Fifth Chamber

When holding the small bird
its needle-y feet will tickle your palm.

You will need patience.
Blow gently into its open beak

to gain time. It will blink
and reconsider.

Reach with your undominant hand
and unlatch ribs four, five, and six

on the left side. Swing them open
comfortably.

Two or three breaths,
expansions of the chest,

and your heart will open of its own accord,
shiny and glistening:

the fifth chamber. It is important
not to hurry the bird.

Late or soon
it will flutter in, and you will feel

its prickly toes on the smooth muscle.
The heart will give a little jump,

which is normal,
and the bird will begin to sing.

Close the ribs, and wipe the skin dry
with a clean cloth.

Drink plenty of water, and for a few days 
avoid  excessive talk.

Farther Yet To Go

That edge of desire, dull now, 
but the more dangerous for that:
any pantry chef can tell you it's the dull knife 
you cut yourself on. You push too hard.

And every walk accompanied by a rising
falling drum roll, mimicking the hills: 
each raindrop tracing down your cheek like a stick 
caressing the drum's tight skin.

Far, far, we've come far, 
but we have farther yet to go;
the drummer's wild pulse will drive us on
though flowers bleed to life on either hand.

Little Clay Figures

But there are times when reality runs skittering backwards, on sandpiper feet, when something else comes washing in: a something I might taste on your lips, or that might brush against my open palm, if I were lucky. 

Today the high white clouds were swinging one way, and the low gray ones were leaning the other, two eager dogs tangling leashes, and then on the hills above Sylvan the fog was snagged on the firs, and lay panting across the red and yellow foliage below. What quick tongue, what thumping tail, might stretch across that inlaid kitchen floor? The last of the sun broke through, guessing its way through the Coast Range, and all the colors flared against the dark.

Like one fully dressed, embraced by one naked: humbled by the vulnerabilities, and trying to guess what sense is to be made -- what weakness would be strength, and what strength would be betrayal? All their protocols are useless prattle, petty sergeants imagining themselves lords. Human beings have no time for that.

And so I held your hand a long, long time, and little clay figures caught the firelight. Their mouths were little O's of wonder, and their hands were lifted in supplication or surprise.

Beyond the Quarrel of the Crows

Strength slowly seeping back into me: cloudlight, dew, leaf-stained wind. I linger in the quiet places, recovering myself. I go out to the porch at first light and watch the Douglas firs define themselves; listen to the crows' sleepy disputations.

Back into the shadowed house. I lie down, on the square of Persian rug on top of the concrete slab, and do my back exercises, while light drifts in from the skylights and the hedge windows. Reluctantly, all the clutch gives way, and my ribs can move freely. Beyond all expectation, beyond all justice, I am alive and well and even blessed. Saved (for who knows what fate or interest!) for another day.

At Tom's, I carefully work through my Spanish. I learn that an esbirro is a henchman, a minion, from Corsican sbirro, policeman. I pause on that, trying to think through what I know of Spain and Corsica, the Crown of Aragon, the court of Naples. How did Corsica come under French hegemony? I don't know: I could look it up, but it all shreds and blows away. It's one of many, many things I will never master, not this late in the day. Whatever my god is preserving me for, it's not my grasp of Mediterranean history, or even of historical linguistics. It has more to do with the high, clear bell that rings, just out of hearing, beyond the quarrel of the crows.

So: good morning, dear ones.

Sundowning

At sundown the shadows come to the door—
don't ring—just cast themselves on the frosted window.

Or three children play on the floor
just around the corner, never quite in view;

the tick and whisper of toys that can't be there;
sudden movements; flickers in the fading bars of light.

What can you bring between two ordinary hands
to distract from what a troubled soul

must fashion from the orange script
that bleeds through the drawn blinds,

when the sun leaves a gap in the western rim
of the world, and all that's real runs out?

The King of Nightmares checks his horse—
pauses on the hill—rides on.

Kick

The hammer rebounds in any case:
but still, you can tell by touch alone
whether the blow was true, whether
the nail drove straight. The kick
is slightly different in the hand.

(Clouds fall back from the ridgetops
and the mountain appears: shadowed, stern,
unsnowed and unshaven, all blue-gray,
unreachable by sun.)

Enough of stories that hit just wrong,
too soft or too hard, that slightly bend the nail
or glance. 
Give me just one that hits fair, let the steel

sink like that one perfect dive
into green water 
forty years ago and more, when 
coming up for air, and looking
into the high snowfields, you said
this much, exactly this much, no more.

Amordazado

When my mouth is filled with pulp

surrendered by some unfortunate --

with hard bits like watermelon seeds,

and obstinate threads

that anchor nought to nought,

but pull against the tongue -- I give up chewing.

I think maybe

there are enzymes for the job.

The night thoughts begin to recede

and plain day resumes. Until enlightenment

I take refuge in the Buddha

the Dharma

and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha.

