Pie Charts

But I do want to bring the amount of time I spend on things more in line with what I purportedly want, and value: not necessarily by chivvying myself to do more of what I ought to do so much as by realizing that I am making my declarations of what I value by spending my time. There is nothing wrong with treasuring my interactions on Facebook – I have always been, really, an occasional writer, drawn to the glittering surfaces of things; almost a writer of epigram, except that I'm a too wordy. I like floating down a current of random thoughts and responding to them.

On a thread about catcalls and wolf-whistling, I wrote:

Not a sexual response exactly but a response to sexual frustration and humiliation, I think. It's a way of swaggering in front of the other subadult males: "I'm so studly I can make advances to any unattached female! Right here in public! Louder than any of you!" Of course, the only people it can possibly impress are other subadult males even more anxious than you are, but hey, we're primates, we'll take status where we can find it :-)

And in response to a link to a biographical essay about Obama:

Roy Jenkins, I think in his biography of Truman, said something like: "The American republic has many qualities, but recognizing greatness in a sitting president is not one of them." I'm not even a political ally of Obama, except by necessity, but I think he's one of the four or five most impressive people ever to hold the office.

I like summing up, recapitulating, settling my thoughts in an orderly fashion. And I like chatting with people. I've never chatted much with people face to face: I talk too slowly, and get flustered too easily. So it's fun for me to chat in the written word. I type as fast as I talk, if not faster. And on a keyboard there's a backspace key, something that viva voce woefully lacks.

Still, if I was to make a rough pie chart of what's important to me, and a rough pie chart of where I put my time, the slice devoted to chatting on Facebook (and blogs, though there's a less of that, these days) would be about five times larger in the second pie than in the first. And, contrariwise, the time devoted to less occasional writing would be about five times smaller. I don't want to be a martinet with myself, but I do have the uneasy feeling that I'm not tracking well. And the current of life runs so deep and swift, nowadays. I lose track for a bit, and I find myself fifty miles closer to the ocean.

I do like to bear in mind that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea, not because I'm gloomy, but because it reminds me that things are both more and less important than they seem: there's a frame around the picture, endpapers to the book. More important because everything you put in is something else left out: less important because it's just one fleeting life among billions, quickly over and quickly forgotten.

So perhaps a little more time here, and a little more time reading Dickinson et al, and a little less over there on Facebook. And maybe I really should make up those pie charts and have a think about them.

Rat, Peach, Hypoglycemia

“Stop,” I said. “There's nothing to be gained.”

Martha left the quilt untouched, and stood back up. “You're right,” she said.

“Just open the door,” I said, but she couldn't just open the door. She had to take the curtain down from the bedroom door too, lest I trip. But then she opened the door. “And just get out of the way,” she said, speaking for me, and moved aside.

The quilt on the floor, where Kiki had been examining it most closely, lay half over a throw rug, giving me a glimmer of hope. I reached my gloved hands to the far side, rapidly bundled the quilt together, and lifted the whole of it up in the throw rug, a cradled bundle. Quickly but smoothly I trotted out of the room, out of the house, out into the depths of the yard. Dropped the bundle and lifted the quilt by one corner.

The edge of my eye glimpsed the rat in flight – a young one, I suppose, for she had an extraordinary length of tail, which curled and flew like a whiplash in a Disney cartoon. She ran like a squirrel, bound after bound, her tail describing elegant curves the while, and then vanished into the shrubbery toward the street. She was slender and black and beautiful: and she seemed improbably fit and sound, for a creature who had – presumably – been carried inside, through the open window, in Kiki's jaws.

---

The peach was not quite ripe: though sweet, it was dry and tart, more of a piece with its skin than a peach is supposed to be. And the sweet potato too, though I've gotten much better at microwaving tubers, was a little unsatisfactory. But the salad was good, and the chicken was salt but delicious. I was so hungry, when I got home. I'd let myself get hungry and stupid. Bad planning. But I stuck to it, and cooked, and ate real food. So there's that.

---

My client last night felt suddenly sick, at the end of the massage, and horribly thirsty. I helped him up and he took a couple steps and collapsed on the couch. I got him a drink. I didn't like the look of him at all: pale and sweating. I took his pulse. Strong and regular. (I didn't bother to count, I just wanted the reassurance of a good beat.) Asked him questions about how he felt, mostly to see if his speech was slurred: it wasn't. Then he measured his blood sugar with (to me, who had never seen it done before) incredible rapidity. 48. Good Lord. Coma range. Luckily – or rather prudently, luck had nothing to do with it – he had fruit handy, berries and an orange. I helped him walk to the kitchen to get them. Within a few minutes he was looking better, though he still felt horrible. By the time I left, his blood sugar was over a hundred, and his wife was with him. I'd never seen hypoglycemia before, though of course you learn about it in school. They tell you to have candy handy, in fact, because massage typically lowers blood sugar levels twenty points or so. (I have no idea why it does this, actually, or how. Ignorance.)

Wayfarers All

I start to think of traveling, of a journey of a few months, a there-and-back-again across the country. I'm like Bilbo and Frodo: autumn always puts me in mind of traveling. It's not time yet. At least a year away, probably more. I want to travel alone with my table, doing massage in return for a couch to sleep on and breakfast in the morning. Meeting people I've known in my cyberhood for years, but who are scattered hither and yon across the continent; and making at least one more long road trip across the North America. It's an indulgence, of course, environmentally speaking, to travel when you don't have to, but what's the point of living before peak-oil, if you don't bust loose every once in a while? Nothing I do or refrain from doing will stop the plunge. Travel of this sort may not be within the means of ordinary people very much longer.

