The woods are more open by the day.
Three croaks from overhead: a raven,
rattling like gravel in an ice cream churn.
We've moved to the high country
where the power lines cut the sky
into polygons of cloud
too bright for human eyes: where
the stars burn like acetylene,
and loneliness fits over your heart
like the sleeve of a sphygmomanometer.
What impends – what waits – what hangs –
is a noiseless leaning tower of air.
In response to this Morning Porch post.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Ruins
There are always ruins, she said. I used to think, but not here: not in this raw country. The Indians left no real trace, and our traces, the wounds we've inflicted on the forest, are still open and bleeding. There's nothing calm or elegiac about the trash fields left by clear-cutting.
But I was wrong, though I had to grow to middle age to understand why. For one thing, the Indians did leave traces, and in fact they're still here: they just didn't leave the sort of traces I knew how to see. And for another, with enough practice you can see the present wounds as ancient tumbled temples. The space of years and the paint flaking off the white bones of the statues, the impenetrability of the old carved letters, those are accidents that make it easier to see the futility of ancient hopes. With practice, you can see the stumps and snags and quick-rusting cables the same way. The ambitions are no less forlorn and distant for having moved men yesterday instead of couple thousand years ago.
I traveled in Greece when I was in my early twenties – it was I think on my 22nd birthday that I sprang up a slope spattered with massive stone blocks to the top of the hill of Mycenae – and nothing hit me so hard in the face as a Greek tour guide, in the front of a bus, announcing with pride our entrance into the Forest of Daphne. I craned my neck: I looked everywhere, bewildered. We were swaying through a stand of sparse shrubbery and spindly second-growth pines. It was on my lips to ask, “where is the forest?” when I understood. This was the forest. And yet Greece had forests, real forests, once. And then almost at once we were on the other side of this wretched man's “forest,” driving on to the next wonder.
There are always ruins. When we were moving out of the old house, I drove to the Powell's warehouse, where they buy books in bulk, and brought in box after box of decaying books: yellowed paper, cracking spines. They bought a tenth of them, for a tenth of what I paid for them. The rest, a person could dump into a bin to be sent to hungry libraries in the third world. I dumped them there. All those books. I'm not one of those people who buys books and doesn't read them: I had read all of these, at least once, at some point in the long backward of days. They were supposed to make me wise, or at least knowledgeable. Ha.
After a month of dislocation, a month in which I've ridden my bike maybe twice, my own body is a ruin: I haul myself out of bed with an effort; I use my arms to help heave myself up from a cafe booth. It all goes to wrack so quickly.
But I was wrong, though I had to grow to middle age to understand why. For one thing, the Indians did leave traces, and in fact they're still here: they just didn't leave the sort of traces I knew how to see. And for another, with enough practice you can see the present wounds as ancient tumbled temples. The space of years and the paint flaking off the white bones of the statues, the impenetrability of the old carved letters, those are accidents that make it easier to see the futility of ancient hopes. With practice, you can see the stumps and snags and quick-rusting cables the same way. The ambitions are no less forlorn and distant for having moved men yesterday instead of couple thousand years ago.
I traveled in Greece when I was in my early twenties – it was I think on my 22nd birthday that I sprang up a slope spattered with massive stone blocks to the top of the hill of Mycenae – and nothing hit me so hard in the face as a Greek tour guide, in the front of a bus, announcing with pride our entrance into the Forest of Daphne. I craned my neck: I looked everywhere, bewildered. We were swaying through a stand of sparse shrubbery and spindly second-growth pines. It was on my lips to ask, “where is the forest?” when I understood. This was the forest. And yet Greece had forests, real forests, once. And then almost at once we were on the other side of this wretched man's “forest,” driving on to the next wonder.
There are always ruins. When we were moving out of the old house, I drove to the Powell's warehouse, where they buy books in bulk, and brought in box after box of decaying books: yellowed paper, cracking spines. They bought a tenth of them, for a tenth of what I paid for them. The rest, a person could dump into a bin to be sent to hungry libraries in the third world. I dumped them there. All those books. I'm not one of those people who buys books and doesn't read them: I had read all of these, at least once, at some point in the long backward of days. They were supposed to make me wise, or at least knowledgeable. Ha.
After a month of dislocation, a month in which I've ridden my bike maybe twice, my own body is a ruin: I haul myself out of bed with an effort; I use my arms to help heave myself up from a cafe booth. It all goes to wrack so quickly.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Notes
Three preceptors have told me three different stories recently, and I consider them as I wash down the little stand – full of construction grime – to make myself a sink for shaving.
One told me: “you are fearless: I have always appreciated that about you.”
And one said, “you are soft,” which others have said of me. They are to be taken as words of praise from Buddhist lips, or from a poet's, I suppose.
And yet another said, “but there's no problem!”
Of course there is a problem, but – I translate – what if the problem is not what I think it is? What if a person with one sweep of the arm cleared the table – books and papers and dishes flying – and simply started over?
I have let so many nets of expectation, so many interpretations of my duty, settle over me; I have developed so many habits of thought and action for fulfilling or evading them, that I can no longer see through it all. They don't just color my world: they make it. But there is a real world out there, a world of red leaves, and shifting sunlight, and ants with ticklish stomachs, that cares nothing for my obligations.
Theodore Roosevelt's uncle was the man who arranged for building and fitting out the Alabama, in England. I never knew that.
Over there, the heads of two Douglas firs stand against an October sky the color of old snow. The trees are an old, tired black: the black of a belt that is fading a little, going a little green. They don't move.
One told me: “you are fearless: I have always appreciated that about you.”
And one said, “you are soft,” which others have said of me. They are to be taken as words of praise from Buddhist lips, or from a poet's, I suppose.
And yet another said, “but there's no problem!”
Of course there is a problem, but – I translate – what if the problem is not what I think it is? What if a person with one sweep of the arm cleared the table – books and papers and dishes flying – and simply started over?
I have let so many nets of expectation, so many interpretations of my duty, settle over me; I have developed so many habits of thought and action for fulfilling or evading them, that I can no longer see through it all. They don't just color my world: they make it. But there is a real world out there, a world of red leaves, and shifting sunlight, and ants with ticklish stomachs, that cares nothing for my obligations.
Theodore Roosevelt's uncle was the man who arranged for building and fitting out the Alabama, in England. I never knew that.
Over there, the heads of two Douglas firs stand against an October sky the color of old snow. The trees are an old, tired black: the black of a belt that is fading a little, going a little green. They don't move.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
From a Love Letter
Just memorized this stanza this morning -- this is from memory:
I don't love you because you're good at rhymesIt is so easy to memorize metrical stuff that rhymes: I got this by heart in five minutes, and started graving it in my long-term memory by saying it over as I walked back from Tosi's; just a couple recitals tomorrow and I'll have it forever. It's from "Love Letter" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg, from the early 80's. The whole poem is marvelous.
and not because I think you're not-so-dumb,
I don't love you because you make me come
and come and come innumerable times;
and not for your romantic overcoats,
and not because our friends all think I should,
and not because we wouldn't or we would
be at or not be at each other's throats,
and not because your accent thrills my ear --
last night you said not "sever" but "severe,"
but then "severe" describes the act "to sever" --
I love you for no reason whatsoever.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
"Opening the World" at St Johns Booksellers
Portlanders: St Johns Booksellers is now carrying Opening the World. Support me and a fabulous local bookstore!
(If you're not in Portland, order it direct from Pindrop.)
(If you're not in Portland, order it direct from Pindrop.)
Monday, October 10, 2011
Tenth Horseman
All day the roar rattles my office window,
the chanting and the drums, the honking
of the horns of supporters safe in cars,
headed for a weekend in the suburbs.
All is horror: your baby faces all alight
and dressed in tattered cotton armor
you think will make you real
when the rubber bullets fly. Oh, go home!
This beast is older than you think,
and he sleeps in your own young blood as well:
if you once wake him well he'll eat you all,
using your own teeth, chewing your own tongues.
Go home and make a peanut butter sandwich.
Find a channel playing Gilligan's Island
or Bewitched. Dream about
some spotty Apollo, some Aphrodite
wearing braces. Do a little algebra homework.
Forget about oppression and justice. Go home.
On empty pavement, two blocks from the march,
drawn up two abreast are nine police
on horseback, still but for the swish
of tails, their plastic visors raised, the horses
visored too, in riot plexiglass.
A strategic reserve, no doubt. Oh please, go home!
The third row was missing a horseman: the third man back
had no one on his right. So they sat
before Agincourt or Crécy, before
Peterloo. Always that one space empty,
held by the phantom dream of order. That's the one:
the one who will panic and begin to shoot.
Oh please, my dears: oh please, go home.
the chanting and the drums, the honking
of the horns of supporters safe in cars,
headed for a weekend in the suburbs.
All is horror: your baby faces all alight
and dressed in tattered cotton armor
you think will make you real
when the rubber bullets fly. Oh, go home!
This beast is older than you think,
and he sleeps in your own young blood as well:
if you once wake him well he'll eat you all,
using your own teeth, chewing your own tongues.
Go home and make a peanut butter sandwich.
Find a channel playing Gilligan's Island
or Bewitched. Dream about
some spotty Apollo, some Aphrodite
wearing braces. Do a little algebra homework.
Forget about oppression and justice. Go home.
On empty pavement, two blocks from the march,
drawn up two abreast are nine police
on horseback, still but for the swish
of tails, their plastic visors raised, the horses
visored too, in riot plexiglass.
A strategic reserve, no doubt. Oh please, go home!
The third row was missing a horseman: the third man back
had no one on his right. So they sat
before Agincourt or Crécy, before
Peterloo. Always that one space empty,
held by the phantom dream of order. That's the one:
the one who will panic and begin to shoot.
Oh please, my dears: oh please, go home.
Friday, October 07, 2011
Death Pledges
It seemeth that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the Feoffor will pay at the day limited such summe or not, & if he doth not pay, then the Land which is put in pledge upon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for ever, and so dead to him vpon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the Tenant, &c. -- Sir Edward CokeWith all due respect to Sir Edward, this is absurd spin and obfuscation. It's called a "death pledge" for the simple reason that someone taking it on knows that he's going to be in debt until he dies. Debt peonage is as old as civilization: it's illuminating to consider,in fact, whether the two terms are not broadly equivalent.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Mortgage
On the wrong side of a continent
which the origami of my heart
has never learned to fold, or on the shore
of islands whose names made my heart catch, oh!
when I had not traveled and learned
that no country is far and fabled
when you get there, or where the scented oil
gathers my hands and your chest together –
on any of these crumbling banks,
with the cold rain rattling, and summer
just a story to soothe the children –
is it too late
to stop the dapper Mephistopheles,
to refinance my soul, consolidate
its mortgage, amortize the beating
of my under-capitalized heart?
House within house, roof under roof:
oh darling! Where tabs and slots of flesh
are fitted and rocked, where happiness
is sold by weight, because (you know, my dear)
contents may settle – I hear
the splatter of the wind against the shingles,
the push of tiny, restless, chitinous feet –
I feel the waste, the coming-on of war.
which the origami of my heart
has never learned to fold, or on the shore
of islands whose names made my heart catch, oh!
when I had not traveled and learned
that no country is far and fabled
when you get there, or where the scented oil
gathers my hands and your chest together –
on any of these crumbling banks,
with the cold rain rattling, and summer
just a story to soothe the children –
is it too late
to stop the dapper Mephistopheles,
to refinance my soul, consolidate
its mortgage, amortize the beating
of my under-capitalized heart?
House within house, roof under roof:
oh darling! Where tabs and slots of flesh
are fitted and rocked, where happiness
is sold by weight, because (you know, my dear)
contents may settle – I hear
the splatter of the wind against the shingles,
the push of tiny, restless, chitinous feet –
I feel the waste, the coming-on of war.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Chopin
Suddenly, Chopin is the theme of my life. On Friday, my massage downtown was done to his music – I have no idea which pieces, I don't know one from another, but I always recognize him, ignorant as I am: I had an album of his piano music, which was the only classical music I ever played back when it was usually Crosby Stills & Nash, or Simon & Garfunkle, on the record player. (Not the stereo: stereo was beyond my means, back then.) I loved the way the piano wandered, seemingly without direction. I've never been able to view the over-organized authoritarian march of symphonies as real music, however grand it may be: music that knows where it's going before it gets there leaves me cold.
So I stroked the chest of my poor South American exile, who longs for warmth, and thought of Schnackenberg's “Kremlin of Smoke,” about Chopin in exile in Paris, Warsaw falling to the Russians, and Chopin, having no more sense than any other musician, but having the extraordinary sense to simply follow the notes. That's all the sense we need. The only discipline we need. As if that weren't to say: all you have to do is the hardest thing in the world.
And then today, Luisa's poem about the ghost of Chopin rising from a Japanese bed:
So I stroked the chest of my poor South American exile, who longs for warmth, and thought of Schnackenberg's “Kremlin of Smoke,” about Chopin in exile in Paris, Warsaw falling to the Russians, and Chopin, having no more sense than any other musician, but having the extraordinary sense to simply follow the notes. That's all the sense we need. The only discipline we need. As if that weren't to say: all you have to do is the hardest thing in the world.
And then today, Luisa's poem about the ghost of Chopin rising from a Japanese bed:
However his name is said, its syllablesSunday at Tom's. Coffee. Over there, a glossy girl of Japanese descent is sitting with a Caucasian couple – kindly, dowdy, gray, and stout. She is sparkling and making jokes, and wagging her index finger at both of them: they are rolling their eyes, but glowing with her warmth. They heave themselves at length out of the booth, and she lifts, hummingbird-like, without effort, to accompany them. Sage is right about how all these things converge to a message:
linger a little: sostenuto, the way water-
drops slide down the glass panes, the way
each prismed surface looks sheathed in another
skin; the way each bud in the garden might be
a heart embalmed, floating in a globe of fluid.
When I nearly knocked myself out in the garage as my brother and I were digging around in the bikes, I found myself on the floor with a pile of toddler toys on top of me. Was this The Universe playing a knock-knock joke where the punch line was my lack of playfulness? I don’t know; but it’s fun to guess.
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Cursed
. . . fans
open in the underbrush like a hundred
feathered eyes. . . .
Oh yes, there was a time
when the back of my hand could see Alcor,
when my knees could read an optometrist's chart
down to the smallest line.
Great sad watery eyes in my shoulder blades
looked backwards with regret;
my every knuckle was nobbled with eye clusters
that gave me a wicked return
to a table-tennis serve.
My penis's hooded lens, on its flexible neck,
could see around corners, up skirts:
every bit of me was eating up light –
the soles of my feet had a sidelong glance
at the passing ants on the sidewalk,
and my elbows blinked sentimentally
at moonset over the river.
How did I dwindle to this one minor pair,
huddled on their cheekbone ledges,
peering through a shrubbery of eyebrow,
timid as soft-boiled eggs?
I have offended some great hulking sweating
son of a sea god, maybe, dripped hot oil on Cupid,
stolen a pie that was cooling on Pluto's
vaporous window-sill. I took the tags off a mattress,
undertipped at a fancy restaurant. Who knows?
My offenses are in ranks, they march to heaven.
