Going to the Beach with Jessie

You remember Jessie. Apple Scruffs. The woman with the green coat. 

I went up to pay my bill at Tom's. Jesse took my check and said, "I dreamed about you last night! About you and Martha."

I made a civil inquiring noise, and she said, "I have this habit of dreaming about work, it's awful, because I'm here all the time, and anyway, I was waiting on you and Martha, and I started to figure out that I was dreaming. So I told you guys: hey, this is actually a dream, so I'm going to the beach instead. And so we all went to the beach together."

"I'm so glad we went to the beach with you!" I said. I took my change, and laid my hand down on the counter as I turned to go. To my surprise, she touched it.

It made a little twist in my heart.

The Remedial Class

I think my task now is to go back home, and fully inhabit it. Not to go flitting off on pilgrimages, crossing strange streams and collecting curiosities. Not to set out to found a Utopia in some far away, unspoiled (until I got there) place. 

No, to inhabit this place, right here, among these people, where we find ourselves now: not because we are perfect, but because we are here. To paint our own houses and plant our own gardens and help our own neighbors. To deal with our own maddening people; to sort through our own garbage. I do not want to live cloistered, in any way. I want to open my heart here, in these dingy, despairing suburbs, under these skies roped with power lines, among these scattered, straggling douglas firs -- these stunned survivors of destroyed forests. Just here.

I of all people to say this! -- I who have been so good at running and hiding. But it is the remedial class that needs to study hardest. When Martha said, "what good is Buddhism if Buddhists behave like this?" -- she says it was terribly useful to her that I said, remember, you come to a church or a temple, not because you're spiritually healthy, but because you're spiritually wounded, because you have a sense of just how bad it is. This isn't the advanced spiritual class, it's the make-up class. These people came together out of their sense of lack, out of their sense of missing something.

Likewise. Not because I know how to stay at home, but precisely because I don't.

Not Satin

My erotic imagination doesn't run to satin. Not enough drag for the fingertips: not enough depth of field. Give me a flannel nightgown, or a worn-to-transparent tee, any time. Give me a faint down, body hair I can see distinctly only in the corona, when an elbow eclipses the sun, but which tickles, tickles faintly, a spiderweb whisper before the cold-to-warmth of real touch. (Real! Get out.)

I don't want slick or smooth. Not, at least, until it is well-earned: warmed and sweated from within. I don't want an Eros who is glib, who knows what to say. I want one who stutters and loses his place. I want an awkwardness of desire that drives beyond capacity. A strangled baying, not a little-girl lisp. I want to be struck and scratched. By accident. I am not looking for tableaux, however pretty. Not my thing. No: no satin, not for me.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young. 

Kraken

The outer edge of each curve is a clear if faint shifting line: the inner edge fades imperceptibly. And it all vanishes before it has risen higher than a woman's hand. 

It goes on rising, unseen: the scent comes to my nostrils. Coffee. But this terrible weariness weighs and weighs. No sleep touches it. Can this be age? There is no refreshment here: only a staving off. I rise to the surface more slowly, each time. I am more waterlogged, more densely built, less hopeful, every time; my horizon is more bounded, my spirit more petulant. How could any god even get purchase on this slippery, sodden mess, let alone lift it up?

I am huge and old, huge and old: a kraken who imagines it has some appointment with the sky. Delusional. I mistake my own monstrous coils for ghost riders: the shudder of my gills makes the skin of the water twitch for miles roundabout. The higher I rise, the lower the pressure, the giddier I get. All these years I told myself stories about the sun. Now a smear of caustic white, burning the enormous glassy darkness of my eye, informs me that I had left out the most important fact: it burns.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young.

Restless Leg Syndrome

The evening winged like an ant,

frantic and ill with the burden of flight

and a desire – unfamiliar –

for things beyond its light.

An ill and an expensive sleep,

all twitch and haul and fling,

shadowing, shouldering on

the discontent that mornings bring:

the second skin rolls off in flakes,

the wings drop off the chain,

the large head is aching then;

the six thighs crawling with pain.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young. 