Autumn: the autumn of the year, the autumn of my country, the autumn of my species. It's a good time for traveling.

Grave Robbers

Emily Dickinson with her friend Kate Turner. Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. See the article, with reasons for thinking the recently-surfaced daguerreotype authentic, here.

---

I have a double response to Dickinson: on the one hand admiration and empathy – admiration because she is probably the best American poet I have read, and empathy because I feel myself at a similar emotional & intellectual stand at this stage of my life, stymied in every generous endeavor – but on the other hand dismay: she is the most death-centered poet I have ever read. Keats, for all his self-indulgent “half in love with easeful death” turns, doesn't really want to die. Dickinson really does: she deliberately writes her way into the grave.

Or so it seems to me, at this moment of reading. I am no romantic: I don't believe in the redemptive power of poetry, or in its immortality. Clearly many people feel that Dickinson was somehow justified and translated by her posthumous fame. I feel, quite the contrary, that snuffling about in the private papers of an unhappy dead woman calls our own justification into question, and translates us into something like grave-robbers. Where is it written that being a great poet means you have no right to privacy? When we meet Dickinson, in the heaven she resolutely disbelieved in, will we be able to look her in the eye?

And Life is over there -
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keep the key to -
Putting up
Our life - His porcelain -
Like a Cup -

Discarded of the Housewife -
Quaint - or Broke -

Ant by Moonlight

Monstrous that the moon should rise tonight,
bulge-headed, throwing

shadows without scale or increment:
in its light that a benighted traveler ant

should cross pools of gleaming motor oil,
his legs ticking

in an abominable
hail of photons –

even worse. What tyrant god
allows this home-wrecking,

this scouring floodlight, this bleaching breach
of peace? The Queen of Night is nailed up

by a few faint lyrical stars, helpless,
while the bloat of the moon

drifts through her kingdom:
day-creatures stutter on their shadows,

their eye-buds breathe in phosphor,
they taste

with their feet
the poisoned ground.

Embarrassing the Dog

Of 'shunning Men and Women' - they talk of Hallowed things, aloud - and embarrass my Dog

I'm pretty sure Emily Dickinson would have disliked me: I don't do it slant enough, and I would certainly have embarrassed her dog. Sorry, Emily.

---

I spoke when I should have been silent, yesterday. Tried to talk to a client about different ways of approaching chronic pain. It was the wrong time and I used the wrong words, and it was probably counterproductive, not to mention probably losing me a client. I've been reproaching myself steadily ever since. Of course, there were probably twenty times yesterday that I should have spoken and did not, but I don't get my face rubbed in the consequences of that.

Another broken night, awake at 2:30, filling in the time doing laundry (there is always laundry to do, if you're a massage therapist.) Light is beginning to show in the bands of sky between slats of the blinds, though the streetlight is still on. I might try getting a little more sleep. It's still an hour or two before anyone will wander down to open up a restaurant. It will be broad daylight by then, but you odd people will all still be in your beds, dreaming through the daytime. How do you do it?

Italy

Percy Shelley and Emily Dickinson strike me as similar people, led each to his – her – own particular ruin, by the implications of he and she.

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between -
The solemn Alps -
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!

...wrote Dickinson, but Shelley could cross the Alps: and little enough luck, for himself or for others, would he find on the far side.

Weary of Time

The sun is hesitating behind the shoulder of Mt Hood, patting her hair and checking her makeup, I suppose. Half the sky is watered rose. As I watch, yellows begin to infiltrate the intricacies of the clouds, exploiting tiny weaknesses, and pale blues begin to gather behind it all. And then, suddenly – though the sun is still not up – it all collapses into plain morning, ordinary day. The patterns blur, the rosewash dissolves, even the yellow loses its warmth. A smear of light in the east, a tattered hood of cloud to the west. Nothing else.

I try to gather some courage for the day, and know before I start that I'm going to come up short. The mantra that was so useful a few days ago – “everything you do will help” – is meaningless. I want to open my torso, take out the organs, one by one, wash them and polish them, and return them to their places. Political animosities are drawn to my face like moths by my anxieties, and I worry about them making their way into my ears or my nose or my mouth. Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha, I mutter, but I don't really: I take refuge in the car starting and in scrambled eggs and in coffee fatted with cream. I think of all the cancers growing in my friends, and in strangers, possibly in myself: the race between cells that know restraint and cells that don't is not a hard one to call. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and single-mindedly, bloodily intent on replication. The faces in the Republican Convention hall didn't even look human to me: they looked like masks. And say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.

I am out of the path, out of all paths. So damaged by grief. And not one of the ways seems to go toward the light.

There May Be Rain

There may be rain, they say.
The pale, straw briznas will raise their heads,
and the dominion of the dandelions
will totter. Revolt after revolt,
season by season: Kentucky grass
will start the Civil War again;
stars and bars
will flutter in the wind.
The lawn mower stands
unsharpened in the shed,
its wheels still cased in twisted ruffs.
Too late now. The tide
is rising; with a sound like a thousand
serried typewriters, the thawed hail
will batter every window, flank
every weatherstripped redoubt.
There may be rain.
Oh, yes, there may be rain.

