Aquarius

He is large, clumsy, inarticulate:
and he carries a shallow pan filled with white,
or cream, or light, or wincing happiness.
It slops, as he hurks and hesitates
his way across the stibbled ecliptic,
poor man! A reluctant king, who limps
up to his ankles in freezing cloud,
as anxious to please and sure to fail
as Maximilian of Mexico.

This is the awkward dawn of an age
writ in the stars with dry-erase; this,
the white-board of heaven, where
a mortal's brainstorm is a bullet point
scrawled each in its personal faded color.
Cast your eyes up to the dribbling pan
of our distressed and twitching lord:
this is the spill of compassion;
this is the splash of eternity.

Digital Clock 1, Unconquerable Soul 0

The last few months, I've been waking three or four times a night, needing to pee. Not urgently, not even pressingly, but enough to keep me from going back to sleep. So I pad over to the bathroom – about twenty steps in our new place – pee, wash my hands, and come back to bed. Not really a problem. In the old days, when my stress levels were higher and getting back to sleep was an issue, it would have been a big problem: I'd have been done with sleeping for the night. Still, I was starting to wonder if I should google it and see if maybe I had some sinister health problem developing. (The trouble with doing that, of course, is that the answer always turns out to be yes: just about anything presages health disaster, if you ask Google.)

One night Martha remarked, “You know, that clock really puts out a lot of light.” It was true. I had been thinking the same thing. It was just the glow of the green numbers on the digital clock, but they were pretty bright numbers. And then there was the glowing orange button on the power strip beside the bed. It was not only bright, but had an annoying occasional flicker to it.

“I've been thinking about putting the clock away,” I said. “Now that it gets light early enough, I don't need it.” (The only thing I use that clock for, you understand, is to tell me if I ought to resist the impulse to get up and start the day, and make myself get more sleep: in the summer, I don't need it – if it's dark I know I should still be sleeping.)

I would have gotten around to it, possibly even before Fall. But Martha, being a more proactive type than me, got around to it immediately. Away went the clock. I covered the orange power-strip light, too. It's been a week now, and the number of my nightly trips to the bathroom has abruptly dropped from three or four to zero or one.

The thing is, I knew that small amounts of light have a large impact on quality of sleep. I had read Dement's terrific book. But there's a strange resistance sometimes to believing that our own unconquerable souls are subject to the same influences as those of ordinary mortals. And to the notion that our unconscious brains, one way or another - did you know that human beings can detect light without their eyes? True fact - are picking up and processing information that our conscious brains never handle. No matter how thoroughly we understand that – we never really believe it.

Sacred

The dream line: the clouds whipping past, flaring over the clinic, and the shells from the buds of the cherry trees clattering along the gutters like the hooves of tiny galloping horses. How they brought the good news from 37^th Avenue to 38^th.

Stopping with my fingers over rim of the iliac crest, not really mixing it up with the iliacus, not trying to do anything – that ambition that has ruined so many massages! – but just resting there. I've done deep work on this client before, going right down to the psoas, where it nestles by the spine under the intestines, and into the bowl of the pelvis to work the iliacus. It's not needed now, and it would in fact be counterproductive, but I pause a moment, letting my fingertips be so many heavy gold ball-bearings, weighing there. This is part of the temple too: this is sacred too.

How difficult and necessary the concept of the sacred is! It gets bullied and worried from both sides: from the people who think it makes no sense, and from the people who insist that properly speaking everything is sacred, so we shouldn't single anything out. The everything-is-sacred people are right, of course, on some abstract plain far above 38^th Avenue: but we're just a bunch of nervy, overexcitable primates, and we need our touchstones, our lucky charms, our teddy bears. Let them not challenge to themselves a strength they have not, lest they lose the comfortable support of those weaknesses that indeed they have.

I spoke of every day being an opportunity to start over, and Barney said every moment could be such an opportunity. Any moment could be a such a turning. I wonder if that's true, or if that's a similar reach for a feline dignity, a reach for something beyond what primates can really do?

Lines in April

April is the cruelest month, wrote T.S. Eliot, and when I first read that I imagined that Eliot and I were twin souls: oh yes! April filled me with apprehension and dismay, too.

I later figured out that my kinship with T.S.E. was – in this matter, as in many others – bogus. To Eliot, April was cruel because it woke hopes of a summer happiness that would never come. To me, April was cruel because it presaged a summer weather that really would come, and which I hated for its own sake: for its featureless blue skies, burning sun, and meaningless glare; for the noisy nights and drunken fun that I found frightening and alienating; for the heat which made having a body a misery to me; for the sun that set too late and rose too early. I didn't want summer to come. The only thing I really liked about summer was that women wore fewer clothes.

I've changed. I have a guarded liking for summer now. Something has changed in me physiologically: the hot weather doesn't distress me as much as it used to. I used to dislike the sensation of the free air on my skin, and now I enjoy it. And I have always liked all the green and growing things waking up and reaching for the sky.

---

Always my days have seemed to me too short to achieve my desire.

Lines converging on the distance, and then flipping over my head, a sudden inversion. What are my hands for? Why all these gifts? And why the long whisper of sand running?

My Dad had a real hourglass, and it fascinated me. My vision was better than it is now, and I could watch the individual sand grains struggling to make it through the neck, and then, each one, drop like a parachutist out of an airplane. And when they were all through, except for a little inevitable dust, you could turn it again. Up became down, freedom became bondage, and the struggle began all over again.

But getting back to lines, convergences, asymptotic approaches, verges and swerves. Sometimes, above the silver ringing, there is a complicated drumming going on as well, a bass throb, a snare rattle, the sharp tok! of wood-block: an endlessly surprising syncopation, slightly delayed gratification, all the more gratifying for the wait. A broad jumper suddenly launched into the air.

A faint taste of vinegar in my bread, an unfamiliar tang to the lettuce. The pins that hold the day in place have slipped, and it's wobbling, wobbling.

Odds and Ends

I've finally had a chance to read the first couple chapters of Marly Youmans' Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. People will inevitably call it Faulknerian – it's Deep South, it's hot, it's told through the lens of a boy who's neurologically atypical. And it's got fruit and blood. But if you have any spiritual antennae at all, you'll quickly grasp that it's anti-Faulkner. There's fullness, not emptiness, in back of everything.

And the story is backwards, too. Christianity first made its way by claiming the crucifixion and resurrection as the answer to evil. But this novel turns that upside down: in this the novel the crucifixion (at least) is the evil that must be answered. Pip knows at once, in his chaotic, inarticulate way, that everyone is responsible for the death of his brother. The question is, how do you find your way, hobbled with knowing that? Christianity here is the question, not the answer.

---

Fun fact: only about 75% of people in my new zip code, 97220, speak English at home. Behind me, a conversation in a tonal language – Vietnamese, I think, though it might be Chinese: my ear for these languages is very poor. I find I'm still defensive and unhappy about having failed to learn Chinese. I'm a smart-ass and a showoff, academically: I don't take shit offa nobody and I don't give up on learning anything. Except Chinese. (And its distant cousin Tibetan.) I devoted years to those languages, and I remember absolutely nothing, not a single word, of either one.

---

High walls against the sky, dust blowing up into my face, the faint sour smell of lichen.

---

Jessie, sleepy, wearing a turquoise cardigan over a hot pink shirt, her hair swarming like an amiable Medusa's. She looks as though she just rolled out of bed, grabbed a coffee pot, and went straight into battle, taking orders and refilling cups. I'll take the time to wake up later, she seems to have said to herself. I find her adorable. I do worry that she doesn't get enough sleep. But I've never seen her irritated or fussed: whatever she bases her sense of herself on , it isn't the ups and downs of waiting tables.

---

I want about five more clients. I imagine writing fan letters to fifty Portlanders I admire, enclosing gift certificates. Super-targeted marketing. Would that net me my five? Or even one? I've been putting off advertising again, it's such a tiresome business, and I haven't needed to for a couple years. You get spoiled when that happens.

Comb-Over

Morning flares up. Alarm clock lost in the covers. We've been in the new place half a year, and I still wake uneasy at the different fall of the light. I half expect to open the door and see the ground covered with snow.

I wash the morning dishes, do my back exercises, take my shower. Everything flickers: nothing stays still.

Mornings like this, I come loose in time, as I imagine people with advanced Alzheimer's do. I could be a college student in Olympia, a pantry chef in Portland, a programmer in Beaverton. I check, and try to stabilize my story: I'm a massage therapist and a database guy, living in the East County. Right. Spies must need to do this: get their story straight before the day begins. I have a feeling it's not so common for other people.

I see no particular reason why it should be true, why I'm not somebody else today.

---

Kia pauses, the sparse long hair on top of my head between her fingers. “I don't cut this?”

There's an odd amused cast to her expression, as though she's offering complicity. It takes me a moment. My perception of my own hair is crude: I have only two categories for it, “right” and “too long”: I'm clearly missing something here. Then it dawns on me: she's offering a comb-over! You always wonder how hapless men take to those silly things, how they tell their barbers to do it. Well, this is how it starts. “Whatever will look right,” I say cautiously. I slip a hand from under the cloak to show: “I part it here.” – Not saying, but meaning, and not way off to the side! “Up here?” she says evincing faint surprise. I leave, not exactly disgruntled, but not quite gruntled either. Balding is fine, no problem with that: but to be taken for someone who would be anxious to conceal it is wounding.