Ancient Wisdom of India

I was being interviewed for my second high tech job. I liked the interviewer a lot, and he seemed to like me. He asked when I would be able to start, if I took the job. Always a question you like to hear! I said I'd need to give my present employer two weeks' notice. I added that I felt a little bad about leaving them: they had put good resources into training me.

My interviewer looked a little worried, in a paternal sort of way. He was one of the first wave of hotshot Indian tech immigrants, the people who drove so much of the first generation of high tech development and innovation. “Listen, Dale,” he said, “that company, any company? If ever it is in their interests” –

He held up his hand as if he was dangling something from his fingers, and then suddenly opened it wide. – “They will drop you like that.”

On Going Out To Breakfast With My Partner Of Thirty-Nine Years

We hold hands across the table,

laughing at something, gazing at each other

as we do, with infinite fondness.

A waitress chugs up, breathing heavily.

“Aren't you sweet!” she exclaims, and smiles brightly.

Meaning, perhaps, we are inappropriate,

adoring each other while white-haired:

we should be distant, grumpy, bored.

Some people like to see it. They're not the ones

who comment: beneath the voices

of those who do, there runs a trickle – a gleam

on the basement floor – of hate.

Camas Lily

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
Fields we knew when the world was young.

Extremely Wrong

L. Leslie Brooke, early 20th century
www.gutenberg.org

They sailed away in a Sieve, they did,

   In a Sieve they sailed so fast,

With only a beautiful pea-green veil

Tied with a riband by way of a sail,

   To a small tobacco-pipe mast;

And every one said, who saw them go,

‘O won’t they be soon upset, you know!

For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long,

And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong

   In a Sieve to sail so fast!’

      Far and few, far and few,

         Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

      Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

         And they went to sea in a Sieve.

I have been thinking hard, over the past few months. Probably harder than I have thought since I was a young man. I have been changing my mind about many things – always uncomfortable and distressing – and I have come to conclusions that I don't think much of anyone will like. This leaves me curiously faceless and inarticulate. I don't want no fight, and I haven't got a lot of time.

Having a public face, and being liked for it, has gradually wriggled from the luxury category to the necessity category. It's time, I guess, to try to trap it and put it back. I don't need to be a public person: it actually has many more discomforts than comforts. I am ready to drift back into the radar grass.

I will write, of course. I will always write. But I am going to have to be elliptical, to talk around things, or through them. Poetry will come in handy for that. As soon as you introduce line-breaks, most people stop reading, and those who do keep reading assume that you don't really mean it.

I will miss my old friends and my old community. But I was wearing out my welcome anyway. It's time to go to sea again.

A Position in Sales

An echoing “clop” on the door, the sound

of a horse slowly crossing a wooden bridge

at twilight. His hopeless voice goes

into a rhythmic spiel. My wife's

sympathetic one interrupts

as soon as decent. We don't want any.

I glimpse him trudging back down our

long, long driveway: just my age,

just as stout, slack-faced, the cloudlight

pale on his skin, which is

just the color of the flesh

of a well-baked potato.

I am reminded of a night forty years gone

when a drunk girl knocked at our door

late at night, a stranger to us,

and walked straight into my arms.

I held her as she wept and told

an unintelligible story: all that rose to clarity

was that she was desperately sorry:

sorry to intrude, sorry to weep,

sorry to exist.

The walls are fragile.

No suburban wall

will stop a bullet any more: if you hear shots

the basement is the place to be.

And yet with years the walls

are all too strong;

and they thicken,

thicken with time.

Bell

The morning opens, and the waves run away in all directions: I take a deep breath, and release it, and the warm air spills over the hand that props my cheek, like a murmured benediction in an unknown language. I glance up at strangers holding toast, chewing, chatting. I hear many different voices, but no words. A faint, accustomed isolation. It's like the chirr and click and buzz of insects on a summer evening. It's fortunate for me that this sort of loneliness is comfortable, familiar from long use, stretching back to childhood. Understanding and being understood – in real time – are luxuries to me: a little rich for daily fare.