What Rough Crust

Every once in a while, I realize that the fact that four or five people out on the internets agree with some of the things I think doesn't change the fact that there's a few billion people out there, at a variety of points on various social, political, and religious spectra, who would gladly stone me to death if they could only get at me.

When I do realize that, it's important to a) get over myself and b) stop and get lunch.

God, though, how overpowering the sense of loneliness and desolation can be! And yet a good meal, a kind word, the touch of a hand, or unexpected good news -- however trivial -- can unseat it in a moment. I limp homeward as shreds of the sky fall, and panicked chickens slash my bare feet with their claws as they rush by. And even so, the stars trace their precise wheels on the far side of the world, and even, invisibly, on this side, turning like the edge of a pizza slicer. (And what rough crust, its hour come round at last, is lifting from the pan?)

I asked my client when her knee began to hurt. It was when she was sixteen, she said, when she was running down stone steps to catch a train in Zurich. Which I reckoned, as I pieced all the information together, was eighty years ago. Not much stays with us longer than the echoes of those moments of surprise and pain.

Lunch. Right.

Nameless

Many things I want to do today: for one, get my hair cut – it's longer than it's been since that fatal day, in my senior year of college, when I asked my room mate to cut off my golden hippie locks. Like most of my major life decisions – getting married and having children, for instance – I have no idea why I did it. My theory is that if you actually know why you did something, it wasn't really a major decision: it was just a detail of implementation.

The gold, baby-fine hair drifted down to the floor. Martha found it too traumatic and had to leave the room. When we were done I was someone else: less arrogant, less confident, less opinionated. I had decided, though I didn't know it yet, to become a Buddhist: I had decided to get over myself.

It's a strange thing to pick up your old life, silky and gleaming and weightless, and feel it between your fingers. I wasn't sure, course, that I'd keep cutting it. I might have just let it grow again. But in fact, I've been cutting it for three decades, and whatever I do, I will never have long golden locks again. Long white hair is another thing entirely, with an entirely different range of meaning: more Dumbledore than Roger Daltrey.

Periodically I trim my beard. It's a task I enjoy and am good at. I end up with a handful of soft, stiff, multicolored fragments (but tending more and more to snowy white), which I must always handle, just for a moment, as I'm cleaning up: they too are soft and barely there, vanishing threads, and they always remind me of the day when I made one of the decisive, unknowable turns of my life, and my past whispered over my ears, off my shoulders, to the floor.

If I could have shed my name as well, I would have. I wanted to go forward with no tokens, no banner, no representation, no assertion.

‘Who are you, Master?’ he asked.

‘Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?

No one; or everyone.

Not the Golden Boy

Morning, and swallows dodge the power wires in their flickering hunt, zigzagging across the pale blue.

I am an old man this morning, with a straggly white beard and an enormous nose. My face blinked at me in the mirror, unrecognizable. How had I failed to notice that I had acquired an old man's nose? There it is, as plain as – well, as plain as the nose on my face. A great fleshy overhanging thing, anchored like a limpet on my nasal bones, breathing the sea water of the air, hairs poking out and waving in my breath, like the fronds of a barnacle that search underwater for sustenance. Was I born for this? Apparently. Over my nose, a jutting Neanderthal brow bristles and broods. And yet once, and not so long ago, I was a young man. And I'm still conscious – more conscious than ever, in fact – of reservoirs of power, agility, acumen. I do not yet have any sense of being on the wane. On the contrary, I feel fighting-fit and eager. But – and this is in sharp contrast to the young man I was – I feel nevertheless that I am in some sense a pawn, being moved in a game I don't understand.

I love the scene in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf proposes that Frodo was meant to inherit the Ring, and suggests that this is a comforting thought; and Frodo replies flatly that it is not. I am, perhaps, given to magical thinking, but I derive no comfort from it. If this world was designed, it was designed for purposes that are unfathomable by us, and certainly far from my own. God as a nice dependable buddy is a conception fit for children and idiots. God makes the world considerably more menacing and incalculable, not less.

I swam yesterday, for the first time in a year at least, plowing through the water, registering the unaccustomed strain on tendon and ligament; delighting in the water, but not trusting it as completely as I used to. The crescent moon was barely visible: it hung between two fir trees, but seemed to appear and disappear on its own schedule. I was an old, solitary orangutan in my forest pool. The hair on my chest is quite white now. It readily took the dye of the setting sun: it was orange, not gold. I'm not the golden boy any more. I wonder what I am?

We Need the Eggs

The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders
World Health Organization, Geneva, 1992

F21 Schizotypal Disorder

A disorder characterized by eccentric behaviour and anomalies of thinking and affect which resemble those seen in schizophrenia, though no definite and characteristic schizophrenic anomalies have occurred at any stage. There is no dominant or typical disturbance, but any of the following may be present:

(a) inappropriate or constricted affect (the individual appears cold and aloof);

Hmm, I don't think so, but would I know?

(b) behaviour or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar;

Definitely.

(c) poor rapport with others and a tendency to social withdrawal;

A tendency to social withdrawal, certainly. I don't think I have a poor rapport with others, though.