Out on the sidewalk, unlocking my bike, I start laughing. It's all vanity: it's just that some of it is more obvious. I'm still laughing as I kick off and head up 81st, and the wind flows over my bare neck.

Rochester's Slippers

Brilliant clouds: my eyes are dazzled. I lower them from the window, and inverse shapes still hover, moving erratically across the screen, pulled here and there by the focus point of my gaze.

I am at a brink, certainly: the long sandy crest of a dune, where the wind laps at my feet.

Some things twinge and some don't. Tulips of extraordinary beauty in my office. They opened over the weekend. I think of making something: but I'm so tired, and there's a constant babble all around me. All I want is the stabilization of touch. I forget everything else: some things I forget on purpose, and others by accident, but I forget pretty much everything. A few frozen pictures, that's all.

There is a lingering anger at being so obviously and deliberately misunderstood. But after all, why shouldn't I be misunderstood? In what spiritual bill was it written down, this inalienable right to be understood? It takes time to understand, and everyone is short on time. I am too. And the payoff to understanding me, when I am so confused and contradictory, is pretty small. Let it go. Let the wind blow the sand in snake patterns, sidewinding over the beach; let it ruffle the hair on my head.

Tinnitus

I thought it would be warmer today
I regretted my gloves (folded
in the lap of the dreaming
Awakened One of Tools, on the
dusty workbench)
before I had gone a block. My jacket
fluttered in the wind, and my eyes wept.

It is your birthday today,
and all week I have thought
of flowers, calligraph'd poems,
phone calls at dawn, inviting you to see
the sunrise I gave you.

But the dawn runs bleak, colorless,
ancient. I saw last week
an opossum so elderly,
confused, and stiff, that
he walked witless in the daylight,
limping blind, with his teeth bared,
in the gutter.

Carefully I lock the U
around the bike's tenderest parts
with numb hands. I will give you nothing today.
There is nothing that it makes sense to give,
there is no kindness compares to silence.
In my ears the silver tinnitus
soars into a higher song. I wipe
my eyes carefully. I
regret my gloves.

Spanish Beech Trees and Presidents

Reading again a Spanish translation of The Hobbit – I noted it down inside the back cover, apparently the last time I read it was in July 2001 – to try to clean some of the rust off my Spanish. And because I love the book, and have read it countless times in English, both to myself and aloud to my children. I pretty much know it by heart. I catch the translator out, occasionally, but by and large it's a good job. Each day I make a list of 25 Spanish words I had to look up, and I go over them a bit. My Spanish vocabulary is in a strange, hazy state. It's often hard for me to say whether I know a word or not. An haya, now, that's a beech tree, did I know that? Well, sort of. If you tell me there's three trolls sitting around a bonfire of troncos de haya, I do. But if I met an haya standing by itself in a new poem, I bet I'd have to look it up.

---

Finishing reading a biography – it's always a melancholy business, the finish of a biography – of George Washington. Obama is often compared to Lincoln by his admirers, but really the predecessor he most reminds me of is Washington: particularly in his patience, in his extraordinary ability to leave unripe fruit on the tree. I disagree with him about a great many things – he is after all a center Democrat, the sort of creature we used to call a moderate Republican – but I often feel, as I often do reading about Washington, that he's the only grown-up in the room: the only one who recognizes other people's good intentions, and the only one who understands thoroughly that we don't actually know what's going to happen if we follow one policy or another: we're only guessing. Poor old Washington, who thought that Hamilton and Jefferson would be able to work together in harness, because they were both patriots! There's something very sweet about being able to make a mistake like that.

The Three-Week Projects

So the grand project of mending my life marches on, in three-week sub-projects. There's something a little surreal about it, something a little pompous and overdone feeling, and I wonder if it will eventually reveal itself to be bogus. But so far, it marches.

I set my three-week goals with absurd precision. Be in bed by precisely 10:35. Ride my bike at least 28.4 miles each week. Buy the salad fixings before noon if there's only one salad's-worth left in the bowl at dawn.

But it has to be absurdly precise, because I have to know with no doubt whatsoever that I have either failed or succeeded. There must be no doubt. As soon as I fail, I need to chuck the project and reformulate it, usually (though not always) by halving the effort involved, or relaxing the “time tension” on it. Sometimes the revisions are absurdly small. “No eating after 7:30” becomes “No eating after 7:45.” That sort of thing. And it all gets written down and tracked in its own color on my Google calendar.

The idea is that the commodity in really short supply, the one I must hoard and deploy carefully, is what people commonly call will-power, and I call oomph. As things become habitual, they require less oomph, and typically – as with cleaning the kitchen daily – they can be moved into the less oomphy parts of the day (which for me are afternoons and evenings), leaving the high-oomph mornings for working on the hard things.

And things that are established do, really, require much less oomph as time goes by. When we had first moved into the new house, even things that had been automatic for years – flossing my teeth, for instance – had turned into things I had to force myself to do, with huge efforts of will. It helps a lot to know that every time I successfully do something like this, I make the next time easier, I free a tiny bit of oomph for the next project.

The increments are small. It will take a year or two to get to where I want to be food, for example, so that I'm mostly eating fresh food that I've prepared myself, and drastically curtailing the refined carbs. But since I've been struggling with it all my life, I'm willing for it to take a couple years. I've had enough experience of flinging myself at the whole problem and utterly failing, sliding clear back to zero (and under zero, to new lows). I don't know if I'll ever get there, but I know by now that I can't a) establish new habits of cooking and cleaning, b) establish new habits of eating, and c) forgo most of my favorite foods, all at once. It's too much, and it all crashes, and there I end up, as discouraged as bloody hell, gorging on potato chips and cookies because – since I'm going to be fat and disgusting and die young – I want at least to have some chips and cookies first.

So I'm going in increments, and actually refraining from certain foods comes dead last in the process. I may not ever get there, and if not, then that's just the way it is: but at least I'll be eating good food as well as bad food.

All this focus on myself makes me uneasy, but I tell myself it's not really just in service of my own vanity. I'm going to be a burden to other people, not a help to them, if my health breaks down: and I've already had more good luck that way than I deserve. I may have a tough, sturdy Norwegian frame that can carry seventy extra pounds with a shrug, and guts that absorb anything that faintly resembles food without complaining, but I'm not really indestructible.

Not Coming Back

As I told Nina, my marketing hurdle here is what to call it. A magazine? A photo-chapbook? It's sixteen 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages. You can buy it here -- Not Coming Back -- print version for $5.00, digital version for $2.00. Nina Tovish took 11 of my recent poems and put them together with her photographs. They're amazing photos, which won't surprise you if you know Nina's work -- but what does surprise and delight me is how deeply the photographs and poems speak to each other.

Everyone I've shown it to pauses at the spread that pairs a full page photo of a stream flowing through a an unkempt winter landscape -- trees shaggy with moss, soft alternating with harsh, textures fading away -- with a poem I wrote about the griefs of breaking up a household after a death, of selling, giving away, throwing away the stuff that accumulates in a house over a lifetime. Most of the pairings are more obvious than that, but that's the one that moves me most deeply.

This is not really a collaboration so much as a new thing that Nina made out of my poems. I treasure it. I've never met Nina in the flesh, but we go way back in the online world. She was a student of theology and serious tournament poker player, back then. We both are incorrigibly restless border-walkers, people who can't stay put in one world, and we both experience love as a disaster devoutly to be wished. She tended to pick out my more erotic and theological poems.

The poems include my Anna's Hummingbird poem, which I think is the best poem I've written in the last couple years, about the anxiety of a mother Anna's for her fledgling:

God save us from the slow raccoon
God save us from the mocking crow
God save us from the wide-eyed cat
God save us from the fingered apes.

I hope you'll find this magazine -- photo-chapbook -- whatever-it-is -- as rich an experience as I have.

Famous

I was walking down Rodney Street toward KCC, and and a dark pickup truck suddenly pulled to a stop. Two women waved and beamed at me, Phuntsok and -- was it Michelle? My mind ran through names, couldn't find one. She'd cut her hair, and my brain apparently had indexed her name by her hair.

"I'm loving your poems!" she called. Phuntsok nodded vigorously. "We both are!"

"Thanks so much," I said. There was a tiny awkward pause. I should have said something, but my mind's librarians were racing up and down the aisles, looking for Michelle's name. I beamed back at them, and put my hand on my heart. That seemed a poet-ish gesture. We all beamed at each other a bit more, and then they drove on.

So: there. I'm famous.

Match

When I strain your hair, the sand runs black
over my knuckles. You had to go back
to fear sharks again. Or not: I forget.
Either one you might have said, and meant.
We meet with formality, ambassadors of tribes,
and dally like puppies on the patterned floor,
you stand on my feet to walk to the door.

No one less like winter have I ever known:
sunlight booms on the sunwarmed stone,
ants run away to a cooler home,
spattered unspent glasslight springs
back from the corners like blowing foam.
Between your fingers gathered flax
melts and drips like candle wax.

My ledgers are written on sheets of ice
that lie underground, with tick of dice
and the click of tumblers, one by one,
in spaces innocent of any sun,
where the long slow glaciers run:
but there still, when you pull the latch,
is the mystery that our hands still match.

Strung

He lifts his hands high, as though asking
for water to be poured into them. The needles
sink easily into his wrists. They pull the thread
down through the veins, choosing at every fork
the way back to the heart. The string dye turns out
not to be color-fast; it blackens the blood: where
the veins close to the skin had been blue, they
turn a dark occluded midnight.
He still holds up his hands.