Now my palms are empty flesh, my ankles
are lumps of bone: my forehead is blank
as an unwritten check. Not even a lash
flutters at my wrist. My body is blind,
blind as Homer, blind as Stevie Wonder.
I blunder and I stagger:
just two tiny bulbs for guides.
open in the underbrush like a hundred
feathered eyes. . . .
Oh yes, there was a time
when the back of my hand could see Alcor,
when my knees could read an optometrist's chart
down to the smallest line.
Great sad watery eyes in my shoulder blades
looked backwards with regret;
my every knuckle was nobbled with eye clusters
that gave me a wicked return
to a table-tennis serve.
My penis's hooded lens, on its flexible neck,
could see around corners, up skirts:
every bit of me was eating up light –
the soles of my feet had a sidelong glance
at the passing ants on the sidewalk,
and my elbows blinked sentimentally
at moonset over the river.
How did I dwindle to this one minor pair,
huddled on their cheekbone ledges,
peering through a shrubbery of eyebrow,
timid as soft-boiled eggs?
I have offended some great hulking sweating
son of a sea god, maybe, dripped hot oil on Cupid,
stolen a pie that was cooling on Pluto's
vaporous window-sill. I took the tags off a mattress,
undertipped at a fancy restaurant. Who knows?
My offenses are in ranks, they march to heaven.
Now my palms are empty flesh, my ankles
are lumps of bone: my forehead is blank
as an unwritten check. Not even a lash
flutters at my wrist. My body is blind,
blind as Homer, blind as Stevie Wonder.
I blunder and I stagger:
just two tiny bulbs for guides.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Back to Plan A
We've been in the new house a couple days. Our original plan was to shore up the foundation, tear off the roof, replace all the rotten wood, and then put it all back together (maybe with the ceiling pushed up to the roof and a couple skylights), and move in. But at some point Plan B took over: do the minimum now – replace the sewer line to the street and upgrade the electrical system – go ahead and move in, and leave the big repairs and renovations for next summer, when we'd have some experience living in the house. There's things you learn about what a house needs for comfortable living that you only know after you've lived in it for a while.
(I suspect Plan B also took root because Martha thought it unwise to keep me under the stress of living without a home kennel for that long: but she hasn't confessed to that yet.)
But yesterday we found a tiny puddle of standing water up under the ceiling of one of the closets, and tearing down a spongy bit of sheetrock revealed some flourishing mold. Mold like that is serious bad news. So last night we moved back to our long-suffering host's house. It's back to plan A.
Really, I'm relieved. I felt we were jumping the gun, that the house wasn't really habitable yet. And moving in before doing all that work – which would require emptying at least large sections of the house – seemed like deliberately doubling our labor. But we're displaced persons again, for a while. Meanwhile, the sewer work and the electrical work go on. I'm happy anyway to be employing people.
The scale of the sewer work has startled me. When the guy described it, as snaking a new pipe through the old sewer line, I was picturing something minimally invasive: laparoscopic sewer surgery. But this is really impressive incisions: trenches ten feet deep, two mounds of earth on the parking strip as tall as I am. There's a shovel like Mike Mulligan's, only gas-powered, and two big trucks, and crowds of wiry brown men in bill caps with worried expressions and moustaches on their faces. I've never initiated so much physical fuss and to-do in all my days. It's very odd to drive up to one of those “road work” signs with a sense of of ownership. This is my road work.
So – dispatches from the field, as events warrant and permit: we're not home yet. xoxo
Monday, September 26, 2011
Glory
Black and ragged clouds
try to pull from the struggling feet
of black doug firs, black socks;
an invisible ball bearing
in a plastic maze -- the first blue light --
circles the rim of heaven.
An unexpected whip of rain
cuts the bridge of my nose:
we die in glory if we die today.
try to pull from the struggling feet
of black doug firs, black socks;
an invisible ball bearing
in a plastic maze -- the first blue light --
circles the rim of heaven.
An unexpected whip of rain
cuts the bridge of my nose:
we die in glory if we die today.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Byzantium: the Lady-Friend of the Archeologist
The serpent is inlaid with gold,
all the gold that he can hold;
the dove is rimmed with chrysolite –
she hasn't got a hope of flight.
All across the tessellations
march the figured constellations:
God is pictured there as well,
and Noah, leading apes in hell.
Where Jesus is, I couldn't say,
From a boy he's been this way:
his mother says since he could toddle
he's always been inclined to dawdle.
Late to dinner, late to lunch,
enraptured by a sudden hunch
that bees will talk if treated right –
you'd only need to be polite.
You'll find him squatting in the yard,
both eyes closed, listening hard,
to the golden-flickered hum
of the vespid on his thumb.
she lifts her fingers from the tile,
lit by a wandering, ragged smile,
bringing away the thick prosaic
dust from the eyes of the mosaic:
she believes she's found behind the sky,
of gathered lapis lazuli,
the lines of his suddenly stinging doubt
traced in the ancient workman's grout.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Inconceivable
Raven wrote:
“. . . there are things that we can conceive of that are not possible, but there is nothing that is the other way around.” (On the marvelous POEM site, which, alas, requires registration.)
It was not even a main point. You often find people's most deep-seated beliefs this way: not by looking at what they argue about – which are usually the things they are unsure of – but in their throwaway “of course, we all know” remarks.
This is the fundamental divide between me and the community that likes to think of itself as skeptical. I think that statement is false. Not the first part of it, which is clearly true. Of course we can conceive of things that are not possible. Raven's example of Dumbo, an elephant that flies by flapping its ears, is an excellent. Quite conceivable: utterly impossible. No, it's the second part that strikes me as preposterous. “There is nothing that is the other way around,” she says: that is, there is nothing which is possible which we cannot conceive.
Now I suppose, if I were to put her on the spot, she would rapidly backtrack to a more philosophically defensible position: that there is nothing possible which would be inconceivable by a large enough intelligence, or something like that. And discussion would patter away into increasingly abstract and unprofitable realms of theological speculation. I'm not interested in that.
What I'm interested in is what this reveals about the self-identified skeptical mind, which is a staggering confidence in the ability to conceive, or imagine: that there is nothing which we – we, you and I! – Cannot comprehend. It is a faith compared to which belief in ghosts or astrology or a supreme being looks modest and rational. I can only call it grandiose, and in flat defiance of all evidence. I find it charming, deeply attractive, and quite loony.
I know, I know. I've had these conversations, and I'm familiar with the second line of defense, too. If it's not conceivable, we simply have to leave it alone. Wittgenstein said something along those lines: what cannot be put into language must be left in silence. And there's a pat obviousness to this argument which is appealing. But two things. One, I do not believe it, not for a second. Its not what Raven and her community really think. They really think that everything possible is conceivable. For another thing, it is not actually the habit of the scientific mind at all. Banging away at the limits of the conceivable is practically the scientific national sport. If you want to find me an incipient scientist, find me a child of ten who, with all the force of her imagination, tries to conceive of the Earth, to really conceive of it, to feel it in her bones, as a ball flying through space. She fails, of course, but she tries again, and there's a prickle of euphoria and panic as she gets near it. And then she tries more, conceiving of it as both tiny – as we know it to be, an insignificant planet of an insignificant star – and as vast, as we know it to be, huger than anything our mammalian imaginations were ever designed to hold. Nothing, I would say, is more attractive to the mind that takes up science than this moth-like flutter at the burning light bulb of the inconceivable. Most scientists, would think of this a necessary stage of development. Some of them would even think it was the heart of science.
I do think it's the heart of science: I also think it's the heart of religion, and it's why I identify myself, (although I am by most definitions an atheist) as primarily a religious person. I think that fluttering against that light bulb is important; I believe that anyone who stops doing it begins to harden in mind, and to die in spirit. It's why I think that wilderness is sacred, and that its destruction would be a spiritual disaster even if it weren't an ecological one. We need to stand regularly in the presence of what is beyond our control and our imagination. It's why we religious people, even those of us who don't particularly believe in God, think that prayer or contemplation is a necessary part of a good life. Not because it works. Not because we're sure anyone is listening. But because it's taking on the adventure of speaking to something inconceivable, of being willing to take the enormous part of our mind dedicated to social, interpersonal processing and open it to something bigger, in precisely the same way our ten-year-old budding scientist takes the portion of her mind dedicated to conceiving of soccer balls and opens it to the hugeness of the earth.
“. . . there are things that we can conceive of that are not possible, but there is nothing that is the other way around.” (On the marvelous POEM site, which, alas, requires registration.)
It was not even a main point. You often find people's most deep-seated beliefs this way: not by looking at what they argue about – which are usually the things they are unsure of – but in their throwaway “of course, we all know” remarks.
This is the fundamental divide between me and the community that likes to think of itself as skeptical. I think that statement is false. Not the first part of it, which is clearly true. Of course we can conceive of things that are not possible. Raven's example of Dumbo, an elephant that flies by flapping its ears, is an excellent. Quite conceivable: utterly impossible. No, it's the second part that strikes me as preposterous. “There is nothing that is the other way around,” she says: that is, there is nothing which is possible which we cannot conceive.
Now I suppose, if I were to put her on the spot, she would rapidly backtrack to a more philosophically defensible position: that there is nothing possible which would be inconceivable by a large enough intelligence, or something like that. And discussion would patter away into increasingly abstract and unprofitable realms of theological speculation. I'm not interested in that.
What I'm interested in is what this reveals about the self-identified skeptical mind, which is a staggering confidence in the ability to conceive, or imagine: that there is nothing which we – we, you and I! – Cannot comprehend. It is a faith compared to which belief in ghosts or astrology or a supreme being looks modest and rational. I can only call it grandiose, and in flat defiance of all evidence. I find it charming, deeply attractive, and quite loony.
I know, I know. I've had these conversations, and I'm familiar with the second line of defense, too. If it's not conceivable, we simply have to leave it alone. Wittgenstein said something along those lines: what cannot be put into language must be left in silence. And there's a pat obviousness to this argument which is appealing. But two things. One, I do not believe it, not for a second. Its not what Raven and her community really think. They really think that everything possible is conceivable. For another thing, it is not actually the habit of the scientific mind at all. Banging away at the limits of the conceivable is practically the scientific national sport. If you want to find me an incipient scientist, find me a child of ten who, with all the force of her imagination, tries to conceive of the Earth, to really conceive of it, to feel it in her bones, as a ball flying through space. She fails, of course, but she tries again, and there's a prickle of euphoria and panic as she gets near it. And then she tries more, conceiving of it as both tiny – as we know it to be, an insignificant planet of an insignificant star – and as vast, as we know it to be, huger than anything our mammalian imaginations were ever designed to hold. Nothing, I would say, is more attractive to the mind that takes up science than this moth-like flutter at the burning light bulb of the inconceivable. Most scientists, would think of this a necessary stage of development. Some of them would even think it was the heart of science.
I do think it's the heart of science: I also think it's the heart of religion, and it's why I identify myself, (although I am by most definitions an atheist) as primarily a religious person. I think that fluttering against that light bulb is important; I believe that anyone who stops doing it begins to harden in mind, and to die in spirit. It's why I think that wilderness is sacred, and that its destruction would be a spiritual disaster even if it weren't an ecological one. We need to stand regularly in the presence of what is beyond our control and our imagination. It's why we religious people, even those of us who don't particularly believe in God, think that prayer or contemplation is a necessary part of a good life. Not because it works. Not because we're sure anyone is listening. But because it's taking on the adventure of speaking to something inconceivable, of being willing to take the enormous part of our mind dedicated to social, interpersonal processing and open it to something bigger, in precisely the same way our ten-year-old budding scientist takes the portion of her mind dedicated to conceiving of soccer balls and opens it to the hugeness of the earth.
Monday, September 19, 2011
To my Daughter, away from Home
It's like a face
that has just looked away:
it's like the outspread
hand of a dancer
when the footlights
are cut. A faint
sickle gleam
is laid over its cheek,
and it turns with
the rising or the setting sun.
Darling, don't grieve for home:
the ghosts are gathered
thick enough already; the light
has already bled into the ground.
that has just looked away:
it's like the outspread
hand of a dancer
when the footlights
are cut. A faint
sickle gleam
is laid over its cheek,
and it turns with
the rising or the setting sun.
Darling, don't grieve for home:
the ghosts are gathered
thick enough already; the light
has already bled into the ground.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
"Opening the World" on Peony Moon
If you're interested in contemporary poetry at all, one of your regular pull-offs on the information highway should be Michelle McGrane's Peony Moon: she features new poetry books and chapbooks, with -- this is the rare part -- a couple pages of poems, enough to really get your teeth into and decide if you want to read more of this poet. Following Peony Moon is a poetic education.
So I was delighted and grateful this morning to see my book featured there, along with two of my favorite poems. One of the the faintly louche pleasures of publishing a book of poems, I find, is discovering which of the poems different people gravitate toward.
I was surprised and pleased by both choices. "Calculus" was written to a prompt from one of the now-extinct prompt sites, I'm afraid I no longer remember which one, to write about mathematics. I think this was supposed to be a really hard prompt, with the idea that if you could write a poem about math you could write a poem about anything. To me, of course, it was cake. I have an intensely emotional and "poetic" response to mathematics: for me poetry and math inhabit the precisely the same ecstatic, extravagant spiritual world of perfect forms and impossibilities. I dashed off "Calculus" as fast as I could type. I didn't expect anyone to like it, though. (If there's one thing blogging has taught me, it's to have confidence in my audience, and trust them to follow me. I couldn't count the number of things I've posted things, expecting dead silence, only to receive warm, unexpected responses, often from the unlikeliest people.)
"Border Country" was another poem whose response surprised me. It's full (I thought) of private imagery and of imagery from Tibetan Buddhism. I thought it was a bit of self-indulgence, a piece of private poetry. But it resonated immediately with the part of my audience I think of as "the poetry people," and I've never been sure why. Maybe they have more of a taste for being teased, that way, than most people.
Here's the link. Thank you, Michelle!
So I was delighted and grateful this morning to see my book featured there, along with two of my favorite poems. One of the the faintly louche pleasures of publishing a book of poems, I find, is discovering which of the poems different people gravitate toward.
I was surprised and pleased by both choices. "Calculus" was written to a prompt from one of the now-extinct prompt sites, I'm afraid I no longer remember which one, to write about mathematics. I think this was supposed to be a really hard prompt, with the idea that if you could write a poem about math you could write a poem about anything. To me, of course, it was cake. I have an intensely emotional and "poetic" response to mathematics: for me poetry and math inhabit the precisely the same ecstatic, extravagant spiritual world of perfect forms and impossibilities. I dashed off "Calculus" as fast as I could type. I didn't expect anyone to like it, though. (If there's one thing blogging has taught me, it's to have confidence in my audience, and trust them to follow me. I couldn't count the number of things I've posted things, expecting dead silence, only to receive warm, unexpected responses, often from the unlikeliest people.)
"Border Country" was another poem whose response surprised me. It's full (I thought) of private imagery and of imagery from Tibetan Buddhism. I thought it was a bit of self-indulgence, a piece of private poetry. But it resonated immediately with the part of my audience I think of as "the poetry people," and I've never been sure why. Maybe they have more of a taste for being teased, that way, than most people.