(d) odd beliefs or magical thinking, influencing behaviour and inconsistent with subcultural norms;

Oh yes, always I have had odd beliefs; and being inconsistent with subcultural norms has always been a bit of a specialty of mine. Magical thinking? Dunno. To me, a lot of what the culturally normal do looks like magical thinking. (See? Those odd beliefs, again.)

(e) suspiciousness or paranoid ideas;

Nope.

(f) obsessive ruminations without inner resistance, often with dysmorphophobic, sexual or aggressive contents;

Do I do anything without inner resistance? I doubt it. I do write a lot of dysmorphic prose and poetry, in which I imagine myself to be huge, or misshapen, or tiny, or insubstantial. I think about sex a lot; about aggression, very little. Obsessive rumination might be my middle name, but I'm not sure that's what this is driving at.

(g) unusual perceptual experiences including somatosensory (bodily) or other illusions, depersonalization or derealization;

Pretty much all the time.

(h) vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate, or stereotyped thinking, manifested by odd speech or in other ways, without gross incoherence;

This makes me giggle. “Vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate.” Why didn't I make that the name of my blog?

(i) occasional transient quasi-psychotic episodes with intense illusions, auditory or other hallucinations, and delusion-like ideas, usually occurring without external provocation.

Quasi-psychotic? Aren't we chasing the chickens with chickens here? You tell me if they're quasi-psychotic. They're intense, certainly.

The disorder runs a chronic course with fluctuations of intensity. Occasionally it evolves into overt schizophrenia. There is no definite onset and its evolution and course are usually those of a personality disorder. It is more common in individuals related to schizophrenics and is believed to be part of the genetic "spectrum" of schizophrenia.

And here I thought I was supposed to be the vague and circumstantial one! (Why, I wonder, is “spectrum” in quotation marks?)

Well, that doesn't get us terribly far. But I am rather taken by the idea that this particular genetic spectrum survives because it supplies tribes with their prophets and shamans. Though why having prophets and shamans should be an evolutionary advantage is not altogether clear. "We talk to the dead, so you don't have to!" Reminds me of the Woody Allen joke:

"My poor uncle thinks he's a chicken." -- "Why don't you take him to a psychiatrist?" -- "Well, we would, but we need the eggs."

Old Summer

Whispering lights, vapor trails, gleams on glass and chrome. Walking outdoors is walking into a heavy fabric of quilted air and heat: summer has finally come, even to the Northwest.

But it's old summer, already pregnant with Fall. I can wake at first light, and still have gotten enough sleep. The sun can pound down on us all it likes: it can't alter the fact that September is only two weeks away. My spirits lift, as always, at the first intimations of Fall. Almost always, when we're driving home from our annual beach trip (which is coming up soon!) we'll see a few branches of vine maple going red up in the Coast Range. The rains will come, sooner or later, the mists and the cloudlight. Weather this hot can fill me with dread, if it comes in June, but it can't scare me now. I can even enjoy it, in a perverse way, and guess at how people who actually like this weather experience it. The heat soaks in, all the way to the bones. My body sits a little looser on me, like my clothes after I've lost weight.

I have a suspicion that my new-found tolerance for heat, in the past few years, has to do with being more fit. I spend much more of my life up and about, cycling and doing massage and what not, these days. My tolerance for standing around has also gone way up. I used to hate it: I think just because it was somewhat difficult for me. My heart didn't like pumping that hard. It wasn't used to it. I think the heat used to push me that way too.

Or – it could have to do with having air-conditioning in our new house, a voluptuous by-product of our virtuous installation of a heat-pump. We have not used it much. But just knowing that we could makes it possible to shrug and scoff at the sun. (I've never lived with air-conditioning before. An amazing luxury; a guilty pleasure.)

In any case, I find that I don't hate the summer as I used to, not at all. Of course, summers go by a lot faster than they used to, too; seasons ripple by at about the rate of weeks, when I was a teenager – or days, when I was a kid. Every time I look up it seems that we're entering into the pleasures of a new season: I don't have time to get tired of any of them.

Home

I've always felt at home with women who strip for a living; there's something cut-to-the-chase about them, an impatience with pretenses, that answers to my own. And these are only kids, after all. They sit cross-legged on the bed in their pjs and speculate about the day, while the old man potters about packing up his massage kit. The sun floods into the dim room around the edges of a crooked blanket slapped up for a curtain; the feeble air-conditioner wheezes. I see the two young women in double-exposure: both as vulnerable girls, my daughter's age; and as the objects of desire I used to see up on stages back in the bad old days. They pay me in crisp fifties, which I – picturing them as having come from the wallets of men who look like Paul Ryan – handle with faint reluctance.

They are absurdly, impossibly beautiful. One odd thing about the alchemy of massage is, that while their beauty strikes me in retrospect, it makes no impression on me at as I'm working. All the emblems and totems of status go away with the clothes. Backstage, we're all human, and nothing but human. All those markers, so important in the faces we present to each other, just go away: the flatness of the tummies doesn't mean a perfect 10 and trophy potential, but only that the lay of the abdominal muscles is easier to read; the pimple behind the ear is not a flaw, but a marker of stress and a buoy to steer around. I don't want to possess them: I want only to unwind and unclot their bunched muscles and accumulated unhappinesses. The beauty a person has on the massage table is not special or exclusive: it's the beauty everyone has. Not negotiable currency.