Threaded now, he thinks of
the clew of Theseus,
the claw of the Minotaur,
the clay wound round with waxen floss,
the crusted and scabbed integument
waiting for when, if ever,
he lowers his throbbing arms.

Suppose a murmur rises
in the unseen crowd behind;
suppose that god, goddess, or monster
has stepped down, holding brightness
in a long left hand;
Suppose now someone or something
takes hold of the inner end of the string,
and pulls.

Sunday and Tuesday, Chimp and Orangutan, Cadillac and Tom's

Morning. Finally landed here, at the Cadillac Cafe. I set off for Tosi's, which ordinarily opens at the civilized hour of 6:00, only to realize, on arriving at the empty parking lot and dark windows, that this was Sunday. Of course it was Sunday, that was why I was heading out early: I wanted to get my breakfast-and-writing time in before the morning sit at KCC. But on Sunday Tosi's doesn't open until 7:00, when half the useful day is over. Where else would be open?

Well, no place I wanted to go. I know, night owls feel oppressed by morning people, but let me tell you, the feeling is mutual: to someone who wakes up brimming over with energy and eager to do things at five in the morning, it seems like the whole world is tailored to night owls. Nothing is open. A glorious beautiful morning opens up, it's full daylight, and everyone else in the world, inexplicably, is sleeping. The number of things you can actually do is pretty limited.

So I drove to the ATM, and deposited some massage checks, and then decided I'd drive over to Northeast, KCC's neck of the woods, and see if there was anyplace opening at 7:00 over there. I seemed to remember some places out Alberta or Killingsworth way. By that time it would be close to 7:00, and I'd be that much closer to where I had to be at 9:00.

Nothing. Broad daylight and not a soul on the streets. Downright eerie. Then a gleam of hope came to me: the Cadillac! A little upscale for me, the sort of place where the silverware all matches and the coffee packs too much punch, but at 7:00 on Sunday you can't be choosy. At least they know how to scramble an egg.

So here I am at the window, looking out at trees, across the way, leafing out in the annual Spring insurrection. A yellow chrysanthemum glows on my table. The coffee tastes wonderful, so I have be stern with myself: only two cups of this yuppie-style coffee, or else my hands will be trembly during my massages this afternoon. My equanimity returns. I'm full of good will, even towards night-owls. They didn't ask for their strange affliction. My mind wanders off into wondering about the evolutionary advantages of the variation: did you want some of the primate-group wakeful at night, to keep an ear out for tigers? Did the night-owls wander around, on the night-time savannah, or did they stay put? Did they yearn for an all-night diner? Did they get so bored that they prodded the alpha, to make him wake up enough to take a swipe at them? The stars, the stars must have been glorious.

I come back to this world, this strange world we've made for ourselves. People in ones and twos, scattered about the cafe, drawn to each other's proximity but carefully avoiding getting so close that they might have to speak to each other, or, God forbid, touch each other. No careless nestling and nuzzling together for us, no sleeping together in a huddle, tuning our nervous systems to each other, learning to know each other's smell and heartbeat in the night. No, we keep our distance, surrounded by invisible spheres of personal space, masters of our own loneliness, each of us our own lieutenantless alpha, our own hiveless queen. Well. It keeps me in work: but I wonder how long it can last.

---

And now it's Tuesday, and I'm at Tom's. Never remembered to post the above. Sunday and Monday have become my busy days.

I had to go, but even as I went, I was dissatisfied with those last couple sentences. Chimps may be our closest relatives, but we have other close relatives that are far less gregarious and tribal. Orangutans would spread themselves farther than people in a breakfast restaurant. Socially, they resemble no ape more closely than 21st Century Americans: either solitary, or serially couple-bonding, with the closest ties being between mother and child. And remember they're the cleverest of the apes, after us. And, like us, they don't go into heat (or are in heat all the time, depending on how you look at it.)

But when I watch either chimps or orangutans, my main sense of how they differ from us is the speed at which they live. Turn the dial faster than “human” and you get chimps, quick, busy, sociable, and chattery: turn it slower than “human” and you get orangutans, slow, deliberate, solitary, and taciturn.

Well. Today is an orangutan day: dark, slow, and sad, pregnant with rain and regret. But though the sky is dark, the colors of Spring are rising and glowing in spite of it. It will come, after all, at least one more time.

A Level Head

I love arguing philosophy, though I'm hopelessly ignorant about it – or rather, probably, because I'm ignorant: but I generally come away from one of these internet passages of arms with a deep sense of failure: of having been glib when I should have been silent, of having pretended to understandings I don't really have. My philosophical education amounts to what any undergraduate should have, and no more: it's just enough for an engaging talker and accomplished bullshit artist to duck from tree to tree, taking potshots, and never staying in the open long enough for anyone to take a careful return shot.

So it's fun. I get a thrill from punching above my weight. But I come away like Boswell from a bawdy house, wondering what mental diseases I may have contracted or spread, vowing not to go again, and carrying a strong sense of having wasted my powers for a moment's trivial gratification. I only do it when I'm anxious or distressed, and trying to escape something.

---

The ground is wet, and the morning's been showery, but it held off long enough for me to ride dry to Tosi's. No wifi here, which I'm beginning to view as a blessing. Social media siphons away an alarming amount of me. I have a sense of urgency about time: I have been wasting it, scattering my attention, skipping from one shiny thing to the next. Time to slow down, breathe, and settle to my real work.

But at the same time, it hasn't all been bawdy houses. I feel I have really been hammering out what I think I'm doing, in my massage practice, in a number of online conversations. Now I have to rewrite or tweak much of what's on my massage site: I say a number of things there that I either wouldn't say at all, now, or else would say differently. And it's only now that I'm clear on that, that I feel I can go on to build my practice. I'd like to about double the amount of massage I do, but I haven't done anything to advertise or promote my practice for a couple years: I've been coasting along on loyal clients and word of mouth. Now that I'm really done moving house, and really have formulated what my massage practice is, maybe I'm ready to take it on the road.

---

Fifty-four. 3x3x3x2. It is a number, as Poshi said last night, that is almost impossible not to factor, if you're inclined that way. Three times 18, for one thing: I've had the time to grow to adulthood three times. It's a little embarrassing that I haven't managed to do it even once. At the DMV, renewing my driver's license for another eight years, the man – about my age, with his sparse hair gathered into a gray ponytail – had to retake my picture. “The computer doesn't like this one,” he explained, making a rapid side-to-side motion with a flat hand. “The eyes aren't in a horizontal line.”

I sat back down for another picture. “I've always had trouble keeping a level head,” I said.

“Yeah, me too,” he said ruefully, and snapped another one.

The Spring Rains

The spring rains continue, the real Oregon spring rains: cold, obstinate, and unhurried. No need for theatrical downpours or thunderstorms. These aren't piddly little continental rains that throw a tantrum and cry themselves out: these are rains that have settled in for the long haul. They have the whole Pacific Ocean to draw on, and months before the less-rainy season arrives: there is really no particular reason that they have to stop before July. They usually do, from time to time, but it's a matter of grace, not of necessity.

Deep breath. So accept the rain as a given, and go on. I don't usually bridle at it this way. Usually the rain makes me happy. But I'm off-balance, wanting to ride to work, but not wanting this head-cold to flower, wanting to change my life so that I live in the bright sunlight, convinced that if only the sun was out my will would work properly. I'm one of the least superstitious people I know, but my life is riddled with superstition.

Suppose that I lived somewhere the rain never stopped. I wouldn't pound my head against the wall this way: I'd simply accommodate it.

Tomorrow is my birthday: I'll be 54, which is a pleasing if rather large number. It means I've lived 9 six-year lives, or 6 nine-year lives: it means I'm twice as old as when I had my first child.

All my life before I had children is vague, hazy, unreal to me. I confess that sometimes childless people strike me as irresponsible and clueless, not really grown-up. What they do has consequences only for themselves, or for other people who – supposedly at least – can look after themselves. It's not an attitude I foster, but it's one I can't always avoid. Childless people aren't really any more in control of their lives than we are. it's just a little easier for them to pretend: to pretend that they make their own schedules and choose their own pastimes. But every adult has at least one wayward helpless person for whom they're held accountable.

The rain goes on. I keep an ear cocked for my cell phone. The cold is getting into my bones: I can feel the chill in the radial and ulnar bones of my forearms, and in my shoulder joints. It's as if my body was framed up with scavenged wire from freezer shelves: stale, icy and slow to move. The cold seems to come from the inside out. I huddle my coat over my shoulders and scowl. The warmth is grateful, but I'm moodily aware that I'm cold, not because it happens to be raining, but because I'm deconditioned. Sure, I have yet another plan for getting myself back in shape – this one predicated on eternal rain – but I more than usually acutely aware that this game of aging is one of losing one's conditioning and getting it back again, phase after phase, over and over, until finally the phase comes when you can't get your conditioning back, for one reason or another. And then you're truly old. And a bit after that you die.

