Secret Lives

I had to confess to Elissa that I hate this cover. First there's the painting style, which sets my teeth on edge. I associate it with LeRoy Neiman, who did so much illustration for Playboy Magazine, and who set the style for so many book covers in the sixties: it says to me: Cold War, doublespeak, and above all naughty. I don't do naughty. And then there's the grim, menacing, masterful man, having his way with someone: the stereotype of masculinity that made my life a misery, when I was young, because I was a gentle, tender, and shy person, not at all what was wanted in a boy. I was – up until I was saved by my wonderful, hippie-free-school high school – completely wrong, non grata, weird. I bear the scars of that still.

But I love this novel, and I think it's an important one. It's about submission. Not submission as an act, or a state, or a perversion – submission as a drive: as a fundamental human impulse. It runs from the sweet chivalric devotion of the first protagonist's Russian husband – a totally socially acceptable form – to the totally socially unacceptable work of the professional submissive, Nan, whose devotion lights up the other main narrative of the book. In between these two magnificent characters, the two protagonists, twin sisters, are making their way: what sort of submission, at what cost, with what limits? There are two very poignant love stories in this book, one of finding and one of losing.

The predominant mood is forlorn. Perfect submission, it turns out, is as unachievable as perfect equality. The intense joy of fearful service is something hard to obtain and impossible to keep, like everything else our hearts most desire.

And in the meantime, we have other things to do: we have jobs to keep and children to raise and homes to keep. I can't pretend to have read many BDSM-themed books, but I'd venture to guess that none or few others end like this:

He poured two flutes of champagne, nudged one of them toward me and lifted the other.

“To family,” he said. And we drank.

Touching the Air

Shah Jahan

"After a period of time they'll dry out, and then the phosphorous will contact the air and start burning again," said Detective Howard Greer of the Oregon State Police. "If people are near these things when they start burning again, you can get some very, very serious burns."

“That's why you're safe from me,” you said.

As if any of us could ever be safe from each other:

we are like those tubes of white phosphorus

that wash up on the beach, submarine markers:

it's all a matter of when we touch the air.

May this hand be full of light

may this heart be tipped in the morning sun

may the bowl of my skull be scraped

and clean

and microwave-safe: 

a vessel for morning oatmeal

for coffee

for slanted light

for two hunched crows on a maple limb,

waiting for kibbles and a kind word.

Kartika and kapala

(skin flail and skull cup)

in the bathroom cabinet with the toothbrush

and the razor: maybe the jumbling

becomes richer with age.

October

Rooster Rock State Park. Standing on what, in Spring, is the riverbed: this time of year, with the river low, it's a wide expanse of drying sand. The wind blows steadily. We lean into it and walk upriver. Rivulets of dryer sand come flying over the surface at us, staying ankle-high.

Turn and look back. Down on the river, the kite-sailors' wings rise and fall over the horizon like monstrous birds flocking. The rivulets run away from us.

I remember to tell Martha about the vultures a couple weeks ago. Above the 82nd Avenue train station, I counted 46. Not wheeling, as they usually do, like in a cowboy movie -- they were more rumbustious than usual, like crows mobbing together, flapping their wings, going every which way. And not anchored: they were drifting south. I've never seen them do anything of the sort, and I don't know what to make of it.

Now, worn out with the wind and the sun. Wondering.

We walked back, carrying plastic water bottles, a quart Pennzoil bottle, two small plastic bollards, an energy drink can. Martha took a stick and threaded the bollards and and cans on it, and carried it before her like a scepter. "I'm a new age shaman!" she said. "Woo."

October.

Good night.

The Settling of Bones

Sometimes it's bittersweet, to drive away
with a gibbous moon groping
over the crowns of dusky trees
and dragging her game leg.

We held hands in the dark
(not what you think)
and I could have made up a thousand
stories, but I chose not to be the last sad man

on the shore of a long sad sea.
If it's true, and it is, that I know more ways
that hands can fit together than
even the moon before her wound,

then the interlace of fingers,
the ball of my thumb
wearing your palm like a hood,
might be only professional skill:

and that gasping creak
might be only
the settling of bones
preparing themselves for winter.

One Swift

I nearly typed, "do I exist?" as a Facebook status update, but I realized that no answer I received there could be convincing.

No answer here could be convincing either: but here there's room to unpack a little. To ask, for instance, "why do you ask?"

Well, obviously, because a sense of unreality is growing on me. The gears of my soul are stripped. The wheels are turning, but nothing is happening.

So, well -- just stop, then.

Take a few breaths.

Think about it. What do I really want? There are a number of shadowy people lingering here, who want a variety of things, but I think that even when they seize the steering wheel, the conviction that they are not real is altogether appropriate.

It is not any particular falsity about myself, however, which produces these phantoms. It is the unreality of this life. No one could feel real in these circumstances.

So. Therefore?

Therefore, do something real. It's pretty much as easy as that.

There is no changing the falsity of the modern world. But that's finite, and I am not. Not by any measure. Mortal, yes, but that's the answer to a different question.

This, actually, is a start. Just to write it down. Even if it is like picking out one swift to follow, from the swirl over Chapman School.

The house where I did a couple massages today looked out over the Valley, with the trees turning, and a bit of river showing like a steel plate under long grass. The sky a patchwork of grays and whites and silvers. And my client lying on the table like the statue of a crusader on his tomb, with his hands crossed on his breast, his bones too large for his flesh.

Later, when I lifted one from under the blanket -- such large hands men have! He asked for more pressure. "It hurts, but it feels good," he said. I wondered, he was so thin, if he was ill. Or -- my imagination running somewhat wild -- if he had been captive and ill-fed for many months. I suppose my medically-minded massage friends would consider me remiss for not pressing him, and finding out. But sometimes people don't want to be pressed. Sometimes they want to drop their identity and leave it behind, like their clothes, for the duration of the massage: and why not? I've never wanted to take on a medical role. Not qualified, not by education, not by temperament. Even when I know something, I don't know best. I have no intention of knowing best: not now, not ever.

Rootlessness

Sagittaria Latifolia: Wikipedia Commons

Morning. Across the street, the new gas station is framed, and clothed in plywood. It is actually, right at the moment, a pleasing and well-proportioned object. Sober concrete steps go up to the rectangle where the side door will be. Soon, no doubt, it will be uglified with advertisements and decked out with lurid pictures in (as the Spanish would say) shrieking colors: but right now it's a testament to the extraordinary, underappreciated building skills of my people: modest but sturdy. It will stand easily through storm and earthquake: properly painted and maintained, it should last practically forever -- certainly longer than civilization that built it seems likely to.

Sitting on my couch is a booklet, published in 1909, I believe: the 15th edition of a dictionary of the Chinook Jargon. Its own introduction confesses that it's useless for any practical purposes: the last Chinook speakers had died recently, and no occasion for the use of the jargon would ever arise again. Still they published it then, and I leaf through it a century later, finding place-name elements that I know -- "chuck" means "water": of course, I should have guessed that! It gives me a queer and salutary frisson of transience. I and mine will pass too, without the hills paying much mind. Seeing the name of the river I was born beside, and have lived beside almost all my life -- Portland being simply a hundred miles downriver from Eugene -- spelled "Willamat" gives me a twinge. And Sauvie's Island referred to as Wappatoe Island: which makes me think -- as I do periodically -- that there is something impious about living here on the Lower Columbia, where sixty thousand Chinook, drawn hither by the wapato, used to live, and not to recognize the plant, and never to have eaten the root.

P.S.: this site quotes Lewis & Clark:  “in this pond the nativs inform us they Collect great quantities of wappato, which the womin collect by getting into the water, Sometimes to their necks holding by a Small canoe and with their feet loosen the wappato or bulb of the root from the bottom from the Fibers, and it imedeately rises to the top of the water, they Collect & throw them into the Canoe, those deep roots are the largest and best roots”.

