Drawing a Heart

1.

Drawing a heart is particularly difficult, because
you must pull the left hand curve into a right,
and pull the right hand curve into a left.

All very well to reach for anatomy;
try to finesse the difficulty with atria,
ventricles, chambers, anything bloody

and (therefore) supposedly real:
but the fact is that life and we are
stylized, and it is a matter of anxious care

that the left should pull to right and right to left
and arrive at a symmetric downward thorn.


 2.

Just so, the past must be pulled forward
and the sweep of the future pulled back,
while my massage therapist's eye

considers the set of the shoulders,
(the habitual purse of the orbicularis oris,
the buccinator's telltale grief.)

Friendship must be drawn to love
and love to friendship, each curve
inverted at the same time and in the same degree;

left should pull to right and right to left
and arrive at a symmetric downward thorn.

While the Sun Checks her Make-Up

God knows what all these things mean to all these people: we know so little, and we try so hard. Scuff and a pebble skits right over the edge, and falls without a sound. Good night! Good night! Dream of ragged ships coming in over the bar; dream of cinnamon and sunlight; dream of wet shirts laid out on the rocks to dry. More things are in play than ever we imagined: of that, at least, I'm sure.

A pause, while the sun gathers her courage to climb up over the hill. She's packed her lunch and taken her meds, and she has her to-do list sketched out, but there always that little pause before throwing herself into the day.

I don't need to know. It's frustrating sometimes, the slow decay of the senses: not being able to read fine print, not being able to catch the ironic asides muttered by younger people. But it keeps me aware of the distance, of how much I don't know, of how much I'm guessing; of how much more serviceable it is to maintain an intention of love, than to try to understand everything. I used to think that if I just knew enough, paid enough attention and took good enough notes, I could avoid looking stupid and being caught off guard. Ha.

Still. Surprisingly often. I reach out a hand, and a hand reaches back, out of the dim, unintelligible world. And it makes me glad that the sense I placed my bets on was the sense of touch. It is, I'm told, the last sense to go, and so far it is as clear as ever. My left hand cradling the neck, the jut of its wrist snuggling up into the suboccipitals, the fingers working their way into the upper trapezius, and my right hand listening to the shoulder, watching for the breath. Blind and deaf, I could still do this work.

Blue Clay

A wandering line of blue earth
showing through the shale:
precious stuff from storybooks --
gold for armbands, or nickel
that will make a famous sword:
and you stand clayfingered, trying
to haul a net-full of soaking denim
up from a stubborn mind --
what was it? Forgotten now, along
with skills: smelting, hammering,
plunging the hot blade into cold hissing water.
You never knew
how to do any of them, you know.
Start again. Begin when all the rest had left behind them
headlong death in battle or at sea --
No, that again
is someone else's story. Not mine.
Where does mine begin?
Well, there was a mixer, an egg beater,
and if you took the paddles out
and put it at the stern of the top bunk
it became the motor of a boat
and you could twist it for fast or slower rev.
Three children blonder than possible
would slowly throb through brilliant
aquamarine lagoons, and gaps in wicked reefs,
and when the sharks came -- full throttle,
clinging to the sides,
the urgent whine singing above our heads,
and the spray flying!
Is that my story? One of them?
I let the sodden mass go:
I'm out of strength, or courage.
I want to go now naked of the stories,
I want to go on light bare feet
over the hill where waves of wind
scurry through the grass. Is it too late?
Turn back, and the sun is rocking backwards,
the city's lights already gaining strength.
But even at twilight,
blue clay: the riverbank
of stories told before the words were known;
it is not inside the stories that you want to look.
It is inside the clay. Thrust your fingers deep.

Get Real: You Are Poor

I get worried about my American friends these days. I don't think they understand how poor they are.

We grew up with some truths about money and working that aren't true any more, and I don't think we've quite realized it yet.

Inflation. When I was at an impressionable age, inflation sometimes ran into the double digits. In that environment it made all kinds of sense to borrow money, lots of it, because the money you were going to pay the loan back with was going to be worth less than the money you borrowed. My grandparents' horror of debt vanished. Everybody was borrowing money. Everybody is still borrowing money, but now they're going to have to pay it off with real money. Borrowing money is stupid now.

Furthermore, when money was dwindling rapidly in value, employers had to keep giving raises to keep up. We came to expect raises of ten or fifteen percent as a matter of course, just the way things worked. Well, they don't work that way anymore. You make what you make, and if you don't like it, there's plenty of unemployed people who would be delighted to step into your shoes. Suck it up. There's no reason to think you'll ever make more money than you're making now. You might well make less. This is it.

The balance of power has shifted decisively to Capital. Pensions, unions, benefits, all those Western European style things, are vanishing from our landscape. Labor, with a few dwindling exceptions, is passive and powerless. We grew up with the vague expectation that we just had to earn a living – make our daily expenses – and everything else would be taken care of. That's how people in France and Germany live: if something awful happens, the State will take care of you.

Not here, not now. You're on your own, and if you don't have money saved for your incapacity or your old age, you're going to be out on the street. In the age of inflation, saving was for suckers, and making a few percent on your capital was a mug's game. Now it's working for a living, just meeting your expenses, that's for suckers. The overriding priority, in this economy, is to get yourself over to the Capital side of the equation, where people actually get ahead.