Well. That's a gloomy point of view, and I can comfort myself with the fact that my father is not yet, by that reckoning, old. And if I'm counting properly, he's 27 years older than I am. And even my mother, miraculously, is still alive and well, though she is truly old, and has been for decades. So apparently I'm built of sound genetic timber. Still, I yearn to be back in shape. I hate this. I hate having to stock up on oxygen with a couple deep breaths before I can tie my shoes: I hate the faint lurch I detected last night when I was rising from my knees during a massage. I should be able to breath even when I'm bent over, and I should be able to rise from my knees as easily as a ferret lifts its head.

et ego in Circadia vixisti

Chimneys blotch the thinly snowed-over roofs. I woke at five, automatically calculating, before I was sure I'd read the clock properly, “it's really four, right? Spring forward. Right.”

And Martha woke too, and I read to her for a while – near the end of the Lord of the Rings, the scouring of the Shire – till she fell asleep again. Still no sleep in me, not then, so I slipped out the bed and out of the room. And now the vanished sleep has come back, making my eyes swollen and irritated: but now I don't want it, lest my circadian rhythms get even more confused. There are many things I need to do today: but nothing I look forward too.

Eventually the morning came, and I opened the blinds, and saw that the world was dusted with snow. A gull passes the window, now, calling its complaints. Over in the east, between the houses, is a brightness, where the cloud cover thins, but mostly the sky is dull gray, the same cold color as the snow. A wind stirs the fir boughs in my neighbor's yard, and shakes a little snow loose. Most is already gone.

A crow comes to rest on the on the telephone wire, his legs spraddled, Western fashion. The wind is moving the wire so much that he has to flirt his tail continually to stay aboard: he tires of that and launches again: a black scrap blown suddenly upwards, out of view, over the house.

---

I really don't care how you number the hours of the day, but skipping them back and forward twice a year, playing the devil with circadian rhythms and disrupting whatever delicate balance people with sleep disorders have achieved, is deep-dyed nonsense. But it did allow me to post this joke on Facebook on Sunday morning, which almost made it worth it: et ego in Circadia vixisti, I wrote. "I, even I, have dwelt in Circadia."

Tryst

A scallop shell, pale blue, rests
underwater, shifting and shimmering
in the urinal: as its sea-chamber
warms and yellows, it darkens,
yearning to understand, maybe, or

hungering for light. Does its heart
climb the thin thread of wet warmth
reaching down to it? It was held
within the mind of some designer,
lives faintly in some portfolio,

but this intimacy
is all out of proportion. I and thou,
O wavering scallop! Tied by fates
that neither can control. The last kiss
of epthelial lips, one last

springing leap for the waters
collected from chipped coffee cup,
from the steel nightstand glass,
from a dozen unsuspected unsuspecting places,
and here to join a greater way,

but first, this swirling embrace,
in a little porcelain foyer, in
a little room in a restaurant,
a tiny resting place that no one
and everyone calls home.

A Builder of Bridges

March 30th is the Launch of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage by Marly Youmans, from Mercer University Press. It won the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction. Lucius Shepard writes:

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression America and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years.

We, of course, being bloggers, get to sneak backstage and waylay the producer among the properties. I asked Marly this question:

I'm curious about origins. Did the Depression come first, imaginatively -- with the story growing up, so to speak, inside it -- or did the story come first and then locate itself in the Depression?  & was there some particular book or film that turned your mind to that time?

In some families -- mine, certainly -- the Depression lives on as a place of origin: I think that my grandmother, who died quite wealthy, never threw away a paper clip or a rubber band in all her life: she never stopped storing things up in case the bad times came again. Did your family have "Depression legends"? Did they inform this novel?

And got this wonderful answer:

Dale, my mother remembers her family saving jars, paper bags, string, and so on.  They lost much hard-earned Georgia property during the Depression and had good reason to be saving.

Unlike most of my work, this novel is seeded deep in family story—not because I knew all my stories well, but because I did not know all of them well and longed to know certain ones better.  Large portions of my paternal family history remained a blur to me, despite my questions.

It’s possible to see how what I did not know about my father and his family triggered a story. My father’s childhood as a sharecropper’s son was what we would now call harsh, although he never called it so. Life in the deep South was not pretty for his parents, born three decades after the Civil War, and he was born in 1926, before the hard times of the 1930’s. He was pulled around in a box till the age of four, perhaps because he had some light cerebral palsy—later on he developed a number of neurological problems. But by the time he was seven, he was plowing on a cut-down plow. As a teenager, he ran away from home several times and rode the rails. Once he was discovered in Florida, a good distance from his home, 90 miles west of Savannah. At 17, he joined the Army Air Corps and fought in World War II as a tailgunner, and the miracle of the G.I. bill allowed him to attend college and graduate school and become a professor of analytic chemistry.

But from my father’s teenage years, all I knew was fragments.  His times as a runaway and as a teenage tailgunner were mysterious to me. I believe it is often not so much the fragments but the spaces between the fragments that lure a writer. We want to cross a gap, join one land mass to another. It can’t literally be done. But the gaps can inspire a new story and a new wholeness.

While Pip is not based on my father or any member of my paternal family, his life shares many family facts. The family house at Lexsy (the farm with the outbuildings and well, the four-room house with porch and giant hedge) is the blueprint for the Orphanage, and Pip’s rural life of labor and school is not much different from the life of any sharecropper’s child of the time. He does resemble my father in intelligence and his dash of neurological trouble. Like my grandfather when he was a boy, Pip chooses as his favorite sibling not one of his legitimate brothers and sisters but one of two illegitimate and mixed-race half-siblings brought up in the family after the death of their mother. In this way, like my great-grandfather, Pip’s father appears to be a builder of bridges, both real and metaphorical.

More about the book at Marly's place. I'm so looking forward to it!

Radiance

An ant, the size of this 'l', walks carefully
the perimeter of my laptop, straying at whiles
onto the warm snow of the writing app, blinded,

struggling on. I pause with my finger over him.
I've killed them before, without thinking,
despite my Buddhist convictions.

They make your fingertip smell like rust.
A Buddhist when convenient, you might say, or
culturally Christian, instinctively American:

bugs are to kill. Or you can spiral into
justifications: is
an individual ant a sentient being? Surely

the hive is the sentient being? By which argument
my own status as unexpendable
is hardly beyond doubt. I pause again, then

lift my laptop, and blow. A mighty wind,
and the field of warm, dazzling,
inexplicable light vanishes. Falling

and falling, what whisper of consciousness
draws the eddying curves of his descent?
What flickers of fear or desire

Haunt his fall? I am the Lord your God
who brought you out of Egypt.
The sun falls warm on my skin,

And I glance up, blinking,
at the unexpected radiance of Spring.


In response to this Morning Porch post.

Accrual

I try to imagine this timid, trusting teenager
tending bar in a downtown dive: I fail.

Yet she does, or says she does. Perhaps
the drink is a catalyst. Perhaps she is not a teenager.

Perhaps she is not timid. The silences that accrue,
maybe they are mistakes of mine, cues missed.

I am a full generation older than she:
the backs of my hands show

corrugations, like weathered bark.
I pause with my hands on her shoulders,

listen. Somewhere, far away,
someone is weeping.

Against Purity

Well, no. I used to think that. Now I think the shaping intellect is more of a curse, and it's better to let yourself drawl and yawp all over the page. Say everything. All you need to do at the end is run back through it and take out the intensifiers and repetitions.

When I was young I loathed Dickens. Now he's my favorite novelist.

When I was young I loved Flaubert. Now I can't read him. What's the point? He went meticulously through all of his baths, throwing out babies to purify his bathwater.

A gull flies straight towards my window, wobbling like someone you meet on the sidewalk, when you can't decide who's going left and who's going right, and just before disaster, one of you makes a desperate resolve. Swoosh! and he's over the roof. Good luck, fellow traveler.

See? Like that.

And all the branches of all the firs are nuzzling and noddling each other, and the power lines shake, while the wind herds the cloud cover over the housetops.

I laugh, shake my head, and close my tired eyes. God, how I love you.

Extrapolation, Incompetence, Spring

I'm reading Jonathan Carroll's Sleeping in Flame. Such a long time since I've read a novel! The first half I enjoyed very much. But now we've come to the magic, and suddenly, from being sensitive and nuanced, it's become clunky and over-explained. I watched Clare Dunkle do the same thing in the progression of the Hollow Kingdom trilogy: from the first volume, a magnificent, eerily haunted gothick-cum-Jane Austen novel, it dwindled to two ordinary fantasy-kingdom genre novels. Once the secret is out of the bag, the bag collapses, and the secret, in the light of day, is not all that interesting. Why would it be? In itself, it's neither real nor emotionally right: it's just something someone made up. The systematic explanation of the rules of someone's magical world are far less interesting than the Oregon State Department of Motor Vehicles pamphlet explaining the rules of the road. Those at least encounter reality and reflect it.

You can feel it, when someone drops the shaping imagination – what Coleridge would have called the esemplastic imagination – and shifts to the busy-work of hammering out their system. The tree of their creativity has been girdled, and it's only a matter of time till it dies. I hate watching it. That's one of the reasons I quit reading modern fantasy: it got to be too depressing, watching those moments of high, intense imagination collapse into traffic manuals. They switch from what had to have been, what could have been no other way, to what might have been, to something merely possible. Any hack can play with that. Nothing strangles the literary imagination quicker than extrapolation.

---

I firmly believe that the state of Massachusetts only pretends to elect their governors: they must really select them by written exam. How else to explain the extraordinary political incompetence of Mitt Romney and Mike Dukakis? You could swear that neither of these men had ever dealt with the public in their lives. Their instinct for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way amounts to perverse genius. Two more nationally unelectable men I've never seen. Maybe the people of Massachusetts are freakishly attentive to policy, and vote on issues, rather than on personality? That hardly seems likely. It's a puzzle.