Moue

Gestures are not love, but what is love
without gesture? Once an almost imperceptible moue
told me you'd thought of kissing me:
that
was enough.

The Song Again

I don't know. The grief goes on, running under the surface of things. I've pretty much conceded that it's just going to be the way it is. It will never be okay with me. It will never be closed.

Now that I say it in so many words, it seems both obvious and right to me: why would I want it closed?

But still: how to explain it? And who to explain it to? And is there really a reason to explain at all? After all, I have learned nothing, have come to no conclusions, have solved nothing.

Shall I, then, go backwards or forwards? There seems little point in doing either. I am pretty sure that I am somehow faced in the wrong direction. Stuck in one slot. Whether I go forward or back is of little moment. What I need to do is get out of the slot.

Fallow, yellow; fealo, gealu. The dapodencia of Fall, the rattle of seeds in their cases. Gold and the value of men. Something does not quite line up, here. I'm missing something.

Just do the next thing, I used to tell myself, in the bad old days, when I could not bring myself to do anything at all. I thought it was such clever advice, but it wasn't really. Because it was written on the blackboard of despair. Just do the next thing, because it doesn't matter what you do. Nothing you do will change anything, so why fret about which one to start with? That wasn't really going to prod me into motion.

Now, you know, despite my frustration, I have to acknowledge that I have left that behind. The things I do matter, now. I may be confused and grieved, but I'm not hopeless, and I'm not powerless. "I did not know I was so empty, that I could be so full."

I suck up this autumn sun, like the juice of nectarines, through a thin straw: it goes straight into my circulatory system, and flickers of bright yellow flame run under my skin, tiny pulses of intelligence. There is something to be done, something to be said, whether I can identify it or not: there's something being written, in a fine solar script, on the walls of my arteries and arterioles. I spread my hands, palms up, and the sunlight skates across them: and something inside answers too, an equal and opposite brightness. Lift the song again, in our time; it is not too late.

My Brush with Fame

A little embarrassed by how thrown I've been by my little brush with fame. I knew it would pass, leaving hardly a wrack, but every time something like that happens it takes me weeks to recover from the sense of exposure. It's so destabilizing. There's a wild hope that rises: this might be it, this might be when it all comes true, when everyone realizes my brilliance, when all the fascinating people want to sit at my table and all the beautiful woman want to lie in my bed.

What would I do? I already know more fascinating people than I can find dinner-date time for, and there are already as many beautiful women in my bed as I will ever be able to cope with. People already tell me I'm brilliant, with embarrassing frequency: if I don't believe it now, what makes me think I would believe it then?

Its promise of a different life is as obviously bogus as the (deeply Christian) Nigerian widow's plea that I let her park eight million dollars in my bank account: yet that doesn't diminish its force, its almost wholly baleful force. I eat anxiously, forget to exercise, haunt the social media. I go to check the preternatural run of the page-view counter. All those people are reading me. It must mean –

Well, you know, it means only that I hit a nerve, this once: it was short, sweet, believable, and inoffensive, and it said something that people badly wanted to hear. It was true, too, which is nice, but that's not why it's popular. And my point here is not to fish up compliments about it being well-written: sure, it is well-written, but so are hundreds of others of my posts. No, my point is that it's very peculiar that it should matter to me, in quite this way, with quite this much force. Perhaps I am of a uniquely, squalidly weak character, but actually I don't think there's anything unusual about this response. When I ask, who cares what strangers think of you? The answer that comes back is, I do. And so does everybody.

And really, you know, it's odd that it should be so. Of course you care what the other primates in your troop think of you: the people at work, the people in your family. Your economic and psychological security depend on their approval. There's nothing mysterious about that. But why care what the others think?

I suppose it's because we don't stay put all our lives. Almost all of us eventually move out of our parents' basement, eventually get a new job. And every time we shift, or are forced to shift, we are at a moment of high vulnerability. Are we still wanted? Do we still matter? And that's why we care what strangers think of us. Because somewhere, in the back of our little primate brains, is the dread and desire of the new troop. Maybe we'd be more important there. Maybe we'd even be alpha there. Or maybe we'd be the cringing, scrounging, perpetual outsider. We don't know. But there's a piece of us that never, never stops wondering.

On Reading the Essay of a Friend

Litera scripta manet, so we're told
but words written on the flesh
must move when the body moves;
words written on the heart
must beat.

The scrape of metal on stone fades
into silence. I almost think I will
set myself to unwrite every word –
my tongue at the corner of my mouth,
my pen filled with white ink; that I will carefully
trace every line you wrote,

until the words gleam only like
old scars, caught by a chance
change in light: weals of meaning
to be traced by a lover's hand.

Silk

It's as if I had a silk streamer tacked to the back of my head, and every time I stop quickly, or turn to look at something, a long colorful trailer floats across my field of view. It's my own motion, but it seems alien, colorful, distracting: and how it comes to be attached to me, I can't well say.

So. It's a small thing, but it jives all too well with feeling deracinated. I am awkward, ill at ease, at once too formal and too confidential. A species of survival guilt, maybe, though I don't honestly know if I've survived, nor if anyone else has perished. And anyway, melodramatic gesturing does no good to man nor beast. What's wanted is sober work.

I suppose. One of my clients always brings me a glass of water, and she or I always place it on the same corner of the same bookshelf. Sometimes I drink it all, sometimes I forget it: but that's our place. I feel like the pieces of my life that still work are like that spot: a bit of territory marked out by time and custom, comfortable, familiar, assumed -- and yet, it could be gone forever, in one flickering shift of intention. Nothing, I feel, is very stable or very assured. I have built up my life out of these little habits, these concessions, and one by one they will drop away again. I want to memorize that shelf, photograph it, versify it. But I don't even know if my memory of the wood is to be trusted. In my mind's eye it's raw, unstained, unvarnished, unpainted, but that hardly seems likely. In what sense, then, can I think of it as mine? But I can think of nothing I own in any more convincing sense. The silk floats in front of my eyes.

I want to reach out to people, but the old people are too old, and the new people are too new. I breathe in the scent of raw wood, and of the rain-beaten vines behind the house, and of my massage oil. This is, simply, an in-between time, and no good will come of denying that. It's like that moment in meditation, when I have settled my attention on my breath, and my breathing stops, and for a moment I am fighting an absurd panic: what if it never starts again?

What to do? Easy. Wait. The breath comes again. It always does, in the space of a few heartbeats. Or anyway, it always has so far. And the panic dissolves, and the swirl slows, and the sand begins to settle at the bottom of the glass. "Wait, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing."

So I will wait, and let the folds of fabric fall into place around me. The breath will take care of itself. The love I have set in motion will rise and fall again, lifting my ribs and my collarbone. There is not, in fact, any stopping it.

Invocation

On the other hand (I think) who could know
less about love than I do? And the blinds
rattle closed, and the light fails again.
Each step would be a stumble.

Should I, then, lift my voice? I don't want to.
It's late. And yet I would like for you to know,
since we have come this far together,
sister of my heart: there is more to say

than has yet been said, and in a queer way
there is justice to be done and there may be
speaking to be done for those
who have no voice.

And if, having come the bewildering circuit
of the water-glass's lip, an ant should find
his own scent before him, we might
forgive him imagining

that by hurrying forward he might find
company for the road ahead,
the homely speech
of his own people.

Blessings beyond their Writ

Careful now, careful dear...

None of this is going to change anything.

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man
Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.

Grateful, grateful for Neva, grateful for the violent rain. Grateful for a book arriving on my doorstep, while I was reading a library copy of it:

Grateful for blessings that run far beyond their writ: for the stormy skies clearing long enough for Vega to appear, and to lance me under the collarbone, cold and blue as shadowed ice. "You are still blessed," she told me sternly. As much as to say, "don't get any ideas about slipping out the back door, bucko."