Here's the link. Thank you, Michelle!
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Infanta
Infanta, the score of five claws
drawn crosswise over your cheekbone;
consort to princes
of the blood (that one particular blood):
there is yet time but not very much of it --
you could, you could, you could strip off your gold
and go naked into the world of hummingbirds
and of yellow birch leaves spattering light
across lattices of bright white bones
where kisses
come without question or consequence;
where my hand would rest on your belly
and move only with your breath.
drawn crosswise over your cheekbone;
consort to princes
of the blood (that one particular blood):
there is yet time but not very much of it --
you could, you could, you could strip off your gold
and go naked into the world of hummingbirds
and of yellow birch leaves spattering light
across lattices of bright white bones
where kisses
come without question or consequence;
where my hand would rest on your belly
and move only with your breath.
Friday, September 16, 2011
The Windows Here
You tear the paper packet open
and push your tongue inside.
Sugar meets the spurt of saliva.
It crusts and crumbles; a clear syrup
forms in the channels. Sweetness!
And yet prickly and dry as sand.
The husky voice of the respirator
sings torch songs to a chirping backbeat
of vital signs: O baby,
it croons, O if you only knew.
Huge cakes filled with honey-air
and flavored helium: happy birthday,
happy birthday, dear! This was on sale,
and that stirred an unfamiliar rasping
near the prostate. Birthday candles
of lithium burn a brilliant blue
in the pure oxygen of your room.
One slender needle will suffice
for cake and lung and balloon.
One long venomed stinger
protruding from an infected abdomen
(still jacking) will make you well:
everyone knows that poison
cut small enough will heal.
It's not that your hands are too weak,
dear: it's that the windows here
were never made to open.
and push your tongue inside.
Sugar meets the spurt of saliva.
It crusts and crumbles; a clear syrup
forms in the channels. Sweetness!
And yet prickly and dry as sand.
The husky voice of the respirator
sings torch songs to a chirping backbeat
of vital signs: O baby,
it croons, O if you only knew.
Huge cakes filled with honey-air
and flavored helium: happy birthday,
happy birthday, dear! This was on sale,
and that stirred an unfamiliar rasping
near the prostate. Birthday candles
of lithium burn a brilliant blue
in the pure oxygen of your room.
One slender needle will suffice
for cake and lung and balloon.
One long venomed stinger
protruding from an infected abdomen
(still jacking) will make you well:
everyone knows that poison
cut small enough will heal.
It's not that your hands are too weak,
dear: it's that the windows here
were never made to open.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Refugee
But seriously, how could you say a person had wasted his life? You would have to be sure that a) that his life was intended for some particular purpose and b) that he hadn't met it. Maybe you're privy to God's private thoughts like that, but I'm not. And likewise, I give a skeptical ear to discussion of a meaningful life. Meaningful to whom? And meaning what? Is it really proper – is it really meaningful to discuss a life as if it was an intelligible statement? Possibly. But if so, both the speaker and the audience are supernatural creatures, beyond our understanding. We should probably not get too big for our britches. Lets leave the meaning of our lives to creatures with the capacity to assess it.
I prefer more mundane questions: am I leading a useful life? Am I leading a satisfying one? And these are pretty easy to assess. I'm leading a useful life, if people would be distressed if I vanished. I'm leading a satisfying life, if I wake up looking forward to things. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe, but not much.
Just finished reading a fat history of Mexico. In times of stress I always become more political; and being – in the most minor way possible – a refugee, makes me think of refugees everywhere. My house stands empty, not yet moved into: the house we are buying has stood empty for six months, and belongs, in vanishingly minute shares, to people who have never seen it, will never see it, have not the faintest human interest in it: indeed, it's very difficult to determine, when a bank owns a property, just which bank it is, and equally difficult to determine who owns that bank. And the sale is hanging fire only because the bank (whatever bank it is) doesn't seem to know for sure whether, when it foreclosed on the previous occupants (whoever they are), it entirely extinguished all of their legal claims to the property. The temptation to simply move into this vacant house and get some people employed in making it habitable is strong. We wait, though.
We sleep in a living room with swords in brackets on the walls, a halberd or two, and a sort of shrine made of two daggers and needle-pointed vambrace above the mantel. The three samurai swords and the halberd make the four horizontal strokes of a Chinese character, at night, which the streetlight completes by supplying vertical strokes from the mullions of the window. At bedtime I read The Hobbit aloud to Martha, by dim lamplight. My eyes are not as good as they used to be, but I know the book so well, having read it aloud so often, that I need to distinguish only a few words per line to recite it correctly.
The weather has cooled, and we begin to worry about what we'll do when the rains come: much of our stuff is still loose in the back of the pickup (especially heavy stuff, such as the weight machine) or lining Ashley's driveway in a litter of cardboard boxes and makeshift containers. It's not supposed to rain until Saturday, though, and while I go to work and catch up on things, Martha exercises her genius for compression. I think of James Stephens' Philosopher, who teaches the precept: If there is no more room in a box, you must take something out in order to put something else into it, and his Philosopher's Wife's precept: There is always more room in the box.
Ashley's is close to Tosi's, so close that each morning I hesitate about whether it's even worth hauling my bicycle out of the garage. I could just stroll. At Tosi's I sit in the booth I've sat in of a morning for twenty-five years, and look across the slant of Sandy Boulevard to the north: four doug firs march away down the ridge, in a dwindling sequence, towards the invisible Columbia, beyond Ken Van Damme's Automotive. (Ken has breakfast here too, in the morning, and reads the paper.) Tressa, the ablest waitress I have ever known, brings coffee exactly when I want it, and remembers not only my regular order but also the different order I would make if, by some calamity, I didn't make it in until horribly late, say 8:30. No wifi at Tosi's, though. I can't decide if that's good or bad.
Each morning I think about how full of unemployed people Portland is, and I try to figure out some labor-intensive enterprise I could start up, to help all those people, like Martha, who are chock-full of skills, and are eager to work, and can't find a job. But it's not a kind of thinking I'm used to or good at, and I soon give up. I think vaguely about buying cheap properties and doing a bit to make them good, cheap, ecologically sound rentals, since the great American public has decided that the working class should no longer be able to afford to buy houses. But I know that idea only comes to me because my father did something like that, under radically different economic circumstances; and that few people could be less suited than me, by temperament or skill, to be a slumlord, however benevolent.
I wonder if I can bear to vote for a Democrat for president, again. I'm not one of those people who cherished great hopes of Obama, if you'll remember: he was and remains a center Democrat, and his administration has been governing, by most measures, to the right of Richard Nixon's. I like him more, personally, than I've liked any president since Jimmy Carter: I like his civility and his prudence and his imperturbability. Nevertheless, he is, politically, what in my youth would have been called a moderate Republican: I was horrified by some of his cabinet choices. His great selling point is that he's not dangerously insane.
Of course, if the Republicans nominate, say, Perry – and polls say he might win – and Oregon is in play – I'll vote for Obama, because any other act would be patricidal. Otherwise I'll probably vote Green: I want the Democrats to know that they're losing me.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Mask, Moving
A One Minute Videopoem: 'Mask'
Brenda Clews made this, riffing on a blog post of mine. Amazing.
It's one of the deepest pleasures, having someone take your work and make something new with it. Art to me is nothing more nor less than conversation. I have no interest in making objects, per se: I only want to talk to people: to them and through them and with them and by them.
Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learn their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did.
Brenda Clews made this, riffing on a blog post of mine. Amazing.
It's one of the deepest pleasures, having someone take your work and make something new with it. Art to me is nothing more nor less than conversation. I have no interest in making objects, per se: I only want to talk to people: to them and through them and with them and by them.
Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learn their tree-talk. They always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Ser Chö Ösel Ling
A hot moon weltering in the blood of pine forests: the wind could sweep our new-built cloisters away with the careless back of its hand. "The Place of the Clear Light Golden Dharma," in Goldendale, Washington, is threatened by wildfire. But the latest news seems to be good, They're holding the line of the Little Klickitat River, and there's a fallback line at Highway 97. But a number of homes have been lost, already. There's a fire haze over Portland, though from other, nearer fires, I think. After the coolest summer I can remember (while the rest of the country was broiling) we in the Pacific Northwest have surfaced into an intense late summer, now, in the second week of September.
Monks from other traditions, Tibetan and Zen, as well as regular members of sanghas round about, have come to help improve the fire defenses. Mostly lean, tough-looking, shaven-headed men in reddish skirts and heavy brush boots, to judge from the photos. I haven't been out there myself. Possibly it's not the image most Americans have of their native population of Buddhist monks. (Do most Americans know they have a native population of Buddhist monks? Good question. I doubt it.)
Monks from other traditions, Tibetan and Zen, as well as regular members of sanghas round about, have come to help improve the fire defenses. Mostly lean, tough-looking, shaven-headed men in reddish skirts and heavy brush boots, to judge from the photos. I haven't been out there myself. Possibly it's not the image most Americans have of their native population of Buddhist monks. (Do most Americans know they have a native population of Buddhist monks? Good question. I doubt it.)
Thursday, September 08, 2011
It's Live!
My book is here, and it's gorgeous! Go buy a copy to reward Jo for her rashness in publishing a completely off-the-radar poet. She's done an amazing job. Order it here.
Dave Bonta made this "moving poem" out of a reading of one of the poems in it:
(Read his post about the mole, the video, and the book.)
Dave Bonta made this "moving poem" out of a reading of one of the poems in it:
The Last Brave Ship by Dale Favier from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.
(Read his post about the mole, the video, and the book.)
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Rosetta
Oh Rosetta, little rose, stone
of my multilingual heart:
Do you still think that to say something over and over
is to make it true?
The New Year begins to write itself
in anger and forgiveness, mark after mark
in the soft clay of love and friendship:
the intelligibility depends on the hardening.
Litera scripta manet: each letter, being written,
manhandles the next. In the elevator I count the floors
in five different languages, still hoping
for a 'A' from teachers twenty years dead.
The sound of rain thins to a whisper.
September is the pivot of hope and
the hinge of nativity: it is the kneading trough
of the old year. We lie down naked
in the clay, and the rain surges
as it drums on wart and callus;
on the roof; on the oak leaves
toughened by a long summer.
In response to this Morning Porch post.
of my multilingual heart:
Do you still think that to say something over and over
is to make it true?
The New Year begins to write itself
in anger and forgiveness, mark after mark
in the soft clay of love and friendship:
the intelligibility depends on the hardening.
Litera scripta manet: each letter, being written,
manhandles the next. In the elevator I count the floors
in five different languages, still hoping
for a 'A' from teachers twenty years dead.
The sound of rain thins to a whisper.
September is the pivot of hope and
the hinge of nativity: it is the kneading trough
of the old year. We lie down naked
in the clay, and the rain surges
as it drums on wart and callus;
on the roof; on the oak leaves
toughened by a long summer.
In response to this Morning Porch post.
Saturday, September 03, 2011
Luisa Has Accomplished Fifty Today
In the east there's a glowing patch
of fawn-colored sky with soft gray kerchiefs
drifting across it. Dawn.
Luisa has accomplished fifty today:
the age at which, my old professor said,
you don't take shit offa nobody.
Not grandmothers, who have
gone to their various rewards;
not husbands sifted
to fruit and chaff
in their right proportions;
not puppyish admirers,
blond or gray, who want
to scribble in your margins.
(Fair enough: but
it belongs to them, not you.)
And should anyone ask
the secret of being beautiful at fifty
you don't even have to say
the obvious – “Attend to beauty,
and it will attend to you” –
You can make the faintest
acknowledging or deprecating moue,
an impatient shake of the head,
and go directly to the next task,
as you have as long as you can remember:
cooking, cleaning, worrying –
and doing your daily obeisance
to how the tunic rubs its velvet raw;
to Annie Oakley's interval of thought.
velvet tunic: Occasional
Annie Oakley: Dear Annie Oakley
of fawn-colored sky with soft gray kerchiefs
drifting across it. Dawn.
Luisa has accomplished fifty today:
the age at which, my old professor said,
you don't take shit offa nobody.
Not grandmothers, who have
gone to their various rewards;
not husbands sifted
to fruit and chaff
in their right proportions;
not puppyish admirers,
blond or gray, who want
to scribble in your margins.
(Fair enough: but
it belongs to them, not you.)
And should anyone ask
the secret of being beautiful at fifty
you don't even have to say
the obvious – “Attend to beauty,
and it will attend to you” –
You can make the faintest
acknowledging or deprecating moue,
an impatient shake of the head,
and go directly to the next task,
as you have as long as you can remember:
cooking, cleaning, worrying –
and doing your daily obeisance
to how the tunic rubs its velvet raw;
to Annie Oakley's interval of thought.
velvet tunic: Occasional
Annie Oakley: Dear Annie Oakley
Friday, September 02, 2011
Airport
So I dropped the boys off at the airport. They're going to Boston. And I stay here, trying to piece this broken pot together. I will stay here now forever, I think: no more airports for me. A self-imposed house arrest.
But the sky is gentle, just now, the sky that my son and his friend are rising through at this very moment: in the east there's a glowing patch of fawn-colored sky with soft gray kerchiefs straggling across it. Dawn.
It's not that I have a grievance. I have an abundance, an embarrassment of gifts. They just don't seem to fit the mission I've been given.
It's good to pause, like this. At the new house a lizard dived past my shoulder into the hedge, unless it was a slender gray bird. Either way, it seemed like a good omen.
From the new house, it's downhill in three directions: we sit atop a shallow ridge. The ground only rises slightly to the east. North, west, and south are all downhill. From the edge of the lawn, sighting down 86th Avenue, you can see the top of Mt Scott, with gold grass lit up by the sunset. But Mt Tabor is hidden behind the trees.
Well. Back home, to see if I can get a bit more sleep. Good morning, and good night! Lots of love.
But the sky is gentle, just now, the sky that my son and his friend are rising through at this very moment: in the east there's a glowing patch of fawn-colored sky with soft gray kerchiefs straggling across it. Dawn.
It's not that I have a grievance. I have an abundance, an embarrassment of gifts. They just don't seem to fit the mission I've been given.
It's good to pause, like this. At the new house a lizard dived past my shoulder into the hedge, unless it was a slender gray bird. Either way, it seemed like a good omen.
From the new house, it's downhill in three directions: we sit atop a shallow ridge. The ground only rises slightly to the east. North, west, and south are all downhill. From the edge of the lawn, sighting down 86th Avenue, you can see the top of Mt Scott, with gold grass lit up by the sunset. But Mt Tabor is hidden behind the trees.
Well. Back home, to see if I can get a bit more sleep. Good morning, and good night! Lots of love.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Cardboard Boxes and Postponements
There is no waiting for the clouds to lift, no break in the rain to be expected. We turn with one shoulder the pivot, drawn toward earth, and the other pulling to the sky, fixed to our own skeletons. If we wait for the ergonomically correct moment, we'll wait forever.
No. Heave with such muscles as can get purchase, and hope.
