food? Because for me, dealing with food depends on careful deployment of will power, and replenishing will power depends on sleep, and sleep depends on exercise. It's that simple. I don't exercise, I won't eat right. It's not about burning calories; it's about feeling good. And about waking up with enough oomph in the bank to get through the day.

This Food Thing: The Family Curse

“You know,” I found myself saying to Martha the other day, “I think I have this food thing whupped.”

I went on to walk it back and qualify it and add disclaimers: a long way to go, just maybe over the hump, could still be wrecked by this or that – you know. That's my way. I'm a cautious man. I don't believe in rashly drawing the gods' attention. But really, I do think I have this food thing whupped.

“This food thing,” what thing would that be? Overeating, eating compulsively, eating lots of things that I know are bad for me. It's an embarrassingly big deal for me, and always has been. I've been struggling with it all my life: I've hovered on the official overweight/obese line, sometimes ten, twenty pounds from it one way or the other, as I tried various approaches and lost control of them, but always within hailing distance of it, and always, until recently, always with the dread that it will get away from me altogether, and that I'll become downright enormous.

I've noticed with friends and clients that many of them, maybe most of them, believe in a family curse. It's their fate to die of cancer, or to always make bad relationship decisions, or to be unwise with money. It's the fatal weakness of their family: and it's bound to get them eventually, no matter what they do. There's a grain of truth to it, often – all these things do run in families. But they believe in them much more strongly than the data warrants.

The curse my family laid on me was, that I was going to become fat, and I was going to die of a heart attack. I've known this all my life. My mother's father – the one everyone exclaimed I was the spitting image of – died of a heart attack at 62. My mother was fat, and hated being fat, and told me over and over that if I kept on eating as I was, I would become fat too. Which would, of course, be the worst thing that could befall anyone. But she also came from an Illinois farm family that believed one of the cardinal virtues was stuffing your menfolk, so at the same time that she warned me about this, she fed me unlimited amounts of rich food. Everything I liked to eat was on hand, all the time.

I ate. This was my fate. I'd eat, and become fat, and die early. Serve me right for my wickedness: but there was nothing to be done about it.

Oh, I'd go on diets. All of them worked, for a while, and I'd lose ten, fifteen pounds, maybe – quite quickly – and I'd picture losing the rest of the weight, how easy it would be, and I'd escape the family curse, and be free! And then the weight loss would, mysteriously, stop. Following the diet would become harder and harder, the sruggles against myself would become epic, titanic. And then – suddenly – I'd break. I'd eat. And eat and eat and eat, and accept my fate.

The state of obesity research and nutritional science, in those days, was abysmal, and the dietary advice was almost uniformly bad. One of my “diet” foods was low-fat fruit-flavored “yogurt,” sweetened to a candy with corn-syrup. Medical authority solemnly told me to avoid things like butter and red meat, and eat this poisonous processed crap instead. It wasn't until much much later that I discovered how little and how bad the science behind this advice was. It was science, right? It was the Surgeon General. It had to be true.

Medical authority also told me how to exercise to lose weight: low-intensity, endlessly repetitive, supposedly “aerobic” exercise. Here again the science was bad or simply non-existent. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that exercise of this sort, or of any sort, leads to people losing weight. It simply doesn't. Exercise and obesity basically have nothing to do with each other. But again, the recommendations were laid down by all the authorities I knew of. I wasn't a science guy. I was an English major. I took the authorities at their word. So when I did undertake exercise, what I did was try to jog, daily, for longer and longer amounts of time. Eventually I'd hurt myself, or need to do something else with all that time, and I'd give it up. And again, I knew, anyway, that there was really nothing I could do. My fate was waiting for me: there was never really any getting away from it.

It's been a long hard haul since then. I've had to learn a lot, and unlearn a lot. I've had to get stricter with myself in some ways and easier on myself in others. I've had to run a lot of experiments in what Paul Ingraham calls “the laboratory of me,” and make up new approaches based on the results. But I do think that I have, finally, whupped this food thing.

I sat down and drew up an outline of how I did it. I might write a post on each of these. Or I might not. But here's the outline:

1. A habit of exercise, and learning not to “train to failure”
2. Protecting my sleep
3. De-stressing my life
4. Learning to distrust carbs
5. Commuting by bicycle
6. Keeping the kitchen work-ready
7. La Grande Salade
8. Training the will, getting help, and hiding treats
9. That palatability study, and learning to trust carbs again. Some of them. Some of the time.