Putting the Sun to Shame

And if I tire of the weak, restless striving? And if I shake myself,

like a dog coming out of the river, like a god coming out of the river,

spraying a fiery light that is pregnant with my own breathing musk?

Well suppose. And if the flare of my nostrils takes in the valley and its hills on either hand,

and if my breath lifts the dust, if I snort the Willamette like a line of cocaine?

And suppose what comes into my hands is everything that ever longed to surrender;

and that the ferocity of my eyes
is putting the sun to shame.

The Sea Creatures, Crowding Pinkly

At the end of the sea – where the white curls stiffen,

far away from toast or jam –

are the sea creatures crowding, pinkly.

At the end of the sea, and the end of the sky,

their humid lungs are heaving; the wheeze

and spume of their vasty breath

makes a fume shot with scarlet twinkling.

At the end of the sea, where the drawer of the world

snicks shut, and the water quivers –

there the emotional sea creatures crowd,

and the anxious anemone shivers.

See Niya Christine's story painting, Emotional Sea Creatures.

Leaving for St Helena

The chaff turns out to be
straw colored maggots of fruit flies
overflowing from the compost box;
Napoleon, the suicide attempt
when the opiate was past its sell date
(a tummy ache, no more)
the attempt past, I say, the morning audience
underway, had snuff all over
his blue cutaway. Strutting
was by that time all he knew.
There is only one spooky thing
and that is, for something dead to be alive:
I watched the chaff crawl for three heartbeats
before I understood. Just so, the snuff
would have crawled
on the simple blue
of his civilian suit: just so.

Corpse, Crows, Gull and Vulture

Early morning: a crescent moon high in the pale blue sky, with Jupiter trotting happily behind his shoulder. Some of the beach in the clear, some still in dense fog.

The weather cleared yesterday, and we had one of those rare, early-fall days here: there's no sense of loss or decay on this coast, with the onset of winter, for the simple reason that nothing is preparing to die. Winter here is nothing worse than a long cold shower. So when the light goes golden, and the spray from the surf is hanging in the air, lit up with the setting sun, you get the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” without death behind it: you could believe that war has vanished from the world, and that no parent and child will ever be parted. The pelicans framed their antediluvian profiles, black against the gold, slowly flapping their ancient wings, with their pterodactyl heads drawn well back, and the quadrilaterals of their wings shifting from diamond-shapes to Tennessee outlines and back again: each with its neck proudly bared to the knife.

In the Middle Ages it was thought that pelicans tore open their breasts to make themselves bleed, and fed their young with their blood: hence the pelican was an image of Christ. There is something about the deliberate motions of the bird that makes this plausible: it does not seem quite of this world.

We paused on grassy bluff, where we could look back at the cliff above which our condo is perched, and the little beach at its foot. The corpse of something was there on the beach – a large fish? – a small seal? – and a couple beach-crows were at it, dodging the surf from time to time. A seagull watched them, perched on a rock a couple of yards away, but never disputed the corpse with them. As we watched, a turkey vulture came slowly, slowly down, in great circles, till he was skimming the little beach and practically brushing the rock walls with his huge wings. Eventually he settled on the gull's rock, a little farther back, and observed the crows at their work. He was remarkably small, with his wings folded: not really much bigger than the gull. We expected him to drive off the crows, but he just watched, for a long time. Eventually he stepped down, going carefully behind the gull, and sidled up to the grey lump, whatever it was, that occupied the crows. He never pecked at it, or interfered with the crows: all three of the bird-kinds resolutely ignored each other. He just looked it over, a long, patient contemplation, while the crows darted in and out. He did not seem to like the surf much, and retreated from it a couple of times. And then he took to the air, unfolding again into a huge, magnificent bird, and rose in circles, as slow as he'd come down. He circled a while and then vanished. The gull never moved.

We went on our way: when we came back that way, an hour or two later, the tide was was slightly higher, and everything was gone: corpse, crows, gull and vulture. Not a sign of any of them.

The numen seems to be coming back into the world. I am still at a sad loss to know what exactly I'm doing here; I've run far past the end of my marching orders, but the emptiness that distressed me yesterday has passed. We're going home today, and I'm glad of it: I have massages and painting to do. But it's clear as the morning that I must do some hard thinking, over the next few days.

Butter-Colored Dots

No, the trouble is not Facebook, nor the work I'm trying to get done around the house, nor what anyone else may be doing to hinder me. The trouble is the quality of attention I am bringing. I am scattered, distracted, and worried: and hence dismissive, judgmental, and small-minded.

Once again, I have to admonish myself to slow down, to do less, to take more time. Bring my full attention to bear. The craving for quick reassurance grows by what it feeds on: wasted time will lead only to wasted time. Enough.

Last night we swam in the pool, and sat in the jacuzzi, with a cold rain pelting down on us. Not really very cold, but cold by contrast, and not one's idea of an August beach vacation; not unless one is a native Northwesterner.

I have been down to the beach only once. It worries me that I view the sea, this time, with no awe. It does not even seem particularly big. It doesn't draw my eye. I reached yesterday in my poem, trying to find my way to it, but there's really nothing sillier than trying to force an awe that I'm not feeling. It will only jeopardize my future responses. I called the water “obsidian,” which is pretty enough, but it was just poetizing: the water I had been watching earlier was cloudy gray, freckled with butter-colored dots. Not a bit like obsidian. Stop, Mr Dale; stop before you draw yourself into further absurdities.

Restless, restless. And Seamus Heaney gone now, how can that be?

I see that makaris amang the lave

Playis here their padyanis, syne gois to grave;

Sparit is nocht their facultie:--

Timor mortis conturbat me.

I see that poets, among the best,

Play their pageants and go to rest,

Rhyme they never so skillfully:--

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Leaving the Sea

The waves are gray, running in, and the sky

is gray too. Light rises from water and wind,

obliquely. The tide is past the flood.

I'm still grateful, but I'm puzzled.

Why was I sent here, with an empty envelope

to deliver to a bad address?

There won't be many more,

and a grand love now would only ruin me:

I am leaving the sea.

Now the spine of my life

must be the making of small

and intricate things; the replacement

of a rotting window-sill

with good sound wood;

the call of a thrush

from the red sunrise.

The foam slides in long, ghost-white garlands

down wet obsidian slopes, whispering

of promises long unkept. When I woke this morning

the light of your eyes was fading from mine:

my arms were empty.

The Numbers

I'm sorry, but the numbers matter, they really do. You can't hammer a perfect world out of a few happy incidents. Things have to add up: demand has to meet supply. The numbers are inexorable.

-----

The panic of being stranded away from one's tribe: when I arrived, it was all pale skin, tee shirts with eagles and American flags, belt buckles, bill caps. I was wearing jeans and suspenders too, but the suspenders were in a harlequin-check, and there were sandals on my feet, and I wasn't fooling anyone. Deep relief when some brown-skinned people showed up, and men wearing what we used to call Bermuda shorts. (What do they call them now, I wonder? I haven't heard “Bermuda shorts” for an age. Maybe just they're just “shorts” now?) In aggregate, the tribal markers are overwhelming, even when all intentions are benign. I must remember that, when I'm in the heart of Portland, among my own, and I meet an outlander: special kindness and attentiveness is called for.

-----

Much to do today: the end of summer and the advent of the rainy season are looming. If it's not painted in the next few weeks, it's not painted till next summer.

Maybe I'm trying to change too much at once. But I'm so tired of temporizing and shilly-shallying. I just want to point the boat in its final direction and row, row till I drop. Still that deep respiration, under every other sound. And the years are too short.

In the Dead-Letter Office

It gets more difficult to write, in some ways -- or rather, to bring myself to click the "publish" button. I tire of hearing my own voice, for one thing. For another, the burden of my failures weighs on me: so much of my writing has been of the preaching and exhorting sort, and I'm feeling less and less that I have any standing for that. Who am I to advise anyone on eye-motes?