---

Light wells up behind the trees and the houses, washes over the fret-bars of the power wires, pools in the deep places of the rumpled sky: white cloudlight, surging in like the tide. The asphalt and cement glow with it. Today, the 3rd of March, is the beginning of Spring in Portland.

A Stronger Thought of Peace

My favorite new blog in a long while. New to me, I mean. A couple tastes:

The Gaps in Us

. . . His fingers . . .
in between the ribs at odds in my chest.
The bones should feel stranger, I think,
as God lifts us up by the gaps in us.

Receptivity and Little Disasters
. . .
In my dream world, we wouldn’t need to wait for something bad to happen before we could speak to those around us. I won’t pray for trouble. But if disasters big and small are what make our hearts receptive to connection with others, I will use them to the fullest. Bring on the dirty diapers, dropped books, unexpected thunderstorms, and broken pencil woes. If our lives start to suck, at least we’ll have something to talk about.

Of course, we always had something to talk about.

But now you finally want to share with me. How were you to know you had me before hello?

Overstaying at the Window of Tom's Cafe

A wind beats the fluttery awning
as a householder beats a rug:

silver nightgowns of water fall
down to the darkened walk.

A cripple with bowed head
limps to the door:

his humped spine lifts
his collar so high

that it opens a mouth
for the rain to run down.

Tell me, winter: has she
forgotten already how she trusted me?

Christians

Christians come from time to time – plump, with shaven necks, from a seminary that believes in exposing them to other religions. Some are wary but intrigued; some frankly delighted. Some are horrified: they can't believe that their own teachers have sent them into a nest of devil-worshipers who bow to golden statues.

When I recognize that we have a contingent of Christians, I generally forgo my three bows, though I love them: love the physical acknowledgment, love my forehead kissing the cool clean wood of the floor, love the heart's-ease of saying, with all my body, “there is something more important than the petty parade of wishes and fears, and I remember that now” – forehead to the floor – “and now” – forehead to the floor – “and now” – forehead to the floor. But the Christians have no idea what I'm doing, that my reverence is not for the golden trinkets on the shrine, nor even for the Buddha, but for what the Buddha in turn represents: the possibility of being awake. So I would have done without, but I was late and careless. Lama Michael was already speaking, and I was anxious to get to the cushion. I did my three bows and settled down to listen. On my left, a young woman I didn't know, gingerly holding a printed liturgy, stiffened.

“Oh, shoot,” I thought. “A Christian, and now I've not only done bows right beside her: I've cut off her clear escape to the door.”

Michael gave some meditation instructions, and we mumbled and moaned our way through three repetitions of the refuge and bodhicitta prayers. Tibetan, being a tonal language, lends itself admirably to this sort of droning chant: it's always melodic, and anyway in Tibetan it's mostly written in verse. Listening to Tibetan monks or nuns chanting is in itself a lovely esthetic experience, even if you have no idea what they're saying. The imitation of it in unmetrical, toneless English is a rather dismal, drawling drone, like schoolchildren, who have given up all hope of recess, reciting their lessons. I take inspiration from it, now, and I love the prayers, awkward, clunkily-worded translations though they are. There are even particularly gifted chanters who can make them beautiful, and sometimes you're lucky enough to sit beside one. But it would take a very generous outsider to guess at the beauty we old hands are experiencing.

Finally – I sometimes suspect that Michael, knowing how very long 50 minutes of sitting is going to seem to newbies, drags out these preliminaries a bit so as to give them an easier first ride – we settle into meditation, simple following of the breath, the sensation of the air moving at the end of the nose, tickle cold on the inbreath, tickle warm on the outbreath, the strangely erratic spaces of time between each. Sometimes no interval; sometimes almost a catch, and then a fall. Sometimes the deep even breathing that I used to think ought to be usual, but now recognize as, for me, a bit of an oddity. The usual discomforts, the usual panicky thoughts – “Oh my GOD I'm sitting STILL, am I going to DIE?” – acknowledged and sent to go play quietly with their toys in the other room. I love sitting shamatha.

The young woman on my left shifts and fidgets. Her fingers twitch at the liturgy on her lap. I imagine that physical contact with it repels her. Oops! Losing my attention on the breath. Back to the tip of my nose. Such a wonderful, reliable tether, the breath. Always there, always just interesting enough and not too interesting.

More twitching on my left. I imagine that this is getting harder, not easier, for her. “You have no idea what she's experiencing, Dale,” I tell myself. “And back to the breath, bucko.”

Five minutes, maybe ten minutes, pass, and suddenly she takes the liturgy out of her lap, lays it on the zabuton in front of her, and stands. She finds her way between me and the person behind me. A moment later the door opens and closes quietly. I imagine her taking deep breaths in the clear cold air of morning.

I don't move; I haven't moved even my eyes: my physical stillness is pretty deep at this point. A little sad. A silly fantasy of trotting out after her, reassuring her, bringing her back in. The worst thing I could possibly do, no doubt. And anyway, once I've set the intention to meditate, I'd damn well better do it: nothing is more destructive to practice than letting something – anything – override the intention. And furthermore, Mr Dale, this impulse is fueled in large part by her being young and pretty, isn't it? And you're losing attention on the breath. Back to the tip of the nose.

Part of my mind is still out on the porch, and going down the stairs, guilty and overwhelmingly relieved, running from the golden idols and the weirdly painted deities, the horrible bearded old men with their droning voices and smug self-satisfaction: getting out, out into the clarity of God's morning, weaving the story of the morning this way and that. I'm with you, dear. One faith is hard enough.

Newtonian Theology

Natura valde simplex est et sibi consona, wrote Newton: “Nature is very simple and conforms to Herself.”

So deeply do we moderns take this for granted, that we are likely to be puzzled to know, at first, just what Newton is driving at. Nature conforms to Herself? To our ears, that verges on tautology. In this instance what he meant was that the laws of motion that obtain in Galileo's tower should obtain in his own Cambridge chambers: that they should apply equally and impartially to the sun in heaven and to a particle of dust floating in a shuttered room. It is overwhelmingly due to Newton that we speak of natural “laws.” Many philosophers of science disapprove of that word, and would like to replace it with something more neutral. I have no objection to that, except to observe that Newton – a passionate, if eccentric, theologian – would probably never have achieved what he did had he not believed that he was discovering and revealing God's design principles. He was not working out descriptions: he was finding out laws.

“Nature conforms to herself.” Newton made no argument for this, and in fact it's a difficult point to argue. Most people, for most of the time human beings have existed, have not believed it. They have seen no reason why one should assume that nature plays by the same rules in the neighboring village as it does in their own. They lived in a world of multiple deities and local powers, which made up own rules as they went along, and often enough found themselves at war with each other. When that happened, a prudent man kept his head down, made offerings to as many of the powers as he could afford to, and hoped to stay out of their way till things settled down.

Science never got very far until monotheism prepared the ground, until whole cultures believed that everything everywhere obeyed the same rules, and was subject to the same Judge. Individuals might speculate, and did: flukes might produce a Pythagoras or an Aristotle. But for science to get very far, it needed a scientific community: it needed continuity and debate, financial resources and social prestige. We only find such communities arising in places where monotheism has been firmly established for generations. The typical “history” that most science people believe, in which courageous fact-based scientists arose ex nihilo to dispel the immemorial fogs of religious dogma, is almost exactly backwards. A scientist, historically speaking, is simply a Jewish, Christian, or Muslim theologian who has followed his speculative discipline so far that it has begun to destroy its own foundations.

Whether scientific communities can survive, having eaten their own roots, is an interesting question. So long as they offer power, commercial and political princes will support them, in their fashion. But science needs more than money to survive. It needs a powerful sense, throughout the community, that the service of truth is sacred, and that truth is One and universal. Otherwise, scientists will begin to be seen more and more as alchemists and magicians: as mere grubby contractors with arcane, possibly diabolical, powers. There are many people who already see them this way, and it's a cultural current that I don't see slackening. If science is to regain (find?) its place in the hearts of the public, it's going to have to learn to speak of its sense of holiness – its radical devotion to truth, and its conviction of the unity of that truth – in terms that the religious communities that begot them can understand. It will not really be that hard: there is not much that really separates science from the religions that produced it, except bogus history, mutual ignorance, and arrogance.

Nina Tovish

Oh my God. Designer and photographer Nina Tovish has been working on a book putting together some of her photographs and my poems: she just sent me an initial pdf. It's so beautiful, and put together with such care. Unbelievable.

Nina and I go way back: she must be one of the very first bloggers I knew. I have never – to use the archaic vocabulary of the meat-world – met her: but from the start we've understood each other with startling depth and completeness. It's the sort of connection that makes you nervously reassure yourself that all that former-life stuff is nonsense. God and desire, risk and consequence: we're often on the same page when other people can't imagine what book we might be reading.

I'm full of – what? – joy and gratitude and yearning: some feeling compounded of those.

Vegetarian Tigers

Every day I see denunciations of corporate greed. I see them on Facebook, and on Occupy poster-boards. “End corporate greed!” they say: and often they complain bitterly about how little taxes corporations pay.

This perplexes me. Corporations are supposed to be greedy. That's what they're there for. The wealth of a nation is determined largely by how efficiently its people are organized to produce its goods: and that translates pretty directly into how successfully greedy its corporations are. It's no more wrong for a corporation to be greedy than it is wrong for a tiger to be carnivorous.