Who knows if I'll actually follow this out and write all the posts? I might. And who knows whether I've really escaped the family curse? We'll see. Stay tuned.

Redder Than Yesterday: Manaza

The Sunday cartoons are reader than yesterday

and the wind threw

the gap in the window flew

them off the table, and they rock

paper

scissors

gently to the floor. You rock

too. The floor holds your hips in his wide

carpeted hands: did you know there's a word

in Spanish for a big hand, a mitt, a paw?

Manaza. True story.

In response to this morning porch entry.

Battle Ground

3:00 a.m.: I haven't slept. Outside, the moon glares on the new white paint of the south wall. Something trips the motion sensors and the lights go on in the front yard. Kiki, possibly; possibly raccoons. After a few minutes, the lights go out again, and once again the only light – the only thing I can see, except the gleam of my fingers as I type – is my laptop screen.

I hear two clocks ticking, and the refrigerator fan, and a faint sound like a jet engine building up on a runway. I don't know what that is. The loudest sound is that of my tinnitus, floating by my ears like a oversized, melodic, silver mosquito. I miss the tumble of the sea.

My hands smell of apple, and behind that there's even still a faint tang they picked up from the rock at Lucia Falls, up on the east fork of the Lewis River. Smooth gray rock, curved and twisted: shaped like soft ice cream when it comes out of the machine at Dairy Queen. It's all bare: not a bit of soil. Only the green water rushing through narrow channels, or settling in deep pools. Where it falls over a lip of stone, you can see, through a glassy wall of water, the foam-bubbles forming. When the water strikes, they'll be released to the surface: for the moment, though, they're trapped between the water and the rock, and are carried down, willy-nilly, to the splash pools.

Signs forbade water contact, lest the salmon be disturbed or confused on their way upstream. Perhaps that's why no one was there. Or perhaps it's just too late in the year: beautiful though the weather is, people have put away the things of summer, and they don't even think of it. At any rate, we had the park to ourselves: just stone and water and red light slanting through the hemlocks. A bloody sun to remind us of the wildfires burning on the other side of the mountains.

We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in the small and pleasant town of Battle Ground – which is named after a battle with the Klickitats which was expected, but never happened. There was war with the Yakimas, so the Klickitats up the Lewis River – who so far as I can tell had nothing to do with it – were rounded up and interned at Fort Vancouver. Some of them escaped: a detachment of soldiers went after them and talked them into coming back. On their return, the settlers were disappointed that there hadn't been a battle, and they took to referring to the place where they met, derisively, as “Battle ground.” And Battle Ground it is to this day. I'm glad the soldiers didn't gratuitously murder the Klickitats for the heinous crime of wanting to sleep in their own beds, but the disappointment leaves a sour taste. And there's the bizarre fact, protruding awkwardly from all accounts, that Chief Umtuch was “accidentally” killed during the encounter. Accidents do happen, of course, especially when lots of jumpy untrained people are toting guns around. But one wonders.

Anyway. Our waitress was clearly a native speaker of Spanish, and I confused her by pronouncing “chile verde” in what I fondly imagined to be Spanish fashion. I switched to “chilly vairdy” and got on better. The food was cheap and good. When I was young, the food that got passed off as Mexican in such places was awful, but it's getting so that if you want a decent cheap meal in the rural Northwest, your best bet is the Mexican restaurants, the ones that the Mexicans themselves frequent. The Anglos out in the sticks seem to have forgotten how to cook.

It was a good day. But I'm worried about a friend, who spent the day, not clambering around on the rocks of the Lewis River, but anesthetized upon a table, with worried surgeons trying to understand the nature and extent of her tumors. All day I dropped into prayers from time to time, and I seem to have fretted restlessly through most of the night. It's morning now, a bright and beautiful Fall morning. No certain or reassuring news.

River Beach

Behind us is a long dike, running for miles: open grassy country, a little bleak. The bluff falls to the beach, and where it reaches the sand, runs into a thicket of blackberry. The September sun is low, and the blackberry casts a shadow far out into the sand. We sit in its shade and watch the river.

A long straight line of ragged silver pilings runs out into the river on our left. Martha tells me it's where the log booms used to tie up.