Oh, you who have prayed the longest

and thought the least,

walk back with me along this needled path:

take my hand, all figured like Caduceus,

straight tendons wound about with veins:

still competent to touch, though

maybe for a while.

If my mouth were my own

I might formulate a halting

request for forgiveness

of the ordinary kind:

I overstayed my welcome,

but how was I to know?

I go amordazado, mute,

over last year’s prickled gooseflesh to the lake;

I kneel and spit,

and the day’s slow gods wake to me at last.

Wash out his mouth

and take him to the house:

never mind a jury of his peers.

Sweetness of the Rain

My feet sank into the wet lawn,
my toes into the mud.
Such a relief:
and my soles drank the water.

I stood there
swayed by the wind but not by wanting,
and the tips of my fingers tickled;
just the budding of leaves,

the slough of flesh, the bones
more slender all the time,
long whips that swished the sky.
and my toes finding their slow way

into softnesses you can't imagine
in your animal hurry. Oh, 
the sweetness of the rain! And the wind
of heaven in my hair.

The Lines Poor Euclid Dreamed Of

6:00, and first light has not shown itself yet. The clock ticks. I sit in the glow of my laptop: yonder is the light of the landline screen, a hazy greenish smear, with the winking lights of the router beneath it; and beyond it the bluer, sharper numbers of the microwave clock shine in the dark of the kitchen. Above me, the red light of the smoke alarm appears a moment, and disappears.

At one of those periodic stands, when I can endure neither my ills nor their remedies: as usual, these happen with no apparent reference to the circumstances of my life. They seem to follow their own rhythm, a slow building frustration with my spiritual insufficiency that takes years to crest, culminates somehow, and goes quiescent again. 

I remember in grade school sometimes having a pencil I could not sharpen to a point without snapping the lead. I could either write with a dull pencil (which I hated: the fat lines and the sloppy glide were repugnant to me) or sharpen and break, sharpen and break. I wanted a pencil point so fine that its line was absolute, dimensionless, like the lines poor Euclid dreamed of. I could consume a whole pencil that way in the course of a class period. The shavings would wad up in the little clear plastic holder, like the clippings-bag of a lawn mower, with which my sharpeners were outfitted. When I got the lead sharp enough for my liking it would sometimes tear the cheap exercise paper we used. I preferred that to the glide of a dull lead, though. I wanted my writing to cut.

Now hints of light through the sculptured glass of the front door. A lightness at the window blinds. I am glad that the dark is easing, though I'm not ready for the day, and I hope to get more sleep yet. Perhaps I will try it even now: lie down on the sofa and see if I can unmoor it from this wakefulness, and take it out to sea.

Old Copper

I had a revelatory moment, a couple decades ago. I was experimenting with an antidepressant, effexor, I think, which damped down my libido. And I suddenly discovered an obvious truth, which had been hidden from me by its sheer ubiquity: that I ordinarily had a lot more desire than other people. Because now I was having responses that were more like the mass of people, who had always puzzled me. It no longer took all my will power to tear my gaze away from someone I found attractive. Something disgustive -- loudness, unkindness, poor hygiene, stupidity, even poor dress sense -- could trump sexual desire. My desire wasn't gone: but it was only one player on the stage of my mind, competing with others.

I walked around in wonder for a few days, savoring the unusual experience of being normal. My moods, also, had stabilized. No more surges of ecstasy upon reading a poem or seeing a cloud mountain slowly toppled by the wind. No. Good poem: nice sky. Next, please. And no sense of ominous looming presences, of shapes speaking just below my hearing behind my back, foretelling disaster and desolation.

It was deeply instructive, and went far to help unbuild much that was harmful in my habits and my personality. I'm grateful for the experience. But it wasn't where I wanted to live. I discontinued the drug. I went back to the world as I knew it, albeit with a hint of transparency. It was the world as I knew it, but it wasn't the world as it was.

(Not that the normal world was the world as it was, either. I'm still Buddhist enough to hold the conviction that the world "on its own side" is inaccessible to us. What we have is the world of appearances.)

But. Now my own chemistry and personality, as I age, is running its own new version of this revelation. Fortunately the clouds and the admonitory presences remain largely as they were. But the desire has dwindled, and changed. Young women no longer engage my attention much: they often strike me as ill-informed and self-absorbed, and sometimes even vapid. Presumably it's my cathexis, and not the young women, that has changed. 

Last week I saw a woman of my own age, with a fierce, strongly marked face, and a mass of iron-gray hair shot with black, padding across a parking lot like a great cat. I was surprised at the depth of my response. I would always have found her attractive: but now she is an exception. Her image retains its intensity in my mind, when most others fade and go dull.

What does it matter? What do such things have to do with me, now? But it does matter, nevertheless. I have nothing to rewire with but the old copper. Whatever the current that makes this consciousness play, it's the same as it ever was, and I can only draw it in the fashion I'm used to.