All the major transitions of my life have worked this way: a sudden oblique shift, a step sideways into the wings. Never a stride forward in full view. That is not, apparently, how my life was designed. “Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two...”

Across the street, faded prayer flags sway and shiver, mapping out the chaos of the air, as falling snow, or a field of long grass, can do: suddenly I'm aware that all that turbulence is the usual thing, that every reach of the air is whirling and bucking and shifting. Fast or slow, maybe, but never really still. If I scan for every moving leaf, ribbon, thread, fly, bit of paper, puff of exhaust, with my eyes in soft focus, I get a dim sense of the surge and billow, the continual restlessness.

Another deep breath. I will pack up my things now, pay my bill, drive to the store. I am waiting for the bell, for one clear stroke of silver, to make sense of the hour. God bless you and keep you, my dear.

In Which I Destroy Civilization

My dear friend Kim gave me a wonderful book, "An Everlasting Meal," which is making me realize I have been taught to think that vegetables are dangerous, temperamental, edgy, easy-to-ruin cookstuffs, rather than the amiable, durable, almost-impossible-to-wreck home buddies they actually are. You can effing boil them and mash them up if you want to. You can eat them hot, cold, or room temperature. You can reheat them without being a Goth and destroying civilization. All this crap about rushing them home from the store and lightly steaming them at the last minute and eating them hot, well, sure, that's good, but it's a lot of trouble and fine timing; and fact is, at the store they've just been sitting in the refrigerator (if not the freezer) for days anyway.

I wonder how many people besides me have been driven away from them by the stigma associated with – quelle horreur! – overcooked vegetables? There is something far, far worse than overcooked vegetables, and that's no vegetables at all. I have been microwaving my broccoli for the last few days, like the wicked old man I am, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I am never going to be a foodie. I enjoy my food enormously, always have -- I can savor quite horrible junk food -- and generally speaking this capacity for enjoyment seems to me a quality to be cultivated, not destroyed. I don't want to have a delicate palate: I want to eat my food with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of health and get on with my life.

I Think It Must Be True

I think it must be true

that when the membrane tears

and the drenched butterfly

hauling with all her strength

leaves her petrified skin behind

I think it must be true that for some time

she does not know 

if what she's done to herself

is mortal.

Regrets

What do I most regret, looking back on 56 years? (about which I regret very little, all told, I should say.) I most regret not having given up sooner.

I see lots of inspirational slogans about perseverance, but not very many about recognizing defeat. I wasted a fair amount of time not recognizing some things that weren't all that hard to figure out: that some ambitions were unattainable, that some expenditures of time and energy were unsustainable. The trouble is, of course, that "give up" appeals most to the people who should persevere, and "persevere" appeals most to the people who should give up. So, why I'm writing this, I don't really know. Personal reference, I guess. G'night!

There are goals that you can't really give up and remain human: the goals of being happy and useful, it seems to me, are non-negotiable. “To love and to work,” as Freud said. But there are goals that people commonly mistake for these: the goal of having a certain sort of love life, say, or of having a certain career, become so identified with “happy and useful” that it seems to them that in talking about giving up one, they're talking about giving up the other. No wonder they resist any talk of surrender so fiercely. But in fact there are many, many ways of being happy and useful, more ways than any one person can imagine. The ways that are handed to us by parents, storybooks, and movies may not be possible at all; or they may not be possible for people of our particular propensities, abilities, opportunities. There is a time to stop beating your head against the wall.

Here is a list of the major surrenders in my life, in roughly chronological order:

1. I gave up on establishing utopia (on even a small scale!)
2. I gave up on writing fiction
3. I gave up on being an English professor
4. I gave up on attaining enlightenment in this life
5. I gave up on being a computer programmer

That's a lot to give up, and that's only the major ones, and only the ones I feel comfortable talking about in public: I gave up on other things too, such as achieving fluency in Tibetan, and becoming comfortable making phone calls to strangers. I should be miserable, right? In fact, each major surrender – difficult as each was: each resulted in weeks or months or even years of distress – marked a palpable increase in my happiness and usefulness.