A fleeting wish for a cigarette. I've smoked maybe six cigarettes in my life: the last one must have been ten years ago. I think the wish is gleaned from watching people smoke: the smell of the leaf, the flare of the match, the first breath, and then the shoulders settling as the whole nervous system resets, and north by the compass becomes north by the map again. Those mirror neurons, as convenient as DNA for tale-spinning: we're going to be heartily sick of them soon, and wish they hadn't been discovered, no doubt. Their only larger significance is rhetorical: our sociability, our compassion, is inwritten in our very cells! But anyone capable of introspection already knew that we trade feelings back and forth with other people all the time, that we're emotional sponges, mutual spiritual contaminants. That's why my fantasy life is a public health issue, and why meditation is not self-indulgence, but hygiene -- like washing my hands after using the toilet. I do it to protect other people more than to protect myself.
My life is all cardboard boxes and postponements, just now. My great anxiety is that it may still be that, two months from now. Storage and life-comes-later are powerful habits of mind.
The clouds are breaking up, and the oblique sunlight of September is rushing in. The sun's been stealthily sinking to the south ever since the third week of June, of course, but I never really see it until the first cool weather comes. Now suddenly it's not an overhead light, but a cozy reading lamp by the side of the couch. The last of summer slips down the drain with a swirl and a little plumber's belch. So much for that.
Hugs --
No. Heave with such muscles as can get purchase, and hope.
A fleeting wish for a cigarette. I've smoked maybe six cigarettes in my life: the last one must have been ten years ago. I think the wish is gleaned from watching people smoke: the smell of the leaf, the flare of the match, the first breath, and then the shoulders settling as the whole nervous system resets, and north by the compass becomes north by the map again. Those mirror neurons, as convenient as DNA for tale-spinning: we're going to be heartily sick of them soon, and wish they hadn't been discovered, no doubt. Their only larger significance is rhetorical: our sociability, our compassion, is inwritten in our very cells! But anyone capable of introspection already knew that we trade feelings back and forth with other people all the time, that we're emotional sponges, mutual spiritual contaminants. That's why my fantasy life is a public health issue, and why meditation is not self-indulgence, but hygiene -- like washing my hands after using the toilet. I do it to protect other people more than to protect myself.
My life is all cardboard boxes and postponements, just now. My great anxiety is that it may still be that, two months from now. Storage and life-comes-later are powerful habits of mind.
The clouds are breaking up, and the oblique sunlight of September is rushing in. The sun's been stealthily sinking to the south ever since the third week of June, of course, but I never really see it until the first cool weather comes. Now suddenly it's not an overhead light, but a cozy reading lamp by the side of the couch. The last of summer slips down the drain with a swirl and a little plumber's belch. So much for that.
Hugs --
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Pepek the Assassin
Pepek the Assassin
Even those weird old guys in coffee shops who need haircuts are reading it. Although they first have to wrestle it away from their wives, who protest "but it's interesting, it has a story. It's not like--"
But you don't stay married for thirty years without developing the skill of falling silent at the right time. "--Just let me finish the Pepek part," she finishes meekly.
We both have a weakness for East Europeans, for people who know they're not in control of much and that at some points, for the sake of their family and friends if not themselves, they're going to have to cut and run and let people make up a story to cover for them. West Europeans and Americans learn that once, maybe, in a generation, and write incredulously about it ever after. East Europeans have learned it half a dozen times before puberty.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Dotted Line
Signed the title papers. The house is officially sold. We need to be out in about a week. Hopefully closing on the new place shortly... we're rockin now!
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Autumnal
And again, news of meteorological disaster and suffering in the rest of the country, this time a hurricane hitting New York City and the hill-towns of Massachusetts, while here --
Only this calm, golden summer, that has seemed quaint and autumnal since June, always already nostalgic for itself, never too hot, sweet and gentle, like a carefully painted miniature. We sit out on the deck of an evening and watch the stars come out, the 'w' of Cassiopeia and the bold cross of Cygnus, during the last weeks of living in this house. No pests, no wasps or ants or mosquitoes this year. All is sweet and mellow. The Idylls of Oregon.
And I, I'm squaring up corners and throwing things away, lightening ship, aware of the privilege of these last couple months, fearful of jinxing it.
Only this calm, golden summer, that has seemed quaint and autumnal since June, always already nostalgic for itself, never too hot, sweet and gentle, like a carefully painted miniature. We sit out on the deck of an evening and watch the stars come out, the 'w' of Cassiopeia and the bold cross of Cygnus, during the last weeks of living in this house. No pests, no wasps or ants or mosquitoes this year. All is sweet and mellow. The Idylls of Oregon.
And I, I'm squaring up corners and throwing things away, lightening ship, aware of the privilege of these last couple months, fearful of jinxing it.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
God's Work Habits
I try not to criticize God, it's a big job and all, but it does irritate me the way that he lets everything pile up in his "Dale Favier" inbox and then deals with it all at once. So that we are knee-deep in buying and selling houses at the same time as I have terrific ideas for no less than three books to write, and I'm going first-timers through the thrilling process of revising and proofing a book for the best editor in the world (how can one book of poems be such a complicated enterprise?) and am snowed under at work while everyone else is busy with the Russian delegation (since when do local Library Foundations deal with Russian delegations?) and Martha has a job interview today and massage business abruptly picks up from the high summer doldrums and I have three books to review that each deserves a really thoughtful treatment, and a conversation about the high philosophy of massage that I desperately want to participate in suddenly ignites. If I owe you email, don't give yourself airs and think you're special: I owe everybody email.
Here's the cover of the soon-to-be poetry book, by Robin Weiss
Here's the cover of the soon-to-be poetry book, by Robin Weiss
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Prodigies
"It's to keep my shoulders from getting sunburned while I eat my breakfast," she said.
I was gazing at the dishcloth -- black, with nickel-sized pink, yellow, and turquoise dots -- that Martha had draped around her shoulders.
"What I like about being us," I remarked, "is that we're not going to have to change anything to become eccentric old people. We've already got it down."
"We're prodigies!" said Martha.
I was gazing at the dishcloth -- black, with nickel-sized pink, yellow, and turquoise dots -- that Martha had draped around her shoulders.
"What I like about being us," I remarked, "is that we're not going to have to change anything to become eccentric old people. We've already got it down."
"We're prodigies!" said Martha.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Salt Water
My sentence is not to go down to the sea,
which is only for pure of heart;
I wander where the asphalt is bitten away
by winter rains on the clifftop.
The moon is a mottled pearl afloat
in wash of milk: the long fluttering manes
of the white horses wade ashore
in wavering skirmish lines. An endless assault.
The generals fall off
the horsebacks and disappear -- it's only water,
after all. The seals' haul-out is empty,
and no whales swim.
I count them off on my fingers, each wave,
but the total never comes out right. I think
they must be right, that I embezzled
the salt water entrusted to me:
but what I spent it on
I could not tell you now.
which is only for pure of heart;
I wander where the asphalt is bitten away
by winter rains on the clifftop.
The moon is a mottled pearl afloat
in wash of milk: the long fluttering manes
of the white horses wade ashore
in wavering skirmish lines. An endless assault.
The generals fall off
the horsebacks and disappear -- it's only water,
after all. The seals' haul-out is empty,
and no whales swim.
I count them off on my fingers, each wave,
but the total never comes out right. I think
they must be right, that I embezzled
the salt water entrusted to me:
but what I spent it on
I could not tell you now.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Marble Canvas
image from St Mary Magdalen's, Mortlake, London
Clear and cold. This morning Sir Richard Burton
lies on his slab where the light of morning
pours through a marble canvas. His wife lies
on a lower slab, and all around the pink-pearl dawn,
flushed, like milk with a little blood stirred in,
laps in, just as she planned it, just as she pictured it,
when he said “I don’t give a damn. Just
don’t put me in the dark.” He wanted to be
left in the desert or tossed into the sea, he had said:
but seeing the trouble on her Catholic face, he softened.
Anywhere, he said. Doesn’t matter. Just not dark.
in response to this Morning Porch post.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Coming up over Vista Ridge
The transmission shifts down, and
a volley of light spatters the windshield.
Waiting for us on the reverse slope
is a blazing regiment of sun soldiers. They fire and reload.
The glass is all glowing dust, dragged web,
mineralized entrails of bugs
made into a phosphor,
a blinding euphoria, a flourish,
a hissing matchhead, and the slopes of Beaverton
shimmer beyond the flame.
in response to this Morning Porch post
a volley of light spatters the windshield.
Waiting for us on the reverse slope
is a blazing regiment of sun soldiers. They fire and reload.
The glass is all glowing dust, dragged web,
mineralized entrails of bugs
made into a phosphor,
a blinding euphoria, a flourish,
a hissing matchhead, and the slopes of Beaverton
shimmer beyond the flame.
in response to this Morning Porch post
Flinchery
Awkwardly I shove my head up through
stiff fabric, embroidered
with ragged stitchery. What to do
with all this? It settles on my shoulders,
and I start to sweat: little beetle feet tick
above my ears; step knickingly
across the hairline behind.
One must I suppose dress for occasions.
But poetry is the worst cocktail dress
I have found yet. “This little thing?”
I worked on it for years in secret,
and it looks dreadful on me.
Start again.
No. Maybe
some other kind of writer, some other place.
Something more in the Hemingway line?
Unflinching? Unfortunately
Flinching is what I do and how I do it.
If I have a gift, it's flinchery.
Still the corners of my mouth
begin to move; the laughter starts;
the eyes open wider and the light
begins to wash across my lap.
This is what they came for.
They want something else,
they can ask.
stiff fabric, embroidered
with ragged stitchery. What to do
with all this? It settles on my shoulders,
and I start to sweat: little beetle feet tick
above my ears; step knickingly
across the hairline behind.
One must I suppose dress for occasions.
But poetry is the worst cocktail dress
I have found yet. “This little thing?”
I worked on it for years in secret,
and it looks dreadful on me.
Start again.
No. Maybe
some other kind of writer, some other place.
Something more in the Hemingway line?
Unflinching? Unfortunately
Flinching is what I do and how I do it.
If I have a gift, it's flinchery.
Still the corners of my mouth
begin to move; the laughter starts;
the eyes open wider and the light
begins to wash across my lap.
This is what they came for.
They want something else,
they can ask.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Past the Crown of Summer
We're past the crown of summer. I know this because my pail of apples, the windfalls I pick up before wheeling my bicycle out, was not full this morning. For several days the bucket has been overflowing; but not today. Three-quarters full. So the midpoint of summer, as I've reckoned it for twenty years, is past. And looking up, I see the branches lighter, easier. I suppose bearing fruit is not easy on any of us.
I wrote to a friend:
This is not the bad-boy boyfriend house. Martha calls this one the nerdy boyfriend house: not much to look at, maybe, but easy to love and (possibly) a surprisingly good financial bet. It's tucked way back from the street, and the front yard is a riot of trees: not a single drop of sunlight gets through to it at this time of year.
I wrote to a friend:
Life continues to be extraordinarily good to me. I sometimes wonder whether I'm Job in reverse: if God and Satan have a bet going about what will happen if they shower me with undeserved blessings. If so, I'm surely pursuing the optimal strategy: giving them no conclusive results, so that the contest has to go on. I wonder how long I can keep it up?
The house is sold, and we'll probably make an offer on a tiny place in an iffy part of town. "Small, dark, far, and cheap," is how I sum it up. But we've met a couple neighbors and they're enthusiastic about the neighborhood. It's just a few blocks from the intersection of 82nd Avenue, the boulevard whose name is a Portland euphemism for "prostitution," and Burnside Street, which is the local name for "skid row." But really neither street lives up to its reputation, where they intersect, and the houses round about are well kept up.
This is not the bad-boy boyfriend house. Martha calls this one the nerdy boyfriend house: not much to look at, maybe, but easy to love and (possibly) a surprisingly good financial bet. It's tucked way back from the street, and the front yard is a riot of trees: not a single drop of sunlight gets through to it at this time of year.
Saturday, August 06, 2011
Monkey Makes a Presentation
First real run-in with Crocodile last night. Made a thick hamburger patty liberally washed with Worcestershire sauce, and ate an enormous salad. I can't really have been hungry, in the sense of needing nourishment: I had already eaten a huge burger and salad, just two hours before. But Crocodile wanted ice cream, or donuts, or cake, or even just bread – anything packed tight with carbs. He wanted that feeling of a bomb of nutrients going off at once, of the sugar flooding the system, of energy washing through every cell. He was restless and snappish.
“You're not really hungry,” I told him. “You just think you are. If you were really hungry, any old food would appeal to you.”
Crocodile eyed me coldly. “I'm hungry,” he said, and his tail whipped back and forth like an irritated cat's.
“You can have all the salad you want,” I pointed out. “with all the unsugared salad dressing you want. I'll open a can of tuna for you and you can scarf the whole thing, with mayonnaise, if you want. I'll scramble you some eggs, or fry you another hamburger. See? There's plenty to eat.”
“I'm hungry,” said Crocodile.
I tried to check in, to identify the feeling. I speculated about nutrients I might actually be short on. I really didn't think there could be any. Crocodile wasn't interested in this investigation at all. He wanted ice cream. Failing that, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Images of the foods he wanted flooded the system. He knew exactly where all the treats were squirreled away, and what they were.
“Let's go upstairs!” I said brightly. “Monkey will show you things on the internet!”
We got through, somehow. But we won't get through many evenings like that. So I set Monkey to worrying through what went wrong. He presented his three points, this morning.
“First of all,” he said, “we put off lunch till way late. Because we were waiting for the checks to process at the Foundation, remember? So we actually went from breakfast to dinner time without food. So our blood sugar started swinging.” Monkey loves the image of the blood sugar swinging: he pictures it like a huge weight, a pendulum, swooshing through the air.
“Second of all,” he went on, “we ate those little tiny candies the cleaning crew leaves in the offices, remember? Little bangs of sugar? So that will have added to the swing.”
“And third, we had . . .” his voice lowers to a tragic whisper “. . . ketchup on that lunch hamburger. And thousand island dressing on the salad. That's sugar.”
“It's not very much sugar,” I said, skeptically. Monkey raised his eyebrows, laid his hands on his belly, and looked wise.
“There's sugar in the Worcestershire sauce too, I suppose,” I said. Monkey frowned at that. He likes Worcestershire sauce, a lot, and he didn't like this turn to the conversation.
“But anyway, the first point is well taken. We'll have to be especially careful on Fridays, to eat lunch in plenty of time.” Monkey was on board with that. Eating lunch early is fun. Everybody's out on the street, in the summer: there's so many things to watch!
“You're not really hungry,” I told him. “You just think you are. If you were really hungry, any old food would appeal to you.”
Crocodile eyed me coldly. “I'm hungry,” he said, and his tail whipped back and forth like an irritated cat's.
“You can have all the salad you want,” I pointed out. “with all the unsugared salad dressing you want. I'll open a can of tuna for you and you can scarf the whole thing, with mayonnaise, if you want. I'll scramble you some eggs, or fry you another hamburger. See? There's plenty to eat.”
“I'm hungry,” said Crocodile.
I tried to check in, to identify the feeling. I speculated about nutrients I might actually be short on. I really didn't think there could be any. Crocodile wasn't interested in this investigation at all. He wanted ice cream. Failing that, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Images of the foods he wanted flooded the system. He knew exactly where all the treats were squirreled away, and what they were.