We had our fallen ash tree cut down level to the ground, this spring. What was left was flat splotch of spongey, damp, crumbling wood. But all summer long, through the long drought, with not a leaf to its name, the roots of that ash kept wicking up water from some deep underground source. It was always damp. And I don't doubt that we'll have stubborn shoots to cut back for some time to come: maybe even years.

Why One Becomes A Massage Therapist

You take me down long roads dusty with grief
and show me: "Just there. The water used to fill a little pool
and spill over: you could cup your hands beneath."

I cup my hands beneath. Your shoulders rise 
with hesitation now, born of pain so automatic
that no joint moves without a grimace. Still

I pull the whole arm up straight and reach behind
for a spot that's hidden by the scapula else,
I let my fingers settle into the flesh, like

the bare feet of a happy four-year-old
in wet beach sand. I ponder the empty feel
of the house: I ponder the echo and the silence.

I heard the beginning of your apology
for not being cheerful. Forget it. The gift
of good cheer is cheap: use it once

and throw it away. The gift of plain suffering
is a gift that will guide me in the parched hills
when all else proves worthless. This

is the gift I came for: this is what my hands drink in
when I cup them under the little stream of light.

The Law that Shatters the Pot

There are days when everyone seems to be dying;
others, divorcing. You lay the porcelain pieces together,
but they don't fit, and the fish are fleeing: 
a wriggle and gone. Scales and flakes
are what we have left: a gleam on the ground,
a flash in the water.

Still, you heft a sleepy little one over your shoulder
and carry him up to bed. Asleep before you lay him down,
and the moonlight signing the floor,
sealing a contract you never knew you wrote.
Knowledge of the law is no excuse, they say:
but they have to say something. Deep down
nobody knows the law that moves the moon,
the law that shatters the pot.

Unaccustomed Worry

And here, the startlement of September, deeper than ever before: nowadays every season comes before its time, crowding the one before, pushing and shoving. September of course was always a longed-for surprise: but now it's a sudden split in a rock face, with the sun splashed across, and no reasoning changes it. The wind has the upper hand. If you don't have deep roots, you better hold on.

I go cloaked in unaccustomed worry. I no longer understand the wheel of the seasons or the moods of the sky. The aquifer of love, the one thing I've never doubted -- is it running out? Is that possible? And if so, what becomes of me? I am dwindling.

At the same time, I can hear the knock and rattle of percussion instruments, the long roll and rattlesnake buzz of sticks on a drum head, clear pings and whip-cracks. Someone is playing. It's not the music I've attended to for most of my life, but maybe it's been there, waiting, the whole time.

So it's time to stop -- buffeted though I may be by the wind, and unhomed as I am -- and just listen. Listen and try to make out the time and the beat. Honestly, what choice remains to me?

Fierce and Graceful

"I am not fierce or graceful," she said.

Well. So autumn is coming, after all: whatever autumn means now. We'll find out.

When you come up the slope the the Vista House, and the Gorge opens up below you, the row of hills behind each bend of the river gets its own color, and the farthest is a featureless slate gray: a smooth cutout against the breathing sky. Maybe it's always that way: its the transition from terrain to geometry, and back again, that entrances us. God writes in shapes against the sky, and if you could just find the proper focus, the right distance, you'd be able to read it.

(She is fierce and graceful, she is nothing else. That's the geometry of it, though; and she sees herself, up close, as terrain. These things are as they must be.)

---

Jarrett took a picture of the Three Sisters, stripped and despoiled, from his airplane window. "I have never seen the Cascades so bare of snow," he wrote. If you think they will not exact a price for this humiliation, you don't know much about mountains.

---

Handling my poems, and sending them out for publication, I find that they are not very good: they can be tightly woven or they can have verve, but they almost never have both. And a poem should have both. I think maybe poetry is a mistake, for me, but I'm not quite sure. It doesn't matter.

My neck and cheeks are all bristly. These days I have an insuperable resistance to shaving and getting a shower before breakfast. It always seems tremendously important that I get out of the house, and leave fussing with my appearance for the trivial parts of the day: mornings are far too important to waste on primping and trying to disguise the fact that I'm actually, in my soul, a slovenly old man. Or maybe, further than that, it's as a slovenly old man that I have anything to say at all. A tattered coat upon a stick may have something to say: but whoever heard a word worth hearing from a brand-new coat in a shop window?

September. Whatever September means now. Every season is new and terrible: impermanence with a vengeance.

Creed

Where the thumb of its own accord comes home
in the hollow between two hills of bone,
between the second metatarsal and the first,
where the grief of standing upright is the worst:
there is the fons et origo of love,
whatever they may say above.

Christ washed the feet of each disciple
not to display his archetypal
disregard for hierarchy
or humble future patriarchs. He
soothed the flesh that split and flaked,
and rubbed, because their insteps ached.

Notation

The mist that slips away 
like the skin of an overripe peach
as the sun reaches 
over the ridge 
and lays hold of the beach;
the laboring cry of the gulls 
pumping daylight up from the sea;
each footstep filled with luminous water, leaving behind 
a wandering trail of notes on the staff lines of the tide.