And then, I am ever more acutely aware of how very little time remains. I used to write to kill time. I'm not feeling so spendthrift, now.

And this weather, this dark, sullen, sultry summer overcast, is weighing on me. I want to reach up and sweep the clouds away. Where is the sun?

But: this is valuable for me. To stop and write. Even if I start by writing the same old thing: even that will nudge me towards replying to myself, to taking it further, to going beyond. And I am, maybe, learning how to write in my own house. Dangerous; difficult; long overdue.

I run a hand over the tickle of my beard, the rasp of my unshaved throat, listen to the whirr of the refrigerator and the keen of my tinnitus. There's a sound just barely audible beneath those: the respiration of some gigantic creature under the ground. I am still surrounded by messengers and messages. I need to attend, for me as well as for them. I have to let it be all right, if the letters are dead ones. That's not my business.

Today's Blessing

 

Am I the only person troubled by the fact that Vladimir Putin, former KGB colonel and master of the gangster paradise that is present-day Russia -- and so, obviously, an exemplar of mental and spiritual health -- might just wake up some day and decide he wants everyone to die? Because, you know, he could make it so. I think of that every day. So far as I can tell, nobody else ever thinks about it at all. Stephen Covey would approve -- after all, there's nothing we can do about it; why trouble our little heads? But given all the much less likely and smaller-scale catastrophes that people obsess over -- oh my God, there's a puddle at the North Pole! -- it seems odd to me. It's true that it wouldn't be in Mr. Putin's rational self-interest to do it, but if that brings you great comfort, you have not read very much history.

(I do worry about the established fact of global warming and the train of disasters it's going to cause. But I only hope we avoid the Last War long enough to have to deal with them. Really, you know, things are far worse than most people think. We're storing up a whole raft of environmental disasters for ourselves. If I lived in Africa or the Middle East I would be doing anything, anything at all, to get myself and my family out: I think the disasters will hit there first and hardest.)

I am, of course, much given to gloom, when thinking on a large scale, and I must remind myself that when I was a teenager I confidently expected ecological disaster, and a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and China, and other wars over the remaining stores of potable water, to break out within a decade. Most of that didn't happen.

Dave Bonta commented, "you are the most cheerful doomer I know!" I guess it's because I start from such a dark place. Also because I'm just a pretty cheerful person by nature: I wake up to a new day and think "Oh my God! It's so beautiful, another day of amazing people and a breathtaking skies, and there's eggs and bacon and coffee, and women so beautiful they make you trip over your feet on the sidewalk, and friends who just won't stop writing heartstopping poems and painting gorgeous pictures, and -- we made it another day, Vlad got up on the right side of bed too, apparently. How's that for a blessing?

Leeway

"You don't need to decide what you're going to do next with your writing," he said. "You just have to make space for it to happen."

Well, that was smart, I thought, and colorable. Has the koshtra trademark all over it. That guy can be so very plausible, you know? Winning smile, and he seems to have read every single book that's ever been written, but sometimes you wonder if he forgot to let the centerboard down.

---------

"Nothing about human thought, feeling, and behavior can be understood without acknowledging that humans evaluate events, others, and themselves on a good-bad continuum and try to acquire the personal features they judge as praiseworthy." -- Jerome Kagan, An Argument for Mind.

All categorical statements are false, of course, but I ran into this, quoted in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, and paused on it for quite a while. For a Buddhist, it takes some mulling over.

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Joy comes drifting down, like floss from the cottonwoods.

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The aged opossum who lives under our shed, like so many elderly creatures, has lost track of the days and nights: he walks slowly, stiffly out to get a drink from the water Martha leaves in the front yard, in broad daylight. Then shuffles back to the shed. "I can't worry about crap like dogs any more," he mutters. The cats and crows watch him attentively, but make no move.

Whipsaw

Wikipedia Commons, Whipsaw

The teeth of a whipsaw (more frequently used in a sawpit than up on trestles like this) were in ripsaw fashion, i.e. they only bit on the the downstroke. Made it a bit easier on the topman. But God, imagine how sore a day of sawing planks would have made you! According to Wikipedia, these guys were probably up in the Klondike in the 1890s. I wonder how long it took to saw a plank? And how often the planks and logs came down on the pitman?

I was going to post about feeling raw, and the word "whipsawed" occurred to me, followed closely the the realization that I've been using the word all my life with no clear and distinct understanding of what a whipsaw was. So I looked it up. And after looking at this picture for a while, I've decided my own troubles and labors are not very burdensome, after all.

And turn no more aside to brood
Upon love's bitter mystery:
For Fergus rules the brazen cars
And rules the shadows of the wood
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all disheveled, wandering stars.

But still, you know, the wind comes walking up from the river, and the little cemetery stands on the hillside, five blocks to the northeast of us, and the cat comes in for dinner in the evening.

Today we worked on the boat dolly a bit, and I got a trade-massage from the fabulous Neva. Martha went to a birthday dinner, and I stayed home, and now suddenly the day is over. A cool breeze coming in the window, and the streetlights coming on: the sky a shadowy, fading turquoise.

A moment of panic and wanting to binge, but Martha had the car (& I don't drive the truck), and the nearest store is ten blocks away, and by the time I'd walked most of the way there I'd talked myself down. The panic is a funny thing. I'd let all day go by between my modest breakfast and my dinner. I tell myself a story sometimes, which I'm pretty sure is not true, but which I find useful: the only time our ancestors made themselves refrain from eating (goes the story), it was because the tigers were down by the fruit trees, or maybe because the alpha male was down there in a crappy mood. So what we're programmed to do, when it finally does seem safe to eat, is to chow down for real, get it while the getting's good. It feels like that. Quick, quick, eat before the tigers get back, before the Alpha catches on!

I told myself this story as I walked, and then I just turned around and walked back home and made myself a sandwich. Even though I had just eaten: I was still a thousand calories shy for the day, after all. And now the panic has gone away, and Martha is back. And night is falling. The passing of the day is still mysterious, though.

I close my eyelids and feel the midday sun still wounding them. Tender, a little swollen. The sun and I, despite our detente of recent years, will never really be friends.

Good night. I think that's all for now.

How to Stop Eating Too Much

I dithered about whether to post this here or on my massage blog, but I'm tending to put my health-related writing over there now. So it's over there: a post on how I'd reform my eating if I were starting over again. I like framing it this way, "stopping eating too much," rather than as "losing weight." Losing weight is a temporary project, of dubious health value, which doesn't address the real problem at all: so long as your metabolism is screwy, you have an eating problem, regardless of how much you weigh.

Handyman

A pause, a deep breath, before the new life. It took some reckoning, and I'm still piecing it slowly together. But basically, I'm going to become a handyman, and I'm going to spend a few years doing things as cheaply as possible. We're living quite cheaply now, but we're making no headway, and we're not going to make any headway if maintenance expenses keep periodically dinging us for hundreds, or thousands, of dollars at a time. I have to learn to do my own work maintaining the house, to fix the place on the south side of the house where shingles are coming loose; dig out the earth & possibly pour a little concrete to keep the house walls up out of the dirt & of course to scrape and paint, scrape and paint, scrape and paint.

I will enjoy this work, I think, if I go into it mindfully and deliberately. I've always liked working with my hands. I only ever shied away from it out of embarrassment, a conviction that as a man I ought already magically to know how to do all these things. But with the glory of the internet -- how-to videos about everything under the sun -- and the recently-discovered resource of ancient hardware-store guys, who basically know how everybody in the neighborhood has rigged everything, from boat-dolly wheels to curtain rods, for the past sixty years -- I think I can get over that hurdle too. What's the point of being a whiz at learning things if you can't learn to do what most needs to be done?

The Bay Candles

Coming up
from long underwater, still dark,

a snorting breath in the quiet
under the bridge.

The water ticks on the pylons;
outside, somewhere, the sun.