And now, as I pack up, we are all equally awkward; all, equally, jammed halfway into a world that can neither digest us nor spit us out. If we had ever learned to be fluent or at ease in the appearances, to serve up the appropriate small-talk on all occasions, I suppose we would be Paul Ryans or the wives of Paul Ryans. But we are only grateful for each other, grateful for the daily bread of ordinary respect and kindness.

We are de trop in the world of Paul Ryan: slackers, failures, also-rans. But as I stand by the table holding this young woman's hand in both of mine – pausing for the space of two synchronized breaths – I permit myself to doubt that his world holds many such moments of tenderness. I'm content to live here, on the margins, where the unauthorized spaces open. This is as much home as I will ever have.

Ninja Massage Therapist

It's supposed to get hot today. 95 degrees, just like for the grown-ups over there on the far side of the mountains, in Real America. I've gotten my bike ride in early, before the heat, after a short restless night. But I'm anticipating my two o'clock massage – in an old, un-air-conditioned apartment building – with some trepidation. Client, prepare to be dripped upon! I doubt my tennis headband will stem the flood. (This is, by the way, the same client who exclaimed, upon seeing said headband, “Ninja massage therapist!”)

But it's August 4^th, and it will be the first hot day of the year. I've been told that this is supposed to be the local effect of global warming: even milder summers for the maritime Northwest. Too good to be true, I expect. But certainly last summer was idyllic: lots of these cloudy mornings, and the sun coming out too late to roast anything. It was wonderful. Everyone complained, and I nodded sympathetically: dreadful! Dreadful! And wriggled with delight. And at night the moon would roll into the cool night, up through the zodiac corridor, enormous and quiet, and the wind would run through the grass, like a sweet night-lizard bringing sleep. And so it will tonight, and while I sleep he'll make the crossing over the Columbia, stepping carefully, like a cat walking on a sheet of ice.

A Note On My Artistic Process

They tell me Henry James
surprised at the funeral of a neighbor child
explained his presence: “Where emotion is,
there am I.” I hate you, Mr Henry Fucking James.

No. And even if a wind gathers
and sand scours up my legs
the buildings yaw backward the ticking
pauses the tinnitus changes note and
the patter of the congas
trails off –

if my head grown long and heavy
slews back panning street and sky
and the lozenge of day-fire
streaks across the film –

even then I will not tour
other people's lives or even mine.
I live here. Put your fingers
in someone else's soup,
Mr Henry Fucking James.

Something I Ate

“Must have been something I ate,” we say, or possibly it was everything I ate: a couple days of high stress, a couple days of reckless eating. It came on yesterday, as I was finishing up the weekly reports for work: a sluicing diarrhea, and the strange intense pains that can go along with that. You would think that it would be a nice break for the bowels, dealing in fluids for a change; but it seems not – sharp, griping pains, and faint efflorescences of panic.

I made it home without accident, and spent a disturbed night, back and forth from the bed to the bathroom, pain enough to make me gasp and think of death one moment, and mere faint discomfort the next. I remembered a retreat I was on once, with Lama Michael, and Michael in the grips of a horrid flu. Pale and sweaty but good-humored. “Sometimes,” he remarked, “impermanence is on our side.”

And now I'm fine, and already it becomes dreamlike, the distress difficult to recollect. Now the fact that I took the day off work already is larger to me than the digestive episode, the fact that I disturbed the even, two-stroke motor of my life across the pond. It's nice to do something different. I cooked my own eggs – eggs from the neighbor behind us, the ones with the Yeats-and-Richard-Wilbur poetry board, or rather from their murmurous, mellifluous chickens – and ate a wedge of extraordinarily sweet cantaloupe, and shared Martha's grounds to make my coffee. And then I made a salad, and washed up, taking time out to lie down from time to time. It was very domestic and nice.

Maybe, I thought, maybe I could learn to stay home in the morning, make breakfast, not be so restless. I knew there was not a chance of that, though, not while I'm healthy. When the sun is out and about, I have to be too.

And now – it's about time for a nap, I think. My eyes are closing themselves. Later!

Glorious Summer

Typical of me, that at the moment of success, being fully booked for weeks, I should find myself most beset with doubts about whether I'm any good as a massage therapist. It used to drive Martha nuts, when I was in school: after the end of a semester, when it turned out I'd succeeded, my grades were good, my professors full of praise -- I'd go gloomy, dissatisfied, and doubtful. Maybe it's partly a primitive response, a reflex: if I were to delight in success, it would bring down the anger of the gods. Success exposes you, puts you on the map, makes you the target of poltergeists, controversialists, and spirits of envy. There is behind it, maybe, an existential conviction that if the universe was ever fully aware that I was here, it would crush me like flea between its fingernails.

I am aware, anyway of a strong impulse to jump overboard and begin a new life under a new name.

Meanwhile the trees are in full roaring leaf, crowding each other into the sky, shrugging sidewalks and driveways into ridges with their roots, struggling against each other, swaying and heaving like greco-roman wrestlers. It's hard to believe in Fall, or the Fall rains, right now.

The Lips of the Planchette

A ticklishness sometimes, sometimes
unbearable, like the crawl of restless legs
at night, when sleep
refuses to meet your eyes –
sometimes though a stiff wind of joy,
and the flesh in tatters streaming out behind.