How do you do that? By saving like a motherfucker. 'Scuse my French. All that stupid crap about saving five percent of your income? Forget it. You want to save half your income. Half of it. Get that through your head. When you have paid off your debts, and what you have saved equals 20 or 25 times your annual expenses, then you can ease up. Then you can live off your capital, and you're not a slave any more. Till then, it's going to be hard.

But that means I'm poor, like really poor. Yes. It does. You are. You have to live in a shit place. You can't afford lattes every day. You can't afford a car. You can't afford vacations abroad. You can't afford to eat out. You are poor. You're not “middle class.” There's no such thing any more: there's rich and poor. I don't like it any better than you do, but not liking it doesn't make it go away.

Save radically, as much as you can. Stick it in an index fund and leave it there. Don't try to outsmart the wolves: just get in amongst the pack and try to blend in. This is survival we're talking about. Get real.

Stronger

Young people seem so very young, nowadays. Their bodies are absurdly pliable, and their problems seem so very far away from mine. Real enough to them, of course. You wish there was some way to tell them: the grand things they're angst-ing about are not what's going to matter to them in the long run; not nearly so much as the habits they're forming while they're waiting for the Dreamboat Boy and the Meaningful Work. Those habits will outlast both, and become the real fabric of their lives. 

But I was one and twenty,

No use to talk to me. 

All the world seems dark, with the colors rising vividly against it, since the snow melted. We're living in a black velvet painting of a world. Startling reds and greens and yellows glow in the gloom. Even the dull purple paint so mysteriously favored by Portlanders has an eldritch gleam and richness to it. The first madly reckless crocuses are placing their bets, and the leafless whips of anonymous bushes have gone scarlet, or mustard, or spring green: the shrub equivalent of rolling up their sleeves and spitting on their hands. All hell's going to break loose pretty soon.

I quietly grow stronger, every day, in body and in mind: I love it that if I lay my hand on my belly, when I'm sitting up from lying on my back, I feel a sheet of hard muscle there, despite how well-marbled I am. I love that I can spring lightly up from there without using my hands. I love that I can make myself do one more thing, and another beyond that, before my will crumbles. It's nothing and it's everything.

Up at Dabney, on the Sandy River, we wandered in the first snowfall, with the ducks and the kingfishers. A woodpecker – what was he? We forgot to look him up, and he was so distinctive, all black and white bars and stripes! – rappelled down his rotting tree a couple yards from us, either completely unworried, or so focused on his meal that he never noticed us. He probably thinks that slow clumsy primates are the least of his problems. We all make mistakes.

Grateful for friends, friends of the hand and friends of word, for sustaining me, interrogating me, steadying me while I scramble up unfamiliar slopes. Long, long ago I bushwacked up the Duckabush valley in the Olympic Mountains. Every crest disclosed a new world, in those steep, miniaturized alps. I feel a bit like that now. Everything new and strange.

Borrowed Time

The twined wire runs gracefully up over the white roofs like a thick-sewn seam: it follows the haunch and thigh of a giant, invisible model crouching over Division Street. It is the color of coarse-ground black pepper, and it shivers against the straight lines of the clapboard below. No human eye could bring that twine to focus, as it wavers against the straight-ruled paper of the walls. Certainly not in the shifting snow light.

---

You said you were warm, even toasty, with the table warmer turned to high: but the handsbreadth of shoulder I'd left exposed was cold when I came back to it. I rested my warm hands there for a count of three, while the blood and heat rose to my hands again, and I shivered: not for cold, but for way warmth runs to warmth and blood to blood. This is how we cheat winter. It's borrowed time, sure; but everything important is borrowed.

---

As a matter of fact I do count myself the king of infinite space, and my dreams are of shivered nut shells and glorious meats.

Snow

The checker at Fred Meyer was friendly, and judging by her accent, a native Oregonian like me. She spoke distinctly, and quite loud enough. But I could not assemble the sounds into speech. I stared at her. It's a familiar sensation, for me. My needle slips out of its groove, somehow: speech dissolves into a mere sequence of noises. I said, "I'm sorry?" and she repeated herself cheerfully.

Still just sound. "I'm sorry," I said, feeling old, fragile, and unnecessary, "I'm not following."

"Do you want these in double bags, or are singles fine?" she asked yet again. Still cheerful and patient. Part of the job, no doubt, is dealing with doddering, deaf, dementia-ridden customers.

"Oh, singles are fine," I said, "and you can leave the milk and the cat food out." The cat food was a boxful of cans. She duly lifted them into the little cart, and I added, "Let them run free!" You know, a little jeu d'esprit, to show that when I am tracking I am capable of playfulness. Not doddering at all.

Out into the parking lot, where the new snow was skipping on the pavement, twirling and eddying. Now I felt strong and vital -- I love the snow -- despite my inability to decode human speech. Sometimes the sounds just won't chain together, for me. It's nothing new. It's one of those human things, and sometimes I don't feel very human. More puma than human being: something that's used to the stillness of snow and the shadows under the heavy fir boughs. There are times, many times, when I don't feel all that invested in humanity. "The death of Jesus set me free: then what have I to do with thee?"