Play fair, they said. And as I climb
hand over hand, the beams creak,

and a kingfisher streak of sunlight
crosses my eyelids. Above, now,

leaves boil in the Spring wind,
and cotton glides to the roadbed.

I pitch over the rail, with the sky revolving,
my eyes still blurred with water,

and two feet, mine, land
on the wooden planks, prickled

with the long needles
of the ponderosas.

Say, dear, what odds now?
Your thick dark hair

smells of olives and
of bay candles on a snowy night;

we are never
in the right place,

we are never
at the right time.

Reincarnation

I don't know why I come up with these little mottos and slogans. A Lichtenberg manqué, I guess: I imagine my trove of pithy sayings being discovered and my genius suddenly flaring up to light the world. But anyway, the one I'm thinking of now is: never a new beginning.

And, back when I was surer of myself and my place than I am now, I pronounced America to be plagued by new beginnings. We are, after all, a nation-full of people who picked up and left to start over. Don't fix it! Get a new one! A new home, a new wife, a new life. Now, I don't know, that sort of thing sounds glib and trivial to me. And anyway, what do I know? I've spent my life here: I can no more tell you the qualities of America than a fish can tell you the qualities of water.

But I do know that reincarnation is the Buddhist teaching that sticks most often in my throat, and it's because of that ambivalence about new beginnings, or cutting-and-running, if you prefer. Some people -- mostly people who've never thought hard about it -- think that reincarnation is a reassuring doctrine. Well, it's not. What would be reassuring would be an end: a guaranteed end to suffering, a time when the burdens are lifted, when the bets are all off. Having to do it again -- and again -- and again -- until we get it right? Oh, Jesus. I'm tired already.

And. It means, say the teachers, that you never really get to leave any relationship. You don't get to start over. You come back and take it up where you left off. That's why you connect so intensely with some (apparently) new people: you were in the middle of something when you left off with them. And you still have to work it out with them, for good or ill.

It's at this point that you begin to appreciate the enormity of the Buddhist world-view, the vastness of its time-scale, and, at the same time, the terrifying constriction it implies. The world is huge: but there is no way out of it. The kid you pushed on the playground, the spouse you divorced, the home-town you ditched: they're all waiting for you. You are slowly, but inevitably, cycling round to meet them again -- and again -- and again. Are you tired yet?

No, no, I don't believe in reincarnation. I don't believe in believing in things, for one thing, and for another, I don't see the mechanism. I think we die dead as a doornail. But that's not the point. Who cares whether we die dead or not? The point is what we do when we're alive, no matter how many iterations we have. And dying dead is not an escape. It's not a liberation. It's just -- nothing. It's really no help at all.

No, the only point of any cosmological notion is not perceiving ultimate reality -- which I'm convinced we are utterly unfitted for in any case: we have no more hope of understanding the universe than an ant has of comprehending Beowulf -- it's not for perceiving ultimate reality. It's for perceiving this reality, this one right here, where

The noise of life begins again, 
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain 

On the bald street breaks the blank day.

And what the notion of reincarnation says is: there's no getting away from it. Starting over is an illusion: you may think you're walking away from these relationships, but you're just putting them off. There is no real choice but to fix them, here and now. There is no "away" to get to.

Believe it? No, why would I do a silly thing like believe it? That's not what it's for. But I will use it. I will use knowing that this is not just one thing here now, a one-off relationship of no importance. This is the whole pattern of my life, the basic confusion of my mind: it's the longing and the revulsion that marks out the minutes and hours of my ordinary life. The more I turn away and back off, the longer it will haunt me. I had better, far better, deal with it now, here, with you, in this fleeting shape.

But even if we say, we will not start over, we will clutch at no new beginning: still, there is the sweetness of night and the healing of sleep: stars casting shadows over closed eyelids, and water running underground. Rest, rest is real too.

Sundowning

They melt away when you try to reach them, my mother says. And perhaps there's not much sinister about them. “I think they were probably just looking for a warm place to stay the night,” she confides to me. Still it's a whole crowd of them, in a house that's supposed to be empty. Well, it's not supposed to be empty. But it's supposed to be empty of strangers, anyway. Her husband is overseas, getting his mother settled in a nursing home. No one knows exactly when he'll be back.

Three children playing on the floor. And a tall, shadowy couple that called her name through the door. She doesn't know who they were.

In the hospital, they think it's the UTI infection. Fair enough. She can catch their conversations, though. And sometimes she can see their emails, scrolling down the whiteboard where the nurses write their names. There are two groups of them, in conflict. Some of them want to kill her, and some don't. Dr Phil comes into it, at this point, and she carefully tics off his list of different sorts of people. There are baiters, and helpers, and traitors, and... she frowns at not being able to complete the list. But anyway, there are no “baiters” in this group. That's her point. She smiles at me, winningly. I smile back, and take her hand.

They won't believe her about the people. It's hard to know who might be in on in and who might not. But there were some of them riding on top of the paramedics' van when they picked her up: how could that be imaginary?

But something happened Sunday night. That's when the whole scam began to come apart. And that explains why some of them were trying to get into the house. They were just looking for a warm place to sleep.

I consider remarking that the evening outside of her air-conditioned house that evening had been a particularly warm, even sweltering, summer night, and decide against it.

A great sadness and weariness comes over me. There is a whole crowd of them waiting for me, too, I suppose. They come at sunset, when the shadows are long, and shapes move on the windows. Every obligation I failed to meet, every lover I disappointed, every deadline I missed. Everyone I ever failed to attend to when they needed me. And now, with the light draining out of the world, it comes to me to make arrangements, to know what to do? It's laughable, a fantastic notion, far more ludicrous than gangsters perched on top of an ambulance. Someone has made a mistake.

Sweet Dear Love of the Clear Blue Sky

Sweet dear love of the clear blue sky:
turn, lay a finger in this cradle,
the transverse metacarpal arch
of my palm: I will grasp it
and pull myself up out of the ground,
a self-plucked carrot, with earth
still clinging to my hips and feet.

Sweet dear love of the clear blue sky:
suck the air until your ribs catch, and then blow
with such violence
that all my clothes fly clean away,
across the valley and the river
and the creosoted bridge; over the freeway,
not stopping till they gently drop
into a box marked "free" at the curb
of a quiet street.

Sweet dear love of the clear blue sky:
lay one each of your four white hands
on my wrist and my wrist and
my ankle and ankle: pull, oh pull, pull dear!
pull the balls from the sockets, the bones from the flesh:
let drops of blood form perfect spheres;
let strings and nets of nerve float on your breath.

Sweet dear love of the clear blue sky:
darling, set each vertebra apart
where it has always longed to be, let
the new wings of each dry out in the radiant sun,
let its arteries fill
with your gasping sapphire fluid
till every wrinkle is smoothed
and their glistening sails
lift with your luminous breast.

Disposable

Cautiously groping my way forward to the next stage. I had to pause and absorb the fact that nobody is going to help me in this: I am quite alone, and I will have to be very deliberate, focused, and at times rude. Or at least abrupt.

"Don't waste time," has become my mantra. It's a little surprising, even now, to discover just how often, in various obscure ways, I mark time, rather than using it: I put my productive life on hold because I am not, in my mind's eye, my own master: I am at work, or home, and therefore under authority -- on call -- not at my own disposal. So I just -- fidget. Hang about on Facebook, or read up on the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune and the Belle Epoque, check the current political and financial news. It's sheer nonsense, of course. I am as much my own master at those times as at any other. (How much that may be, well! I don't know. I take a Tostoyan view of the Imperial Self: whatever little bit of consciousness happens to have floated to the top at the moment takes itself for the grand Lord of Dalish Destiny, master of all it surveys, until another wave comes along and -- farewell king! But I digress.) I am, I repeat, as much my own master at those times as any other, and my extravagant passivity is a habit, not something imposed from without. I can do otherwise. Whoever I may be, I can do otherwise.

Listen: don't waste time.