Does it matter which hand palms the coin,
when he has ten thousand, and each a blazing eye?
I would say only, wait, and sway, and say
Oh not the lovely defensible prayers
you learned as an adult, no: say the Lord's Prayer,
dear, or “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

Now as I wait for this hesitating chest
to rise again, just a little; now while I wait
to hear the faintest breath,
now while all the joists are breaking,
the studs splitting the drywall,
and the cinder blocks grinding

one against the other --
now tell your simplest rosary,
or lead your fattest darling to the knife;
now touch your nibbled fingertips
to the lips of the planchette;
forget shame, this once, and ask.

Aurora

I understand there was shooting in Colorado last week, some dozen people killed in a theater. That's all I know, and all I intend to know. I am not going to read about it. I'm not going to click links to it. I'm not going to learn the shooter's name. He wanted real estate in my mind, and I'm not going to give it to him, not for this. You want real estate in my mind, write a poem. Of course I have flickers of curiosity about it, but when I do, I deliberately turn my attention to something I feel deserves the reward of my attention. I respond the same way to terrorism. It's just not a game I'm willing to play. I recognize that I am as vulnerable as anyone else. These unhappy people might well kill me or my loved ones, eventually. But they can't make me act as though they merit my attention. I very deliberately pull up Via Negativa and read the latest incredibly beautiful poem Luisa Igloria has written. That's what deserves my attention. That's what's going to get it.

As far as actual personal risk goes, it's miniscule: we're all far more likely to be killed by a flood, or by lightning, than by such a shooter. For me, it goes into the large bin of “risks not worth worrying about.” It's both extremely unlikely and extremely difficult to fend off. Everything of that sort goes in the bin, along with West-Nile-bearing mosquitoes and mad cow and rabid bats and meteorites. Who cares? No one who does level-headed risk analysis. The death with my name on it is cardiovascular disease, cancer, car accident, stroke, or plain old traditional infection, our age-old enemies that cut us down with tuberculosis or pneumonia. If you're going to fuss about something, fuss about those.

I'm unimpressed by both sides of the gun control controversy. I'd like to see guns go away: I have zero interest in them, but I just don't care much either way. On the one hand, the military conditions of the Second Amendment have long since vanished. Credible military power is no longer within reach of civilians, in industrialized nations, whether they can buy submachine guns or not. On the other hand, I'm just as unimpressed by many of the arguments of gun-control advocates: they fail to explain why some very heavily armed civilian populations, such as those of Canada and Switzerland, very rarely experience these psychotic shooting episodes. To me, the obvious question these things bring up is not “why are guns not harder to obtain?” but “why is the mental health of our young men so bad?”

For every young man who breaks this way, there must be hundreds teetering on the brink, in similar misery, who just barely don't break. Now that, that is really disturbing. That is something that needs to be addressed. By all means, pass gun control laws, if you like: I'll vote for them. But don't think you've solved the problem if you do.

What The Night Horse Said

In the dark, cool Virginia Cafe. Here and there light gleams on polished wood: light from the windows, zigzagging in, on its third or fourth bounce. The windows look west, right at the mass of the Central Library: even on this fair, high-summer day, not much of the sunlight that makes it around the library and through the windows gets back to the booths. Back here, such light as there is comes from dim orange globes floating by the walls. I think you're supposed to kiss in here. That's what Virginia is for, right? In any case, you're not supposed to read.

I neglected to bring someone to kiss, so I'll just mull instead. Mulled Dale, that's what we've got on tap. But all my usual topics bore me. I've said too much and stretched my thinking muscles too little, lately. I think I need a book of poetry that will slap me around a little, kick my feet from under me, give me a sharp little push. It's not thinking, when you're just wandering around the bric a brac of your mind, absent-mindedly fingering thoughts you stowed away twenty years ago. It's not even mulling.

---

But I am a spirit of a different sort, says Ariel. Ariel and me, you know, we go way back: both bound to services that have stopped meaning anything, the aides of a resigned congressman, lingering on in Washington, or the wait-staff of the Cannibal Isles, maybe, while our principals have vanished. Voices, empty corridors, beaches piled with stormwrack. We wander about and amuse ourselves with practicing ventriloquism: we are dull, and faintly predatory. We're waiting for another storm and another cast of characters, I suppose.

I'm tired, despite my surefootedness and quickness. There's an old, old fatigue gaining on me. I've cut to the chase a few times too often, maybe. The rewinds flicker past me and I'm not even slightly interested. Why would I care about the backstory? I don't even care about the frontstory. I'm puzzled, impatient, tetchy. There's nothing here for me to do. Othello's occupation's gone.

---

Another day comes, after an evening of thunder and lightning, and of hoots and shrieks from drunks under the window where I was doing my massage. A deep, deep gloom overtakes me: unreasonable spurts of anger and impatience. I know that most of it is a response to the humidity, which I have always hated, but it's more than that: a sense of everything I ever grasped at drifting away, a profound sense of failure, of the world going on without me and leaving me behind with the other wrecks. Not a characteristic frame of mind for me, and not one that will produce anything good.

---

I challenge myself to endure this anger without having a single opinion, without blaming a single person, without reaching for a single solution. The lightning from last night is still flickering in my mind's eye; the thunder is still in my marrow. May it shake me to pieces, blast me to bits, scatter me on the gasping winds.