“Let's go upstairs!” I said brightly. “Monkey will show you things on the internet!”
We got through, somehow. But we won't get through many evenings like that. So I set Monkey to worrying through what went wrong. He presented his three points, this morning.
“First of all,” he said, “we put off lunch till way late. Because we were waiting for the checks to process at the Foundation, remember? So we actually went from breakfast to dinner time without food. So our blood sugar started swinging.” Monkey loves the image of the blood sugar swinging: he pictures it like a huge weight, a pendulum, swooshing through the air.
“Second of all,” he went on, “we ate those little tiny candies the cleaning crew leaves in the offices, remember? Little bangs of sugar? So that will have added to the swing.”
“And third, we had . . .” his voice lowers to a tragic whisper “. . . ketchup on that lunch hamburger. And thousand island dressing on the salad. That's sugar.”
“It's not very much sugar,” I said, skeptically. Monkey raised his eyebrows, laid his hands on his belly, and looked wise.
“There's sugar in the Worcestershire sauce too, I suppose,” I said. Monkey frowned at that. He likes Worcestershire sauce, a lot, and he didn't like this turn to the conversation.
“But anyway, the first point is well taken. We'll have to be especially careful on Fridays, to eat lunch in plenty of time.” Monkey was on board with that. Eating lunch early is fun. Everybody's out on the street, in the summer: there's so many things to watch!
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Four Feet
“They're going to want to know,” said Monkey. He loves the idea of the book, and he's always thinking about the audience.
"I don't want it to be about the scale and the measuring tape,” I said firmly. “You care about that kind of thing too much already. You'll obsess about it, and the first time the measurements are bad you'll throw a tantrum and eat a pastry shop.”
Monkey looked at me with pained dignity, as if he would never dream of eating a pastry. “You're the one who's so gung-ho on measurement,” he said. “'How do you know without measurement?' You're always saying things like that. 'Anything that is, can be measured somehow.' If you don't measure it, how are you going to be able to say it worked?”
“It worked,” I answered, “if I change what I eat. The size of my body will take care of itself.”
Monkey grimaced and squirmed in his seat. “This is a case study,” he said. “Good information. That's what you always say. You want good information.”
“Look,” I said severely, though I was weakening. “If we make it about the measurements, it will be temporary. It will have an end-date. It will be a diet. Something we go on and go off. And then eventually we'll go off, and you'll go wild, you know you will. And then there won't be any changes and there won't be any book. That's why we're not doing it that way.”
“All right, all right,” said Monkey. “Have it your way.” He picked up the measuring tape and started coiling it backwards, like the ribbon in an old tape recorder: he's always fidgeting with something.
“I wonder,” he added, after a moment, looking off into space, “just how big you are around the waist? Man, you've ballooned, what with selling the house and all.”
“Very subtle,” I said. “Oh, give me that thing!”
I measured myself. 48 inches around the waist. Wow. “I don't think I've ever been that big.”
Monkey was delighted. “That's four feet! Isn't it? Four feet? Two thirds of your height!”
“It's not as if I'm spherical,” I said, grumpily. “That's circumference. My diameter is only, um... fifteen inches. Sixteen. Something like that. 48 over pi.”
“Four feet! Wow!”
"I don't want it to be about the scale and the measuring tape,” I said firmly. “You care about that kind of thing too much already. You'll obsess about it, and the first time the measurements are bad you'll throw a tantrum and eat a pastry shop.”
Monkey looked at me with pained dignity, as if he would never dream of eating a pastry. “You're the one who's so gung-ho on measurement,” he said. “'How do you know without measurement?' You're always saying things like that. 'Anything that is, can be measured somehow.' If you don't measure it, how are you going to be able to say it worked?”
“It worked,” I answered, “if I change what I eat. The size of my body will take care of itself.”
Monkey grimaced and squirmed in his seat. “This is a case study,” he said. “Good information. That's what you always say. You want good information.”
“Look,” I said severely, though I was weakening. “If we make it about the measurements, it will be temporary. It will have an end-date. It will be a diet. Something we go on and go off. And then eventually we'll go off, and you'll go wild, you know you will. And then there won't be any changes and there won't be any book. That's why we're not doing it that way.”
“All right, all right,” said Monkey. “Have it your way.” He picked up the measuring tape and started coiling it backwards, like the ribbon in an old tape recorder: he's always fidgeting with something.
“I wonder,” he added, after a moment, looking off into space, “just how big you are around the waist? Man, you've ballooned, what with selling the house and all.”
“Very subtle,” I said. “Oh, give me that thing!”
I measured myself. 48 inches around the waist. Wow. “I don't think I've ever been that big.”
Monkey was delighted. “That's four feet! Isn't it? Four feet? Two thirds of your height!”
“It's not as if I'm spherical,” I said, grumpily. “That's circumference. My diameter is only, um... fifteen inches. Sixteen. Something like that. 48 over pi.”
“Four feet! Wow!”
Bad-Boy Boyfriend House
“Oh, man,” I kept saying. “Oh, man. I love this place, and it would be nothing but trouble. It's more than we can take on.”
It stands in a gully below the veterans' hospital, flanked by half-million dollar houses. The top of it is just visible from the street: you reach it by descending a wooden stairway, thirty feet straight down the retaining wall. There it sits, a turn of the century house, overgrown with laurel and maple. The roof is thick with moss. The living room looks into a wall of sunlit green. If you could see through the trees, you'd have a splendid view of Mt St Helens. When the big Portland quake comes, it will undoubtedly slide down onto the house below it. If a fire comes up the gully, it will go up in flames. It's only surprising that the rain hasn't yet washed it down. It's a lovely house.
“It's a bad-boy boyfriend house,” remarked Martha, thoughtfully.
“A what?”
“Everybody will tell you to have nothing to do it,” she said. “It's nothing but trouble. Dangerous and exciting. And you say, 'I can change it. It's never been properly cared-for, that's all. It comes from a good neighborhood.'”
It stands in a gully below the veterans' hospital, flanked by half-million dollar houses. The top of it is just visible from the street: you reach it by descending a wooden stairway, thirty feet straight down the retaining wall. There it sits, a turn of the century house, overgrown with laurel and maple. The roof is thick with moss. The living room looks into a wall of sunlit green. If you could see through the trees, you'd have a splendid view of Mt St Helens. When the big Portland quake comes, it will undoubtedly slide down onto the house below it. If a fire comes up the gully, it will go up in flames. It's only surprising that the rain hasn't yet washed it down. It's a lovely house.
“It's a bad-boy boyfriend house,” remarked Martha, thoughtfully.
“A what?”
“Everybody will tell you to have nothing to do it,” she said. “It's nothing but trouble. Dangerous and exciting. And you say, 'I can change it. It's never been properly cared-for, that's all. It comes from a good neighborhood.'”
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Quick Work
We worked quick when we came home and saw the treats. Monkey stashed the cookies in the upper cupboard, and threw the bag of chips into the lower one. I stuffed the whole sack of groceries in the fridge -- no time to unpack -- and laid the chicken hastily on the table. Crocodile surged forward, nothing but hungry, and ate half the chicken without a pause, his head settled deep in the folds of his shoulders. Totally absorbed. That's his way.
Don't think he didn't mark where everything went. He knows, and he remembers. But he's unlike Monkey in this: he doesn't resent being managed. He won't hold it against us. He won't go after the cookies just because he can -- that's more Monkey's style.
Don't think he didn't mark where everything went. He knows, and he remembers. But he's unlike Monkey in this: he doesn't resent being managed. He won't hold it against us. He won't go after the cookies just because he can -- that's more Monkey's style.
Monkey and Crocodile
When I first thought of them, I thought: since they're forced to live together, Monkey must be very clever. Crocodile is so old and strong! Monkey must learn to manage him -- stay two steps ahead of him -- make sure he's fed and rested and calm. Monkey, I thought, is the one under threat. Monkey is the one who needs to be protected. This will be a book about how Monkey can survive with Crocodile.
But now I'm wondering if Monkey is really so innocent, and Crocodile so brutal. What if I have them mixed up? What if the problem is that Monkey teases Crocodile unmercifully? What if Crocodile was never the problem at all?
But now I'm wondering if Monkey is really so innocent, and Crocodile so brutal. What if I have them mixed up? What if the problem is that Monkey teases Crocodile unmercifully? What if Crocodile was never the problem at all?
Fishhooks
Shelby Foote, in the Bibliographical Note to the first volume of his history of the Civil War:
". . . I have tried for accuracy because I have never known a modern historical instance where the truth was not superior to distortion, by any standard and in every way."
I don't espouse what some people call "realism." There's the truth of the dream and the truth of desire as well as the truth of the camera. But they all have inconvenient, fishhook details that catch and seem to want to pull against the story, so there's always the temptation to hammer them straight and to shear off the barbs.
Foote was speaking as a novelist and a historian, but he sums up my position on poetry and science too, and on intellectual endeavors of all sorts. The truth, and the truth, and always the truth: nothing else will do. If it seems to clog and complicate the story, that's only because there's a better, deeper story that I haven't achieved yet. Any time I want to bend a detail to the story, I need to remember that I'm not just betraying the detail: I'm also betraying the better, deeper story that I could have told if I'd kept my commitment to truth.
". . . I have tried for accuracy because I have never known a modern historical instance where the truth was not superior to distortion, by any standard and in every way."
I don't espouse what some people call "realism." There's the truth of the dream and the truth of desire as well as the truth of the camera. But they all have inconvenient, fishhook details that catch and seem to want to pull against the story, so there's always the temptation to hammer them straight and to shear off the barbs.
Foote was speaking as a novelist and a historian, but he sums up my position on poetry and science too, and on intellectual endeavors of all sorts. The truth, and the truth, and always the truth: nothing else will do. If it seems to clog and complicate the story, that's only because there's a better, deeper story that I haven't achieved yet. Any time I want to bend a detail to the story, I need to remember that I'm not just betraying the detail: I'm also betraying the better, deeper story that I could have told if I'd kept my commitment to truth.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Closing Costs
We've accepted an offer on the house. Still contingent on inspection, and a month till closing; and I'm assured by everyone knowledgeable that plenty can go wrong in the interim. But I woke today with a load of anxiety off my chest. I rose light and gleaming and wise as a serpent.
We have barely had a summer here. What we have now is like lovely spring weather, but already the days are lengthening, and the word “autumnal” was the first one that occurred to me, when I tried to describe the quality of my happiness. But autumn has always been my favorite season, and summer my least favorite: I'm quite happy to elide this summer and go straight on into September.
We have been looking seriously at houses, all this while, so we have a good idea of the market, of what we want and what we can afford.
My main wish is simply to be done with it. I don't believe which house we live in is likely to have much to do with our happiness, in the end. I want to get back to my untroubled mornings, to focusing on writing and friends and massage: I dislike above all things “having too much to do.” It's debilitating frame of mind, struggling against time. Time always wins, after all.
Still, I have injured myself and my relations with Martha by never fully inhabiting our house, and I intend to do the next one differently, to give more of myself to it: to sink into being a householder without irony or restraint, to care about the paint on the windowsill and the hot water heater. There is something grounding and humbling about caring for a place, which is still there no matter which way the light slants. I don't think I need to worry about getting too caught in the quotidian. Not my weakness.
We have barely had a summer here. What we have now is like lovely spring weather, but already the days are lengthening, and the word “autumnal” was the first one that occurred to me, when I tried to describe the quality of my happiness. But autumn has always been my favorite season, and summer my least favorite: I'm quite happy to elide this summer and go straight on into September.
We have been looking seriously at houses, all this while, so we have a good idea of the market, of what we want and what we can afford.
My main wish is simply to be done with it. I don't believe which house we live in is likely to have much to do with our happiness, in the end. I want to get back to my untroubled mornings, to focusing on writing and friends and massage: I dislike above all things “having too much to do.” It's debilitating frame of mind, struggling against time. Time always wins, after all.
Still, I have injured myself and my relations with Martha by never fully inhabiting our house, and I intend to do the next one differently, to give more of myself to it: to sink into being a householder without irony or restraint, to care about the paint on the windowsill and the hot water heater. There is something grounding and humbling about caring for a place, which is still there no matter which way the light slants. I don't think I need to worry about getting too caught in the quotidian. Not my weakness.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Lumps of Coal
After a blinding day of birds calling
whose names I will never know,
and trees dropping noisome
sap in the curdling street --
a night less oppressive.
I wish for a cauldron
to cook all the fat out of me,
to leave me slender, interesting, pale:
to render me into a storybook likely lad.
I am
genial, jolly, kindly, sexless, droll:
red faced, puffy and plump.
Still under my red velvet and white fur trim
there are odd ferocities and hungers.
Don't cross me too often or too much,
or you may see an old darkness
come into my eyes. I may not be dangerous
but I am not quite safe.
At night I take my lumps of coal
and fling them one by one at streetlights,
hitting aluminum crossbars
with a high and chilling ping,
the frosted glass
with a muffled chink. Wicked boys
and girls, here's what you get tonight,
here's your real reward: old fingers
smeared with soot, and a tongue
black with licking.
whose names I will never know,
and trees dropping noisome
sap in the curdling street --
a night less oppressive.
I wish for a cauldron
to cook all the fat out of me,
to leave me slender, interesting, pale:
to render me into a storybook likely lad.
I am
genial, jolly, kindly, sexless, droll:
red faced, puffy and plump.
Still under my red velvet and white fur trim
there are odd ferocities and hungers.
Don't cross me too often or too much,
or you may see an old darkness
come into my eyes. I may not be dangerous
but I am not quite safe.
At night I take my lumps of coal
and fling them one by one at streetlights,
hitting aluminum crossbars
with a high and chilling ping,
the frosted glass
with a muffled chink. Wicked boys
and girls, here's what you get tonight,
here's your real reward: old fingers
smeared with soot, and a tongue
black with licking.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The Word for Home (Present and Past)
Bright sky torn across the top;
crow calls where the damaged cloud
picks apart the tufts of soiled floss
and runs a ragged furrow through the trees.
He carries in an inside pocket (quilted plaid)
surgical instruments in a neat row, polished
and sweet, like the needle teeth of kittens.
He always says that opening the body
is something best done quick or not at all.
The stutter of the cloud fades into purple
where the bay goes silent and the gulls veer
left and right, leaving the straight ahead
to eyes without the sense to pull away.
They ask him if he misses home
and he just shrugs. I don't remember,
he says, how to say the word
in my own tongue.
Bright sky torn across the top;
a crow called where the damaged cloud
picked apart the tufts of soiled floss
and ran a ragged furrow through the trees.
He carried a in an inside pocket (quilted plaid)
surgical instruments in a neat row, polished
and sweet, like the needle teeth of kittens.
He always said that opening the body
was something best done quick or not at all.
The stutter of the cloud wore into purple
where the bay went silent and the gulls veered
left and right, leaving the straight ahead
to eyes without the sense to pull away.
They asked him if he missed his home
and he just shrugged. I don't remember,
he said, how to say the word
in my own tongue.