I watched the sky shaking out its white linens, the powder falling, and the wind made visible, its long white whips lashing and coiling on the street. But I was human enough to drive home, five miles per hour all the way, in a long line of worried cars pouring into the suburbs from downtown. We are not used to snow, here.

That was yesterday. Now, after all day at home, I am restless. "A caged tiger," Martha calls me, varying my cat-identity. I went for a walk in the snow at twilight: everything shadowy blue and white; and the snow cold enough to be light, thick enough to be good footing. So cold it didn't even get my feet wet. But now it's night, and I have not been out enough. I want something to catch: something to chew on and tear to bits.

Climate Change

Cold from the glass
beats on my forearms: the winter sun is
pooled but helpless. A failed brightness.

The breathing of the sky is deep, settled, old:
it ebbs and flows through weakness in the walls,
it drags across my blanched and lifted hairs

too slow for gooseflesh, too fast
for comfort. If it seizes the awnings a moment,
and shakes them, like a person folding sheets,

remember: it has no wish 
for completion. There is nothing 
it will stow or lay to rest. That is not its job.

That is what we are for, why we were brought
from the Rift 
to flood this grieving planet at the last;

we are here to fold what trembles, 
smooth it, lay it down in lavender,
before the shivering altogether stops.

Seattle

Dale Favier, visiting Marcel Hatch and Norman Hathaway in Seattle, circa 1974. Photo Norman Hathaway.

How places accumulate shadows, over years and years! I find it difficult to imagine Seattle as an ordinary place in modern time, a place I could drive to in my own car in three hours. Avgolemno soup at the Continental Cafe; bare apartments of philosophy students; the confusion of water and snow-capped mountains on both sides of you. I've almost always lived in the trough between the Cascades and the Pacific ocean, where everyone knows: the sea is West and the mountains are East. But in Seattle, the Sound or Lake Washington or Mt Rainier or the Olympics show up, a trompicones, over every ridgeline. Snow and water; water and snow.

I was trying to think when I was last there, and kept coming up with ridiculous answers such as "twenty years ago? Thirty?" Nothing happened in Seattle. I have no history there. No reason it should frighten me: except -- except that it's a different place, and it's a place where one of the lives I didn't choose unfolded. I guess I'm afraid I'll meet that life, and it will shrug impatiently and turn away.

Thin sunlight. Always sunlight, in Seattle, in the rain-shadow of the Olympics, but a fragile sunlight, coming slantwise. I am afraid of Seattle.

I was a teenager, and I got off the bus in downtown Seattle, the biggest city I had ever visited then. I was alone, and the skyscrapers downtown were vast, and blind at street level, and a dusty wind howled through them. I had friends in Seattle, so I believed: but Seattle was not my friend.

Yet I do have some sort of history in Seattle, though it pieces itself together slowly, slowly. I even had a lover in Seattle -- or did I? We dallied, and got so far as bare chests. A doorway curtained with strands of purple beads. I do remember that, or believe I remember it. Shadow follows sun, though, and sun follows shadow. I was lonely then, unendurably lonely. I don't know how I stood it. Loneliness like that would break me now.

I plan to go up there, at the end of February. Just for a couple days. I never go anywhere, but I'm going there. I'll stay with Kim, who brought the orange flowers, and I'll take my massage table.

The Makings of a Drum

Rise up,

you sleepy, wayworn worm,

shrug off your crusty jacket,

lift your eyeless head

to the beating sky.

Ten thousand hands have held you –

wake or sleep or dream –

and still

you seek the friction ridges

of yet another palm.

What is it, then,

that one blind snake

can teach another?

Light moves

(cautious, delicate)

between the shutter and the wall:

I have heard that daylight begins

in just such a tremulous,

uncertain commerce.

Somewhere, behind the mountain and the cloud

a sun is struggling in the nets of snow;

somewhere a heart has found 

the makings of a drum.

Waterman

I'm three quarters of the way through Bone Worship. I want to write to the author and say: you had better not make anything bad happen to Jasmine. If you did, I want you to write me a different ending.

I have lost all sophistication about novels. I don't know if I ever really had any. They're too big: you can't memorize them, you can't hold them in your mind all at once. All I have is a deep tenderness toward the protagonist: she's been made into an American, but she doesn't belong in America, or anywhere, and she takes the most preposterous stories about who she might be dead seriously. How not? She doesn't have a story, and she has to start somewhere.

And novels take place in time, except that it takes me so long to read one, now, that I begin to worry that I'm not doing it right. 

I worry a lot, these days. All the confidence has dropped out of me. I no longer think that I'm smart, or wise, or funny. I feel like a piece of river trash that is snagged on a reedy margin. I look up, and little brown birds look back. The current has left me behind, and it will only take me again to sink me.

Like that. Silly. But I worry. I can't tell people what they want to hear, and I'm not as good at concealing my thoughts as I used to be. As my confidence dwindles, my conviction grows: not that I know the truth, but that other people do not. It's an ungenerous, ungracious frame of mind, and I wonder sometimes why people put up with me.