So I don't want to make corporations less greedy. I don't want to turn them into philanthropic organizations. They produce plenty of public benefit just by being themselves. And I don't want to tax their incomes, which puts American corporations at an international disadvantage. Tax their shareholders, by all means. Tax their ridiculously compensated CEO's. Tax their sales, if you must. But leave the tigers healthy to hunt.

But by the same token, it's silly to treat corporations as persons, and give them political rights. A corporation is no more capable of public spirit and selflessness than a tiger is capable of becoming vegetarian. The founders of the United States would have been horrified at the idea of a corporation having political rights. And so am I. It's not just common sense that's outraged by the idea of a corporation having god-given, inalienable rights. It's political sense. A corporation, given the power of political speech, will use it for the one thing it knows: maximizing profit. The same thing that makes a corporation a healthy economic creature makes it ineligible to be a political creature. A corporation doesn't, and shouldn't, understand the public good. It doesn't have children whose future it's anxious for. It doesn't care about rivers being polluted. It doesn't think some things belong only to God.

Corporations don't belong in the political arena for the same reason that tigers don't belong in sheepfolds. And it's not because they're greedy. It's right and proper that they're greedy. I wouldn't have them any other way. It's because they are not, never have been, and never will be persons. No matter what the Supreme Court says.

The New Erasers

I remember when the new erasers came
long and sleek and gray, suspiciously like
antler velvet, as though behind the blackboard
might be heaped the heads of desecrated deer.

The teachers knew you could not let a child,
even once, even as a treat, even alone,
clap those long erasers each to each:
so white and full an ectoplasmic cloud appeared,

a mother ghost of chalksmoke: they would
never ever stop, clap after clap, summoning
mother after mother. But once, one afternoon,
I don't remember or I never knew why,

the glory came to me: and instead of recess
I got to stand alone, calling ghost after ghost
to life in the slantwise sun, until my throat caught
and my hands were powdered like a baker's.

The Ordinary World

I have the privilege of reading Jo Hemmant's Houdini poems in manuscript. I don't know any other poet quite like Jo. She's a novelist, really – but her novels are a couple dozen lines long. The writer she reminds me of most is Maupassant. That spareness and clarity. I think she hails from an alternate universe, in which Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot never existed. None of this heavy breathing and groping for God's privates, none of this blundering about knocking over the furniture in search of the sublime. She has nothing to confess or apologize for. It's the ordinary human world, but in focus for the first time. You didn't know how blurry your vision was, until you put on your Jo glasses.

---

The next three-week project is underway. No refined carbs at breakfast, fresh veggies every day, no eating after 7:30 pm.

---

Winter is quietly packing his belongings, getting ready to leave. He's been an unobtrusive guest this year, in the Willamette Valley.

Enough Rope

Wooden soldier, wooden sword,
Chocolate coins in crinkled gold
Hints of something bought and sold,
Hints of murder in the stars.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Advent Calendar”

---

Quickly I've come to love the low, growly form of Mt Tabor against the western sky, when I walk down from our little ridge to the 82nd Avenue Safeway to buy milk. The main hump is mama bear: just beyond her sleeping nose is the smaller hump of the baby bear. His tail wanders northward, along about 70th Avenue, making a little hump for the commuting cyclist to climb over. The baby bear's tail, and the ridge of 84th Avenue, don't exist on the geological survey map. But they exist to a bicyclist, or to a shopper going on foot. At twilight Venus glows above mama, and the baby's tail points at his celestial counterpart, Ursa Minor, circling his own cruelly staked tail over the unseen river to the north.

---

Patiently, day after day, I pick apart the strands of the rope. As Martha Grimes noted, it's always easy to find reasons to hate, when you have the will to do it. I don't like to hate. All precepts and commandments aside, it's like having a fever or an intestinal complaint. What I don't really know is whether there's a core under all these fibers, something that needs to be fixed or addressed. Maybe it's just hatred all the way down. I come to the slam-dunk reason to hate, the one clear treacherous dishonesty, and – satisfying though that momentarily is – with it comes the certainty that this reason, this rational and justifiable reason, has actually nothing to do with the blaze: I'd have to rewrite the whole history of the injury in order to pretend it did. No, I think all I ever hated anyone for was not loving and admiring me. That's the only unforgivable sin: that's the rope, the twist, and every fiber.

---

“Saint Valentine's is past,” observes Theseus, pausing by the tangled, sleeping lovers. “begin these wood-birds but to couple now?”

Answer

Also fragen wir beständig,
Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll
Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler --
Aber ist das eine Antwort?

We keep on asking, said the old not a Jew,
not a German, dying of the lead-cancer --

until our mouths are plugged with a handful
of earth -- but is that an answer?

Well, in the same sense as the fingernail-white
is an answer to the cloud-eaten sun;

even if you can't step in the river twice,
you can drown in it as handily as in the same one.

Priam

For the first time I understand the old King of Troy
who wanted the body back: when I was young

I thought, what good is that? But it wasn't for good.
It was for anything, for the eyes and tongue

caked with dust, for the torn skin
that could not keep its brightness in.

Talk

Virginia Cafe. The conversation, rises around me, like spaghetti sauce bubbling, slowly, through its own thickness. I wonder how much of the habit of my mind has been formed by the fact that I walk all day through soups of unintelligible words? I understand so little of what is said around me. Nowadays I can blame my worsening hearing, but the truth is, even when my hearing was keen I often heard just splutters of sound. Maybe there's something off about the tempo at which I decode speech: I'm slow at it, slow and easily thrown off. I spend lots of time smiling and nodding pleasantly at little explosions of verbal sound that have conveyed nothing to me. Often I don't know what people have said. It seldom makes much difference. Mostly people just make noises and hope for reassurance: if you supply the reassurance, you've done all that's required. I'm happy to do that. But it leaves me oriented a little obliquely to the human world: like I'm usually watching the television of human life with the sound turned off.

Am I just making it up, pretending I don't understand? Or maybe everyone else is just making it up, pretending they do? Even when I understand the words, I often have difficulty stringing it into a meaning. I wonder sometimes: are we are apes that know how to speak, or just apes that believe we know how to speak? Maybe in heaven we learn to actually speak, and to actually hear: now we're just learning the motions.

---

Facebook:

CM: Forget all this political BS for a bit - if you had the power to nominate a specific individual to be President, whom would it be?

[ entertaining comment thread, people suggesting Martha Stewart, Jon Stewart, the Dalai Lama, P.J. O'Rourke... ]

DF: What disturbs me about any discussion like this, is that it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of American government, and of what the president is supposed to be. He's not a king. He's not supposed to solve our problems. He's supposed to implement the solutions that we send to him. We are supposed to be running this country, and we're doing a really, really, really bad job. It's our fault. So get some real damn opinions and elect a real damn congress and quite expecting tabloid celebrity presidents to fix all your damn problems for you.

CM: Damn Dale, those are the harshest words I've ever seen from you...

‎DF: :-) I get a little cranky about it. Didn't we fight a long bitter war in order not to have kings? And now we want them back, because we're too lazy to do some arguing and organizing? Sheesh.

Roof, Part II

Oh, yes, I knew. How could I not? Who better
to detect the small motions of intimacy, the gaiety?
I wasn't born yesterday. And across
the long green surge of water, the treachery
of cold pilings gulping, the uncertain sky –
I discover only what was always there: it was only
ever love. So I was right, after all.
And if it twinges, what of that? I never expected
a life free of twinges. I never expected a life at all.

I recover the hammer from the muddy ground,
recover the heft and sway of it. No notion
of what to build. That comes later.

I would take back only one thing. I said
I would never be happy, and that's true enough,
but I said it in bitterness, as if it were your fault.
I wonder if I can say, now, that I'm sorry?
I have more wilderness to wander in,
but that is not your fault; it never was.

But this happiness is one piece
I can hammer into place. This joy
need no longer be denied or idolized.
It's paid for, done, sealed, and still.

And the warm beating in my hand
of some strange fruit takes life again,
fledges in one flowering moment
and wheels toward a country still unknown.

The Skilful Deployment of Oomph

I recently read some books that are not in my usual range: books with titles such as Willpower, Succeed, and Learned Optimism.

The psychology of cognition and and will has changed beyond recognition, in the past twenty years. Or rather – it's changed so that, for the first time, I do recognize it: for the first time, what these people are describing looks something like my interior landscape. I don't live in a world of low self-esteem, deep suppressed anger, and endless replication of childhood trauma. I live in a world in which I frequently run out of steam. Oomph, as I call it. Oomph is what allows me to resist temptation and change habits. I also use it to write poems, and to write difficult database queries, and to engage in socializing. It is a precious and limited resource: and a couple years ago I formulated my notion of its importance. “The art of life,” I declared, “consists of the skillful deployment of oomph.”

It turns out that psychologists have been studying oomph a lot, lately. They call it self-regulation, which is a rather negative way of phrasing it. Roy Baumeister calls it willpower, but rightly cautions against a) the grandiosity of the term, and b) the tradition of considering “willpower” a fixed personality trait, rather than the name of something that rises and falls, is depleted and replenished, in everyone. He also – and this appears to be the mainstream view, at the moment – thinks it can trained up, like muscular strength. I'm a bit skeptical about this, but he has some data to back the idea up.