The wind is stiff and the river is alive with sailboats. We talk idly of getting a boat – what sort of boat? Motor or sail? We haven't been out on the river since Ernie's death, and to talk of boats is to defy mortality. I wonder if we'll ever get one. In the back yard, under a tarp, is the old dinghy, which has moved everywhere with us, and which we have put in the water exactly once. It's moldering away, and I even made so bold, this Spring, as to suggest that we finally get rid of it. No.

It's a strange, barren beach, north of the airport, looking across to Washington State. I'm not sure why we go there. It's not a beautiful place, and the beaches are littered with broken glass, cigarette butts and detritus; it's nearly as bad as a beach on the East Coast. Airplanes roar up from the airport and over our heads. The people who come to this beach are not the people who hike up the gorge: they're immigrants, or working class kids looking for a party, generally with an escort of big, untrained, but good-natured dogs, who plunge into the chilly water, chasing sticks. Not the sort of place your Nature Conservancy or Audubon Society people go.

Three Mexican men fish from the beach that's built up against the pilings. Their rods are too far away to see except when they catch the exact angle to reflect the sun at us: then they flash into existence for a moment, wands of brilliant light, and disappear again.

Gulls, cormorants, ospreys. Bald eagles come here at times, but not today. But as we're leaving we see a hawk, or an eagle, that baffles us. Too bulky for an osprey, wrong color for a redtail. And it's fishing. Could it possibly be an immature golden eagle? We can't decide.

We'd worn our bathing suits under our clothes, in the faint hope that we might warm up enough to find the idea of swimming attractive. Not a chance. But we watched the sailboats, the birds, the plunging dogs. It was a good day. The good weather has stayed long past its time, and for all the sun, and the bareness of Mt Hood – who ought to be in her new brilliant white winter coat by now – it feels nothing like summer. There's an uneasiness to the air and to the water. Sound won't hang properly in the air.

We walked slowly back, picking up some of the larger shards of glass, and fragments of styrofoam packing, and dropping them into a cloth bag as we went. The instinct to pack out more than you pack in is pretty entrenched in us, even here, where of course there will never be a clean beach again.

October comes soon.

The Shadow of a Harvest

A hesitant muzzle flicks my ear,
the brush of whiskers threads my beard;

the strange dry supple flesh of snakes
prickles its way across my wrists and the backs of my hands.

I have much company today. Bumblebees at my elbows,
and fleas springing up from the dusty floors,

looking for room at the inn: their wanderings
as epic as Old Manyturns. What Circe have they left?

Will they attain the inside of the knee at last?
Soft flesh, sweet blood, three holy men with gifts?

The cat lands on the sill with a thump,
a rat still twitching feebly in her mouth:

the house yaws: its fins break the surface of the ground,
it breathes and shudders. All this fuss

for a few stains of fluid – for one skittery attempt –
for one Indian summer's shadow of a harvest.

Pie Charts

But I do want to bring the amount of time I spend on things more in line with what I purportedly want, and value: not necessarily by chivvying myself to do more of what I ought to do so much as by realizing that I am making my declarations of what I value by spending my time. There is nothing wrong with treasuring my interactions on Facebook – I have always been, really, an occasional writer, drawn to the glittering surfaces of things; almost a writer of epigram, except that I'm a too wordy. I like floating down a current of random thoughts and responding to them.

On a thread about catcalls and wolf-whistling, I wrote:

Not a sexual response exactly but a response to sexual frustration and humiliation, I think. It's a way of swaggering in front of the other subadult males: "I'm so studly I can make advances to any unattached female! Right here in public! Louder than any of you!" Of course, the only people it can possibly impress are other subadult males even more anxious than you are, but hey, we're primates, we'll take status where we can find it :-)

And in response to a link to a biographical essay about Obama:

Roy Jenkins, I think in his biography of Truman, said something like: "The American republic has many qualities, but recognizing greatness in a sitting president is not one of them." I'm not even a political ally of Obama, except by necessity, but I think he's one of the four or five most impressive people ever to hold the office.

I like summing up, recapitulating, settling my thoughts in an orderly fashion. And I like chatting with people. I've never chatted much with people face to face: I talk too slowly, and get flustered too easily. So it's fun for me to chat in the written word. I type as fast as I talk, if not faster. And on a keyboard there's a backspace key, something that viva voce woefully lacks.

Still, if I was to make a rough pie chart of what's important to me, and a rough pie chart of where I put my time, the slice devoted to chatting on Facebook (and blogs, though there's a less of that, these days) would be about five times larger in the second pie than in the first. And, contrariwise, the time devoted to less occasional writing would be about five times smaller. I don't want to be a martinet with myself, but I do have the uneasy feeling that I'm not tracking well. And the current of life runs so deep and swift, nowadays. I lose track for a bit, and I find myself fifty miles closer to the ocean.