The young woman on my table today was so slender that with one hand under the small of her back, and one on her belly, I had her almost compassed. All lean muscle. Radiantly beautiful, with the winter light falling across her face and her shoulders. Sometimes I think my table is a boat drifting by Avalon, half-submerged, carrying the lady from one world to the next; and I am one of those fixtures, the old waterman who steers it, neither of this world nor of that; and my straggly gray beard is threaded through the buttonholes of my coat. When I speak it is like the twitter of birds, or the splash of water, or the snapping of dry reedstalks. I belong to the boat: I have no story apart from it.

And that will do. A little winter sunlight: I can live on that for months.

I hope things work out for Jasmine. Good night now, dear.

Imaginary Lines

White sky: blue-tinged and shadowy to the north, brighter by infinitesimal gradations as we crane our heads and trace a line through the zenith and down to the low southern shelf where the sun is stowed -- somewhere behind the sheets -- in deep winter. But all white, and all pulsing with diffused light.

I think of the rope of flesh, the rope that ties everything and nothing: how frail it is, how uncertain: how driving the need and how crushing the disappointment. How do we bear it, just the ordinary life, let alone the disasters and the calamities? Making love, you have to imagine that the line continues, like our imaginary line in the sky: from the root of the tongue through the central channel of the body, to where the cervix of the womb kisses the tip of the penis, on down through the kinked turn at the prostate, and up channel to the other tongue-root, also speechless. You draw lines, hoping that none will fail. You celebrate the solstice because you're not sure, not quite really sure, that the sun ever will climb again.

So far, so good. I may well walk on grass of Mt Tabor, on the concrete sidewalks of Portland, for my 56th summer, with the sun pouring down, and heat pouring back up from the glowing ground. The shadowed north will seem pleasantly cool. But there's a shelf there too, for when the playthings are all put back in the box.

Ash Tree Down

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.
                                                -- Louise Glück

The wind blew down much of our old ash tree last night. If I was a better citizen I'd be out there right now sawing off the branches so as to clear the sidewalk, but instead I'm at Tom's having my usual leisurely breakfast. I'll get it later. I reckon I make up sixty percent of the foot traffic on our sidewalk, anyway: our neighborhood is not -- in that sense -- very pedestrian.

The ash is not one of my favorite trees. I've never been very partial to ashes, and this one has been moping and dropping limbs ever since I've known it. It has supported a surprising number of fungi -- always something new popping up -- but I'm not grieving for it. It still has one ramshackle mast standing, but we might just give up on it and plant something else there. I wonder if a birch would do well?

I'm often passionately attached to trees, so my indifference to this one troubles me a little. But there it is. I may not make friends with many more trees in my life: I find my ability to form firm attachments is dwindling. I am a little mopey myself, maybe: the long march through the giving season is beginning to tell, and I feel I've missed my footing several times, this winter, coming down hard on unexpectedly slanted surfaces that have given way. I grow circumspect, with shrewish, waspish impulses that surprise and trouble me. I don't want to go that direction.

Trying, perhaps, too hard, too much, too long.

Other things have opened, meanwhile, unlooked for: unexpected late blossoms. And I am slowly gathering strength. Winter and its clarity have come late, this year, but the rains are building up over our heads even now: we should have a real downpour this afternoon, to wash the world clean. I am ready for it.

That Particular Green, And No Other

Jessie hangs her coat back here, a yard from the half-booth that is my usual table. A deep green pea coat with wooden toggle buttons -- those clumsiest of all fasteners, pinkie-long pegs which hang by thongs and have to be threaded through another dangling loop of thong. Preposterous, but I love them, and I love, as always, Jessie's sartorial extravagance. She is raffish, ridiculous, adorable. The sort of girl all those pop songs of my youth were about. Apple Scruffs. Ruby Tuesday. Everyone-Knows-It's-Windy. I let my gaze linger on the coat, from time to time, since I'm too polite to let it linger on Jessie.

I have wondered sometimes why she doesn't hang her coats in the kitchen. When she comes on shift she walks over to my corner and hangs her things on the standing hat rack here by the window. But just now I realized: "Dale, you idiot, you'd think you'd never worked in a kitchen. She hangs it out here so that it won't reek of fryer grease by the end of her shift." Of course. Nobody with any sense would keep garments they cared about in a diner kitchen.

The cloudlight brings up soft blurs of lighter green where the angles of the coat face the sky: the edges of pocket and sleeve are the bright green new pool-table felt, and the shadowed draping is exactly the color of old fir boughs. For a moment I become Jessie, shrugging into the coat to go home, the hood heavy against my neck, my thoughts wholly taken up with the world beyond the cafe, a world Dale knows nothing about, but which I am anxious to enter. Today is the day -- what? I don't know. I'm Dale again, just me, with my own to-do list: massage at noon, then work, then home. Taxes to do, dishes to wash. The ordinary world. Not a loft apartment, close-in Southeast, with cloudlight slanting in and falling over Indian beadwork, belts with thick buckles, fragrant with spice tea. Oranges all the way from China, peeled by quick, slender fingers, scents that tickle the nose, candles, tapestries. Time coming slowly to a stop. Dalliance.

