Enter July, Full of Tongues

No, not guilt, and not be-shouldings: that's not how I roll. I come not from the quaint Victorian town of Neurosisville, but from the howling wilderness of modern Psychosis. The one-winged bird, wisdom without compassion, that's me, limping along with a cocked head and a glare in its beady eye. I may not be able to fly, but I can break your shin with this wing. Don't get chirpy with me.

I long to make something intricate and precise, a Swiss clockwork doll with infinitely articulable hands and fingers: a doll that could snap its fingers in time to West Side Story, perform tapotement on my forearms, or spread its fingers in front of the mirror and whisper “Showtime!” It could ride on my shoulder and sign for me, or snip cigars to hand out to my friends.

Here comes July.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

Tired, as I often am these days: year after year of trying, failing, trying again: respites brief and seldom. I am not easy in my skin. I shift, squirm, glance out the window.

In the morning, every morning, before the world is awake, I go outside and gaze at the sky, at the tumble of clouds or the strangely shifting veils of blue, the eastern sun struggling up through dirty rags and bandages, the power wires. Crows, gulls, hawks. Wandering frets of rain. The cement is cold on my bare feet. I examine every horizon, like a prisoner examining his walls. I try to imagine that I'm at peace.

At breakfast, I read my Spanish book, enter my fifteen new words into my flashcard program. Review my chemistry. Half a dozen new books by friends that I need to get to, reviews I should write. Responses I should make. Who knew that my friends would prove so prolific? I'm proud of them; they amaze me. But I hold them at arm's length. “This needs to be settled first,” I say, and I know that I've found the right words: the only trouble is that I don't know what they signify. What do I mean, “this”? What needs to be settled?

In the evening I do massage, touching mortal men doomed to die; I touch my own decay, feel the fading traces of my own desire. The conversations become more and more telegraphic. This upper trap, between my thumb and forefinger. You know what this means! Remember? This cradling of the head, these fingers gently pulling your hair, this rain of tapotement on your calves: you remember? We've had this conversation before. Just my hand closing on your wrist, and the whole story replays, of pulling your arm over your head, of reaching under your shoulder. Eventually I'll be able to give a whole massage by resting my hand for ten seconds on your sacrum.

I become more and more superstitious. I hoard talismans. Look for signs. Count crows crossing the milk white sky.

June is almost done. The Sun is growing old too, the light will be getting gentler. The year, thank God, is already on the ebb.

Lady Franklin's Lament

From Baffin Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Lord Franklin – has sailed – too well –

I don't know if anyone actually sings it that way: it's the way it came to my ear, long ago, and I like it better than the words I find by googling, which say “In Baffin's Bay” and have the clunky fourth line “Lord Franklin with his seamen do dwell.” The point of the song and the lament is that we don't know where Franklin is – last seen, Baffin Bay, heading northwest – and that he's too bold and skillful for his own good.

Such a haunting song. I sing it to myself often, as I walk along, baffled by the fact that I, of all people, am still here. Not that Franklin was all that skillful, apparently: a bit of a good-natured bungler, maybe, without the wide streak of ruthlessness that makes a good explorer. But that's reality. We were talking about longing, and those people who vanish over the horizon. Which is, of course, all of them.

Huge clouds pile up, throw a water-balloon of rain, run away over the hills. They're followed by blue sky, and then another pile of huge clouds. Makes me uneasy. This is the weather of Ohio, not of Oregon, this whipsaw weather is not what I'm used to. But the shapes of the clouds are arresting. Citadels – cathedrals – lovingly worked and infinitely detailed, shifting like the minute hand of a clock, ineluctably but imperceptibly. You look back up and all the workmanship has changed.

Raw clay under my hands, the creak of the wheel, the spin of moody flesh, the crust of dry earth flaking away, sandalwood and lavender.

“Make me beautiful,” said one of my clients, with a hopeless shrug

“Well, that's easy,” I said. That's always the first thing you do, if you're doing it right. You just lay on hands, and wait for what's beautiful to rise up to meet them. Exactly like crouching down and waiting for an interested cat to come and smooth its whiskers against your hand. No skill required but patience, stillness, and kindness; but it's surprising how few people learn the knack of it.