Now, the most interesting part of this exercise was discovering that if I was going to put the crow call into the simple past, I could not leave her without an article. It had to be “a crow.” Whereas in the abstract present (what's the technical term for that?), I was perfectly happy with “crow,” unarticled. I'm still waiting for this man to tell me more about himself: I rather think he fled Poland after the 1830 uprising and spent twenty years practicing medicine in the Rheinland before moving on to San Francisco in the 1850's, where he may or may not have drunk whiskey with a young, redheaded, rather hysterical ex-military young man (who was trying to become a banker & realtor and failing), name of William Tecumseh Sherman.
crow calls where the damaged cloud
picks apart the tufts of soiled floss
and runs a ragged furrow through the trees.
He carries in an inside pocket (quilted plaid)
surgical instruments in a neat row, polished
and sweet, like the needle teeth of kittens.
He always says that opening the body
is something best done quick or not at all.
The stutter of the cloud fades into purple
where the bay goes silent and the gulls veer
left and right, leaving the straight ahead
to eyes without the sense to pull away.
They ask him if he misses home
and he just shrugs. I don't remember,
he says, how to say the word
in my own tongue.
Bright sky torn across the top;
a crow called where the damaged cloud
picked apart the tufts of soiled floss
and ran a ragged furrow through the trees.
He carried a in an inside pocket (quilted plaid)
surgical instruments in a neat row, polished
and sweet, like the needle teeth of kittens.
He always said that opening the body
was something best done quick or not at all.
The stutter of the cloud wore into purple
where the bay went silent and the gulls veered
left and right, leaving the straight ahead
to eyes without the sense to pull away.
They asked him if he missed his home
and he just shrugged. I don't remember,
he said, how to say the word
in my own tongue.
Now, the most interesting part of this exercise was discovering that if I was going to put the crow call into the simple past, I could not leave her without an article. It had to be “a crow.” Whereas in the abstract present (what's the technical term for that?), I was perfectly happy with “crow,” unarticled. I'm still waiting for this man to tell me more about himself: I rather think he fled Poland after the 1830 uprising and spent twenty years practicing medicine in the Rheinland before moving on to San Francisco in the 1850's, where he may or may not have drunk whiskey with a young, redheaded, rather hysterical ex-military young man (who was trying to become a banker & realtor and failing), name of William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
The Word for Home
Bright sky torn across the top;
crow calls where the damaged cloud
picks apart the tufts of soiled floss
and runs a ragged furrow through the trees.
He carried a in an inside pocket (quilted plaid)
surgical instruments in a neat row, polished
and sweet, like the needle teeth of kittens.
He always said that opening the body
was something best done quick or not at all.
The stutter of the cloud fades into purple
where the bay goes silent and the gulls veer
left and right, leaving the straight ahead
to eyes without the sense to pull away.
They asked him if he missed his home
and he just shrugged. I don't remember,
he said, how to say the word
in my own tongue.
crow calls where the damaged cloud
picks apart the tufts of soiled floss
and runs a ragged furrow through the trees.
He carried a in an inside pocket (quilted plaid)
surgical instruments in a neat row, polished
and sweet, like the needle teeth of kittens.
He always said that opening the body
was something best done quick or not at all.
The stutter of the cloud fades into purple
where the bay goes silent and the gulls veer
left and right, leaving the straight ahead
to eyes without the sense to pull away.
They asked him if he missed his home
and he just shrugged. I don't remember,
he said, how to say the word
in my own tongue.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Gathering the Threads
Begin when all the rest had left behind them
Headlong death in battle or at sea --
I am, you realize, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley grown old, fat, timid, and doubtful. I understand all that swathe of destruction. The conviction that the desire sweeping over me must be drenching all the land, filling up arteries and arterioles of the earth -- not to mention the woman who has fixed my attention. But, you know, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. And Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin Shelley learned that the bitter hard way.
Still, Mary would never hear a word against him. And that counts for something, as his poems wash up less and less often on the shore of the present. He's slipping back into the ocean: his champions have made personae non gratae of themselves, and anyway, he was not quite, not quite good enough to make the leap. It's good to know Mary is still waiting for him down there, among the other women and the fish.
It's this business of seeing around corners, of seeing the transparency of your own flesh, the quick glance away of knowing dark eyes, the blindness as the sun swings into the telescope, when the sidewalks all twist and ripple and you can see all the restless things beneath. It's never quite still, and never quite dead. Things that other people can't see clutch at you. Words throw long thread-roots into other words, and drag themselves into other languages, while they're still not quite unfleshed. It's the not-quite-ness that stings.
But none of this is what I wanted to say. I look over the lined faces of the poets carefully, as they lean into each other, each in black, and try to read the threads there, too. We are all Penelope, unweaving at night what we wove in the day, putting off a new husband as long as we can, hoping old Manytropes will still roll home in the end, shaggy but mossless. He might still outsmart them all. He might.
Fools and children!
They feasted on the kine of Helios
And he who walks all day through the heavens
Took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
Headlong death in battle or at sea --
I am, you realize, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley grown old, fat, timid, and doubtful. I understand all that swathe of destruction. The conviction that the desire sweeping over me must be drenching all the land, filling up arteries and arterioles of the earth -- not to mention the woman who has fixed my attention. But, you know, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. And Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin Shelley learned that the bitter hard way.
Still, Mary would never hear a word against him. And that counts for something, as his poems wash up less and less often on the shore of the present. He's slipping back into the ocean: his champions have made personae non gratae of themselves, and anyway, he was not quite, not quite good enough to make the leap. It's good to know Mary is still waiting for him down there, among the other women and the fish.
It's this business of seeing around corners, of seeing the transparency of your own flesh, the quick glance away of knowing dark eyes, the blindness as the sun swings into the telescope, when the sidewalks all twist and ripple and you can see all the restless things beneath. It's never quite still, and never quite dead. Things that other people can't see clutch at you. Words throw long thread-roots into other words, and drag themselves into other languages, while they're still not quite unfleshed. It's the not-quite-ness that stings.
But none of this is what I wanted to say. I look over the lined faces of the poets carefully, as they lean into each other, each in black, and try to read the threads there, too. We are all Penelope, unweaving at night what we wove in the day, putting off a new husband as long as we can, hoping old Manytropes will still roll home in the end, shaggy but mossless. He might still outsmart them all. He might.
Fools and children!
They feasted on the kine of Helios
And he who walks all day through the heavens
Took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
What She Said
I have feathers growing over my skull, like a Mohawk parrot: and a line of wispy foliage runs on down my spine. Ridges of featherwork lead from pinky-base to elbow, from elbow to shoulder: rusty red feathers that tickle in the breeze. On the tops of my ears are delicate tufts. I hear better than I did.
I suppose I am turning into a bird: I have stronger than ever a yen to climb lightly onto housetops and to perch on wires. My bones are hollowing, turning to wishbones and tuning forks. Open spaces, where the wind might big me up and tumble me, are dangerous and alluring. The high silver static in my ears modulates to the distant scream of hawks.
I can feel my eyes grow brighter and sharper. When someone says something muddled I find myself turning my head to the side, so as to fix them with a one-eyed, brilliant, predator's stare.
Not long now, says the goddess. Oh, not long now, my darling.
I suppose I am turning into a bird: I have stronger than ever a yen to climb lightly onto housetops and to perch on wires. My bones are hollowing, turning to wishbones and tuning forks. Open spaces, where the wind might big me up and tumble me, are dangerous and alluring. The high silver static in my ears modulates to the distant scream of hawks.
I can feel my eyes grow brighter and sharper. When someone says something muddled I find myself turning my head to the side, so as to fix them with a one-eyed, brilliant, predator's stare.
Not long now, says the goddess. Oh, not long now, my darling.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Overshadow
Thirteen years a sapling
too weak to fight, too tough to kill;
thirteen years a young tree
struggling to stand;
thirteen years of bearing
confiscated fruit.
The roots knot
under the wall and pull;
the slow lean of tree thighs
splits the stone;
in the shade moisture
gathers, freezes, cracks.
When the wall falls
no one is surprised but the tree.
too weak to fight, too tough to kill;
thirteen years a young tree
struggling to stand;
thirteen years of bearing
confiscated fruit.
The roots knot
under the wall and pull;
the slow lean of tree thighs
splits the stone;
in the shade moisture
gathers, freezes, cracks.
When the wall falls
no one is surprised but the tree.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Cute Curls, Bodhicitta, Birches
Came downstairs, and rapidly cleaned the kitchen up to house-showing level – threw the few last dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on, wiped down the counters, polished the glass of the stove top. Then did my back exercises, but rebelled at the idea of taking a shower. Instead I just threw on a new shirt, all wrinkly from sitting in the clean clothes basket in the basement, and drove here to Tom's in the drizzly summer rain.
I got eight hours of sleep last night – much more than I've been getting lately – and I feel rumpled and unkempt, inside and out. In the bathroom mirror at Tom's I see tufts of white-and-gray hair poking this way and that, including a fetching little curl on my temple. Can't quite tolerate that. I moisten a finger and try to straighten it: when it won't straighten, I settle for poking it under another tuft. Looking like an old homeless alcoholic is one thing: I can deal with that. But a cute curl at my temple is too much. I often wonder what it would be like, to be truly free of caring about a face to meet the faces. It might be wonderful.
Or it might just be a door into another room of doors. People spend lifetimes at it, trying to get free, and the reports that seem most honest are not particularly encouraging. Those people posit further lives, I think, not because they want to live forever – that's the whole point, they emphatically don't – but because they recognize that a project of that scale is not one to be completed in a paltry three score and ten.
In any case, there's no draft of fresh air from that direction, not for me, not today. Today the outside air, smelling of rain and hilltops, comes from the simplest bodhicitta prayers: May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all beings be without suffering and the causes of suffering. May all beings never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering. That's the direction in which freedom seems to lie today.
A deep breath. I push my spine against the booth-back, let it unscroll, let my sacrum unlock, let all my ribs lift towards the rain, towards the simplicity of love: and I have a sudden wish that I still had little children. Putting compassion in action is so easy, then. You just sit down on the floor and pay attention, and their cup of joy fills right up. With adults it gets so much trickier.
I want to plant a birch tree, at the new house, if ever we get so far as a new house. And if it fits, of course. I love birch trees. Are they native? I don't know. I think of the marvelous stand of birches in that park towards the Coast, on the slopes of – Saddle Mountain, was that it? And the yellow-green light and the white trunks, the spaciousness. They weren't large trees, but it had the feel of an old wood. There's a grand old birch behind the parking lot at Tom's, that's come in and out of my poetry a couple times. Posing as a willow, once, because I needed two syllables and liquid consonants. Sorry. I still feel bad about that.
I got eight hours of sleep last night – much more than I've been getting lately – and I feel rumpled and unkempt, inside and out. In the bathroom mirror at Tom's I see tufts of white-and-gray hair poking this way and that, including a fetching little curl on my temple. Can't quite tolerate that. I moisten a finger and try to straighten it: when it won't straighten, I settle for poking it under another tuft. Looking like an old homeless alcoholic is one thing: I can deal with that. But a cute curl at my temple is too much. I often wonder what it would be like, to be truly free of caring about a face to meet the faces. It might be wonderful.
Or it might just be a door into another room of doors. People spend lifetimes at it, trying to get free, and the reports that seem most honest are not particularly encouraging. Those people posit further lives, I think, not because they want to live forever – that's the whole point, they emphatically don't – but because they recognize that a project of that scale is not one to be completed in a paltry three score and ten.
In any case, there's no draft of fresh air from that direction, not for me, not today. Today the outside air, smelling of rain and hilltops, comes from the simplest bodhicitta prayers: May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all beings be without suffering and the causes of suffering. May all beings never be without the sacred joy that is without suffering. That's the direction in which freedom seems to lie today.
A deep breath. I push my spine against the booth-back, let it unscroll, let my sacrum unlock, let all my ribs lift towards the rain, towards the simplicity of love: and I have a sudden wish that I still had little children. Putting compassion in action is so easy, then. You just sit down on the floor and pay attention, and their cup of joy fills right up. With adults it gets so much trickier.
I want to plant a birch tree, at the new house, if ever we get so far as a new house. And if it fits, of course. I love birch trees. Are they native? I don't know. I think of the marvelous stand of birches in that park towards the Coast, on the slopes of – Saddle Mountain, was that it? And the yellow-green light and the white trunks, the spaciousness. They weren't large trees, but it had the feel of an old wood. There's a grand old birch behind the parking lot at Tom's, that's come in and out of my poetry a couple times. Posing as a willow, once, because I needed two syllables and liquid consonants. Sorry. I still feel bad about that.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Parashara
The man from the mountains
ferreted out the fish girl; feet sore
with calluses, he descended the hills
like a mountain lion and sniffed her skin
scaled in water. . . .
“Satyavati and Vyasa,” Uma Gowrishankar
Ferreting out the fish girl: I have spent my life
finding wounded girls on mountainsides
and bringing them to the river.
I turn quickly; one callused foot
in the clear water running over the staves,
one foot in the mud of the bank – and then I am running,
running to where the sweet fish smell and the pitch,
the resin of the young alders, can no longer find me.
Oh yes! I can call the mist; and I can change the smell
of fish into something so rare and lovely
all kings desire it; and I can restore
virginity – always the last gift they ask for,
and the most important: make it, they implore me,
as if you had never been.
Well. It is the lesson every rishi should learn,
if being is illusion and every man
calls his own fate down upon him: the price
of love is the river water
filling your footprints, and the quick shove
of a boat into the stream.
ferreted out the fish girl; feet sore
with calluses, he descended the hills
like a mountain lion and sniffed her skin
scaled in water. . . .
“Satyavati and Vyasa,” Uma Gowrishankar
Ferreting out the fish girl: I have spent my life
finding wounded girls on mountainsides
and bringing them to the river.
I turn quickly; one callused foot
in the clear water running over the staves,
one foot in the mud of the bank – and then I am running,
running to where the sweet fish smell and the pitch,
the resin of the young alders, can no longer find me.
Oh yes! I can call the mist; and I can change the smell
of fish into something so rare and lovely
all kings desire it; and I can restore
virginity – always the last gift they ask for,
and the most important: make it, they implore me,
as if you had never been.
Well. It is the lesson every rishi should learn,
if being is illusion and every man
calls his own fate down upon him: the price
of love is the river water
filling your footprints, and the quick shove
of a boat into the stream.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Linkenstein
My response to Zhoen's comment on the post below is here, on the massage blog.
I haff created a monster! With two blogs, and posts published from each on two social networks. Linkenstein and Bride of Linkenstein.
I haff created a monster! With two blogs, and posts published from each on two social networks. Linkenstein and Bride of Linkenstein.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Privacy and Exposure
Dawn: Venus high in the southeast; light clouds. A quiet morning. Light just beginning to collect in the spaces between the leaves.
It was still full dark when I awoke, conscious of a dull pain in my chest, around the fifth or sixth rib on the right, fretting about it – chest pain! It could be my heart! – in my sleep. I sat up and meditated for twenty minutes, watching my breath, becoming aware of all the light in the room, the green light from the clock, the irritating blue-white throb of my netbook recharging beside the bed. It's just a little indicator light, the size of the head of a pin: but it pulsed in my peripheral vision, catching my attention again and again. I wonder if it woke me. I'll put the netbook to charge downstairs, from now on, and cover the face of the clock before I go to sleep.