Trainable or not, it's a limited resource in everyone. People are very bad at assessing how much of it they have: almost everyone overestimates. And hence they put themselves in the way of temptations they can't really resist, or set themselves self-improvement programs that they can't really carry out, which is very discouraging, and they draw the conclusion that they're weak-willed, in a permanent and pervasive way, which is even more discouraging. But in fact they've just been treating their oomph as it was inexhaustible, which it's not, not in anyone.

So. I have some things I've been trying to change in my life, for years, for decades, actually. These books, and my own thinking about oomph, have given me new hope about succeeding in changing them. The basic approach is to split the changes into manageable steps – steps that will require oomph, but not more than I have. I create clear, explicit goals for these steps, so that there's no waffle-room – I know for sure whether I'm succeeding or failing. I track it on a calendar. If I succeed in a step for three weeks, by the end of that time it should be requiring much less oomph. It will have moved into “habit” territory. I get a reward of some sort, and I go on to the next step.

If I fail – and the steps should be ambitious enough that sometimes I do – then I don't need to waste much time scolding myself and beating myself up. I just need to recognize that what I thought was one three week step is too big for that: I need to break it down, somehow, into a couple of steps, and start over. It's important to really start over: rewrite the goals, re-set the endpoint, and to thoroughly give up on making it all the way through that project in three weeks.

From time to time is that I'll start failing again at something I thought I had mastered and had moved into the “habit” column. This is to be expected, and when it happens I simply need to put it back into the “un-mastered” column. I'll take it up again.

The key here is to have only one or two steps that I'm working on at any one time, so that I know what I'm focusing on, and so that I'm not overspending oomph at any one time.

The reason all this has come up, now, is that in moving to a new place, I lost several good habits, and have had to recover them. Things as simple and fundamental as showering and doing the dishes every day had moved from being habits to being things I had to spend oomph to accomplish. I'm fortunate to have stumbled over these books when I did, because they made this deterioration much easier to understand, and made it seem much less sinister. It's more than just the stresses and uncertainties of being displaced, and having a large house-full of stuff to sort, store, or dispose of. Habits are tied to time and place: with the move I lost my bearings in both. My schedule was disrupted, and the daily furniture of my life was gone (or at least in storage). The cues for doing my back exercises in the morning, and for doing the dishes in the evening, had vanished. I was going to have to rebuild my habits in the new house.

I've re-established most of it, now. When the current three-week projects are done – I'm about halfway in to them – I should have restored my habitual exercise (cycling 4+ times per week), and moved my schedule back 2½ hours, so that I'm getting to bed at 10:30 again. From there I will move into the much more difficult territory of changing my eating, which looks to be a whole string of three week projects involving planning, shopping, cooking, and storing food. Actually restricting what I eat will come last: I need to have a whole infrastructure of food habits in place before I attempt that.

Restricting eating is its own game, uniquely difficult: one of the more fascinating discoveries that Baumeister et al have made is that self-regulation – the expenditure of oomph – depletes the glucose supply to certain oomphy areas of the brain, which results – of course – in strong bodily cravings for a quick carb-rush. It's a neat little catch-22 that was not understood until recently, but which sheds a lot of light on the failures of dieting. I have some ideas about how to circumvent it – but that comes later. First I need to have daily habits of cooking and supplying a kitchen in place.

The Death of the Author

In the Guardian, recently, Ewan Morrison shared his dismay over the impending death of the author:

In the last 50 years the system of publishers' advances has supported writers such as Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, JM Coetzee, Joan Didion, Milan Kundera, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Anita Shreve, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and John Fowles. Authors do not live on royalties alone. To ask whether International Man Booker prizewinner Philip Roth could have written 24 novels and the award-winning American trilogy without advances is like asking if Michelangelo could have painted the Sistine Chapel without the patronage of Pope Julius II. The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.

Well. You know, I really don't give a damn about the death of the author. I've read one or two books by most of the people listed above. I may get to one or two more before I die, but I'm not fretting about the possibility of missing them. I certainly would never sink the rest of my reading life into reading all of the books of any of them. For one thing, most of the ones I've read are not all that good, and for another thing, for most novelists, when you've read one of their novels you've really read them all. After a couple hundred pages of prose, pretty much everyone takes to repeating himself. I don't know who the people are who “keep up” with the modern novel, but they must read thousands of pages of fiction per week. This doesn't strike me as a hunger for literature so much as a hunger for sedation.

We are now supposed to view with horror the fact that the system that sustained these writers, and kept them producing novel after novel after novel, is decaying. I really can't work up much. The novelist does not strike me as a major kind of artist, and the novelist is the only sort literary person that this system supported anyway.

And did this system ever work so splendidly, keeping the good writers in steady work? All my life I've known “failed novelists,” people working along, isolated and increasingly desperate, who couldn't “get their novels published,” and who took this to be the failure, not just of their books, but of their lives. I would guess that number of these men and women were novelists every bit as good as Morrison's list of makers. No one ever read their books, or ever will. Were they well-served by this system? Was it kind and humane to dangle the lure of professional authorship in front of these people? Everyone knew that novels were the only real literary form. And everybody knew that if you weren't published, you were nobody, and your stuff wasn't worth reading.

To my way of thinking, mainstream publishing was never good for writers. It never employed even a sizable fraction of the good ones. It promoted an idea of the “author” – meaning always and only, someone who writes a new novel every year or two for decades – that is limited and deadening. And it was incredibly centralized: the whole system orbited around a close, interlinked coterie of the graduates of a few universities, who had moved on (or, usually, back) to live one of the three capitals of literary English. They might adopt mascots from other places, exotics from the lower classes or from poor countries far away, but the power of selection remained firmly in their hands.

I'm not going to mourn that system. And I'm not going to miss the professionalization of writing, which is a much more recent development than Mr Morrison seems to realize. No, Shakespeare did not make a living wage from the publishing business. He made his money from producing plays, which he happened to write the scripts for. His “published” works, during his lifetime, were all pirated editions. He never made a penny from them. He thrived in an environment that was much more like the coming internet age that Morrison fears: an age in which intellectual property barely existed, and brought no income to anybody. He was not a professional writer; he was a professional producer. Like most of the best writers, he did a lot things, and did them very well. No one gave him purses of gold so that he could stop everything to brood and “focus on his writing.” He had plays to put on, properties to furbish, rehearsals to oversee. He had a life. That's why he had something to write about.

---

I do share one of Morrison's concerns. How will writers find leisure to write? But this is part of something larger: and it's not a literary issue, it's a labor issue. How will painters find time to paint? How will dancers find time to dance? How will anyone find leisure to do the things that make life worth living?

But this has nothing to do with the breakdown of the “professional author” system, which never employed more than a small fraction of literary writers. It has to do with wages dropping to levels at which one has to work most of one's waking hours just to sustain oneself. Having to work twenty hours a week at some crummy job never kept anyone from writing a great book or painting great paintings. But having to work fifty or sixty hours a week, or being unable to find any work, certainly will. That's the real disaster for the arts, and for all of us. In the Thatcher-and-Reagan world, we 99 percenters are either frantically busy or anxiously poor: swollen with economic desire or paralyzed by economic fear. That is something to worry about.

---

The fact that the dissemination of writing has become so cheap as to make it nearly free, that the classics are readily available, that the wealth of the literary world stands open to anyone who can afford an internet connection, is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my lifetime. It is a great good thing, and while I'm not surprised that the people who stood to profit by literary scarcity are complaining about it, I'm not about to join them. Today I will read some marvelous poems that a friend who lives off in the sticks of Kent sent me, and continue to review the manuscript of a terrific book on massage that another friend in Texas is preparing for publication. I wouldn't even know these people, if not for the internet. I would most likely never have seen the work of either of them, under the old dispensation. I'm willing to take the risk, in return, that I might miss Don DeLillo's 16th novel. I'll even forgo the $50,000 advance that Random House was poised to offer me to continue writing this blog.

One-Horn

(1) The heart is a large involuntary muscle in the chest cavity.

(2) The heart has its own timer: it takes advice, but not orders, from the central nervous system.

(3) Heart is where the home is.

(4) If you go back far enough, heart is related to core, courage, cordial, and cardiac (but not to curd, curt, or courteous): the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European root is kerd-. The Germanic languages, you will recall, changed an intial 'c' into 'h', which is why a Latin unicorn has a cornus, but an English one has a horn.

(5) The meanings of English heart used to include "memory." We have forgotten this, mostly. Except that we still learn things "by heart."

Pulling

Should burdens fall softly,
balloons nudging and noddling

their way from your shoulder to the floor;
should feet flutter struggling from their nest of shoes;

should ribs open out like fingers spread
in a “hands-off!” gesture to the flickered sun

(I've read about snakes that fly
by flaring their ribs into glider wings);

then, only then, I'll sink my hands
into your breathing hair and pull them out:

whirring thoughts, pulses of flame,
tendernesses that have no name.

Resentment

Yesterday I took my mom grocery shopping. Her husband's down in Costa Rica for a week, building houses for Habitat for Humanity, and the friend who was going to come stay with her was prevented from coming by the winter storms. My mom is doing quite well: I offered to simply shop for her, but she was quite up to making the shopping trip, and the cart served quite well as a walker. I just walked along beside her, chatting occasionally, making sure no one jostled her. It was easy.