And – this is maybe the most interesting and unexpected thing – each surrender has been followed by a sense of expansion, not contraction. The world seems wider, the possibilities greater, the future less limited.

The losses are real, don't mistake me. I mourn all of them. But as I say, I regret none of the surrenders: I only regret having delayed them. I regret the year I whipped myself to write fiction, grinding out a few short stories at the cost of incredible self-inflicted suffering. I regret the years I spent (not) finishing the two dissertations I started; I regret the years I spent trying to make myself into the sort of person who makes a successful career at IBM. None of those things were going to happen; nor – it becomes increasing obvious to me – would any of them have made me a lot happier or more useful.

What makes me happy and useful now, insofar as I am, and so far as I can see (which is not at all far, and that's one of the lessons) – what makes me happy and useful now is writing my blogs, doing my half-time work as a data entry clerk (mostly) at the Library Foundation, doing massage, and going for rambles in the Gorge with Martha. None of it is distinguished, or remunerative, or special; none of it figured in my youthful ambitions; none of it will leave a mark. But I only wish I had found my way to it all sooner.

Hawthorn Pome

for Katherine Mayerovitch

pomaceous /pɒˈmeɪʃəs/ adj

1. of, relating to, or bearing pomes, such as the apple, pear, and quince trees http://www.wordreference.com/definition/pomaceous
   

A pome is the fleshy fruit of the apple
and related plants, it consists of
an enlarged receptacle, enclosing
ovary and seeds.

The hawberry,
though you might not think it,
is a pome.

Chinese hawthorn pomes
are used to produce
jams, jellies, juices,
alcoholic beverages;

In Mexico, hawthorn pomes
are called tejocotes: they are
eaten raw, cooked, or in jam
during the winter months;

in America
we do not use the pomes
at all.

Breakfast Hall

The Breakfast Hall

Hah! Here I am in the splendor of my private breakfast hall: eight feet wide, perhaps, and opening onto a vista of our ten-foot strip of back yard – mostly concrete – which ends in a mixed laurel and juniper hedge, under which the neighbors' magnificent chickens strut – glorious gray-speckled dominae, with red crests that take on an unearthly glow in the sunlight: they tear up the duff with gloriously contemptuous back-kicks of their powerful feet, and peck up whatever they find. Kiki likes to contemplate them too, but apparently all parties are convinced of mutually assured destruction. They keep a watchful eye on each other, but they stick to their spheres of influence.

The Chicken Hedge

 But my dining hall: Alan is coming back for at least the early part of the summer, and I'm going to require some private space, so I'm turning this odd slot of a room into a breakfast nook / writing space. It was simply storage, and the door to the back, before. So I've cleared some things away – my poor neglected bicycle, alas! among other things – and set up a card table and a folding chair, and moved my coffeemaker back here. The kitchen window, which used to be an exterior window, overlooks this space, and its sill can serve conveniently as a pass-through. When I'm done I can simply stand up and set my dishes up there. This all may work. We'll see. Two boiled eggs – I can do my back exercises while they boil – and broccoli steamed in the microwave, and a banana, and coffee. And straight up above my head, a skylight: white clouds drifting due east in a blue sky. I may even set the door ajar and get some spring air and some birdsong. 

The Elegant Pass-Through

Birdsong; spring air. It's good.

For Livia Montana

(Who asked: “What does the beating of the heart and the taste of salt have in common?”)

One

you feel both in the tremble beside the trachea,

where the carotid and the swallow-muscles clutch.

Two

Blood, they have blood in common,

the taste of tarnished copper in the mouth.

Three

They have grief in common, the skin of the world's drum:

I wonder you would be asking this late in the day.

The Quiet Dark

Fascinated always by watching the slow rise out of a slough of despond. I'm seldom in any doubt about whether I'm going in or coming out (though I should be; I'm often wrong). But the shift, though subtle, is radical. Perhaps the heart of it is doubting whether I'll be able to do all that is expected of me.