You will have to do things you have never done before, said the Night Horse. And I will.

Reading

I set off twenty minutes early, giving in to my anxiety – though I knew perfectly well it was displacement – about whether I would get to the bookstore in time. Went around the block, and parked on a quiet street, switched off the engine, and sat shamatha for five minutes, feeling the extraordinarily high pitch of my body, my heart pounding, my breath shallow, my mind balky and inclined to bolt. It's valuable to watch, at these times when I'm least inclined to watch. I don't know if it calmed me or heightened my nerves. It's easy to confuse awareness of nervousness with nervousness. And it's not merely a confusion, either: realizing I'm nervous can make me more nervous. If the goal was simply to become less nervous in the short term, I don't know that meditation would be such a good choice. But the deeper goal of course is to see what's there, to see how it works. What is actually going on?

It's a fear of exposure, of course – there isn't a much more exposed situation than reading your poetry aloud, especially if your poetry is on the confessional and emo side – as mine is: full of declarations of devotion and emotional extravagance of all sorts. My mind uneasily tried to recall Wodehouse's description of someone reading his verse aloud, in – what was it? “a sort of gasping bleat”? Oy. One of those characters with long sidewhiskers and no gumption. But you see where my mind is going, and why I'm so anxious. The question isn't: “will they like my poetry?” or “is my poetry any good?” It's, “am I actually a pathetic Gawd-help-us?”

M and Steve are old hands at running poetry readings, and they've structured it beautifully. There are two featured readers, Joyce Ellen Davis and I. But there's an open mike as well. If you want to read, you write your name on a ticket and toss it in the bowl. Steve pulls a few names out in the intervals before, between, and after the featured readers, and the open mike people trot up and read of their verse, or someone else's. Everyone gets to read, and everyone's paying attention because they might be up next. There's no dead air, everything is lively and good-natured, and no one tries to hog the mike. It's not easy to make events like this work.

Then there's the other source of anxiety: feeling responsible for members of tribes that may or may not be on good terms. There are folks from my sangha there – will my lines about the Buddha being dead and the Dharma rattling like zinc pennies offend them? There's Joyce's people, presumably Mormon, with little kids in tow: I wince a bit at a stridently anti-religious poem, and at a few sexually explicit lines in another. And a rather austere poet has come, whom I admire greatly, but who practices in the high modernist tradition of Eliot and Pound. Around her I feel terribly soppy, slipshod, and self-indulgent. I'm not an artist, I think: I just knock a few poems together on weekends. And there's even someone from my massage universe, with her daughter, and there my fears run the other way: if you're not an initiate into the hothouse world of poetry, is all this too rarified and labored to make any sense at all?

It's not my job, I suppose, to make sure all these people like each other. But I love them all and I want them to like each other. It's a bit like taking your new girlfriend home to meet your family, except that it's several girlfriends and several families.

It's all lovely. I can even see that I make a hit with couple people. The audience laughs at the right parts of my poems, and for the first time (that I know of) I sell a couple of my books cold, to complete strangers. The resolution I made a couple hours ago, not to do any more readings, because getting this het up is simply not worth it, strikes me as absurd, and I dismiss it. Of course I'll do more readings, I think. I should even get out and start drumming some up.

A Very Tired Man About To Go To Bed

My restlessness rises and falls: anxiety about the reading tomorrow night swells, and then vanishes.

As I drove to my appointment tonight, there was sun falling all around, but straight ahead the haze had coalesced into something like cloud cover, and Mt Hood – which was straight ahead, because I was driving to Camas, already on the Washington side of the river – loomed dark, unsmiling, a few flecks of glacier gleaming on his somber body, where the setting sun had struggled through some thinning in the haze. It was ghostly, beautiful, menacing. Driving back, after sunset, the mountain had vanished altogether, and I crossed back over Columbia into a homely, quiet Oregon. The Glenn Jackson Bridge sometimes makes the whole landscape a miniature, the sort of thing you gaze at and wonder how they possibly did such fine detailing. Look, every individual needle on the every individual branch of every individual tree! And the light draining away over the four edges of the Earth.

And earlier today, Joyce's extraordinarily beautiful face as she lay on her back, eyes closed. It's not done, stopping a massage in order to paint a portrait your client. And I don't have any paints. And I wouldn't know how to paint, even if I did. I just finished the massage.

And then tonight, I bought chips and sour cream (for the first time in a month!) from a young dreadlocked cashier, absurdly handsome. He looks like an actor who would play a basketball star in a contemporary movie. Which prejudiced me against him, at first, but he is so very kind and conscientious at the register that I'm beginning to believe that it really is his deepest heart's desire to see that I leave the Safeway having found everything I was looking for.

A stout middle aged Caucasian woman was stepping in to take over from him – the end of his shift? She reached up – a good foot above her head – to rub his shoulders, and he accepted gratefully, like a cat that loves to be petted. The scenario was so improbable that I can't quite believe it, even now. What would become of all of us massage therapists, if this sort of thing caught on? Crikey. We'd have to go find real jobs.

But there it is: a great river running between two states, down from the mountain to the sea, and a bridge between two glittering cities. I live in a little crooked house in the city on the left bank, up on an unnamed ridge. But I'm not a character, and there aren't any stories about me. I'm just a very tired man about to go to bed.