I know. My self-image as an obsequious yes-man does not square with the impression other people have of me, as a willful, stubborn cuss who says exactly what he likes and does exactly as he pleases. I could be radically mistaken. We all know people who are horribly mistaken about themselves and what would improve their characters: cruel people who think they're too soft, and pushovers who think they're too selfish. It's possible to be very wrong. But still, I don't see what I can do but find the best lights I can and steer by them.

The truth is, I have far less influence over other people's emotional states than I imagine, and in fact nobody really gives a damn. If I don't do as they want or expect, they'll experience -- perhaps a brief annoyance --  perhaps nothing at all -- and they'll go on their way, pursuing their own agendas as before. It's time to free myself of the debilitating idea that I matter. I do not. I am, from every point of view, disposable, dispensable. Which, rightly viewed, is a radical blessing.

His Numb'ring Clock

Life got easier when I realized that after composing the crushing retort to a perceived online insult, I could round-file my clever answer and go on about my business. No need to trouble anyone else with my precious dignity: it's not a matter of general interest. It's not even a matter of interest to any part of me that I want to cultivate.

A line from one of my own poems haunting me: "Listen: don't waste time."

Yet I do grieve, grieve for all the wasted time -- which is not, itself, very profitable.

Listen: don't waste time.

Not when there is joy condensing on every cold surface, a sweat of delight breaking on the this old, patched, paved world of yours; a shiver with every wingbeat. It only takes one, maybe two breaths to get there: and the grip-strength come back to my hands, the focus back to my eyes. The grace and the lightness return.

Now. Get your kit together, Dale: you have a massage tonight.

Whole and Full of Light

When the grief rises

because of

an archbishop shot and left

in the gutter, or because of

children –

(but no poem can stand that;

you know that story

even better than I. Start again.) 

When, on a soft afternoon

the light all washes away,

when I wonder

if any of the others

cast away from that same shipwreck

ever think of me, ever think of me

kindly – 

listen –

I am not, never was,

a symptom of your mental disease,

nor am I wanting to open

doors well closed for good reasons.

I am not one to get drunk

and send an email

as if nothing ever happened;

and if I am maudlin at times

it is only because, as a poet,

these things are incumbent upon me.

You said

(this was long ago!)

you would miss having someone

to write you poems.

Which was sweet, I think.

Now, when a bird whistles

twice with the same note

(like a gate shifted back and forth

by a worn man who wonders

if it's latched, and finds it's not)

twice with the same note

followed by a low, ancient,

complicated murmur,

when the leaves cast so many

shadows that

I think “I am underwater,”

and the sun is hidden

behind not only cloud,

but a drench of something

thicker and older than water;

well –

then, I find myself

considering that

the palm of my hand

once rested on your hair

when you were half-asleep,

and that stars, where no stars are ever seen

poured down

on our broken lives –

and then, I foolishly wish

for news from a far country,

for travelers' reports to say

they saw you laughing, that they saw you

whole and full of light.

What's Been Left Behind

I

Sometimes

you invite a witch into your house.

We've all done it. And too late, you observe

the oblique and lightless eye, the hunger and the rage:

you note the little pouch of corpse-powder,

and the uneven breath.

“It's a skinwalker all right,” you think,

and your flesh creeps: your hair rises.

Stories come to mind. You wish they wouldn't.

Somehow you get the witch out of the house, but then

you have to deal with what's been left behind.

II

The first thing to remember is that witches,

having set themselves against time,

are uniquely vulnerable to it.

They grow old faster than we do,

and the half-life of a witch's curse

is twenty minutes.

So when in doubt, you can simply wait:

each day is like a year, each year is like a life.

Time brings to us each sun as a renewal of hope,

each moon as an opening flower. But each spells death

to your wretched hurrying witch. When in doubt – just wait.

III

The next to bear in mind is this:

the details matter to witches, not to us.

Because witches have set themselves against meaning,

they must work instead with forms and recipes.

St John's wort culled at the dark of the moon

and cut with a copper knife – for them, nothing else will do.

But for us in cleansing? Sage to burn, if we have it;

cut any time in any country. But in a pinch

dead grass will do. Or paper matches from a tavern book.

We are working with the meaning, not against.

Anything will do.

IV

And finally, remember the very act

of asking in the witch, the act you so regret,

weakens them fatally.

Hospitality deals them a wound

they do not understand, but which

works backwards in their blood

and multiplies confusion:

any curse they leave behind

may well turn into blessing.

Lines

It all fades away again to this, to a boy walking down the suburban streets, talking to himself, sometimes arguing, sometimes agreeing; sometimes stopping dead to puzzle or admire; the sky a mottled white and silver, dizzying, above him: the warning barks of crows, the caution of cats. He is in love, always gravely in love. The objects of his love change: they move to other towns, or vanish to other classrooms. But he has always been in love. It's what he does, it's how his life organizes itself. Sometimes he walks in the rain, and sometimes under the cloudy sky.

(He avoids the sun when he can: it makes his skin redden and his head ache and his nose bleed. Cloud and rain are his native element. He scowls when the sun comes out, and keeps to the shade.)

He ponders the girl he's in love with, recalls everything about her, how she held her head, how her glance fell across him, the exact cock of elbow and hip as she leaned to the bookshelf. The lines of her face and body are incised in his mind: forty-five years later he will be able to call them up, instantly; they are the curves that appear as the silhouettes of hills, coils of snakes, branches of trees, in all his drawings ever after. The flow of line makes him catch his breath. It's not clear to him what he would want to do with her, should she return his attention. When in fact she does, in the third grade, they dash to the swings every recess, sit side by side, swing, and talk: talk solemnly about books and history and politics. He's happy for a the few months that lasts: as happy as it is in him to be. But mostly of course they don't return his attention. He is an odd boy, slow but intense: when he turns his attention on you it feels like a huge, ponderous telescope has swiveled around, aimed itself at you, and focused. Flattering perhaps, but disquieting.

A week or two has passed, since then. The sky has altered a little though not much. The clouds make towers more often now: and they carry, more often, the same slowly shifting lines that first arrested his attention as the lines of a curved cheek or a bare shoulder – the lines still haunt him. Hair has grown on his chest, and bleached to white. He still walks on the suburban streets at odd times, dawn and twilight, talks, explains, argues, laughs.

Is he still in love? He propounds the question, and frowns, and starts several mutually contradictory answers. He presses himself for a simple answer. He falls silent a while, and watches a cloud move obliquely, climbing gradually up the telephone wire like an albino sloth. “Of course I'm still in love,” he says. But feeling the question linger, he adds: “But this is what has happened: I can imagine, now, not being in love. It hasn't happened, but it's conceivable to me. And I don't know what happens, if I'm not in love. Do I die? Do I become someone who cares about something else? Or about nothing? It's the only mainspring I've ever known.”

He stops, crouches, examines a fir cone on the sidewalk: its flaking scallops, its fading petals and the pattern they make.

“It could be,” he offers, “that the lines remain, even when the women are all gone. That the watch doesn't stop.”

But he wrinkles his forehead as he stares at the play of the cloud. “I don't know,” he says. “I don't know.”

Hound of June

Dayrise: the high vault of June light, casting noon glints and reflections into the most sheltered places. The whole world is pulsing with light.

I breathe – twice – three times. Vanish, and appear again. A little insubstantial, but not bad. Real enough to do the work I have to do.

I bow my head, let the wind ruffle my fur and tick my ears: then stretch, arch my back, let my hindquarters rise; and I feel each glistening bead on my vertebral necklace shift into its sweet spot. I stand and sniff the air. Dozens of stories come from the windward country. Only a few will have to do with me, though. I rub my snout with one paw and sniff again.

That smell. Musk and a hint of blood; paper dust hanging in the bar of sunlight that slips between blinds, and crosses a library rug. That's what concerns me today.

I run. Run, run, and run, following that signature. One more day, alive and in the sun.