I do like to bear in mind that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea, not because I'm gloomy, but because it reminds me that things are both more and less important than they seem: there's a frame around the picture, endpapers to the book. More important because everything you put in is something else left out: less important because it's just one fleeting life among billions, quickly over and quickly forgotten.

So perhaps a little more time here, and a little more time reading Dickinson et al, and a little less over there on Facebook. And maybe I really should make up those pie charts and have a think about them.

Rat, Peach, Hypoglycemia

“Stop,” I said. “There's nothing to be gained.”

Martha left the quilt untouched, and stood back up. “You're right,” she said.

“Just open the door,” I said, but she couldn't just open the door. She had to take the curtain down from the bedroom door too, lest I trip. But then she opened the door. “And just get out of the way,” she said, speaking for me, and moved aside.

The quilt on the floor, where Kiki had been examining it most closely, lay half over a throw rug, giving me a glimmer of hope. I reached my gloved hands to the far side, rapidly bundled the quilt together, and lifted the whole of it up in the throw rug, a cradled bundle. Quickly but smoothly I trotted out of the room, out of the house, out into the depths of the yard. Dropped the bundle and lifted the quilt by one corner.

The edge of my eye glimpsed the rat in flight – a young one, I suppose, for she had an extraordinary length of tail, which curled and flew like a whiplash in a Disney cartoon. She ran like a squirrel, bound after bound, her tail describing elegant curves the while, and then vanished into the shrubbery toward the street. She was slender and black and beautiful: and she seemed improbably fit and sound, for a creature who had – presumably – been carried inside, through the open window, in Kiki's jaws.

---

The peach was not quite ripe: though sweet, it was dry and tart, more of a piece with its skin than a peach is supposed to be. And the sweet potato too, though I've gotten much better at microwaving tubers, was a little unsatisfactory. But the salad was good, and the chicken was salt but delicious. I was so hungry, when I got home. I'd let myself get hungry and stupid. Bad planning. But I stuck to it, and cooked, and ate real food. So there's that.

---

My client last night felt suddenly sick, at the end of the massage, and horribly thirsty. I helped him up and he took a couple steps and collapsed on the couch. I got him a drink. I didn't like the look of him at all: pale and sweating. I took his pulse. Strong and regular. (I didn't bother to count, I just wanted the reassurance of a good beat.) Asked him questions about how he felt, mostly to see if his speech was slurred: it wasn't. Then he measured his blood sugar with (to me, who had never seen it done before) incredible rapidity. 48. Good Lord. Coma range. Luckily – or rather prudently, luck had nothing to do with it – he had fruit handy, berries and an orange. I helped him walk to the kitchen to get them. Within a few minutes he was looking better, though he still felt horrible. By the time I left, his blood sugar was over a hundred, and his wife was with him. I'd never seen hypoglycemia before, though of course you learn about it in school. They tell you to have candy handy, in fact, because massage typically lowers blood sugar levels twenty points or so. (I have no idea why it does this, actually, or how. Ignorance.)

Wayfarers All

I start to think of traveling, of a journey of a few months, a there-and-back-again across the country. I'm like Bilbo and Frodo: autumn always puts me in mind of traveling. It's not time yet. At least a year away, probably more. I want to travel alone with my table, doing massage in return for a couch to sleep on and breakfast in the morning. Meeting people I've known in my cyberhood for years, but who are scattered hither and yon across the continent; and making at least one more long road trip across the North America. It's an indulgence, of course, environmentally speaking, to travel when you don't have to, but what's the point of living before peak-oil, if you don't bust loose every once in a while? Nothing I do or refrain from doing will stop the plunge. Travel of this sort may not be within the means of ordinary people very much longer.

Autumn: the autumn of the year, the autumn of my country, the autumn of my species. It's a good time for traveling.

Grave Robbers

Emily Dickinson with her friend Kate Turner. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. See the article, with reasons for thinking the recently-surfaced daguerreotype authentic, here.

---

I have a double response to Dickinson: on the one hand admiration and empathy – admiration because she is probably the best American poet I have read, and empathy because I feel myself at a similar emotional & intellectual stand at this stage of my life, stymied in every generous endeavor – but on the other hand dismay: she is the most death-centered poet I have ever read. Keats, for all his self-indulgent “half in love with easeful death” turns, doesn't really want to die. Dickinson really does: she deliberately writes her way into the grave.

