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.

Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Makings of a Drum

Rise up,

you sleepy, wayworn worm,

shrug off your crusty jacket,

lift your eyeless head

to the beating sky.

Ten thousand hands have held you –

wake or sleep or dream –

and still

you seek the friction ridges

of yet another palm.

What is it, then,

that one blind snake

can teach another?

Light moves

(cautious, delicate)

between the shutter and the wall:

I have heard that daylight begins

in just such a tremulous,

uncertain commerce.

Somewhere, behind the mountain and the cloud

a sun is struggling in the nets of snow;

somewhere a heart has found 

the makings of a drum.

Waterman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imaginary Lines

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

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

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