So much of it, almost all of it, is expectation, and a sense of the momentum, whether I'm making headway or falling behind. Which is why the worst time of all is the day after some triumph. Backsliding, doing worse, is practically guaranteed. It used to drive Martha nuts, when I was in school, that upon receiving good grades and favorable comments at the end of a semester – upon discovering that my anxiety was groundless – I pitched straight into gloom and depression. As soon as the initial happiness and relief wore off, my response was – all this work, for this? Nothing has really changed, except that now I'm higher up, so now I'll fall the harder. It must have been awfully exasperating to live with.

I am ordinarily a cheerful soul, though, full of delight in whatever comes along. The gloom was temporary. I loved the beginning of a new semester, brand new books, new skills to master, new things to find out. I was natural student, in many ways: I positively like dropping my point of view and adopting someone else's, I love listening hard and following something that's complicated, difficult, involved. I'm patient with needing to build up background and foundational knowledge. Hearing to someone who is passionately involved with their topic is one of my favorite things to do.

Once again I tail off here, puzzled: why am I talking about the long ago days of being a student? Maybe because it was the last time I was actually sure that I was good at something. I go back again and again, and try to figure out where it all went off the rails. I was so promising: what happened? Oh, lots of things happened. For one thing, the American university system hit its first severe pothole right as I was coming on the to job market. To get a job I was going to have convince people, not just that I was good and knew my stuff, but that I was one of the half-dozen best people in the world. I actually may have been, but I didn't have that kind of confidence. And I didn't want to be in a world that competitive. I enjoy competing occasionally, but it's not a state of mind I want to simmer in constantly. Most of the successful academics I knew, at least the ones with personalities like mine, were deeply unhappy.

So. But enough, enough, turn, now. That's all past, it's even long past. I've made my choices, I've taken this road and no other, and barring disaster, my life is fully shaped now. What I need now is to maximize what I have, to continue jettisoning things that will not serve me or anyone else, and to bear steadily in mind that my time is finite, very finite. I never had time to waste – no one is so rich in time as that – but I do not even have much to spend, any more. I need to be slower and more deliberate, to strike less often, but more savagely and surely. I am a big old fish in my small pond, now.

My back was stiff, threatening to “go out” yesterday. Better today, and I'm daring to hope that I've dodged that bullet altogether. Many stresses, mental and physical, converged on the last few days. Now they're lifting and dispersing, one by one.

I dreamed I was at Burning Man, except that it was a resort with a swimming pool. A naked young woman leaned on a rail with me looking at the night sky flare and flicker. Then she leaned against me, and smiled when I put an arm around her. Some minutes later, with the scene somehow shifted, on a dark patio, I was emboldened enough to reach around her and put my hands on her pelvic bones, on the anterior iliac crests, with my fingertips in the soft tender inside rim of the pelvic bowl. She smiled tolerantly, but put her hands on mine and moved them decisively back to her hips. I was a friend, not a lover.

I was crushed: mortified that I had misinterpreted, distressed that I had overstepped. I felt the loss of trust and friendship like a physical wound. It struck me that all my life was of a piece: wherever the boundary was, I wanted to cross it, and the wanting was so habitual that I didn't even know what it was that I wanted any more. The dream of a land without boundaries alternated with the nightmare of a land without friendship, and both were driving me unmercifully. I woke flooded with grief. 4:00, my back aching, my eyes sore. I got carefully up out of bed, using the nightstand and the wall, straightening slowly, and stood for moment in the quiet dark.

Redwood Cafe

Morning: at the Redwood Cafe in Montavilla, where I just had a grand breakfast: a “breakfast sandwich” of scrambled eggs and roast pork and arugula on ciabata. Just why one makes “sandwiches” that are too large to handle, I don't really understand: but you can eat the innards as breakfast and the outards as toast and it works fine. I was breakfasting in splendid isolation, but now a second customer has come in. My fear of crowds was apparently misplaced.