By the time I was saying the dedication prayers the light of dawn was appearing, and I knew my chances of getting more sleep were slim. That's okay. I'll sleep when I need to. The pain in my chest had wandered away. I came down to the landing to look at the sky, saluted Venus. And now I'm sitting in the living room, listening to the loud tick of the wall-clock, and wondering why the birds are so quiet. A car engine starts up, down the block, and the light is strong now, but the birds aren't saying a thing. I even see one, flashing through the maple boughs, a starling maybe. All silent.
Puzzled, I go out to the deck, sit cross-legged against the wall. Out here, I can hear them. But they're very quiet. No wonder I couldn't hear them inside. The loudest ones are the crows, blocks away, over on the slope of 53rd Avenue, where they like to gather for a brief conference before splitting up into their work-groups. But it's just one, saying the same thing over and over again. Two long caws, a pause, two long caws, a pause, two long caws. No one else speaks up: the others are listening sullenly. So I imagine.
I worked long hours – for me – on my data project yesterday, and I'm a little out of sorts, a little out of balance. My mind feels a little out of true, and my eyes are tired. And I've just done, for one day, what most software people do every working day. It's a wonder any of them last a year.
I was so happy to hear from everyone, yesterday, in my comments! And surprised that my last evoked so much response. But a lot of people seem to be uneasy with their online presences – some more uneasy about the fragmentation, others about the overexposure. The advent of Google Plus, even if you decide not to adopt it, has to stir up all the questions and anxieties that Facebook and Twitter were already raising, about privacy and exposure and homeliness (in the older sense of that word). A couple people brought up the very serious matter of exposing other people with your writing. It's not just our own privacy at stake. (Zuckerberg may not be my cup of tea, but he was right in the largest sense, that privacy and exposure are going to undergo radical cultural shifts as a result of most of us being searchable: I have no answers or predictions, but we are all going to have to attend to it.)
I've been astonished at how difficult it's been for me to find my footing with a “professional” blog, the blog attached to my massage website. It's a different kind of exposure to a different audience – exposure to people who might be employing me as a therapist, exposure to people who are colleagues or rivals – to people who know a lot about the topics and might catch me out. It raises some of the anxieties that academic writing raised, particularly since I find I don't fit in well with any of the massage clans – I heartily dislike both the medical and the shamanic models, with their claims to higher occult truths that are accessible only to people who take expensive training workshops: I really think that a fifteen-year-old who gives her grandma back rubs probably does as much good for her as would the most highly trained specialist in Myofascial Some-Guy's-Name Technique or a level 6 master of some supposedly ancient Asian (conveniently untranslated; if pressed, untranslatable) lore. I don't think rubbing people and making them feel loved and soothed and comforted is really that abstruse or that difficult: the only reason it's a viable “profession” is that our culture is so isolating, so high-pressure, and so hypersexualized, that the only way most people can get the humane, attentive, non-demanding touch they crave is by paying for it. They really don't need us: if by custom everybody in the grocery line rubbed the neck and shoulders of the person ahead of them, the bottom would drop out of our business and we'd be out on the street. It's not our skills that are in demand – it's our willingness to touch and attend, without groping, rushing or judging.
But that's hardly the sort of thing you make a professional blog out of -- saying that professional skills are bogus and unnecessary. I don't know. I need to rethink the whole project.
It was still full dark when I awoke, conscious of a dull pain in my chest, around the fifth or sixth rib on the right, fretting about it – chest pain! It could be my heart! – in my sleep. I sat up and meditated for twenty minutes, watching my breath, becoming aware of all the light in the room, the green light from the clock, the irritating blue-white throb of my netbook recharging beside the bed. It's just a little indicator light, the size of the head of a pin: but it pulsed in my peripheral vision, catching my attention again and again. I wonder if it woke me. I'll put the netbook to charge downstairs, from now on, and cover the face of the clock before I go to sleep.
By the time I was saying the dedication prayers the light of dawn was appearing, and I knew my chances of getting more sleep were slim. That's okay. I'll sleep when I need to. The pain in my chest had wandered away. I came down to the landing to look at the sky, saluted Venus. And now I'm sitting in the living room, listening to the loud tick of the wall-clock, and wondering why the birds are so quiet. A car engine starts up, down the block, and the light is strong now, but the birds aren't saying a thing. I even see one, flashing through the maple boughs, a starling maybe. All silent.
Puzzled, I go out to the deck, sit cross-legged against the wall. Out here, I can hear them. But they're very quiet. No wonder I couldn't hear them inside. The loudest ones are the crows, blocks away, over on the slope of 53rd Avenue, where they like to gather for a brief conference before splitting up into their work-groups. But it's just one, saying the same thing over and over again. Two long caws, a pause, two long caws, a pause, two long caws. No one else speaks up: the others are listening sullenly. So I imagine.
I worked long hours – for me – on my data project yesterday, and I'm a little out of sorts, a little out of balance. My mind feels a little out of true, and my eyes are tired. And I've just done, for one day, what most software people do every working day. It's a wonder any of them last a year.
I was so happy to hear from everyone, yesterday, in my comments! And surprised that my last evoked so much response. But a lot of people seem to be uneasy with their online presences – some more uneasy about the fragmentation, others about the overexposure. The advent of Google Plus, even if you decide not to adopt it, has to stir up all the questions and anxieties that Facebook and Twitter were already raising, about privacy and exposure and homeliness (in the older sense of that word). A couple people brought up the very serious matter of exposing other people with your writing. It's not just our own privacy at stake. (Zuckerberg may not be my cup of tea, but he was right in the largest sense, that privacy and exposure are going to undergo radical cultural shifts as a result of most of us being searchable: I have no answers or predictions, but we are all going to have to attend to it.)
I've been astonished at how difficult it's been for me to find my footing with a “professional” blog, the blog attached to my massage website. It's a different kind of exposure to a different audience – exposure to people who might be employing me as a therapist, exposure to people who are colleagues or rivals – to people who know a lot about the topics and might catch me out. It raises some of the anxieties that academic writing raised, particularly since I find I don't fit in well with any of the massage clans – I heartily dislike both the medical and the shamanic models, with their claims to higher occult truths that are accessible only to people who take expensive training workshops: I really think that a fifteen-year-old who gives her grandma back rubs probably does as much good for her as would the most highly trained specialist in Myofascial Some-Guy's-Name Technique or a level 6 master of some supposedly ancient Asian (conveniently untranslated; if pressed, untranslatable) lore. I don't think rubbing people and making them feel loved and soothed and comforted is really that abstruse or that difficult: the only reason it's a viable “profession” is that our culture is so isolating, so high-pressure, and so hypersexualized, that the only way most people can get the humane, attentive, non-demanding touch they crave is by paying for it. They really don't need us: if by custom everybody in the grocery line rubbed the neck and shoulders of the person ahead of them, the bottom would drop out of our business and we'd be out on the street. It's not our skills that are in demand – it's our willingness to touch and attend, without groping, rushing or judging.
But that's hardly the sort of thing you make a professional blog out of -- saying that professional skills are bogus and unnecessary. I don't know. I need to rethink the whole project.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Outing
One of the great advantages to having a blog, over the last eight years, is that it has gradually made me real. I know, the idea most people have of online presence is that it's easily faked -- there are all these articles about people presenting their lives as perfect on Facebook, and so forth. People warn you that you "don't really know" people you've met online. But my personal experience of blogging, and online life generally, has been one of inexorable outing. The people who knew me as a massage therapist met, in my comment threads, the people who knew me as an Old English scholar. The people to whom I was primarily a software guy at IBM read memoir that I had written with an audience of radical lefty free-school kids in mind; the people to whom I was a hard-core Buddhist, arguing about the emptiness of emptiness of an evening, got to read my posts about how I couldn't resist ice cream. The process culminated when I found out my father was reading my blog. All these communities I'd carefully kept apart, at arm's length were all in the same room. And the explosion --
The explosion never happened. Nothing blew up. Nobody hated me, nobody thought less of me. People have been -- especially given how cranky and contentious I can be -- remarkably kind and thoughtful and spacious. I had been basing my idea of what was safe to expose to people on my experience of junior high school. In fact, junior high was the exception, the only community I've ever inhabited in which people despised you for having eccentric interests, and maintained rigid hierarchies of social cliques. I know there are others, and I'm very sorry for people who have to live in them. But the actual social world I live in now is very fluid, very generous. I have gradually learned -- through blogging and online communities -- that I don't really have to hide. Probably I never did, once I was free of compulsory schools: but it took a long time -- and a blog -- for me to learn it.
The explosion never happened. Nothing blew up. Nobody hated me, nobody thought less of me. People have been -- especially given how cranky and contentious I can be -- remarkably kind and thoughtful and spacious. I had been basing my idea of what was safe to expose to people on my experience of junior high school. In fact, junior high was the exception, the only community I've ever inhabited in which people despised you for having eccentric interests, and maintained rigid hierarchies of social cliques. I know there are others, and I'm very sorry for people who have to live in them. But the actual social world I live in now is very fluid, very generous. I have gradually learned -- through blogging and online communities -- that I don't really have to hide. Probably I never did, once I was free of compulsory schools: but it took a long time -- and a blog -- for me to learn it.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Ramble
You can think too much about how you want your life to be, forgetting how little control you have over it – how little engaged in the day to day decisions that make your life, is that morose and detached little twist of the the frontal lobe that likes to speculate on what a Good Life would be. The two things, the thought and the life, don't really have that much to do with each other. And it's probably just as well it should be so, because that little twist doesn't have much sense.
But on the other hand, you can lose track entirely, for months at a time, until you wake up one morning and ask yourself, “who is this person, and what are they doing? And why are they doing it?” And you watch, puzzled, while your hand reaches for the toothbrush. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” intoned the objectionable William. “We have given our hearts away – a sordid boon!”
Since I am quite sure that I have a heart – is this real glass? I asked, and smashed it on the table: sure enough, real glass – since I'm quite sure, now, it might not be completely useless to ask, where I want to lay its patched together fragments. With the complete understanding that the morose little twist that asks the question can speak neither for my heart, nor for my operations manager.
“It will have leaves in it, and massage,” was the first answer I came up with. “And it will read books it delights in.”
And that set me to thinking of how much of this life I've dreamed away in books, following fantasy after fantasy. In the days of bondage I used to read all the time, sometimes thinking that the day would come when I would have a life and a story of my own, sometimes thinking I would not. And the habit lingered into my freedom, until now I have to ask, are the stories now my bondage? What is it that I do, when I read a story? Where am I? What do you call that intimacy with the dead? Because they are mostly dead now, or dead to me. The living writers I know are poets, mostly, and poetry lives in a different space – less controlled, less escapist, altogether more dangerous and unpredictable.
Last night Martha invited me to come read in the back yard, as the long summer afternoon settled into evening, to keep her company while she spread compost and planted grass. So I went and settled into a lawn chair, and she was going to come down and join me. I was reading Dancing Aztecs, by Donald Westlake. I read for an hour and she never joined me. She had been drawn into conversation with a neighbor.
It was a perfect evening, and the book – a dreadfully uneven mishmash of shrewd observation about America, with bits of undissolved racism bobbing in it – was basically about new lives. “Get a fast car and keep on driving,” as Tracy Chapman said. I sat in the yard with the leaves shimmering around me, a perfect summer evening, and thought of how little time I ever spent in this yard, and wondered how we would live in the new house.
Well, obviously, we'll live there exactly as we live here. We'll be the same people. Not much will change, no matter how much hope or anxiety we invest in it. If something is to be different, we will have to do something different. What do we want? Well, we never decided. I was too busy building a private space in which to smash glass to even ask the question. And the demands of raising children overwhelmed us. We're not high-energy people. We do a bit and stop and rest and wonder.
And that, I think, should be all right. Anyway, it's what we have to work with. Unless what we really have is lots of thwarted energy running opposite ways. Sometimes it feels like that. The vector sum of the forces is small, but that doesn't mean the forces are small. That's another thing I wonder about.
I was thinking about IBM, how intolerable it became there. I always think that “I jumped before I was pushed,” but I don't really know that: all I know is that I quit. And it occurred to me, as a startling and novel thought, that I was lonely there.
I don't think of myself as someone who gets lonely. All my life people have pestered me with suggestions that I must be lonely, when I was perfectly happy. I used to roam in the hills alone, and people thought I was lonely. I eat breakfast by myself and write and think, and people think I'm lonely. I wasn't, and I'm not. And I was always exasperated by the “team-building exercises” at work, which jammed a bunch of loners like me into groups to play putt-putt golf or drive little race cars around tracks. I wanted to be left alone to work. But now I think that I was lonely, at IBM, and maybe I have been lonely the last couple weeks at the Foundation.
“Some people,” said Barney, “run on a pretty lean mix.” I don't need much, or want much. But I miss Faith, who used to come in once or twice a week to check on me, and would touch my shoulder, and reassure me that what I was doing was important. Ten minutes of contact a week, maybe. But she looked me in the eye and gave me her whole attention, for that time, and took what I said seriously. It was the mix I needed. And Barney suggested that if I didn't have it now at work, I should think about how to get it, possibly even going to the radical extreme of asking for it.
But on the other hand, you can lose track entirely, for months at a time, until you wake up one morning and ask yourself, “who is this person, and what are they doing? And why are they doing it?” And you watch, puzzled, while your hand reaches for the toothbrush. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” intoned the objectionable William. “We have given our hearts away – a sordid boon!”
Since I am quite sure that I have a heart – is this real glass? I asked, and smashed it on the table: sure enough, real glass – since I'm quite sure, now, it might not be completely useless to ask, where I want to lay its patched together fragments. With the complete understanding that the morose little twist that asks the question can speak neither for my heart, nor for my operations manager.
“It will have leaves in it, and massage,” was the first answer I came up with. “And it will read books it delights in.”
And that set me to thinking of how much of this life I've dreamed away in books, following fantasy after fantasy. In the days of bondage I used to read all the time, sometimes thinking that the day would come when I would have a life and a story of my own, sometimes thinking I would not. And the habit lingered into my freedom, until now I have to ask, are the stories now my bondage? What is it that I do, when I read a story? Where am I? What do you call that intimacy with the dead? Because they are mostly dead now, or dead to me. The living writers I know are poets, mostly, and poetry lives in a different space – less controlled, less escapist, altogether more dangerous and unpredictable.
Last night Martha invited me to come read in the back yard, as the long summer afternoon settled into evening, to keep her company while she spread compost and planted grass. So I went and settled into a lawn chair, and she was going to come down and join me. I was reading Dancing Aztecs, by Donald Westlake. I read for an hour and she never joined me. She had been drawn into conversation with a neighbor.
It was a perfect evening, and the book – a dreadfully uneven mishmash of shrewd observation about America, with bits of undissolved racism bobbing in it – was basically about new lives. “Get a fast car and keep on driving,” as Tracy Chapman said. I sat in the yard with the leaves shimmering around me, a perfect summer evening, and thought of how little time I ever spent in this yard, and wondered how we would live in the new house.