I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew

Reward Theory

I need to read and think more, but I have been struck by the “reward theory” of obesity: I have long been convinced that obesity is not a primarily a matter of faulty will in some individuals, nor of an intrinsic human propensity to store fat in good times – neither of those explanations holds up well under scrutiny. No, the prime mover must be something in the environment that overrides the homeostatic regulators. At first I was convinced that refined carbohydrates were the villain, and I still eye them with suspicion: the idea being that sugars and starches incite insulin resistance, and make fat cells reluctant to release their energy, so that I become hungry despite the fact that my body actually has plenty on hand – the cellular cupboards are full of food, but they're all locked.

This story certainly explains much more than the stories I believed when I was younger. It explain why I got so voraciously hungry when I had been eating copiously, for instance, something the primitive calories in / calories out theory didn't explain at all: and it explained why low-glycemic foods had no appeal at all, no matter how hungry I was. It was all very well for people to say that I couldn't really be hungry if I didn't want to eat my salad: but that was untrue. The truth of the matter was that the salad was completely irrelevant to my hunger: I could have eaten quarts and quarts of greens without making a dent in it. Eating that stuff did nothing to sate my craving for cookies or potato chips. I had far more luck with low-carb diets than I had ever had with the officially sanctioned low-fat diets of my youth. A low carb diet worked for weeks, and had an astonishing effect on my appetite. For the first time in my life, I could forget to eat: lunchtime would simply go by, unnoticed.

But the cravings for my favorite foods would grow on me, waiting for some moment when I was emotionally low or needy, or had let myself become really hungry. Then they'd pounce, and suddenly I was off on a huge binge: I wouldn't be able to rein myself in for days. They'd start with something that actually was low-carb – pepperoni, say, or something heavily salted or smoked. And once the bets were obviously off, I'd move on to the things I loved most of all: the ice cream, the potato chips, the cookies.

Now along comes the reward theory, which, as I understand it, goes like this: foods that are unnaturally rewarding – that is, that are tastier than anything a human being would ever have come across a hundred thousand years ago – have the same effect we were attributing to insulin resistance, though by a different mechanism: in the presence of these foods, or perhaps in the presence of just the thought of them, the ordinary satiety feedback loops are somehow interrupted, and the body doesn't release its fat stores properly, and we become ravenously hungry – not for just anything, but for those specific foods that make our reward centers light up like a Christmas tree. We will eat these things till we injure ourselves.

Apparently the problem is not just one of overeating, though of course we do that too. The problem is the tastiness itself. It would make us fat even if we didn't overeat. This is bizarre, but an experiment by John Glendinning et al appears to demonstrate it. (See Stephen Guyanet's blog for a more intelligible summary of the experiment. It's really quite astonishing.)

Now, this does not necessarily tell me what to do. There is not necessarily any way to undo the damage that artificially tasty foods have done to my hunger-satiety regulation. The obvious first thing to try, is simply to eat plain foods and to stay away sight, sound, or thought of the things I crave: not at all an easy thing to do in a world filled with diabolically clever advertising and fast food drive-up windows. But I'm giving it a shot, and the meditative discipline I've acquired should help: I have a lot of experience with training my attention. I'll let you know how it goes.

Retreat of the Angels

Potencies and powers
recede over the pines;
empty pale spaces where the sky
hales back.

I fold one arm over the other,
and my hands fall warm on either triceps.

Without thinking I work the muscle fibers,
search for sore spots. It's my job.
Put your bare feet in my lap

and, absently, my thumbs will burrow
for deep aches in between the metatarsals,
while my fingers spread them open like a book.

Read this: the history of our kind. Sapolsky says
if a baboon is unhappy, it is because 
some other baboon is making its life a misery.

We do not think hard enough.
We do not sit down, like Shakyamuni,
and say: “why suffering?”

And why we don't sit down is easy enough:
because we already know the answer:
because we don't care enough to stop
miserabling each other. Simple as that.

The hands of the last morning clouds
open to the wind, are blown away;
the blue folds into itself,

its intention curdles. We have not changed.
The angels
keep up their long retreat.

Rind

So oddly shaped and dear, this head,
with its glossy black dressing:
the shape of a filbert meat.

The hair runs silk through my fingers, and
I can roll it like a trackball. You would think
it meant a heart at rest; you would think
it precluded the biting back of tears. You would be
an old fool.

Oh wind, oh rain, oh God, oh dear,
the grief runs on and on so straight:
A long-distance runner, pounding
on the grass of empty hills.

Up hill and down hill: an echo of feet
that clutch now, nerveless rinds,
in the tray of a wheelchair. As if

someone forgot to trim the claws
from a drumstick in a school lunch:
as if his shoes
were not still by the door.