Of course, they don't open till nine – when the day is half over – so it's more like lunch to me than breakfast. But I was getting increasingly unhappy about driving all the way over to Tom's: it was the sort of deep nonsense that cheap fuel fossil fuel breeds. A twenty minute drive just to get breakfast? When there are cafes within walking distance? (That serve, I have to admit, food that's much tastier and much less processed.) There was a reluctance to really admit I live in the Outer East; a reluctance to let go of our old neighborhood.

Also a reluctance to let go of the cafes of my youth: Tom's is indistinguishable from the cafes I grew up with. Whereas this place has intentionally kitsch touches, walls painted a deep, saturated red, and music that one might actually want to listen to. And, of course, chairs rather than booths. The coffee is made with probably double the count of beans per fluid ounce: if I treat it as agreeably flavored water I'll be in for a case of the jitters.

And here, of course – this is perhaps the heart of it – here I am an old man. I've got thirty years on every other human being in this establishment. At Tom's, I'm average-aged and in magnificent physical condition: here I'm on the far side of the hill and distinctly shopworn. My white hair flares in the morning light, and signals my incongruity.

                                              . . . derided by

         A kind of battered kettle at the heel.

But. Good food, a candle struggling to stay alight in its lake of wax, and a cloth napkin that delights my fingertips. I actually like all these things. It's not so bad, sometimes, that the world changes.

Scotch Broom

 We walked, at Camassia. A crew of earnest but inarticulate young people were spraying chemicals to kill invasive grasses, which had been spray-painted a lurid teal color by some other (no doubt equally earnest and inarticulate) young people. We scooted past them at the entrance, lost them and found them again at whiles. It's not a big preserve.

A path snakes off to the bluff. A glimpse of three teenage girls who had taken their shirts off to bathe in the early March sun. On seeing us they grabbed their shirts and pulled them back on, though we were doing our best to pretend not to see them, and they were decently clad in bra-ish garments. “Once upon a time I would have felt bad,” mused Martha, “but now I think being embarrassed about taking your shirt off, when you're a teenage girl, is an integral part of doing it.”

The sky was blue, and Mt Hood's pure white made sharp edges against it. Indian plum was everywhere, its leaves standing up to fill with sunlight, its white flowers dangling down. A couple trilliums were trying it on. We met a white-haired woman who was plucking up invasive scotch broom. She was happy. “It's all new growth this year,” she said, “I think we're finally getting ahead of it.” She showed it to us, and I took a sprig to examine it, and learn to recognize it in its youthful state, in case we met any ourselves. “Slender ribbed branches” – with a star-shaped cross-section – easy enough to tell it, once you've rolled it between your fingers: it has a tough, briar-like feel.

In the afternoon, a deep, aching sadness. Martha was happy reading her book, but I was losing my place in the world. Deeply disoriented, as always after the change to daylight saving time. It makes me feel old and lost: the sun being in the wrong part of the sky, the jolting change to another schedule, the violent wrenching of all expectation, as if I'd gone to sleep in one season and woken up in another, with months of my life lost, and the sequence of natural life destroyed. I have lost my place. It will be days, or weeks, before I find it again.

I was too tired to read aloud to Martha, so I turned out my light, and she stroked my back. Sleep hovered for a while, and then backed away again. I was too tired to sleep. After half an hour or so, I turned my light back on, and read to her after all. The Truelove: we're getting into the later novels of O'Brian's opus, when he begins repeating himself, and his discontinuities begin to seem less like artistic daring and more like senility. Tried to sleep again: same routine. No luck. Got up, went out to the living room, made myself a sandwich, wandered about the web. Around two o'clock, I saw that the light in the bedroom was on again: Martha too was up and reading again. But at four o'clock, when I finally felt able to sleep, the room was dark. I climbed in beside her and fell asleep.