It makes me laugh: how quick each image runs to the next, how deep this groove is in the vinyl of my mind. It makes me laugh, but that doesn't free me of it. It's a dream of freedom, but it is as unfree as dreaming ever gets. It's the green, the green I should be lingering on. The familiar unfamiliarity of that color in the cloudlight, the stiffness of my old pea coat -- I did have one once: when was that, whatever became of it? I remember the silk lining, the abrupt transition to the rough old felt, the way the mist would bead up on it. Olympia, it must have been Olympia, where it was always foggy. And from there to Martha's pink trailer in the woods, and the woodstove, and the sunrise behind Mt Rainier. That was dalliance, if you like.

I have just missed something. Something has just run through my hands, too quick to catch: the brush of a cat's tail. I could catch up a sad nostalgia, if I liked, but there's something much more important. And it has to do with that green, that particular green and no other. There's a reason why doors are painted green, exactly that green. Let's run backwards, a moment. Rewind to the moment when the green was most intensely, newly green. There was something there that I must not lose.

Criss-Cross

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

-- Louise Glück

Frost: cold blue sky. But balmy by comparison with the cold sucking the heart out of the rest of the country. Here on the fringe, everything passes us by -- we still remember the Columbus Day storm of 1962, which was a Pacific typhoon that got hopelessly lost and wandered up here by mistake. It didn't even qualify as a hurricane, but it's the only weather event we ever got, so we treasure it. I remember it, or at least I remember remembering it, unless I only remember remembering being told about it. It blew down the big old cottonwood in our back yard. Earlier, we had delighted in leaning on the wind -- it would hold you up! -- until Dad made us go indoors. This strikes me now as an improbable memory. Would my Dad have been so incautious as to let us out in the first place? But there it is.

I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.

Are you, dear? Could anyone do such a thing? I doubt it. But edges do reach down from the sky: invisible razor blades. We had just arrived at the beach, and my small son was unwontedly quiet as we unpacked. Turned out he had found my razor, and was trying to shave with it: bloody criss-crosses on his chin and cheek. They cut, but they're so sharp you don't know it.

The mountain is brilliant in her fresh snow, every line of her a slash on the sky. I am uneasy. The timing is wrong; the rhythm is off, and everything is wound a little too tight. As I sat in meditation this morning thoughts clawed at me like a frightened cat. I'm pretty sure I have learned nothing.

Ciborium

Alma, the trace of chocolate
on fingers imperfectly sucked:
heart, dear impossible heart,
the wild widening sky
of this gate-month, flying
from bone-standards bending
in the wind of your passage --
Sarah, sore with the rasp
of esposas --
Hart, dear impossible Hart,
this year will bring
fruit from forgotten trees
planted in happier times:
a banquet long preparing
only waited the cry of "uncle!" --
The white flag
will become an altar cloth.
What will be celebrated is not ours to know,
but the ciborium will be inlaid
with sweetnesses you dreamed before the grief.

Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

I regret nothing except my occasional half-hearted gestures towards making myself acceptable. There was a time when I thought might find a home among like-minded people: I'm grateful to them for making clear that it will never happen, and so keeping me from wasting my time.

There is so little time. My awareness of that deepens every day. No: you can take me as you find me, and that will usually be gazing at the sky, while points of rain or starlight patter on my threadbare scalp. The riddle is written up there, and I stop and puzzle out a few phrases, and wait for the lightning or the sunrise. And still the sphere turns, and turns, and turns in its faint wash of darkness. There is nothing else, not really. We are traveling at immense speed, even in simple terms of the earthbound physics Newton propounded: we are falling toward the sun at somewhat more than 67,000 miles per hour. Once you actually absorb that fact, the speeds at which we creep around our falling home take on a comic aspect. In the time it takes us to walk to the store we have also traveled ten thousand miles through space: yet the quarter mile's incidental movement on this blue-and-white marble's surface is the movement that impresses us. Well. Not so clever, for all our airs.

No. Stars and rain are real, the silky hair threading between my fingers is real, the pulsing heart that lifts my fingertips is real. The rest? Toiling from speck to adjacent speck on a marble that's been thrown off a cliff? No: not so real. Not so real at all.

This Time of the Year

Morning comes. This is my favorite time of the year, when the days are short, quiet, and tender; when the nights are long and fierce with stars or rain. Not even the so-called holidays can entirely ruin it. For all their desperate music and laughter, their garish lights and sweet wine, their candies and rich sauces, their gatherings where they earnestly assure each other that everything they think is dead on correct -- they know, they know that this is my time of the year, when the forest is most awake and you can hear its deep, intent breathing, when the rain comes long and hard and the light comes only in glimmers. They hold their loud, noisy festivals now, because they do know it, and are trying not to know it. This is the time when the old world is near and undeniable: cold water, damp wood, hard stone. This is when slow, deliberate creatures open their eyes and consider them: not with contempt -- that is a motion of the spirit these creatures have never known -- but with slow, impartial curiosity. You can meet their eyes, and learn something about yourself; or you can scuttle indoors, switch the TV on loud, and make all the lights in the house blaze. Well: it's no secret what most of you will choose.