Paint it White

I want to see the sun
blotted out from the sky.

Mist shading sometimes into rain: the sky a damp, indistinct gray-white. June in western Oregon: the sort of June that seems right and proper to me, Spring as I have always known it. Everything more than a few yards away is softened and blurred a little. That's how I prefer it. I don't like the glaring light and harsh lines of what they call beautiful days. Not for everyday living.

Summer will come of course, a few weeks of what people call good weather, and women will wear distracting clothes, and I'll glance at them guardedly, careful to betray no unbecoming yearning. It's wearing, even exhausting, sometimes: even now, when I no longer particularly cultivate desire, the habits of a lifetime still drive me. Wanting, and wanting to appear not to be wanting – how much of the energy of my life has disappeared into that fruitless back-and-forth? Most of it, maybe. What Buddhism has given me, above all its other gifts, has been other ways to think about desire, other things to build with it than envy or covetousness or shame. I'm a slow learner, but that's not the Buddha's fault. The fact that I'm learning at all is what I pause on.

Wilder, deeper, more intractable, is love itself, and grief: I am helpless and blinded by both of those. That, maybe, is the work of another lifetime.

Skin

for Jessamyn Smyth, on her birthday

She worried at first
when her skin began to dry and peel
and fragments of it lifted and curled

like the scales of a fir cone.
The air was cold on
muscle and fat, and the grit

was unmerciful: it was only reasonable
to suppose the turn was fatal.
But later, as the flakes fell soft, and fluttered down

She felt viscera blossoming,
and strands unwinding,
and she understood

that everything was opening,
that the bones were unfolding
their gorgeous petals of marrow,

the blood was glistening
on the tip of each arteriole,
fine nets of nerve were

rooting in the ground and pulsing in the sky.
Not even the grit
could find purchase;

not even the dust
could annoy, and sleep
would come again like the shadow

of purple
on a little girl’s eyelids
when her father lifts her from the car seat

and tenderly
carries her into the house.
Home now: home at last.

River God

Blue, or not blue, clear at the shift,
uneasy surfaces meddling with slicks,
antlered logs and shavings of wind:

the river god, quick in all his hatreds.
Jealous of skies, or of nothing;
remembering his daughters only

to thwart them when they might be finding friends.
He is hard to love, the river, in all his petty malice.
He blusters and fumes at bridges,

makes empty threats, leers up skirts,
shakes his slimy beard and hides, shivering,
panicked by tug or pebble,

in the reed-bed. To tell the truth he stinks:
he's needed a change of clothes this age and more.
There's whiskey on his breath, or worse.

And yet his blood is ours, he sucks
all the springs of the valley. We feel his cold lips
bruising our throats in Spring;

our hearts hesitate when he takes
a rattling breath; and we know
when the time comes

grumbling and swearing, he'll roll us – bolts
of gray meat tied with gristle string –
down his muddy drain and out to sea.

Significant Figures

One of the joys of a weird alternative education is that I now, at 54 years of age, am doing with great pleasure what most of my cohort did sullenly at age 16. I've backed off my open courseware Fundamentals of Biology course, because it became clear by week two that without chemistry it was going to be hopeless. Now I'm happily settled in with my Complete Idiot's Guide to Chemistry (I liked the Khan Academy lectures, and will keep watching them as well, but they don't have exercises, and there's something reassuring about having an actual book in my pack when I'm trying to learn something.) And I'm learning about significant figures, which no doubt most of my readers, who went to real schools, learned about at a tender age.

It is deeply, seriously cool. How to work with numbers that are unreliable. In the real world, almost anywhere that it matters, numbers are unreliable, and you end up rolling your eyes at some of the laborious arithmetic people undertake, knowing that the final digits of most calculations are trash. What I didn't know was that people had systematized how to do this. There's a protocol for it! I would no doubt have been irritated by it at age 16, when I didn't realize just how leaky the arithmetical boat would be for actually getting anywhere; at 54, I'm enchanted.

---

The sky is darkening: I should hop on my bicycle before the rain comes, I guess. But suddenly I'm happy. I have book full of things to learn, and a bicycle to ride, and the leaves across the way are greener than any leaves have ever been since human beings first made their way across the Bering bridge and wandered down the West Coast. This beautiful, beautiful place.