Wind

I wonder why they make those "road work" signs so like kites? I walked by half a dozen, this morning, blown over, groveling face down in the street. One had blown over the freeway bridge rail and down into the gully: it looked like the discovery-of-the-body scene at the beginning of a mystery story.

No internet connectivity at Tom's today. I cut my breakfast short (for me.) Read a couple of Luisa Igloria's poems, did my Spanish Anki flashcards, and was home by 9:30, feeling strangely grounded and un-anxious. That's something to put into my pipe and smoke.

Still no drench, after all these weeks: only scattered drops and a stiff wind. I walked in my tee shirt and was never chilly. It still doesn't feel like the Oregon I grew up in.

I close my eyes, and am aware of an immense weariness. I think I will rest some more, and let the wind shake the leaves. I'm still waiting for the rain.

Oarsman

The extraordinary weight of quotidian desire,
even when it has faded to a tenuous burden:

if one tried to land a ship on Neptune
one would sink at first through imperceptible air
for longer than the earth is wide, until the weight of it all
was insupportable, and the air under its own heft
became a viscous ooze. Exactly so.

(Still, what medium else, to carry a shout?
Whales may sing in the water, but we may not.)

If I honor my misplaced hands, it is not for their strength,
but for their curiosity. I cup the syrupy air in one hand --
pour it to the other. the difference
between gas and liquid was never made clear to me:
I only know that neither can be mastered.

(All bellowing would be only the blowing of bubbles
and the thrumming of vocal cords, damped and strictured,
would be the faintest grumble on the muddy ocean floor.)

Still, some work of noble note may yet be done, 
or anyway sketched 
onto a whiteboard, blurred and thumbed.
Rally, my hearties, and raise a cheer
to rise, like a pout, from under boiling eggs:

we moved heaven and earth from here to there, upon a time,
and if we knew nor whence nor whereunto
was that our fault? We did as we were told.

Spa Day

I heave myself up. You have no idea 
how much muscle it takes to raise this mass 
onto the rocks. No clever monkey hands,
not me. I come from the deep water, the cold places,
and when I snatch it's with my teeth, 
and for keeps.

Still I love to sun myself:
it's worth lurching up onto the warm basalt.
I time my lift with the surge of a wave,
wriggle up - with some loss of dignity -
while the water drains away 
and my full weight makes itself known:
Twenty five hundred pounds of pinniped
can spare some pride on a spa day.

Far Side of the Hill

Sometimes just to see that light, that slow light of afternoon washing over sidewalks and the faces of buildings, sometimes just to see it is to betray myself, to go back to being a boy.

I will never be at the mercy of others again, I say fiercely, which is nonsense: we are at the mercy of others every day of our lives. But at huge cost we build up the illusion that we are not, that we are adults, and masters of our destinies. Across a wide array of cultures, those most committed to independence and individual freedom have been the most stubborn slaveholders. The Golden Polish aristocracy, who hired and fired their kings; the American Southerners, who were willing to fight to the death for the principle of radical independence, the free Athenians who acknowledged no lord -- the more famous they are for their unwillingness to be ruled, the more likely they are to have held others in subjection. Only the poverty of our education leads us to find this strange. It makes all the sense in the world. We fling the toga or the cape over our shoulders. I am free because I am a master, we say.

But it is a fantasy that sickens and turns, because we are never masters enough. The slave on his heap of rags, dreaming in his filthy corner: is he flinging a cape over his shoulder? Not wasting his glance on the canaille as he strides down the street? Likely enough, and kicking him awake won't change it.

But again. How I am to avoid that poisonous afternoon light? I am not a boy any more. I am as free as I am going to get, in the dappled interlude between the prison of boyhood and the prison of old age. The air is pure and cold. There is time yet, there is time: but that doesn't mean there's time to waste.

The high call of the osprey. I own no one, least of all myself. I pray that the poison of the afternoon light may pass and leave no stain. You do turn and look back, you must, as you reach the ridge: you turn and look back on the land of humiliation. But then you walk on over the ridge, and the stiff pine needles break and release their sweetness under your feet. Even if it's only a day, or an hour, you have been on the far side of the hill. No master and no slave.

Breathe again, that resinous air, so you will remember it the next time that memory rises to choke you. There is freedom: there is a far side of the hill.

Sun as Orange

A sun as orange as an orange rose
behind the gray, staggered

limbs of the douglas firs:
fires, fires all the way
from Mt Adams to Lake Chelan.

The radio spoke of particulates
and of vulnerable alveoli in lungs
long used to the rain and the breath of the sea;

there is a smell of campfires
as it lingers in damp sleeping bags,
and thrusting gray fingers of

what would be fog
if this were October: there's a catch
too far back in the throat to unspring.

The world is a vacant church
lit by high stained glass. Tonight
a sun as orange as an orange will set

behind the crumpled hills,
and a gasping bloody moon
will waver in the wind.