A couple hours later, the alarm: I had rashly agreed to give Tory a ride to work at seven. So here I am, done with that, having my coffee at Tom's, weighing the pros and cons of trying to eke out another hour or two of sleep before work. Maybe. We'll see. I've learned not to fret too much about sleeplessness, and trying to predict when I'll be able to sleep. It will all sort itself out eventually, until the next change of the clocks, when we'll get to do it all again.

Of course, it's not all the time change: that only gives the sadness and disorientation a local habitation and a name. The current pulling me away is strong. Just now I found a withering sprig of scotch broom in my pocket: slender, ribbed, dark green, out of place.

Temple

One of the things you learn, by my age, is the absolute priority of the body. Gone are the fantasies of trumping its exigencies by will and imagination. Its rule is total. Its judgements can't be appealed.

The freedom left by this realization is shaped differently, but it is really no less spacious. The fourth wall here is death: it is the audience we play to, and never acknowledge, but never turn our backs on. Wall and doorway, barrier and opening. It's where the meaning sits, inscrutable, beyond the footlights.

I let someone trim my beard, for the first time in my fifty-five years, yesterday. She had me sit on the edge of the barber-chair, and scrutinized my face. Her eyes were screwed up, and her lips were pursed and wrinkled like a rose, and she darted at me with the clippers, shearing here and there with sudden darting moves. Like a hummingbird. All the while careful not to do the obvious and easy thing, which would have been to stand between my legs.

I have to be careful not to touch people, nowadays: I am so used to it in my work, that I'm at risk of forgetting to observe the taboos properly, like the foreigner  in the Dilbert comics ("My people have no personal space!") who stands nose-to-nose with people. ("Oh, I get it, your pockets are for your use only?") I am impatient, sometimes. If it's a temple, then why don't you honor it? You can't have it both ways. Sacred is sacred.

Aphrodite

What I have promised, I will perform, says Eddison's Aphrodite, and I must say, that despite her reputation, and her dubious family background, she is the deity that has always dealt most fairly with me. She gives fair warning, and she makes few promises, and what she does promise she delivers. I have never regretted her service.

Not that it would signify, if I did: I have grown old in it and I'm fit for no other, now. It has more to do with the dazzling white of the sky than with fugitive nymphs, at this point. So bright that the pattern of the douglas fir boughs, against it, is printed on the inside of my eyelids. I was promised intensity, and the ability to take or leave anything else life might offer with a shrug, and she has given me those. Eyes open or closed, background or figure: the ragged boughs are there, with the light pouring through them.

The Minotaur Between Clients

I'm a homebody. I like to draw
circles in a dish holding sand. I widen
the halls in that labyrinth and knit
the minotaur a scarf. He visits me
between clients.

--Luisa Igloria, "Open Relationship," The Saints of Streets

Home: the rain drawing beaded trails on the window pane, slantwise to the lines it's drawing on the air -- crosshatching itself, in what appears to be defiance of geometry and common sense. But of course, the glass is oblique to me; that explains it.

A jumble of impressions: the worn steps of a lovely old house on Capitol Hill -- a true neighborhood in defiance of all probability: I am introduced the neighbors at twilight. Inarticulate young men, with their extraordinary energy and shyness. An enormous willow, with its hanging whips already going spring yellow. (Yet another beaded curtain, hanging crosswise!). The doctor, sharp-eyed with intelligence and kindness, shaking my hand.

And a new-built house, and a city now largely Asian and African. Streets that are allowed to be one way in both directions, at different times, and streets I find myself on that were so steep that, had I been driving a standard transmission, I would have simply had to abandon my car right there and proceed by foot.

I too am a homebody, or perhaps a minotaur, and I am glad to be back in my own labyrinth. Seattle is, as ever, a place slightly outside of time, a Narnian wardrobe. I'm glad to know it is there. I'm glad to be back.  

On Facebook, I wrote : Well. I have just done AWP 2014, in my fashion. Three massages, two tête a têtes, one off-site reading. Back home, and I am as new as a bright copper penny. I have met and hugged the poet I most admire in all the world. I have drafted a poem. Here's to being my cranky middle-aged idiosyncratic self, and living within my neurological means!

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.