---

I am so happy that I deserted: that I left academics, and didn't become a specialist or a professional, learning more and more about less and less. It would have been the lucrative thing to do, but my heart always hated the idea. And now I'm free to take up chemistry lovingly, rather than wade resentfully into a pile of academic journals. I'll never have one of those palaces in the West Hills, where I go to do many of my in-home massages, the spacious rooms and lovely windows looking out over the champagne, where the lights twinkle at dusk. But I think I enjoy the views more than the inhabitants. And I get to lay hands tenderly on people, which is what I always wanted most of all.

It's been a life with a lot of odd turnings and detours, but I would not trade it for any other, not for any other at all.

River-Wrack

A heavy, humid Spring morning, chill but not brisk. The worst weather for doing massage: I'll break a sweat because it's so humid, and then the sweat will go cold on my forearms. Hate that.

Wishing desperately to turn a corner, to find a door in an ivy-hung wall and slip through to a secret, quiet space. I feel like I've been walking through clouds of spiderweb, and everything's clinging to me, holding me back: tethers without connection, distractions without interest. I know that I'm just anxious about the day, anxious about disappointing people, anxious about getting backed into commitments I don't want and can't keep.

I used to feel this way all the time: now it's an anomaly. I have to remember that, and keep choosing paths that lead away from the feeling and not into it. The feeling itself leads into the feeling, for one thing.

All this unhappiness, all this sadness, piling up like river-wrack on a weir.

Stepped out on the porch this morning, and in the sky a huge gray ship was foundering in a pale sea, in slow motion and in silence. The faint sound of a few half-hearted birds behind me, but nothing in front but that enormous impending ship, coming down to impale itself on the redwoods and douglas firs.

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

Raft

Almost an out-of-body experience,
he said gruffly: too masculine
to say it straight, too full of pain
not to say it at all. And strange,
because massage is all about the body;
maybe “out-of-body” meant
out of pain for a minute or two.
There's not much I or anyone can do
when the crustacean claws the innards,
and the sugar-piss bloats the calves.
But I can still sometimes do this:
send them out on the wide sea of stars,
to float on the raft of my hands.

Brewing

Affection pulses in my stomach
like a drumbeat in the hollow of a drum.

You photographed his hands:
pale, freckled, vulnerable fish

reaching for a pot. Spruce tips
went from green to seaweed yellow;

yeast took a couple anxious breaths
and sank again to learn its breathing new.

Jealousy is for immortals,
or at least Asuras: not for

creatures of seventy seasons,
barely long enough

to imagine love, let alone
unfold its heavy banners

and rig them on the walls. No.
What I have done, awkward as it is

will have to stand: I have a dying
to work out, and children to soothe.

There is no record to set straight:
this fermentation

began long before
the continents came adrift.

Straw

On the night
that I was born,
the bells rang out
across the world.

– Dick Jones, “Stille Nacht,” Ancient Lights

Me, I was launched more or less
with Sputnik, that steel Russian
egg, peeping day and night
with unhatched, unhatchable dreams.
It floated above us, pregnant with fire,
reflecting on Hiroshima.

We grew up with Boris Badenov
and a thousand other tales spun for us
by alcoholic Jews from a ruined world,
trying to imagine innocence. Not
an auspicious beginning,
but you don't get to choose these things.
If we noticed that our mentors' hands
were shaking, we adopted
a hard-bitten style laughably unmeet:
we lived outside of history
in a land of endless Spring, and
it was explained to us carefully
that nothing would ever come due,
that no one would ever die.

How then to meet
an English kid from Horton Kirby
who thought our beats were real?
We stumbled yearning
towards each other's countries, thinking
somewhere was something
that wasn't spoiled. Trade places:
I'll take the Shire, you can have
the big sky and the Big Easy;
I'll take Shakespeare. You
can have the Delta blues.

Only the bells survived.
That, and the flesh, which we handed on
as best we could. We go now wearing
bear-shirt or feathers, wearing the fell
of whatever our people used to kill.

They knew a thing or two, those Olafs:
that it's better to wear your curse
than to run from it; that home is the straw
where your mother had to stop for the night.