Long White Sand

Struggling to bring this ashore, to roll this corpse up over the tidemark. Not sure, not at all sure, that I shouldn't just let it wash out to sea. Still, some pieties are inescapable. (Not that I'd care to be brought in myself: let me go.)

The clink clank of hammers, far away, of work that I used to understand. A stiff wind bending the beach pines. I remember nothing of all those things I worked so hard to master. There was some Latin verse: passion and a raft figured in it. Virgil? Ovid? I don't remember now, though I remember copying it out. 

It's still so hard. I have to be ruthless, though, about cutting things out and leaving them alone. My time is shockingly short. By some methods of reckoning I have a one in seven chance of having a heart attack, in the next ten years. I don't believe my chances are that poor, but still, I'm in those crosshairs. Sooner or later. And that, of course, is barring accident or misadventure.

Still there is no better way to proceed than to go methodically through the to-do lists that I have made. One thing, and then the next. I keep circling back. Roll the corpse over onto its stomach, then onto its back again. A yard further up the beach.

Oh for the long white dunes and the beach running off into a white haze of spray on either hand! I am doing something wrong. I am doing something wrong. I don't know what, but I know the signs of it. 

The knees of my levis wet from the sand. Grit under my fingernails. Heave again. Come on, man, up we go. You weren't a picky eater, lad! Tucked in with gusto.

As I rock back on my heels, and try to wipe the sweat out of my face without wiping the sand into my eyes, it occurs to me to wonder: what if this corpse is mine? I mean, after all, whose else would it be?

Because in that case I would really be free. Really. To walk away on the long white sand.

Pemberley

We will not be called upon to justify our lives. No ledger appears at the close, no recording angel holds an exit interview. What's forgotten remains forgotten, and the rest spins, as it must, in the slipstream of other people's stories. We are characters in their lives, mostly minor ones, and we play our parts in memory as the staging and the script requires. At the Foundation I see people setting up memorial funds, confident that scores or hundreds of people will donate to someone's memory, and go on donating for years. A few gifts come in. One or two people even give again a year later. But mostly -- your stock falls rapidly, when you're dead.

If you're deeply aware of this transience, you sometimes feel that your death has already sped past, and that your presence here is a haunting. Not so much alive as a living memory, walking carefully on imagined paths: so much of our existence was spent dreaming of things that would never happen. I imagine ghosts cluster most thickly in places they never arrived in life: they search for memories they never had a chance to make. It's Anne de Bourgh, not Elizabeth Bennet Darcy, who wanders the halls of Pemberley.

Still, a pale blue or a pale green fire follows my fingertips as I drag them along the gutters between your ribs, and my own breath is a efflorescence of crimson. The colors are almost intolerably vivid, between whiles. You could make a parlor game of it, if you liked. I prefer to let it be.

Instead, I hear the thud of my heart, like a distant pile-driver, and the tide-surge of my lungs in the stillness. There's a faint echo in the nerve cords, stretched from point to point, which hum under their breath. Listen and the sound will stop; look and the colors will fade. "Only things that can die are real," says someone -- the Unicorn? -- in a Peter Beagle novel. Sure, it's a point of view: To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Fontanelle

Midsummer, leith an if you care;
the foreleith and the afterleith can fail
to knit. The intercalary comes there,
the fontanelle of the year, the fruiting swale

bandaged, but never healed, by a traitor moon:
we stumble on in haste for the hunter or the harvest,
but never quite escape our hearing of that croon,
that soft and pulsing place, when we are farthest

from the Yule. Suppose it blossomed then,
suppose the sutures opened, like all the doors
on a summer morning, and the cool air came in,
kissing knees and faces, pattering on all fours

over every linseed-polished floor,
suppose we gave a welcome to the third
glorious midsummer moon and called it lord,
suppose we all fell silent until his voice was heard.

Something New and Vigorous and Shameless

Toast with marmalade. Ancient sunlight resting lightly on the northwest surfaces of curtains, restaurant tables, hands. Feeling in full possession of myself at last. The dark rind of my heart settles deeper in its nest of ribs, and I scan the world with a hunter's eye, relaxed but deliberate: the sense of being master of my surroundings, once so common and recently so rare, has come back.

I slept, in two stages, until I was all slept out. It's been a couple weeks since that last happened. I feel like the grass that finally got its rain a couple days ago: a sudden unexpected strength is running through me.

Not that this sense of invulnerability is to be believed. It's one face that turns to me, out of many.

I'm tired of all the old stories, the laments for vanished makers, the regrets for fallen kingdoms. I want to make something new and vigorous and shameless, something that will gleam, something that will catch the setting sun and hold it in the sky. Something that will force other faces to turn to me. There are more, there are more who have business with me before the end. It's time to call them up.

Where The Target Is

Downtown, a woman fell into step with me on the sidewalk. She gave me an open, curious glance, and then asked, "Are you from here?"

"From Portland? I am," I said.

"Do you know where the Target is?"