Or so it seems to me, at this moment of reading. I am no romantic: I don't believe in the redemptive power of poetry, or in its immortality. Clearly many people feel that Dickinson was somehow justified and translated by her posthumous fame. I feel, quite the contrary, that snuffling about in the private papers of an unhappy dead woman calls our own justification into question, and translates us into something like grave-robbers. Where is it written that being a great poet means you have no right to privacy? When we meet Dickinson, in the heaven she resolutely disbelieved in, will we be able to look her in the eye?

And Life is over there -
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keep the key to -
Putting up
Our life - His porcelain -
Like a Cup -

Discarded of the Housewife -
Quaint - or Broke -

Ant by Moonlight

Monstrous that the moon should rise tonight,
bulge-headed, throwing

shadows without scale or increment:
in its light that a benighted traveler ant

should cross pools of gleaming motor oil,
his legs ticking

in an abominable
hail of photons –

even worse. What tyrant god
allows this home-wrecking,

this scouring floodlight, this bleaching breach
of peace? The Queen of Night is nailed up

by a few faint lyrical stars, helpless,
while the bloat of the moon

drifts through her kingdom:
day-creatures stutter on their shadows,

their eye-buds breathe in phosphor,
they taste

with their feet
the poisoned ground.

Embarrassing the Dog

Of 'shunning Men and Women' - they talk of Hallowed things, aloud - and embarrass my Dog

I'm pretty sure Emily Dickinson would have disliked me: I don't do it slant enough, and I would certainly have embarrassed her dog. Sorry, Emily.

---

I spoke when I should have been silent, yesterday. Tried to talk to a client about different ways of approaching chronic pain. It was the wrong time and I used the wrong words, and it was probably counterproductive, not to mention probably losing me a client. I've been reproaching myself steadily ever since. Of course, there were probably twenty times yesterday that I should have spoken and did not, but I don't get my face rubbed in the consequences of that.

Another broken night, awake at 2:30, filling in the time doing laundry (there is always laundry to do, if you're a massage therapist.) Light is beginning to show in the bands of sky between slats of the blinds, though the streetlight is still on. I might try getting a little more sleep. It's still an hour or two before anyone will wander down to open up a restaurant. It will be broad daylight by then, but you odd people will all still be in your beds, dreaming through the daytime. How do you do it?

Italy

Percy Shelley and Emily Dickinson strike me as similar people, led each to his – her – own particular ruin, by the implications of he and she.

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between -
The solemn Alps -
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!

...wrote Dickinson, but Shelley could cross the Alps: and little enough luck, for himself or for others, would he find on the far side.

Weary of Time

The sun is hesitating behind the shoulder of Mt Hood, patting her hair and checking her makeup, I suppose. Half the sky is watered rose. As I watch, yellows begin to infiltrate the intricacies of the clouds, exploiting tiny weaknesses, and pale blues begin to gather behind it all. And then, suddenly – though the sun is still not up – it all collapses into plain morning, ordinary day. The patterns blur, the rosewash dissolves, even the yellow loses its warmth. A smear of light in the east, a tattered hood of cloud to the west. Nothing else.

I try to gather some courage for the day, and know before I start that I'm going to come up short. The mantra that was so useful a few days ago – “everything you do will help” – is meaningless. I want to open my torso, take out the organs, one by one, wash them and polish them, and return them to their places. Political animosities are drawn to my face like moths by my anxieties, and I worry about them making their way into my ears or my nose or my mouth. Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha, I mutter, but I don't really: I take refuge in the car starting and in scrambled eggs and in coffee fatted with cream. I think of all the cancers growing in my friends, and in strangers, possibly in myself: the race between cells that know restraint and cells that don't is not a hard one to call. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and single-mindedly, bloodily intent on replication. The faces in the Republican Convention hall didn't even look human to me: they looked like masks. And say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.

I am out of the path, out of all paths. So damaged by grief. And not one of the ways seems to go toward the light.

There May Be Rain

There may be rain, they say.
The pale, straw briznas will raise their heads,
and the dominion of the dandelions
will totter. Revolt after revolt,
season by season: Kentucky grass
will start the Civil War again;
stars and bars
will flutter in the wind.
The lawn mower stands
unsharpened in the shed,
its wheels still cased in twisted ruffs.
Too late now. The tide
is rising; with a sound like a thousand
serried typewriters, the thawed hail
will batter every window, flank
every weatherstripped redoubt.
There may be rain.
Oh, yes, there may be rain.