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

I don't often read novels about myself. Oh, sure, all novels are about me: I am Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Ishmael – not to mention Rochester and Micawber and Ahab – and so are you; but that's only because we all are. It's only once in decade, maybe, that I meet myself in a novel in a more personal way, so as to turn red and plus myself non: I didn't know anyone knew this about me. Tolstoy wrote a monstrous great novel about me, calling me Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov; Trollope once gracefully eviscerated me under the name of Bertie Stanhope. But no one had written about my childhood and coming-of-age, which was a grimmer story than either Tolstoy or Trollope had in mind. Suppose you are a boy of ferocious will and intense desire. Suppose there is an early overwhelming loss, a hole where the center of your life should be. Suppose what is difficult for other people is easy for you, while what's easy for them is impossible: you can solve quadratic equations in your head, but you can't remember the names of the other kids in your classroom. Suppose the sensual world is overwhelming, full of beauties and patterns, while the social world is full of puzzling, trivial detail. Suppose you are awkward, clumsy, irritating: and yet, when whispering time comes, possessed of an eldritch capacity for persuasion. Suppose your own vulnerabilities are so different from other people's that you regularly wound, and are wounded, without anybody meaning any harm. How do you grow up? And how do you recover from a deep, precocious understanding of evil, which – for all your immaturity – marks you as old?

Well, by blundering about, and doing a fair amount of damage; by lots of dumb luck, and by the grace of strangers who are extraordinarily generous and kind. That's my story, and it's Pip Tatnall's too. I cared enough about the outcome of this novel that when I was twenty pages from the end I suddenly stopped, and put off finishing it for several days. I was afraid it would end badly, and I couldn't have stood that.

It doesn't end badly. But 'nuff said.

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

Glimmer

If you could talk to your 16-year-old self, what would you say?  What advice, warnings, or encouragement would you give your younger self?

Oh, he comes now and then, striding, talking to himself, his pale London Fog raincoat swirling around him, his fine blond hair floating over his shoulders and gathering particles of mist. He was never quite in focus, and he always had that broad grin, the grin of someone anxious to be liked, anxious not to give offense. He went long walks and sang, or recited verse. Or argued things out earnestly with himself. What would I tell him? I don't know. He was smarter and quicker than I am: I don't know that I'd have much business trying to teach him things.

I might tell him: the problem is not finding a utopia. The problem is making yourself a person who could live in a utopia. Do that, and the utopia will come of its own accord. Fail at that, and no utopia will be of any use to you, even in the unlikely event that any will let you in.

I might tell him: you haven't got a narrative bone in your body. Give up trying to write fiction. Give up trying to be published. The last thing you want to do is muddle your making with your livelihood.

I might tell him: pay more attention to the people you like, and less to the people you admire.

I might tell him: of all the things you're doing now, only one will turn out to have been important and have lasting consequences, and that's finding a wife.

I might tell him, you'll be stout all your life. Save yourself a lot of grief and don't fret about it.

I might tell him: you take money too seriously and not seriously enough. It's never going to mean anything, but you are going to want it.

I might tell him: look, Kierkegaard says Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Don't try so hard not to be anxious. Don't try to make it hang together. Let the shutters bang in the wind.

I might tell him: beauty will always be a grief to you.

And I might tell him also: spend more time nesting and less time gallivanting.

I might. But I the longer I think about this question, the more it's borne in upon me: I shouldn't be trying to give this young man advice, warnings, encouragement. I should be doing what he most desperately needs someone to do: I should be listening to him.

I should say: sit down with me here, where there's a sound of water, and tell me. Tell me everything, the grief and the longing, the anxiety and the shyness. Tell me about being invisible. Tell me about the dream-maze, far underground, where you wander in the dark, catching glimpses sometimes of a man who is searching, carrying a glimmer in his left hand. What is he be looking for? Why do you see him, at the far end of a long, narrow gallery, every night as you fall into sleep?

One of us is the dreamer and one the dreamed, I suppose. Do we trade places, in the small hours of the night? Does one of us hand off the glimmer to the other, and turn back, defeated again, to find his way back to the daylight world?

No, I don't think advice, or warnings, or encouragement are in order here. I don't understand anything that he didn't.

Eddy

A faint rose-quartz kind of day, everything falling away into distance. One friend said of another, “all her paintings have the same horizon line,” and I think all of mine would too, if I were to paint.

My eye is always drawn to the point of convergence, to the place where all things meet. If I ever realize that it's only a fact of the eye, I don't know what I'll do. I could invert it and decide that my eye is where all things meet. Every ray of light that I perceive, from a star or hill or the salt shaker on the next table, has ridden a straight line to come to my eye, out of whatever unguessable distance, from its last glance. Which is a disquieting thought, if I hold on to it long enough. All this radiance for me? The prodigality of it makes me nervous: I've clearly been cast for a far larger part than I have any idea of playing.