I had to think about that: there is newish one downtown, I think. "I'm afraid not," I said. "I have a vague feeling it's over thataway," and I waved my hands towards the Southwest. "But I really don't know."

"OK," she said. "Thanks!" And we parted at the next corner.

People often approach me for directions downtown: I tend to meet people's eyes and smile, which makes me approachable, but I walk briskly, like someone has definite business somewhere, which makes me seem easy to get rid of. So that was unremarkable. What was remarkable was that this woman was black.

My first thought, upon meeting her eyes, was that she was African. There was an easy boldness about her, and a cheerful friendly confidence, that was not at all typical of the guarded, formal interactions I usually have with American blacks on the street, and especially not with Portland blacks. This is not a city with a happy history of race relations, nor a particularly happy present. But this woman's accent was pure Midwestern, probably Chicago, with no African trace that I could detect.

So the interaction was heartening. It was not a "here I am a black person approaching a white person" interaction, it was an "I wonder where the Target is?" interaction. Like almost all Americans, I have a desperate longing for the racial history of my country to disappear. This little interaction made me feel that it had. We could start over. The world was new. 

There has been so much bad news coming over the wire that many people feel that things are getting worse, or at best, that they will always remain this way. But I don't actually think that's true. I think that comes of not ever having fully understood how bad things have been, not really having understood or digested the long white terror after the end of the hot phase of the Civil War. Things are bad now. But they are actually better. The fact that people can say how bad it is means that it's better.

A single interaction on the street is not evidence: it barely amounts even to a data point. But I'm old enough to feel it in my bones: this was not an interaction that was possible in my youth, and not one that was likely even twenty years ago, in this town. There is a cultural shift. The wind has changed.

There's everything yet to be done. But I'm filled today with an unreasoning joy, and a certainty that in the end—in the end long beyond my end, of course, but still, in the end—we are going to win this one.

Leaving The Water

I break the surface of the water, and wait
breathing the strange air, feeling my gills
heal over: my arms were so tired of being fins.

Of course, a man can drown
or be asked to pay back taxes,
which doesn't happen to fish.

But hands can grasp hands,
or the nobbles of a steering wheel, or 
the handle of knife;

and fish, however calligraphic,
break down in the dotting of 'i's.
I will take this world of searing air

and the terror of sun,
the scrape of wind on the skin;
I will take the epithelium

of your lips pressed on mine,
I will leave the water
one time, one last time.

Cascadia

I love a woman so black
the night overflows with her,
so big that there's no confining her.

There are the scars that feather backward;
there is the grace of flesh and the jet, ramen-
noodle kink of hair against my arm;

there is the curve of eyelid
that makes the heart stand still,
and listen for an answering beat.

No, not looking for absolution;
the long count of crimes can go
and sing for its supper. It's love,

the only love I know and the only one I've held
through a long strange bright and lingering summer
paused at the tremor's edge.

Hatred of White

A spider, having learned
she is not going to take it at a run
takes a step and pauses
takes a step and pauses
on the vertical porcelain.

Can we call it patience?
Has her desire to escape the bathtub
decreased, or increased? 
Is she aware of human eyes
watching her ascent
with oblique sympathy?

If she falls again
I'll drape a washcloth over the side
for easy access, but she can't know that.
She is betting her life on this climb;
and she knows well enough,
snowblind in this blaze of white,
she is a mark for every passing araneophage.

Or maybe she does not, maybe she knows only
unease, distress of spirit, hatred of white,
and the pause at each step 
is helpless as a fall.

Morning Light

Yesterday evening I walked west, toward the city, down from our little upland, across the 82nd Avenue gully, and up the slope of Mt Tabor, high enough to see the dark hills farther east. No mountain: a low cloud cover hid it. But I could see across to Mt Scott. I just wanted to walk, walk forever, hilltop to hilltop. But an hour was about what my knees would do. I turned back for home.

Always this ache, this longing to find some path out. I am so tired, and I can't keep up even with my daily tasks. I have tried to simplify, but the formula eludes me. Too many things too fast. I become duller-witted with each passing day: and even in my prime I was unable to untie these knots. What chance do I have now? Each mistake leads to the next, each waste entails more spending, every sleepless night leads to another. The taste of defeat is on my tongue. A deep breath makes me cough. I've played my bets and lost: why am I still at the table?

I know what's wrong: it's all these days without rain. Feeling sad and wan. Our neighbors aren't watering the tree they planted last year, and it's dying. 

In the morning, the young crows wake first: those strange, bleating caws of the very young corvids, demanding to be fed. They pursue their parents, begging, begging even as they forage. They forage quite competently, but they're still driven by the habit of need, even now when the need is gone.

Morning light filters into the house. I could try to sleep again, or I could wander out into the day. Sleep, I think. Or at least lie down on the couch, and imagine the paths out, and the cold rain. It will rain again, someday.