What Rough Crust

Every once in a while, I realize that the fact that four or five people out on the internets agree with some of the things I think doesn't change the fact that there's a few billion people out there, at a variety of points on various social, political, and religious spectra, who would gladly stone me to death if they could only get at me.

When I do realize that, it's important to a) get over myself and b) stop and get lunch.

God, though, how overpowering the sense of loneliness and desolation can be! And yet a good meal, a kind word, the touch of a hand, or unexpected good news -- however trivial -- can unseat it in a moment. I limp homeward as shreds of the sky fall, and panicked chickens slash my bare feet with their claws as they rush by. And even so, the stars trace their precise wheels on the far side of the world, and even, invisibly, on this side, turning like the edge of a pizza slicer. (And what rough crust, its hour come round at last, is lifting from the pan?)

I asked my client when her knee began to hurt. It was when she was sixteen, she said, when she was running down stone steps to catch a train in Zurich. Which I reckoned, as I pieced all the information together, was eighty years ago. Not much stays with us longer than the echoes of those moments of surprise and pain.

Lunch. Right.

Nameless

Many things I want to do today: for one, get my hair cut – it's longer than it's been since that fatal day, in my senior year of college, when I asked my room mate to cut off my golden hippie locks. Like most of my major life decisions – getting married and having children, for instance – I have no idea why I did it. My theory is that if you actually know why you did something, it wasn't really a major decision: it was just a detail of implementation.

The gold, baby-fine hair drifted down to the floor. Martha found it too traumatic and had to leave the room. When we were done I was someone else: less arrogant, less confident, less opinionated. I had decided, though I didn't know it yet, to become a Buddhist: I had decided to get over myself.

It's a strange thing to pick up your old life, silky and gleaming and weightless, and feel it between your fingers. I wasn't sure, course, that I'd keep cutting it. I might have just let it grow again. But in fact, I've been cutting it for three decades, and whatever I do, I will never have long golden locks again. Long white hair is another thing entirely, with an entirely different range of meaning: more Dumbledore than Roger Daltrey.

Periodically I trim my beard. It's a task I enjoy and am good at. I end up with a handful of soft, stiff, multicolored fragments (but tending more and more to snowy white), which I must always handle, just for a moment, as I'm cleaning up: they too are soft and barely there, vanishing threads, and they always remind me of the day when I made one of the decisive, unknowable turns of my life, and my past whispered over my ears, off my shoulders, to the floor.

If I could have shed my name as well, I would have. I wanted to go forward with no tokens, no banner, no representation, no assertion.

‘Who are you, Master?’ he asked.

‘Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?

No one; or everyone.

Not the Golden Boy

Morning, and swallows dodge the power wires in their flickering hunt, zigzagging across the pale blue.

I am an old man this morning, with a straggly white beard and an enormous nose. My face blinked at me in the mirror, unrecognizable. How had I failed to notice that I had acquired an old man's nose? There it is, as plain as – well, as plain as the nose on my face. A great fleshy overhanging thing, anchored like a limpet on my nasal bones, breathing the sea water of the air, hairs poking out and waving in my breath, like the fronds of a barnacle that search underwater for sustenance. Was I born for this? Apparently. Over my nose, a jutting Neanderthal brow bristles and broods. And yet once, and not so long ago, I was a young man. And I'm still conscious – more conscious than ever, in fact – of reservoirs of power, agility, acumen. I do not yet have any sense of being on the wane. On the contrary, I feel fighting-fit and eager. But – and this is in sharp contrast to the young man I was – I feel nevertheless that I am in some sense a pawn, being moved in a game I don't understand.

I love the scene in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf proposes that Frodo was meant to inherit the Ring, and suggests that this is a comforting thought; and Frodo replies flatly that it is not. I am, perhaps, given to magical thinking, but I derive no comfort from it. If this world was designed, it was designed for purposes that are unfathomable by us, and certainly far from my own. God as a nice dependable buddy is a conception fit for children and idiots. God makes the world considerably more menacing and incalculable, not less.