Sometimes too when I think of the river, I feel the pull of the whole watershed that draws into the Willamette and the Columbia, the tug of all the water in my body wanting the sea. Not long now! It's just pooled here for a moment; it's just a brief eddy and swirl.

Patterns

Up at Tosi's, where there's no wireless. It feels strange, now, to be disconnected: I like it in a way, but I find my mind groping, at every transition, for some way to check for new mail and new Facebook notifications. The way, when the kids were little, I would always be checking their safety, always be listening for noises or ominous silences. I love my online communities; I love being connected; but I don't think this constant nervous nibbling at social reassurance is an entirely good thing. I find myself longing for silence, for the mountains, for the play of wind and water against a deep background throb of quiet. I am not entirely at ease. I have been pushing too hard too long.

Playing with Anki, a flashcard program, as I read my Spanish Hobbit: so far I find it intuitive and easy to use. Adding twenty “cards” per day. Just four days in, so I don't know how it will behave when I've built up a substantial deck, but it might be a tool I want to use a lot.

---

It takes a long slow weary time to become human, for some of us. I preach the Church of the Bitter End and the news of your guilt, boy. I'm loving Marly's White Camelia: the story of Pip's slow coming-to-humanity cuts close to the bone, for me. It's always been too easy for me to cut free of ties, to shrug and wonder if any of it matters, really, to lose myself in the sheer welter of the senses, the building of patterns and their collapse.

A twelve-step program for pattern-addicts, said the Rabbi on my table, describing her path, and I said that was mine too. A 5,000 year tradition insisting on the absolute reality of the Abstract travels west from Palestine, halfway across the world, and meets a 2,500 year tradition insisting on the absolute unreality of the Abstract, which has traveled east halfway across the world the other way from India, and now they're thumbs in the hollows of the shoulders in a sunny room in Portland, Oregon, and they find that they've become very close to the same thing. How's that for a pattern? Leave it. Leave all of them.

I'm a slow reader of fiction now: I'm more tuned to poetry than to prose. I like to read a page or two and then mull it over, maybe write back to it. There's something to be said for losing yourself in a story for days, taking it in so fast you don't even know what you're drinking till you're drunk of it, but that doesn't seem to be my way any more.

Clouds piling up in a sky that was pure blue this morning: the sun has vanished and my hands are cold. Time to ride home, change the laundry, make a salad, get to work. Cross the street carefully and watch for cars, my dears. We need you.

Ode to a Sky-Lark

A bright cloud with two deep, gray gullies,
as though a huge W had been pushed into its dough
early in the baking. I glance away and back: the two –
though not moving – have grown into one, and the one
opens like a hand that mimes a flower. Beyond, somewhere,
the blue fields stretch away, and passengers with window seats
look down on torqued towers
and a half-risen, candy-breaded floor.

Already their calves are aching, and they think
thrombosis and embolism, syncope of pilots,
the carelessness of maintenance guys, occlusion
of arteries and fuel-lines. Somewhere above again,
the delicate lines that Glenn and Gagarin traced,
scribbled over now with satellites for phones,
and filamented drones of unknown purpose.

Higher still and higher from the earth thou springest
like a cloud of fire, the blue deep thou wingest,
and singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest,
I suppose. I have never heard you, never will,
I will never lie back on the meadow-floor
of some brickly Scottish island hill.
No more journeys in the air for me. I'm bound
under the threads of space, the woven nets of time.

The webs are falling on my upturned face:
snowfalls of consequence, dews of karma,
wetting and drying and wetting again.
They thicken and brittle the mask:
the sheathing grows stiff even as the jelly
weakens within. Undress while you still can!
While the mud caked on your jeans is still
soft and wet, and the smell of grass is strong.

Aftertaste

Whether an act of grace was a finder's fee,
whether the joy will be stained or wholly new,

whether the admiration will leap as high, or higher,
whether the body will please, or more, or less:

these are questions I can face with equanimity,
if slightly hard. The zest of the fruit, say,

where the vitamins are. This much
I knew when I sniffed the rind.

I even knew it would be good for me
(“five points from Gryffindor, for being

an insufferable know-it-all.”) So.
But I am lost today, and all days,

wandering by the river where the old
concrete granaries are split and weeping,

silos opening gasping mouths to the sky,
where the ships no longer come, where

the boot of a longshoreman would sound as strange
on the lingering cement as the knock

in the bud of a stethoscope, as the murmur
of a heart that's not quite sound.