In a Time of Drought

Already, September hints, the curtains will fall

and the bare limbs of the trees

will tell their secrets again in an urgent whisper,

while the rain 

runs down the hidden paisley gutters of the glass

back and forth, tracing the unseen curves like a finger 

tracing the features of a dreaming friend.

And you listen, you listen hard, but

it's too fast, and there are names you do not know,

names such as "Alteridae" or "Windfool,"

so the syllables keep running, faster than you can hear,

and the secrets keep themselves.

Still, the trees stand, older than us and prouder,

and the leaves are thick now, from the valley to the hill;

sap spills over, leaf by leaf, 

and the city brick is sticky underfoot.

There is no God but God and God

is a voiced velar stop, follow by a back vowel, culminating

in a voiced apico-alveolar stop.

In the beginning, we are told, was the word,

not the speaker. In which case also

the beginning was the leaf, and the tree perhaps

an afterthought, slowly bringing a sky in its wake,

and drawing a new sun up over the horizon

filling the world with the light of its desire;

and last of all— 

Have you ever thought of how in English,

the beginning of God is a sort of strangling,

a drowning and a death? And once started, 

you must go on, delivering what breath remains to you?

Only then do you tap the aveolar ridge

with your tongue, one last expense of breath,

and after that act of faith, only after, 

do you get to breathe again. 

Other languages, other stories, no doubt;

and the rain will rain harder this Fall 

than it has ever rained before: 

this summer longs for the falling rain

as the word longs for a voice.

Bracket

Proleptic grief: I suppose 
I had better get used to it.
So often death 
comes heralded now,
bracketed like 
a First World War
artillery barrage:
one specialist says a year
(too long) and another
a couple months
(too short) and the death
moves slowly into focus,
churning up the soil
before and after.

You may invite 
your trenchmates
to observe the remaining beauties of nature
how the blasted tree spines stand
like black runes
in the white morning;
how the rich regal purple,
blue, and green of the fly's body,
that magnificent iridescence,
is the next glory we will have:
but don't expect 
enthusiastic reply.

Better the long slow scrimshaw
better the memorized letter from home
better 
a snatch of sleep in the rocking earth.

Cornrows

Cornrows, braids,
close-written texts rising from the scalp;

cuneiform hair gleaming on the wet clay
of a Sumerian morning:

weeping, weeping, long ago.
Did you ask, were you told,

why your fathers took spear and shield
and walked away with the dust between their toes,

and their soles already cracking?
It was the long tallies in clay,

bushels of grain owed and not delivered,
and now woven into your hair as the debt

of your skin and your people:
justice must be served, they say.

The counting of coup will never end,
and the doves are shot with the olive in their mouths.

Quilt

Spin backwards till the whine of the centrifuge
rises to a shriek, then cut the fuel line. Down
fly the red and white streamers: down
fly the tinged drops. Above 
you see what you want to see.
Down here, it's all the glass and the quick poison.

Look, just because it's one thing doesn't mean it's not another.
The day sank in smoke and a sweet sour smell
like a wound gone bad. The stars missed their footing:
Someone cranked the wheel
and shook them down the shabby front of heaven.

Look, even now some one is lying
as they lay out the big squares: orange,
the night-dark of eggplant or avocado,
a deep-stirred red to call for justice.
In the end 

a quilt lasts because the woman who sewed the backing
knew or didn't know what she was doing: some quiet lady
in a small Midwestern town,
willing to meet any power of the Kingdom of Hell
armed only with her sewing machine and the right color of thread.

You laugh, but the devil doesn't. He has not 
had a good night's sleep since the last time 
she threaded in the bobbin. Who'd be the Lord of Darkness?
All work and no play. With the rise of Arcturus, and a hint 
of the Borealis, the ground will shake,
and every bridge will fall into its river.

Tidal Flats

I'm dimly aware of not being my own master, that the words I'm saying are funneled through me. Echolalia. Not just the words; the thoughts as well. The longing for freedom as well as the longing for self: it's so deceptive. Neither is what I want: what I want is other people in subjection. Which would be all very well, were it not that holding people in subjection was my final answer, in the game of "let's define evil!" Which might still be very well, if a feeble and scatterbrained old man had any chance of subjecting anyone. As it is, I get to watch everything I've built and heaved up out of the wrack sliding down into the sand again. Wrong again.

And so I try to put the pieces together another way. Suppose I had been building out of love, rather than out of the desire for domination? Well, one is surely a distorted image of the other -- but which of which? And how would I know? And who has time to find out? Because we're far out on the flats, and the tide is coming in.

This absolute conviction that I am wrong is one of the few constants of my life. It is a psychological phenomenon, not a philosophical one. Of course I am convinced of my wrongness: I always have been, and presumably I always will be. Gnawing on that is not going to yield any marrow.

No, I have to turn, and breathe deep, and open my hands. This is the shadow of a day of idleness, that's all. It means nothing. It is sending me no message.

Turn seawards. Let the tide come. Since when have I been afraid of the sea? Not my worst enemy could accuse me of that.