I swam yesterday, for the first time in a year at least, plowing through the water, registering the unaccustomed strain on tendon and ligament; delighting in the water, but not trusting it as completely as I used to. The crescent moon was barely visible: it hung between two fir trees, but seemed to appear and disappear on its own schedule. I was an old, solitary orangutan in my forest pool. The hair on my chest is quite white now. It readily took the dye of the setting sun: it was orange, not gold. I'm not the golden boy any more. I wonder what I am?

We Need the Eggs

The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders
World Health Organization, Geneva, 1992

F21 Schizotypal Disorder

A disorder characterized by eccentric behaviour and anomalies of thinking and affect which resemble those seen in schizophrenia, though no definite and characteristic schizophrenic anomalies have occurred at any stage. There is no dominant or typical disturbance, but any of the following may be present:

(a) inappropriate or constricted affect (the individual appears cold and aloof);

Hmm, I don't think so, but would I know?

(b) behaviour or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar;

Definitely.

(c) poor rapport with others and a tendency to social withdrawal;

A tendency to social withdrawal, certainly. I don't think I have a poor rapport with others, though.

(d) odd beliefs or magical thinking, influencing behaviour and inconsistent with subcultural norms;

Oh yes, always I have had odd beliefs; and being inconsistent with subcultural norms has always been a bit of a specialty of mine. Magical thinking? Dunno. To me, a lot of what the culturally normal do looks like magical thinking. (See? Those odd beliefs, again.)

(e) suspiciousness or paranoid ideas;

Nope.

(f) obsessive ruminations without inner resistance, often with dysmorphophobic, sexual or aggressive contents;

Do I do anything without inner resistance? I doubt it. I do write a lot of dysmorphic prose and poetry, in which I imagine myself to be huge, or misshapen, or tiny, or insubstantial. I think about sex a lot; about aggression, very little. Obsessive rumination might be my middle name, but I'm not sure that's what this is driving at.

(g) unusual perceptual experiences including somatosensory (bodily) or other illusions, depersonalization or derealization;

Pretty much all the time.

(h) vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate, or stereotyped thinking, manifested by odd speech or in other ways, without gross incoherence;

This makes me giggle. “Vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate.” Why didn't I make that the name of my blog?

(i) occasional transient quasi-psychotic episodes with intense illusions, auditory or other hallucinations, and delusion-like ideas, usually occurring without external provocation.

Quasi-psychotic? Aren't we chasing the chickens with chickens here? You tell me if they're quasi-psychotic. They're intense, certainly.

The disorder runs a chronic course with fluctuations of intensity. Occasionally it evolves into overt schizophrenia. There is no definite onset and its evolution and course are usually those of a personality disorder. It is more common in individuals related to schizophrenics and is believed to be part of the genetic "spectrum" of schizophrenia.

And here I thought I was supposed to be the vague and circumstantial one! (Why, I wonder, is “spectrum” in quotation marks?)

Well, that doesn't get us terribly far. But I am rather taken by the idea that this particular genetic spectrum survives because it supplies tribes with their prophets and shamans. Though why having prophets and shamans should be an evolutionary advantage is not altogether clear. "We talk to the dead, so you don't have to!" Reminds me of the Woody Allen joke:

"My poor uncle thinks he's a chicken." -- "Why don't you take him to a psychiatrist?" -- "Well, we would, but we need the eggs."

Old Summer

Whispering lights, vapor trails, gleams on glass and chrome. Walking outdoors is walking into a heavy fabric of quilted air and heat: summer has finally come, even to the Northwest.

But it's old summer, already pregnant with Fall. I can wake at first light, and still have gotten enough sleep. The sun can pound down on us all it likes: it can't alter the fact that September is only two weeks away. My spirits lift, as always, at the first intimations of Fall. Almost always, when we're driving home from our annual beach trip (which is coming up soon!) we'll see a few branches of vine maple going red up in the Coast Range. The rains will come, sooner or later, the mists and the cloudlight. Weather this hot can fill me with dread, if it comes in June, but it can't scare me now. I can even enjoy it, in a perverse way, and guess at how people who actually like this weather experience it. The heat soaks in, all the way to the bones. My body sits a little looser on me, like my clothes after I've lost weight.

I have a suspicion that my new-found tolerance for heat, in the past few years, has to do with being more fit. I spend much more of my life up and about, cycling and doing massage and what not, these days. My tolerance for standing around has also gone way up. I used to hate it: I think just because it was somewhat difficult for me. My heart didn't like pumping that hard. It wasn't used to it. I think the heat used to push me that way too.