A Closed Curtain

The Lord of the Rings, of course, is not about the ostensible Lord of the Rings, who never even appears on stage. It's not even about Frodo Baggins, who is the other person Tolkien might conceivably have meant by the title. It's about Sam Gamgee and Gollum. Without those two figures at the heart of the story, it would be just another romance: captivating enough, but hardly a book you'd go back to again and again for sustenance.

Sam who knows how to love, and Gollum who does not; Sam who is in his right place in the world, and Gollum who is in irremediable exile. Sam who has what Christians (in perhaps the most unfortunate act of religious nomenclature ever committed, even including “Emptiness”) call “Faith”; and Gollum who has only desire; desire, and the few tattered shreds of love that the years have not yet torn away.

If you want to know what Christian Faith is, I'd point to the Lord of the Rings, and say, “it's what Sam has, and Gollum doesn't.” It's the conviction that there is goodness, somewhere, somewhen – that there is or was or will be something worthwhile, something worth fighting for, even if it's lost to us, even if we can't find it. It has nothing to do with immediate certainties, or personal fate. Sam is pretty sure, from start to finish, that their mission is hopeless and that it will turn out badly. And it need have nothing to do with anticipating a life after death. No one in Middle Earth, so far as I can tell, believes in such a thing.

It does not confer magic powers. It does not, whatever the Bible says, move mountains. It does something much more important: it gives a person the strength to put one foot in front of the other, even in a dark country, even with impossibilities ahead.

I'm not a Christian, so I don't have much business poking about in their medicine cabinet, but that's my take on it.

Cool air on my sandaled toes. The bare arms of a girl driving a pickup truck, its windows all rolled down: she stretches, while stopped at the light, and the cool air coils around her skin, as well. Or so my skin tells me. The sunlight is bright but fragile. It's not summer yet, and the spring might fail yet again. None of us really believes in this weather. The cars drive by, endlessly, like surf, or like endless squalls of rain coming in across the ocean. It feels like no summer could ever root out this chill.

Still. The bedroom was so warm last night that we left the window open a while. And the newly varnished oars are curing on the back porch. The sun is creeping back from its southern excesses.

Sometimes when you pick a book up after while, you scan for where you were and find nothing: nothing familiar enough to be old, and nothing strange enough to be new. I pick up my life like that, searching for my place, but I can't find it. I toy with the pages, and wonder. Maybe this is the wrong book. Maybe I finished it; maybe I never started it. The certainties, such as they were, have all deserted me.

All except for massage, my one anchor to the world, the one thing that seems real amid all these shadows, flickers, gleams. I rub the table down with bleach, wash my linens, refill my oils. Washing my hands in hot water; the smell of lavender or sandalwood, flannel sheets contrasting with warm skin: those are real, and I come back to them with relief. The rest is just a play of light and dark on a closed curtain.

Catching My Breath

I have let myself be dragged a few extra laps around the hippodrome -- a detour of a few years -- but that's all right: such is my character (fate, destiny). I'm soft, as Leks used to say: I've tended to just go wherever others wanted me to. But I've cut myself loose now, and hauled myself clear of hoofs and wheels. The red maple is in leaf, and I am old and battered: and I know precisely where I am going. Just catching my breath a bit, here by the side of the track. Then -- the next journey. Not feeling so openhanded with my time and effort; you may see less of me; but you'll be no less in my thoughts.

Thank you for everything!

Love, as ever --

Ready for the Day

Spring is rising up, gathering itself in masses of leaves, rolling and pitching in the wind, green seas under white cloud. Rain comes and goes, and comes and goes, a spatter on the windshield or the face; sometimes it's surprisingly cold, and others surprisingly warm. Ants have found their way into the house again.

I forget to re-tape the windshield weatherstripping when it's dry, and I can't, when it's wet. So far it's never come off entirely, and no damp seems to have got into the roof yet. But when it comes half-loose on the freeway, it knocks sharply on the roof, or buzzes like an exasperated rattlesnake.

---------------

Tears on the table. Just a few. "Dammit, you unlocked me, Dale."

"Sorry," I said. "It's my job, you know."

---------------

Only sometimes, though. When I was younger, I might have thought it was always my job (and that's one of many reasons why I shouldn't have become a therapist any younger than I did.) Open them up! Make them vulnerable! Blossom them, whether they want to be blossomed or not!

No. There's a time for flowers to be closed, tight-furled. Everything in its season. Armor isn't always a bad idea: sometimes the world really is trying to kill you.

---------------

I did an end-of-month cast-up, yesterday. Money is yet another of those things, long out of control, that I'm finally getting a handle on. It feels good. And yet I long, too, to get away from this punctilious recording and tracking: to get up to the high country and have the wind in my face. Money, like health, is something I attend to in order that I may forget it, which means that even at its best its not really very inspiring.

Bow my head, rest my hands on my lap. Three mindful breaths.

All right. Ready for the day.

Refitting

I've got my ship in dry-dock. Refitting.

Paint. Varnish. Make and mend.

Formless sky, bright with rain and pattering light: the earth a trembling snare drum.

The rhythm just barely escapes me, but the drummer is joyful, and each raindrop is a spark thrown from the drumhead. The rain, thank God: the rain, real rain, at last.

Remember me to your aunts and uncles, with all respect and formality. My duty to them all. But my ship is upside down, being careened and recoppered. The weather, for once, is no concern of mine. My delight in the rain is purely that of a private person.

I shrug, throw on my hoodie, leave it all to the carpenter and the bosun.

I must go up to the shore again, 
where the cat waits in the window, and the hopper in the yard; 
where the beer is in the pitcher and the wagon is on the hard.

A Faintly Visible Silver

I'm very light. I think maybe I burned all up: I'm ash, now. I once saw a sheet of newspaper fall into a very hot campfire: the entire sheet flared and turned carbon-black, all at once, still whole, its type a faintly visible silver. And it floated back towards the sky, in one piece.

I'm adrift like that: transformed, possibly ruined, but whole, and drifting very gently. I have been a long time aloft.

Self-exiled from my friends, from my writing, from all the life I knew before. But I'm coming home now, with my black, silver-tattooed wings shivering. Gliding down to rest, softly. Maybe I'll come to bits, snagged on twig-points and leaf-ends and fence-posts. But maybe I'm fine. Who knows?

Once upon a time, Prince Siddhartha Gautama decided enough was enough. It was time to sit down, and not to get up again until he had solved the problem of suffering. But you have to reach the ground, before you can do something like that.

So many things happened in such rapid succession. I was dazed by the end of it. Because for many long years nothing had happened, and I had grown accustomed to nothing happening. I thought nothing would ever happen again. Then, whoosh! The fire – and again – and again –

And now, the ground coming slowly up to meet me; the night air gently laying me down.

Appetites

The variability of appetites: it was very late in life that I really understood how different we are -- from each other, from ourselves at various times. I have always been a person of very strong animal appetites. I have lost my appetite for food once in my life, when I was very wretched -- I was teaching a course on Chaucer at a third-rate university, to students who could not have cared less about the history of English words or the valor of gap-toothed widows, and I was failing miserably, by every conceivable standard -- and once, after a particularly bad class, for an entire evening, I had no interest in food. That had never happened before, and has never happened since. But even in my misery it interested me. Some people live here, I thought, wonderingly. They never think about food.

Likewise, many years ago now, decades, perhaps, I experimented with a couple different anti-depressants. One of them, I forget which, dampened my libido considerably. And suddenly the world made sense to me in a new way. This is how it is for most people. They can take it or leave it alone. There's no urgency about it at all: in fact, to come to the point of actually doing anything, they have to tease themselves up and work at it. All sorts of things about the world that had always been difficult for me to comprehend came into focus. Very simple. It's just very different, and it makes you a very different person in all sorts of relations, if you don't want things very much. People who break rules and screw up relationships out of desire must seem to you like careless, self-indulgent oafs. As I would feel about someone who, say, stole a watch from a friend because he took a fancy to it. What kind of depraved person would do that?