Milk Witch

"TaraxacumOfficinaleSeed" by Greg Hume - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TaraxacumOfficinaleSeed.JPG#/media/File:TaraxacumOfficinaleSeed.JPG

Blowball, cankerwort, doon-head-clock;
I always took dandelions the wrong way.
They were beautiful, I thought. Fierce.
Tougher than the tame grass;
more extravagant. Splinter-headed suns
drooping one day, and the next
(witch's gowan, milk witch)
lifting perfect spheres of white aeronauts,
ready to take to the reckless breeze.
Weeds: they grow where they're not wanted.
Yellow-gowan, Irish daisy, monks-head, puff-ball.
Well, so did I, and I plan to go on
wrecking the lawns of my betters, scattering my seed
wide as the wind will take it.

Five Tips: What To Do If You're A Person Who Can't Save Money

Well, you're not a person who can't save money. But leave that aside for now. For the moment let's think about the problem this way: there are two people wearing your body and living your life and making your decisions. One of them wants to save money and one of them doesn't.

Tip #1: Treat both of these people as fully rational and intelligent. Because they are. There are lots of excellent reasons for spending money. There are good reasons (though fewer) for spending money you don't have. Your spendy self is not a willful unteachable brat. She's a human being with deep and important reasons for doing everything she does. Find out what they are. Find out why she thinks these things are more important than saving money. Honor her intentions. She's not going anywhere. Your solution is going to involve either enlisting her, or tricking her. Enlist her if you possibly can, because it's not as easy to trick her as you might think.

Tip #2: Trick your spendy self if you can. If you have an employer with a savings plan, which lets you save your money before you ever see it, and makes it hard to take the money back out once it's in, then do that.

Tip #3: If you're self-employed, or in debt, that won't work. You're going to have to enlist your spendy self. Get her on your side. Find the moments when she spends too much, and interrogate her about them. Why does this expenditure seem so imperative? What's at stake? Don't treat her like a naughty child. Treat her like an adult. She might be right, after all. But it's likely that you can persuade her that whatever end she's trying to achieve by spending this money -- generally, making somebody happy -- can actually be better served by NOT spending it. Saving that money rather than buying a treat -- that is the treat. You're buying them, and not just yourself, financial room to maneuver. You're buying freedom. You're buying treats to enjoy later.

Tip #4: Realize that they're out to get you. I don't ordinarily encourage this frame of mind, but in this case it's totally appropriate. They are out to get you. The marketers and credit card companies and banks, the media, often even your friends, are all trying to manipulate you into spending money. If you feel like the target of a plot, its because you are. Cultivate paranoia and even a little hatred. This economy is, by design and with full intent, a machine to manipulate you into spending so hard that you have to work ever harder just to keep up, so that you never have time to pause, never have time to think it over, never have room in your life for art or God or love or contemplation. Push back. They'll nickle-and-dime you into submission, if they possibly can. Screw them. That's not what life is for.

Tip #5: Remember, when you're scrimping: you are already this poor. You are not pretending to be poor in order to be rich later. You really are this poor, and by saving twenty percent of what you make -- the bare minimum, for most people, to set up a comfortable retirement -- you are simply facing the facts of your poverty. Face them boldly and fiercely. Be proud of being a person who understands reality and is willing to be real. Do it for yourself, and do it for the people you love. They need your example.

A Facebook Translation

Enorme tronco que arrastró la ola,
yace el caimán varado en la ribera;
espinazo de abrupta cordillera,
fauces de abismo y formidable cola.

El sol lo envuelve en fúlgida aureola;
y parece lucir cota y cimera,
cual monstruo de metal que reverbera
y que al reverberar se tornasola.

Inmóvil como un ídolo sagrado,
ceñido en mallas de compacto acero,
está ante el agua estático y sombrío,

a manera de un príncipe encantado
que vive eternamente prisionero
en el palacio de cristal de un río.

------Jose Santos Chocano, EL SUEÑO DEL CAIMÁN



Dream of the Caiman

Enormous log dragged by the wave—
caiman beached on the river shore:
backbone a broken cordillera,
formidable tail, jaws an abyss.

The sun wraps him in a dazzling aureole—
a seeming mail-coat and heraldry,
a metal monster who shimmers
and whose shimmering lays a sheen.

Unmoving as a sacred idol
girt in a mesh of compact steel,
he lies against the still, dark water

like an enchanted prince
who lives an eternal prisoner
of the river’s palace of glass.


See four other translations, with a wonderful introduction, at Via Negativa.

Asking To Be Born

I did not ask to be born, she said.

But then I thought, that might be expecting too much
even of God. How can He know? Maybe more like

a confirmation when you reach the age of reason.

What age is that?

Well, I guess that's the trouble, she said.
As far as God's concerned, I'm not sure
we ever reach it.

She kissed my arm: her wrist so thin
my thumb met my fingers
at the radial pulse.

Man is born to trouble, she said,
as the sparks fly upward.