Bad Religion

"I don't care for Bad Religion, never have," and it took me
two heartbeats to realize it was a band. Of course. A band.

And there, where the hills meet, in a smudge of eye-shadow,
just where the edge of your hand would settle

on the breastbone of the forest; where the fog glows
with a certain latency of sun, and its tendrils open

(still generous, after all abuse!) to the warming air;
there where a person might pause, resettle packstraps,

and make sure of direction: well, there,
we don't much care for bad religion either.

There is too much at stake: there is the brightness
where the sun might or might not clear the mist;

there is the fold of garden-smelling earth
running down to darkness.

Toreadora

You said you were afraid always, all the time,

and yet you play it like a matador, you make it

plunge this way first and that, and then 

you stand tip-toe -- at the last --

your shimmering edge held high --

Oh, you uncoil as if you had a millions limbs, or none --

glistening black, oh you dear segmented woman

(how you fold into my arms, as if each limb

was made only to nestle in some hollow of my flesh;

and how you flare your supple, beaded wings:

they open like a huge intake of breath.)

Your heart is cased in oiled leather,

and leather frames the love lock on your cheek.

The blue square window lets in winter light --

beetle-shapes of mercury --

to crawl and skip and trace  

the contours of your iliac crest and thigh.

Spiring

Sometimes the sound of a faulty airlock hissing,
sometimes the wail of stars walled off by cloud,
sometimes spiring grains of iron gathered in by frost:
sometimes salt water subsiding through the sand.

Listen, dear, I hear her song
all day, though it's never old,
she sings to me daylong of absence and regret,
she holds my elbows in her cold hands, she steps between
me and the bank cashier whose mutter moves the air.

She stops
even old friends, and new ghosts, with her
sudden, flattened face and her finger at her lips:
"Quiet there, can't you see he's listening to the god?"
For I am stepping out of line
and turning to
the sun behind the sun, the moon behind the moon.

It is the song of nothing, conceived of by a knot
or not of neurons, a flare of melody; it is the hinge
of darkness, the silver of unsaying, it is the rising,
falling tone of whatever can't be said.

Rising Fish

My friend Lekshe once expressed the wish that my troubles would become so dire they'd drive me back to the cushion. She's a serious-business Dharma girl, not a dabbler.

Snowflakes dart sideways across the douglas firs like swarming insects over a river: I expect some enormous fish to rise out of the ground and snap them up.

Fifteen years before I'm seventy. I have never much minded decades going past, and I've been a little impatient with people who fuss about thirty, forty, fifty. But seventy is a sobering thought: the three score and ten allotted by the Bible. Nowadays, when I find myself dreaming up schemes for a new life and a new way of being, those fifteen years rise like the fish. If all the years hitherto haven't brought the new life, why should the next fifteen do it? Is there time to hammer out a whole new frame? No, this is it, this is my life, to adorn or embellish, but not to really alter. I have set my life upon a cast, and I must stand the hazard of the die.

The phantoms that have crowded so thick begin to disperse, and the light grows: it occurred to me yesterday that there are only two probable turns to my story now, towards joy or towards freedom. There are evil chances, of course: my country has become uglier and less safe than it was. But mostly, the paths lead this way or that. And either way, I'm content.

It tikleth me about the herte roote,
Unto this day it dooth min herte boote,
That I have had my world as in my time.

Thanksgiving Dishes

It was a little more than an hour's work, to clean the kitchen: wash all the dishes, pots, and pans, wipe down the counters, even scrub out the sink with the Bar Keeper's Friend. I could feel Martha's worried eye on me from time to time: she hates it when people get heroic. She fears that when the fit passes, the backlash will be all the worse: or that horse and rider will come down, trying a hedge too high, and she'll be left to put the pistol to the horse's head.

A sensible fear, living with me, but she was mistaken. Sober joy: joy at having survived, joy at being back in a world in which effort has effects, in which facts are true or false, in which light spills over the edge of the world in the morning, and drains away at night, in which there is fresh air and unbeholden creatures roaming at their own sweet will. Oh, it's not fair, it's not fair, but I associate that house with everything suffocating and artificial, and with every mean thing in my soul that answers to them: the craving for endless repetitions, desires and gratifications piling so thick and nauseating together that they lose the name of pleasure and just become the sea, the endless thirsty sea. 

So I now at home I work, I clean and scrub, I dry rack after rack of dishes. I grow tired: but it's not the bone-tiredness of spending all day avoiding the plain tasks before my face. It's just the ordinary tiredness of cleaning a well-used kitchen. And it makes me feel as though there was still a glance from the goddess of hope falling on my shoulder. Every once in a while, a glance. I don't ask for more than that: I don't ask for that much. But I'm grateful. I will sleep tonight.

Pleiades

I wanted to lift the haunted water
to that faint shield, no bigger
than a man's hand,
of the Pleiades.
I found a photo of you, as a girl,
scowling at the camera,
at the future, at me:
you were trying to see
through
the lens, that scissor of darkness.
I reached out fingertips to brush your cheek
but you were wilder then
even than now;
you vanished with your sisters
at a thickening of the cloud.