Well, obviously, we'll live there exactly as we live here. We'll be the same people. Not much will change, no matter how much hope or anxiety we invest in it. If something is to be different, we will have to do something different. What do we want? Well, we never decided. I was too busy building a private space in which to smash glass to even ask the question. And the demands of raising children overwhelmed us. We're not high-energy people. We do a bit and stop and rest and wonder.
And that, I think, should be all right. Anyway, it's what we have to work with. Unless what we really have is lots of thwarted energy running opposite ways. Sometimes it feels like that. The vector sum of the forces is small, but that doesn't mean the forces are small. That's another thing I wonder about.
I was thinking about IBM, how intolerable it became there. I always think that “I jumped before I was pushed,” but I don't really know that: all I know is that I quit. And it occurred to me, as a startling and novel thought, that I was lonely there.
I don't think of myself as someone who gets lonely. All my life people have pestered me with suggestions that I must be lonely, when I was perfectly happy. I used to roam in the hills alone, and people thought I was lonely. I eat breakfast by myself and write and think, and people think I'm lonely. I wasn't, and I'm not. And I was always exasperated by the “team-building exercises” at work, which jammed a bunch of loners like me into groups to play putt-putt golf or drive little race cars around tracks. I wanted to be left alone to work. But now I think that I was lonely, at IBM, and maybe I have been lonely the last couple weeks at the Foundation.
“Some people,” said Barney, “run on a pretty lean mix.” I don't need much, or want much. But I miss Faith, who used to come in once or twice a week to check on me, and would touch my shoulder, and reassure me that what I was doing was important. Ten minutes of contact a week, maybe. But she looked me in the eye and gave me her whole attention, for that time, and took what I said seriously. It was the mix I needed. And Barney suggested that if I didn't have it now at work, I should think about how to get it, possibly even going to the radical extreme of asking for it.
Friday, July 08, 2011
Tidework
Every touch creates a tidemark.
Behind it, the sounding sea, the rush
and swell of blood in capillaries
of ears or throat; air breaking on the beach
of your chest, the fading surf of shame,
the receding tide of insult, and eventually,
the full moon at the still pivot, high tide,
my hands coming to rest, a momentary sense
of plenitude. It will not stay. I did not make it.
Ten thousand advertisements say
they want a walk on the beach and a glass
of some wine better than they knew at home.
Is it disrespect to say I don't believe it?
to say the wind is skating disregarded feathers
on wide and empty sand-shelves even now?
I don't know much, but the moon does come
to sit with me on cloudy evenings, and he brings
a gallon of home-brewed yarrow beer to split.
He tells me all about how people hide from him,
How he rises over bunchgrass and glittering silica
where nothing but cellophane wrappers go for walks.
And a gruff tenderness comes into his pocked face
when he speaks of low tide, of wincing things exposed
that have no recourse, no defense against the sun.
He rises, snaps his weed-pouch shut, and sighs.
It's back to work for him, and for me, it's sheets to wash,
bottles of lavender oil and cloudlight to refill.
Behind it, the sounding sea, the rush
and swell of blood in capillaries
of ears or throat; air breaking on the beach
of your chest, the fading surf of shame,
the receding tide of insult, and eventually,
the full moon at the still pivot, high tide,
my hands coming to rest, a momentary sense
of plenitude. It will not stay. I did not make it.
Ten thousand advertisements say
they want a walk on the beach and a glass
of some wine better than they knew at home.
Is it disrespect to say I don't believe it?
to say the wind is skating disregarded feathers
on wide and empty sand-shelves even now?
I don't know much, but the moon does come
to sit with me on cloudy evenings, and he brings
a gallon of home-brewed yarrow beer to split.
He tells me all about how people hide from him,
How he rises over bunchgrass and glittering silica
where nothing but cellophane wrappers go for walks.
And a gruff tenderness comes into his pocked face
when he speaks of low tide, of wincing things exposed
that have no recourse, no defense against the sun.
He rises, snaps his weed-pouch shut, and sighs.
It's back to work for him, and for me, it's sheets to wash,
bottles of lavender oil and cloudlight to refill.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Small Craft
A stout woman in a black pantsuit driving a black jeep:
does she picture herself in fatigues and a helmet,
dangling cigarette, left leg cocked jauntily over the side?
Our boys cruised over the Siegfried Line like that.
Or the woman with her hair clutched back by barrettes,
in the battered silver Toyota, grimly piloting
her way into the Death Star: a suicide mission
to keep her family from destruction;
or again, driving the old Mercedes,
its interior afloat with masses of dark hair,
the hands of toddlers and the tails of dogs waving
like sea fronds, her sunglasses perched like false eyes
on the back of a creature with no other defense
than to look bigger than it is, and fiercer:
does she hear the blip blip of the sonar,
the silent running of the hidden ship?
The cafe rocks with the shifting of the plates
and I am peering out the window as we start:
the engine of the milkshake stirrer wakes;
we cast off, cruising past the cars and waving trees.
The lurching of upholstered seats, the rocking
of the tables, the silverware aslide on the formica:
Oh yes, we too, we too are underway;
we have our hidden destinations too.
does she picture herself in fatigues and a helmet,
dangling cigarette, left leg cocked jauntily over the side?
Our boys cruised over the Siegfried Line like that.
Or the woman with her hair clutched back by barrettes,
in the battered silver Toyota, grimly piloting
her way into the Death Star: a suicide mission
to keep her family from destruction;
or again, driving the old Mercedes,
its interior afloat with masses of dark hair,
the hands of toddlers and the tails of dogs waving
like sea fronds, her sunglasses perched like false eyes
on the back of a creature with no other defense
than to look bigger than it is, and fiercer:
does she hear the blip blip of the sonar,
the silent running of the hidden ship?
The cafe rocks with the shifting of the plates
and I am peering out the window as we start:
the engine of the milkshake stirrer wakes;
we cast off, cruising past the cars and waving trees.
The lurching of upholstered seats, the rocking
of the tables, the silverware aslide on the formica:
Oh yes, we too, we too are underway;
we have our hidden destinations too.
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
The Pools
Your thoracic vertebrae
curl in a perfect quarter circle,
in a widow's hump that fits,
so small are you, almost within my hand.
(I've laid you on your side:
you'll never again in this life
lie comfortable on your stomach or your back.)
You'd think I was mocking
if I said you were beautiful, but you are,
ninety years and still undaunted;
if your spine is curled
like the frond of a fern,
and the skin of your shoulders
is like a rind of avocado,
still the skin that never saw the sun
is soft and unblemished, and answers any question
my fingers put to it. Age
takes less than we imagine.
You say it must be hard
to massage an old lady. I
deliberately misunderstand, and say that no,
what's hard is weight-lifters
with acres of muscle to get through:
Old ladies, I say, are easy:
this I could do all day. I let
a hint of mockery stand, let
quotation marks settle around "old ladies."
I am perfectly aware of you as woman,
and no, age neither threatens nor repels me:
I hope to get there myself someday, with luck.
For now
My thumbs walk on the basketball curve
either side of the spinous processes,
sinking gently into the laminal groove,
finding little pools of pain you say
you didn't know were there. And this
is what everyone says to me,
whatever the curl of their spine,
however many years
they have been bowing over
kindergartners' desks.
This is not age, my dear one:
this is life.
curl in a perfect quarter circle,
in a widow's hump that fits,
so small are you, almost within my hand.
(I've laid you on your side:
you'll never again in this life
lie comfortable on your stomach or your back.)
You'd think I was mocking
if I said you were beautiful, but you are,
ninety years and still undaunted;
if your spine is curled
like the frond of a fern,
and the skin of your shoulders
is like a rind of avocado,
still the skin that never saw the sun
is soft and unblemished, and answers any question
my fingers put to it. Age
takes less than we imagine.
You say it must be hard
to massage an old lady. I
deliberately misunderstand, and say that no,
what's hard is weight-lifters
with acres of muscle to get through:
Old ladies, I say, are easy:
this I could do all day. I let
a hint of mockery stand, let
quotation marks settle around "old ladies."
I am perfectly aware of you as woman,
and no, age neither threatens nor repels me:
I hope to get there myself someday, with luck.
For now
My thumbs walk on the basketball curve
either side of the spinous processes,
sinking gently into the laminal groove,
finding little pools of pain you say
you didn't know were there. And this
is what everyone says to me,
whatever the curl of their spine,
however many years
they have been bowing over
kindergartners' desks.
This is not age, my dear one:
this is life.
Monday, July 04, 2011
Waiting It Out
I am trying to read George MacDonald again -- Lilith -- and failing. I find him arch and overbearing, both, and I find myself wanting to ask: are you quite sure that the keys were given into your hand? And why should I want to be lectured all day long by an English parson, even if he is a shapeshifter? I think of myself often as a misplaced Victorian, but even I don't have quite that appetite for being improved.
So I lay it aside again. I had wanted to read Eddison, Mistress of Mistresses, but Eddison is packed up with all the E's: both Eliots, Emerson, Edwards. I lie back on the bed, and experience the summer warmth, for the first time this year. Firecrackers pop and things that surely aren't legal blow up, apparently just behind my ear; others whistle and thrash. But the feel of the day is peaceful, and the leaves play with the setting sun: I treat the howling and bursting things as if they were the surf of some ocean, crashing on the shore of the street.
A feeling as if the bones of my hands and feet have grown too large: a faint dustiness between my fingers and toes, a thirst that won't quite be addressed by any drink to hand. I wait for the 4th of July to be over with more patience than I've mustered for decades. I have, like Jefferson, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. Twice a year I can wait.
Ah, but tomorrow, tomorrow I will run like a dog on the beach, and bite the waves, and shake water all over my friends, and no one will make me behave, not for a moment.
So I lay it aside again. I had wanted to read Eddison, Mistress of Mistresses, but Eddison is packed up with all the E's: both Eliots, Emerson, Edwards. I lie back on the bed, and experience the summer warmth, for the first time this year. Firecrackers pop and things that surely aren't legal blow up, apparently just behind my ear; others whistle and thrash. But the feel of the day is peaceful, and the leaves play with the setting sun: I treat the howling and bursting things as if they were the surf of some ocean, crashing on the shore of the street.
A feeling as if the bones of my hands and feet have grown too large: a faint dustiness between my fingers and toes, a thirst that won't quite be addressed by any drink to hand. I wait for the 4th of July to be over with more patience than I've mustered for decades. I have, like Jefferson, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. Twice a year I can wait.
Ah, but tomorrow, tomorrow I will run like a dog on the beach, and bite the waves, and shake water all over my friends, and no one will make me behave, not for a moment.
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Ernie
If I miss your paper skin and shaking hands
then they are not entirely gone; if the membrane
of the sky still shivers with your inhalation,
you are not dead. If the knife that cut your abdomen clean
under a tent in the South Pacific, and fished
the swollen worm of your appendix onto a dish,
is still in a cracking leather case in a closet, somewhere, anywhere –
Dad's surgical kit from the war, would like a museum want this? –
then your blood must still be beating – up and over the hills –
under the river where Tony-Dog anxiously watched you swim.
But this is not afterlife we talk of here, this cloud
that sinks slow and blurs white in a medicinal glass, this
morning half-grapefruit and bowl of mush that we can't believe
there's no one here to eat. This is the startling chitter of squirrels
outraged by by your cat, and all the inexplicable continuations,
all the things that should have disappeared when you did:
the warmth of your wife's skin, the laughter of your daughter's eyes.
then they are not entirely gone; if the membrane
of the sky still shivers with your inhalation,
you are not dead. If the knife that cut your abdomen clean
under a tent in the South Pacific, and fished
the swollen worm of your appendix onto a dish,
is still in a cracking leather case in a closet, somewhere, anywhere –
Dad's surgical kit from the war, would like a museum want this? –
then your blood must still be beating – up and over the hills –
under the river where Tony-Dog anxiously watched you swim.
But this is not afterlife we talk of here, this cloud
that sinks slow and blurs white in a medicinal glass, this
morning half-grapefruit and bowl of mush that we can't believe
there's no one here to eat. This is the startling chitter of squirrels
outraged by by your cat, and all the inexplicable continuations,
all the things that should have disappeared when you did:
the warmth of your wife's skin, the laughter of your daughter's eyes.
Friday, July 01, 2011
The Floor Below That
A minor plunge into disorientation and anxiety, the last couple of days. Of finding myself unable to work, at work, of not being able to get myself to do ordinary chores or make necessary phone calls. Of finding my mind almost wholly unserviceable.
It was my daily frame of my mind, the last few years at IBM: I call it “minor” because it passed so quickly and wasn't all that debilitating while it was here. I did eventually get to work; I did eventually do my chores and make my phone calls.
The whole while it seemed like a weak echo, not the real thing, an atavistic phantom conjured by anxiety about selling the house, and I haven't been that troubled by it. But there's one new aspect to it. Sexual interest is not a get-out-of-jail-free card any more. I hadn't realized how useful it was. I could lose motivation in every other area of my life, but I never lost it in that. Sexual interest doesn't help you get to work at work, but it does at least supply you with, well, interest. It keeps you from subsiding altogether into apathy. But for the first time in my life, I was thinking, “so what?” in response to sexual thoughts. “Where would that get me?”
It's not a response I've ever had before. It used to be as far as I could drop. If everything else seemed useless and impossible, there was still that. I could still respond to sexual image and fantasy. I could still wander out onto the summer streets and see women that enchanted me. If that can go, too – what's the floor below that? Where do you drop if even that fails to hold you?
I don't know, and I'm not anxious to find out. I have no intention of spending any more time in the frame of mind that I (rather unfairly) associate with IBM. I don't want to drop that far again, let alone further.
This episode was the kick in the butt I needed to restart my practice, anyway. I sat shamatha for twenty minutes this morning. And now I'm off to work to catch up on everything I let slide earlier.
It was my daily frame of my mind, the last few years at IBM: I call it “minor” because it passed so quickly and wasn't all that debilitating while it was here. I did eventually get to work; I did eventually do my chores and make my phone calls.
The whole while it seemed like a weak echo, not the real thing, an atavistic phantom conjured by anxiety about selling the house, and I haven't been that troubled by it. But there's one new aspect to it. Sexual interest is not a get-out-of-jail-free card any more. I hadn't realized how useful it was. I could lose motivation in every other area of my life, but I never lost it in that. Sexual interest doesn't help you get to work at work, but it does at least supply you with, well, interest. It keeps you from subsiding altogether into apathy. But for the first time in my life, I was thinking, “so what?” in response to sexual thoughts. “Where would that get me?”
It's not a response I've ever had before. It used to be as far as I could drop. If everything else seemed useless and impossible, there was still that. I could still respond to sexual image and fantasy. I could still wander out onto the summer streets and see women that enchanted me. If that can go, too – what's the floor below that? Where do you drop if even that fails to hold you?
I don't know, and I'm not anxious to find out. I have no intention of spending any more time in the frame of mind that I (rather unfairly) associate with IBM. I don't want to drop that far again, let alone further.
This episode was the kick in the butt I needed to restart my practice, anyway. I sat shamatha for twenty minutes this morning. And now I'm off to work to catch up on everything I let slide earlier.
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