I don't want to oversimplify or excuse anything. these are matters of immense complexity and many valences. There seems to me some overlap, in all the desires: but I don't know how much, and I'm loathe to generalize. How tied to the intensity with which I experience the beauty of a shifting sky to the intensity with which I long for a hamburger? How separate are the appetites? Are they driven from one source of pressure, like a single pneumatic system? I don't know, and I don't really even know how to get purchase on the question. But it seems important.

Three Months

It's three months now.

I have become the world's most boring person. In the morning I weigh myself and measure my waist, and enter the numbers in a spreadsheet; in the evening I conscientiously fill out my food journal. When I wake up I lie in bed for a while, solemnly considering my shopping and exercise plans for the day. I have become a self-contained system, a zero-sum human being: all my energy is subsumed in my own maintenance. I feel a bit lonely, a bit ridiculous. Stupid thing to be doing with my time. Was it for this?

The hardest part of all this is realizing that – while many of the constituent parts of fixing how I eat and exercise are in fact easier than I expected – in aggregate, it is simply a large and never-ending project. The most damaging of all my many damaging fantasies about this was that, if I only succeeded, it would become easy and automatic. At some point, I thought, the boat would hydroplane. It does not: at least, it does not within three months. It simply goes on thrusting through the water. It requires a lot of energy. Period. This is not going to change.

Why do I keep doing it? Sheer cussedness, for one thing. But also, in this as in so many other areas of my life, I am tired of living beyond my means, tired of the ominous sense that I am only getting along by storing up trouble for myself. I want a pay-as-I-go life, not an indebted one. So far this is – just barely – worth it. I like getting stronger, quicker, livelier. I like being unashamed.

But it also makes me feel old, vulnerable, ordinary, mortal.

I will learn what everything costs, says Dorothea Brooke. Well, it all costs quite a bit.

Morning

I roll over, pile up a couple of pillows, and sit up on them. Lift the cardboard box that conceals the clock to get a glimpse of the time. 5:02. A little light leaks in around the curtain: dawn already? Seems too early in Spring for that.

I put my hands together. “Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the Supreme assembly of the Sangha...” My lips barely move, and I hear the murmur only in my mind's ear. I repeat the prayer three times. “...may I realize buddhahood, in order to help all sentient beings.”

I rest my hands on my thighs – I find these days that when I fold them in my lap, my shoulders tend to come up and forward, and queer my posture – and let my eyes find their place. I let my back arch, and my belly swag. I can't see at all, but my eyes come to rest in their accustomed position, somewhere around the unseen foot of the bed. Still very dark. I lay my mind, deliberately, on my breath, which falters a moment, under the weight of my attention, but rallies, and takes its way, carrying my mind with it. The breath washes in and out of my body, and my thought rolls on top of it, like a beach ball in the surf.

Sometimes there's a constriction, and I, remembering an instruction from – it must be twenty years ago now – my very first meditation teacher, I let my mind leave my body with the breath, let my whole self depart and dissolve with the out-breath. As I do the room quite suddenly is visible. Not that the light has changed; it hasn't. But I can see, the dim shapes of bed and dresser, the drapery over the little closet, the dawn light edging the curtain. As I breathe in again the room goes dark and invisible again. The light, or rather my eyes' ability to receive it, comes and goes a few times more. And it is, I think, truly getting lighter outside.

I lift the box again. 5:24. Call it a sit. Hands together again: “By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra, and establish all beings, without exception, in this state.”

The well-worn words tumble out. My hair is tousled, my eyes sticky with sleep. A new day, a new week, a new life: but the same breath, washing in and out, whether my attention is on it or not. I get up to let Kiki in, and open the living room shades.

Morning.

Jasper

Wrestling with strange phantoms of hatred and baffled pride: rage, and the desire to inflict pain. There's nothing mysterious about the daily horrors of the world. It's just this impulse, with a good excuse and the encouragement of a like-minded group. Nothing more dangerous than a would-be alpha resentful of obscurity. When I was a young man, these fits would come upon me with terrifying speed and power: and I had so little skill or knowledge to help me against them. Good luck, that's what got me through.

So I wait, and breathe, and have my coffee. Suburban lawn mowers trumpet and keen, each to each; crows fume on the wires; cats probe the tall grass and the spaces between fence palings. I grow old with each passing moment: wrinkling, shrinking, decaying. The sun blisters and fades the paint on the walls. I keep hearing, or think I'm hearing, the call of a hungry young osprey. Absurd, of course: nothing would induce an osprey to nest here. It must be some other bird. How have I lived so long, to know so little?

I hold an egg-sized stone in my hand, smooth and reddish, with a notion of jasper about it. Place it on my book. My shoulders hunch, and I seem to myself to be rotting, rotting in place. I give up, and dive for the shadow. Next time. Something more, something less. At least, pray God, something other.

Keeping House

The red cubes there are memories
and the yellow flakes are pictures:

the blue dust comes of journal pages --
Facebook threads -- emails crosscut
and suitable for framing.

Turn your hands.

Make them into plastic scoops
nine feet wide, conformable
to any wood or tiled floor;

and now your hair, or beard,
becomes a handy broom.

Sweep, sweep, sweep, sweep:
Fold, shake down, repeat.

In the House of Tom Bombadil

“Here in the house of death,” I muttered to myself, as I pulled a tee shirt out of my drawer.

I was sad: I've been grieving too long, and here was another death, and this one from my own generation. My sister-in-law. Cancer again. Not unexpected, except by Martha, who has a strange ability, despite her habitual pessimism, to create hopeful scenarios out of unlikely materials. I never took the respite for more than that. We will miss Kathy: her madcap gaiety, her immense good humor. Probably the best poem I ever wrote, I wrote in her voice. She was blown about by the wind of the world, but she was always ready for the next adventure. I hope the next is an easier one.

I dressed and headed out to get breakfast at Tom's Restaurant: a treat nowadays, rather than routine. But I needed to get out. Sometimes the weight of death is too much to carry, and I need to get out. Perhaps it's always been that, running from death, or from the dread of it, or the prefigurement of it. You can even run into it, to get away from it, like the supposed bird charmed by the snake: most suicides I think, come from that convergence of running away from it and running towards it, fueled by the delusion – so rampant these days! – that death is a sure-fire escape. Oh, no, my dears: I don't think so.

There is no escape really, of course: in fact the impulse to escape is itself the problem, masquerading as the solution. So many things are like that. Really it is time, and rhythm of the earth, that draws us up and away, regardless of our circumstances, into a different deception, dancing to a different pipe. If I could learn to wait in perfect stillness and adoration, death would pop like a bubble. Even as I am, it does sometimes. And I lay my hand on the breastbone of a client, and years and doubts wash away: and my soul ducks its head into its paws, and curls its tail around its nose. “And that's true too,” says Lear's fool. Exit clown.

And May comes with a vengeance, its colors shrieking, the greedy young sun climbing the sky like glowing yellow ape. It's been ten years since I began this blog: I missed my anniversary, yet again. Such things have no hold on his mind: he would be a most unsafe guardian. Na ja.

Lots of love, dears.

Version of Repose

I clasp my hands, feel the blood knocking
at the roots of my interlaced fingers. Dawn
is still far off: the ropes cast by the summer stars
barely drawing yet. The eyes that will see morning
are not these.

And not these glass marbles, glancing into mine --
quick, opaque, inquiring; pupils wide as death --
and the deft turn, the tufted ears describing
a parabola that hangs a moment in the air --

not these, either. She is gone
before her tail has quite begun.

The old prayers come comfortably,
and the mind settles, the precipitate
of thought coming gradually to rest,
river-silt homing in the lake bottom;
old staggered ambitions and regrets --

what is wished for -- what is dreaded --
drifting down, through the water,
to a dim, rippled version of repose