Aperture

As if we any of us came into focus

more than once or twice a month: the whirr

of the camera and the rasp of the shutter

giving news of aperture, the quick
 

opening of glossy black, the widening pupil,

the short-breathed sobs of coming or of grief;

and then the shutter falls. A quiet comes.

We pull on snaggy knits and clumsy button shirts;
 

we dry our eyes on anything at hand. Before

our hearts return to their horizon note

we are forgetting and our eyes are filming over,

sticky with the kitchen grease of days.

Walking

A craving for potato chips. I don't bar eating potato chips, though I bar having them: I don't keep them in the house. So I walked over to the 7-Eleven and got a bag, and brought it back, and ate it. Feeling a little icky now, but it will pass.

I talked to myself as I walked through the night streets. That little store is maybe a dozen blocks away. The potato chips cost over four bucks -- don't remember exactly -- and the clerk, in a English so heavily accented I had to ask him to repeat himself, told me I could get two bags for five dollars. "No thanks, just the one," I said. Even one was more than I wanted, since I knew I'd eat them all. A strange thing, this compulsion to binge: I don't know what to make of it. I'm glad it comes less often than it used to.

As I walked, I talked aloud to myself. It's been so long since I've taken a walk and talked aloud to myself that it was like suddenly getting back in touch with an old friend. Oh yes, you! We used to talk all the time! It was nice, and I realized I've let blogging and social media crowd out that sort of time. For me, blogging began -- back when this blog was named "Vajrayana Practice" -- as a cross between keeping a journal, and talking aloud to myself as I walked. It turned into communication, and even community, for a time. (My other blog, the massage blog, has always been an uneasy combination of soapbox and billboard.) But by the same token, gradually, private rumination was crowded out. It was queer to hear my own voice in my ears again, with no public in mind but myself, and to hear what I had to say. I had a lot to say. I think I'll walk more often.

It's easy for me to get lost, to get thrown by an audience. That's okay: it's a feature, not a bug. But it means I need to have to maintain some private space, and listen for my own voice. I have been too quick, too clever, lately. I have let too many alien filaments work their way into my soul: there are too many interruptions. I check for responses too often, and do creative work too seldom. I don't blame technology or social media for this: they're just the current mechanisms of fidgety, unhealthy habits of mind that predate them entirely. They make them easier to indulge, that's all.

Ten years of this blog. A decade of water running swiftly under the bridge. An epoch of my life has washed by these pylons. And it has been an extraordinary decade: my life and habits have changed beyond recognition. Whole galleries of online friends have arrived and slipped away. The joys of being understanding and being understood are less intoxicating than they were, but they have transformed me. 

Still. Walk out under the night sky and the prickle of stars, even here where the city lights wash so many away, and I can feel a deeper throb, the pounding of a larger mind, the lure of understandings that are more important and more decisive. I have no wish to go beyond the human and the natural -- God and das ewige weiblichkeit have no purchase on me, and I want nothing that my hands can't touch -- but I'm not done with traveling, either. I breath deep -- my overfull stomach resentfully following my breath -- and a small skitter of laughter, unless it's leaves in the wind, runs ahead of me in the dark. Yes. I will be walking some more.

Some Were Sprung So Tight

Some were sprung so tight --
do you remember? -- it hurt your finger
to drag the nine or zero clear around.

But all things then were heavier, more real,
less apt to disappear or to transmute
when you moved your eyes away.

In this world now all things
lift to your touch as you reach for them.
All things but the frightened, glimmered flesh
of those reluctant incarnations,

the people on the street:
their faces close like sea anemonies
against the unfamiliar light of day.

Recessional

And yet the joy recedes, its murmuration vanishes in the shifted sky. I am left with these two hands, pale in the winter light. I turn them palm up to receive what may remain:

the cold white winter, a heart which hesitates and coughs when I start it in the morning, and the ache of feet that have stood too long on concrete floors.

And if I remember adding a drop of menthol when I rubbed your temples, a smear of comfrey to your knee, I remember it only as dream, tasted on the side of the tongue.

You resurrect the scaffolding of heaven – to build again? To bring it down? – and invite me to climb again. I, who have held your beating heart in my hands, and now

hold the light of winter, the dust of a fading sky.

Water Ouzel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cinclus_mexicanus_-_Nason_Creek,_Washington,_USA_-juvenile-8.jpg

One of several reasons I was a bad teacher: I dislike repeating myself. When I know I'm repeating myself, that is. Like everyone, I tend to say the same things over and over, but that's okay, as long as I've forgotten that I've said it before. When a former version is still resonating in my mind, though, and I try to say the thing again, it kicks up a feedback-storm in my mind – very like what happens, I imagine, to a stutterer, and with a very similar effect. I begin, hesitate, lose my place, and have to start over, only to have what I've just begun add to the confusion. A teacher needs to repeat things a lot. I find difficult, if not impossible. So when someone kindly suggests that I make a book out of my blogs, – as people do from time to time – something about embodiment and massage and meditation – it kindles a flutter, a minor panic, under my breastbone. Deliberately repeat myself? Oh, no.

Yet I'm thinking about it, in my ponderous way, and I'm even doing a little something like it, in that I'm starting to pick up old posts from the archives of Mole, refurbish them, and repost them over on my massage blog, where someone might actually see them. I do this against a lot of psychological resistance, which is why it's happening slowly.