Or – it could have to do with having air-conditioning in our new house, a voluptuous by-product of our virtuous installation of a heat-pump. We have not used it much. But just knowing that we could makes it possible to shrug and scoff at the sun. (I've never lived with air-conditioning before. An amazing luxury; a guilty pleasure.)

In any case, I find that I don't hate the summer as I used to, not at all. Of course, summers go by a lot faster than they used to, too; seasons ripple by at about the rate of weeks, when I was a teenager – or days, when I was a kid. Every time I look up it seems that we're entering into the pleasures of a new season: I don't have time to get tired of any of them.

Home

I've always felt at home with women who strip for a living; there's something cut-to-the-chase about them, an impatience with pretenses, that answers to my own. And these are only kids, after all. They sit cross-legged on the bed in their pjs and speculate about the day, while the old man potters about packing up his massage kit. The sun floods into the dim room around the edges of a crooked blanket slapped up for a curtain; the feeble air-conditioner wheezes. I see the two young women in double-exposure: both as vulnerable girls, my daughter's age; and as the objects of desire I used to see up on stages back in the bad old days. They pay me in crisp fifties, which I – picturing them as having come from the wallets of men who look like Paul Ryan – handle with faint reluctance.

They are absurdly, impossibly beautiful. One odd thing about the alchemy of massage is, that while their beauty strikes me in retrospect, it makes no impression on me at as I'm working. All the emblems and totems of status go away with the clothes. Backstage, we're all human, and nothing but human. All those markers, so important in the faces we present to each other, just go away: the flatness of the tummies doesn't mean a perfect 10 and trophy potential, but only that the lay of the abdominal muscles is easier to read; the pimple behind the ear is not a flaw, but a marker of stress and a buoy to steer around. I don't want to possess them: I want only to unwind and unclot their bunched muscles and accumulated unhappinesses. The beauty a person has on the massage table is not special or exclusive: it's the beauty everyone has. Not negotiable currency.

And now, as I pack up, we are all equally awkward; all, equally, jammed halfway into a world that can neither digest us nor spit us out. If we had ever learned to be fluent or at ease in the appearances, to serve up the appropriate small-talk on all occasions, I suppose we would be Paul Ryans or the wives of Paul Ryans. But we are only grateful for each other, grateful for the daily bread of ordinary respect and kindness.

We are de trop in the world of Paul Ryan: slackers, failures, also-rans. But as I stand by the table holding this young woman's hand in both of mine – pausing for the space of two synchronized breaths – I permit myself to doubt that his world holds many such moments of tenderness. I'm content to live here, on the margins, where the unauthorized spaces open. This is as much home as I will ever have.

Ninja Massage Therapist

It's supposed to get hot today. 95 degrees, just like for the grown-ups over there on the far side of the mountains, in Real America. I've gotten my bike ride in early, before the heat, after a short restless night. But I'm anticipating my two o'clock massage – in an old, un-air-conditioned apartment building – with some trepidation. Client, prepare to be dripped upon! I doubt my tennis headband will stem the flood. (This is, by the way, the same client who exclaimed, upon seeing said headband, “Ninja massage therapist!”)

But it's August 4^th, and it will be the first hot day of the year. I've been told that this is supposed to be the local effect of global warming: even milder summers for the maritime Northwest. Too good to be true, I expect. But certainly last summer was idyllic: lots of these cloudy mornings, and the sun coming out too late to roast anything. It was wonderful. Everyone complained, and I nodded sympathetically: dreadful! Dreadful! And wriggled with delight. And at night the moon would roll into the cool night, up through the zodiac corridor, enormous and quiet, and the wind would run through the grass, like a sweet night-lizard bringing sleep. And so it will tonight, and while I sleep he'll make the crossing over the Columbia, stepping carefully, like a cat walking on a sheet of ice.

A Note On My Artistic Process

They tell me Henry James
surprised at the funeral of a neighbor child
explained his presence: “Where emotion is,
there am I.” I hate you, Mr Henry Fucking James.

No. And even if a wind gathers
and sand scours up my legs
the buildings yaw backward the ticking
pauses the tinnitus changes note and
the patter of the congas
trails off –

if my head grown long and heavy
slews back panning street and sky
and the lozenge of day-fire
streaks across the film –

even then I will not tour
other people's lives or even mine.
I live here. Put your fingers
in someone else's soup,
Mr Henry Fucking James.