Spending that much time with my mother – who is a lovely and un-difficult person, let me hasten to say – exhausts me, in prospect and in reality. Our relationship is not an easy one, not for me, at any rate. I spent the morning in trepidation and the afternoon in exhaustion. Humiliating, but there it is. And I had so been looking forward to this weekend as a weekend of recovery. Instead I read my Curzon mystery, and ate and ate and ate – leftover rich Chinese food, cake, whatever I could get my hands on. A waste of a day. And as the day dwindled into evening I noted, with self-loathing, that my plan for getting regular exercise again was going to go by the boards. And that I had left the dishes undone. Everything I looked at or thought about was a reminder of some failure or other, and there wasn't enough food in the world to insulate myself from it.

I stood at the sink – having ascertained that no, there was no ice cream in the house, and watching the urge to get more duel with the reluctance to do something so fraught with initiative and self-reliance as going to the store myself – and, leaning there like a sick man, breathed, and watched my breath. Inchoate resentments against my family rose around me, like the steam from boiling pasta. I have been surrounded all my life, they said – suddenly and surprisingly coalescing into words – by people whose egos have depended upon my continual failure.

Now that, of course, was absurd, a classic instance of depressive thinking, a billow of nonsense tethered to a couple rusty bolts of half-truth. I loathed myself all the more for entertaining it.

But instead of dropping it, I played what-if with it. And what if it were true? What then? What would it mean? What would be the appropriate response?

The answer came at once: the appropriate response would be to say the hell with it, I'm going to succeed in spite of them. I'm going to succeed to spite them, as a matter of fact. I'm going to succeed and rub their faces in it.

So I washed the dishes, and then I got on the stuck-bike followed out my exercise plan. And so I ended the day.

Amharic

The young man hurries out of the building and comes to my open car window. “Fill it with unleaded?” I say, using modern intonation but obsolete words. He nods. He probably doesn't even know what “unleaded” refers to: it's just a word that old geezers sometimes use for “gas.”

“Regular, I mean,” I say, but he's already moving around the car, taking my debit card with him. He's not the regular morning guy. There are two clans that seem to run this gas station, one Chinese and one... Armenian, maybe? Kurdish? God knows. Portland is a city full of immigrants. I got my hair cut yesterday by a pleasant-looking, wary Ethiopian woman. I asked what her first language was, and she answered “Amharic,” and added firmly that Amharic was really the only language of Ethiopia. (I know how much salt to take that sort of statement with. Americans abroad are apt to make the same claim about English here: what they mean is, they wish it was the only language.) I had a vague notion that Amharic was a Semitic language, but that was as much as I could remember about it. I asked her if she knew any poetry, or children's rhymes, she could recite for me – that's how I like to make my first acquaintance with a language – but she said she didn't know any. I doubted that was true. Does anyone really grow up not knowing any children's verse, even in the modern world? But nursery rhymes were maybe too intimate a matter to share with strangers. I settled for asking her how to say “hair-cutting” in Amharic. She murmured a few sibilant syllables, nothing I could really hear, and I stopped pressing her. We went back to talking about where I lived and what my work was: the standard barber-chair conversation. The shop had six chairs in it, and was empty. I worried about whether she was making it. It's a long, long way from Ethiopia. What happens if you make your big bet here, and it fails? Well, you take a job pumping gas, I guess, if you can find it.

Further up the Valley there's some pretty serious flooding. The second front predicted hasn't rolled in yet – not here in Portland, anyway – so maybe the water will have a chance to subside before it does.

Homage to William Blake

I spend a lot of time kneading oiled flesh, which means my hands are strong but soft. This is sometimes a bad combination. A day or two ago, after washing the dishes, I dragged the surprisingly hard crusted snow off my car's windshield with my soggy-skinned hands. Wasn't till I was driving that I noticed I had torn scraps of skin off from between my fingers. Ouch.

(I'm healed up now, in time for my weekend appointments. I heal like a young dog, fortunately.)

---

Roof

Los by starlight –
he lets his hammer fall
and it slides slowly down the ice,
its haft curling round its head; it moves
down the slant, the second hand
of an unfixed, unfixable clock, to skid
silently over eave and gutter, to write
self erasing circles in the space
above the snow. It falls
without a sound.

---

Much as I admire William Blake, I have to say that he was utterly and completely wrong about stars.

Three Ways from Winter

I

Jealousy wakes hungry after hibernation, quick to rage,
almost blind: its little bear-eyes caked with winter sleep.

Don't get in its way until it's stretched and eaten.
It will wander away into last years' leaves on aching feet.


II

Joy falls soft like snow,
turning trees to fishing nets

and cinder blocks
to intricate work in blue enameling.


III

Children still must be washed and fed.
Above the wrung cloths

stars spin on invisible wheels: sparks that fly
from the grinding of inconceivable knives.

Oh

Oh, if you're here by way of Laura Allen, you probably want my massage blog.

Morning, with Crows and Snowflakes

Snowflakes gathering to the streetlights, and falling away. A blue morning, dark and quiet; the radio is playing softly: some melancholy country/soft rock crossover crooner. I can't quite recognize the tune, but the obsessive repetition of the refrain, and the anxiety conveyed by the ragged voice, feel quintessentially American. We can endure neither our ills nor their remedies, it says.

But it grows lighter, nevertheless. I can see the snowflakes now outside the spheres of the streetlights, drifting down, striking a repelling layer of air some three inches from the parking lot pavement, and bouncing up off it once, even twice, before settling. The flakes aren't dissolving immediately on contact, now. This may stick.

A dozen crows cluster in the air, and drift over to the tallest and nearest of the doug firs, settling on its crown. In all the mornings I've sat here and watched them, I've never seen them settle there, though it seems, to this ignorant primate, like the obvious spot. Is it the snow route? Half a dozen more join them.

The streetlights go out. The snow turns back to rain. Or are those fine flakes? More crows come to the moot: all the highest boughs of the doug fir have black ornaments bobbing at their ends. And then they all launch off and move over to the telephone wires northwards, along 62nd, where they get coffee and and joke and network and exchange business cards. Crisis averted. They've negotiated to discount the loans with the French and German banks.

And now, it's real morning. There are colors: green hedges, blue awnings, red cars. A surprising flood of light, now, coming through the thick cloudroof. Over there, our new white Honda Civic – new to us, of course, not factory new – glows as if it was the real source of all this light, the whitest thing in all this white world. We got it last week. We've become increasingly anxious about Alan driving the now ancient, can't-get-parts-for-it '85 Honda Accord, so the idea of getting the Civic was to give him the Ford, once we've spruced it up a little, replaced the struts and so forth.

When I finish my coffee I'll head on over to KCC for the morning sit. I went last week, too. It was nice to see everyone.

New snowflakes, daytime snowflakes, coming down now. A man hobbles past the windows, white flakes pasting themselves to his red coat. He comes in and takes his place at the special booth where Tosi ordinarily sits, the imperial seat, right by the door, between the old and new dining rooms. He's one of those men with ageless faces who forgathers with Tosi, talking in resonant confident voices in endlessly flowing Greek. Probably, like Tosi, in his seventies or eighties, though you'd guess fifties or sixties. All these men have strongly marked faces, and there's not one of them you'd mistake for American. They don't smile at strangers, for one thing, though they laugh and tease freely among themselves. Not even a flicker of recognition for me, though we've been sharing restaurant space for thirty years, and I must be as familiar to them as they are to me.

Off to KCC. Good morning! xoxo

Glare

Pondering forgiveness: and finding that the first step is to draw up the bill of attainder. If I were to forgive, what would I be forgiving?

Blue sky, the awnings pitching and flapping in the wind. A cold, bright, ugly day, with ice on the wind. Sunlight falls on my right shoulder, on my ear, and on the blond hair of my cocked head: I keep scooting down the bench to avoid it. Threatened with sunburn, in January!

Panic slowly rising. I don't want to think about this. About any of it.

But soft. This is only the racketing of a bright winter day, only the uneasiness of a burrowing creature brought abruptly into the sunlight. I squirm and nuzzle for a weakness in the earth, for a thrusting place for my snout. My star-nosed cousins, you know, can find out far more by groping with their tendril-blossomed snouts than you will ever be able to see with your great lemur eyes. There are realms below the clotted grass roots that you'll never know, not the way we know them: where the judder of an earthworm sends a whisper down a dozen branching galleries, and a footfall slams like roundshot against earthworks.

I am more demoralized, more afraid, than I can remember since the bad old days of IBM. I'm not sure what it's made of, but I know I have to slow down, way down, become deliberate and – to borrow my own word – dogged. I need to to make a list of the five main projects I'm working on, boiled down to single sentences, and be able to say which of those things each thing I'm working on is in service of. Because I suspect I've sold myself into service of something or someone else. Careful here. Careful. Whatever you do, don't hurry, don't shy, don't skip. If you run it only draws the predators. Step by step. Life is elsewhere, maybe, but that doesn't matter right now.

Flu

Driving to the airport.

Useful for understanding the amount of money spent on these things. Not to mention the extent of Rick Perry's humiliation.What the candidates spent per vote in Iowa.

Ronald Searle gone. How can that be?

---

I'm sick with the flu. Last night it was those strange chills, when you shake and you can feel the cold air moving right through your flesh and stroking your bones; when you feel so close, so close. But tonight it's just the sore throat and the headache in a thick clot behind my eyes. I even feel good enough, for minutes at a time, to be mildly bored. That's a good sign.

No chicken soup in the house though. Bad planning.

Happy 2012!