Meantime: I am mortal, so very mortal. I gave a massage in a tea house, yesterday. I know nothing about tea houses – I'm utterly ignorant of all things Japanese – so I simply accepted that I must wear the white socks given me, in that space. I'm all in favor of taboos of place, and of ceremony and ritual that sets certain places apart; so I was quite willing to put on the socks. And massage is, itself, a sacred space to me – a place with its own rules, requiring a certain discipline of intention – so it felt appropriate, in one way: in another, I suspected that it was ludicrously inappropriate, and that somewhere Japanese spirits were cringing. Sorry.

Sorry, but that's my calling and my trade: going where people are, and working with what they give me. I'm a water-ouzel: a queer fish and an odd bird. I belong everywhere and nowhere; follow everybody's rules and nobody's. I don't know if I could do something so very drylandish as to write whole book.

Home

The emptiness of the past is what most disturbs me. I remember my childhood home from the outside: a small low suburban house among others of its kind, surrounded by expansive, flat, close-clipped lawns of yellowish grass, dotted with low shrubs that we called... junipers, I think? – low, squat, dense, prickly blots of dark green. Nothing you could explore or hide under. All dull: all exposed and yet confined. I realize that it's subjective fallacy, and a failure of imagination, but to this day I can't picture a bodhisattva, or even a happy person, living in such a neighborhood. A graveyard of hopes. It's where my parents' marriage went to die.

When Martha and I first got together, she tells me, the thing that most disturbed her about me – and I was a queer enough young man, in all conscience; there were plenty of things to choose from – was that I remembered nothing of my childhood. I seemed to have emerged into a vague and partial consciousness when I was eleven or twelve, and to have almost no clear memories from any time earlier than that. Which, since I was only seventeen when we got together, did not make much of a remembered life. From time to time, small memories, preserved like specimens, showed up. But compared to her riches – she seems to remember absolutely everything, in Dickensian profusion – I was remarkably poor. I had lived in my head, not in the world. I remember the books I read and the pictures I saw. I remember the girls I had crushes on. That's about it.

It was Eros that brought me to anchor in the world, that gave me motive and memory. I really don't seem to have existed before that, in any substantial way. I drifted somewhere, but I don't know where. And if I contemplate a life with the erotic fading from it, my imagination turns up the same emptiness my early past does: a formless, uninhabited, uninhabitable flatland of dry lawns and junipers.

It recurs to me: I need to build a place. I need to make my house into a home, to fully inhabit it. I have thought this before, said it before, but there is an existential urgency to it now. The erotic may have been the only vividness my early life provided – the bright thread to follow – but it's only a thread, a guide out of the labyrinth. It can't make a home. The other impulses to make and mark are only adumbrations of this first, primary need: to make a place, a real place, one that will take the impress of memory and give memories back in return.

I don't even know if it's possible. For a long, long time my primary response to the houses I have lived in has been the imperative need to secure my lines of retreat from it. How do I get out of this place? How do I know I'm not trapped here? How do I keep my freedom of movement? Can I, really, live in my own house? I really don't know. Maybe I can't.

But whether I can or not, it becomes clear to me that nothing else comes next. I either take this step forward, or stay where I am.

The Color of Shells

A cold white morning. Even the crows were silent: when I walked down the drive, they glided overhead towards their morning gathering without a word.

My life is very quiet right now in all its externals, but my mind is a boiling hive. All of my past is vivid to me. There is no long ago, no blue distance. Everything is here, now, urgent. I feel I have never settled anything, never closed any account. Anything might break open again.

I lay my hand on your chest, and roll your cheek into the crook of my elbow; the other hand makes one long stroke over the collarbone, the throat, the face. I end with my fingers tangled in the hair of your scalp, gently pulling your hair. Coda.

… So here is the fisherman
who never caught a thing, having moonlit
conversation in the reeds. She
is covered with scales and sinuous as
brocade. She listens
but will not grant
a mansion for his wife…

-- “Parable of the Fish”, Luisa Igloria, The Saints of Streets

This poem goes walking with me, up the strange little bluff with its terraced, impossibly-named streets (Billingher Drive, Beyrl Terrace). It follows me from the hondonada of 82nd Avenue to the little upland where Dale and Martha are making their last stand.

His hair is fading to the color of shells: so it is, too.

Another Fir

Here is a spiral notebook, water stained,
its wire unthreading from the pages
to make a jabby wayward serpentine;
here is a pen from the dashboard of the car,
where we keep it to endorse a check or
work a crossword puzzle. The old
technology of writing, half forgotten,
peripheral and quaint. Then will I write a poem?

It will not do. I have two
bathtub sponges standing in as kidneys;
an antique bellows, black and salt-stained,
rigged up for a heart; two
clammy pale filters from an air duct
to do the work of lungs. They gasp and shudder,
and the whole machine works, in its way.
But don't mistake me for a person. Hilarity
will not ensue. Out of the window:

nearer hand, a cedar, almost clear --
behind a fir tree lacking in detail --
and further still and dimmer in the fog
another fir, a phantom full of grief.

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.