Out in the Provinces

Gentle rain, drifting slow and slant, barely visible, glowing gray-white sky; everything green and glad. July, as we know it here. It's warm out – by our standards, anyway: 55 degrees, or 14 to you furriners – and I'm still wearing my sandals. About to go get a massage from Neva, out in Hillsboro. There are only a few ways to climb up over the West Hills, and all of them offer the same extraordinary sense, when you come over the crest, of a new world opening up: sky, sky everywhere, the Coast Range dim and blue beyond the sparsely peopled champagne, and the light falling always unexpectedly across the distance. If you've ever fretted on the East Coast for months at a time, and then driven west through the crowded, irritable, privately-owned countryside of rolling bumps, and come finally to the Hudson valley, where you can actually see out a ways, and taken a deep breath and let your shoulders drop, then you've known a pale imitation of this experience, which I have several times a month. So you rule the world over there, in your humid, filthy megalopolises at the seat of the last great standing empire: so what? We live in one of the last places worth living in.

Thank You Notes

Time was I adored a slack, girlish, expressionless face, eyes wide and distrustful: now, it produces barely an echo in the far halls of desire. That girl, over there, now, with a rosebud mouth: even when she catches her underlip in her teeth, you can tell that she's seeing her face in the mirror. She has practiced. She's practicing now.

No, nowadays I want a face that wrinkles frankly with laughter, faces that do rueful or appreciative, eyes that laugh. I want hands that are lined like beach sand. I want skin with a little slack, flesh with a little give, a body that's been lived in comfortably.

Girls we called them, unselfconsciously, when I was young, long ago, in the vanishing country of the 1960s. They took my breath away. I don't know why, now. I guess I thought they would be doors into new countries. Now I take them to be doors into heavily perfumed closets full of repugnant stuffed animals. Neither even begins to be near the mark, I suppose. People are not doors. It's little enough any of us can give to anyone else. And we can give nothing at all until they stop expecting things of us.

Vapor trails scatter and melt in the unsteady sky. Yesterday I watched an airplane coasting the moon, and then a swallow actually crossed his pocked face. I tried to do the numbers: how often should the path of bird or plane cross the tiny disk of the moon, floating in all that sky? It was a surprisingly complex problem, and it defeated me handily. But once I had envisioned all the lines drawn by all the birds all day, I could see it was less unlikely than I first thought: that the moon would be caught often in that net. And of course when you look up at the sky, where do you look? At the moon. And then your gaze is snagged by any nearby bird, and if it seems to be heading for the moon, you keep watching. Not so unlikely after all; not if you spend a lot of time looking at the sky.

Koi zigzag in the brown water. The surface is half silver, piddled with leaves; the koi move deliberately, almost ceremoniously, signing their names on the shifts of the pond. My hands remember your chest, the way your ribs rose gratefully to fill my palms. Desires and memories signed their names under the surface there, writing slowly, fading quickly. Thank you for yours of even date.

Pulling Up Stakes

Yesterday I pulled a metal stake up out of the ground. It had barbs, or wings, but they actually came off, while we were trying to dig it out: a fat chevron of steel-plate. But the stake kept hanging on by sheer cussedness. I almost wrenched my back hauling it up. Turns out that a foot and a half of nobbly metal, once well-bedded in soil, resists uprooting with surprising tenacity. But I got it at last.

Golden light, walls of large-leaved vines embroidering hedges, and trees of with deep purple, lustrous foliage, always moving out of my vision. As so many things do these days! My eyes seem always out of focus.

It's strange to no longer be acquiring or building. I am getting rid of things, avoiding accomplishments. I want to be easy to pull up, when the time comes.

In the morning, the light and the birdsong begin to pour into the house at about 4:30. I wake and leave the bedroom for the cooler air of the living room, lie on the sofa, half awake, feeling the tide of the day rise around me. All my laboriously memorized poetry is gone: no verses come to me. I'm very alone. I wish now that I had memorized less verse and more birdsong: I don't know the names of these creatures, though I've listened to them for decades. It seems a dereliction, an unkindness.

Slowly, the mornings will ebb again, and I'll get full nights of sleep again, maybe. Or maybe not. But yesterday I actually napped, a feat I have never accomplished before without exhaustion. That's promising.

Massage steadies me, nourishes me. It's a loving-kindness practice, for me: how much of myself can I give away without asking return? Trickier than it sounds. There are so many sorts of return, and so many ways of asking, or inveigling. It's easiest when an interruption comes, a phone call, say, just as I'm packing up, so I can vanish without ceremony. It's the deepest wish of my heart, nowadays: to disappear, to perfect my vanishing skills. I want to be so practiced, that when I sink into the water for the last time there's not even a ripple left on the surface.

Linens

The tresses harum-scarum,
the slanting of the skim
the clewing and the rocking and the lolling of the limb;

the stutter of the sternum,
the belly's gulping catch,
the spooling and the locking and unloosing of the fetch;

the kindling of the sacrum,
the kindliness of kin,
the tuning of the turning of the trembling of the skin:

all that vanishes at midnight,
the carriage and the horse –
what remains is just the scamper of the mouse upon its course.

Talismans

Bright sun, clear sky, but still cool. The sap is flowing strong in trees-of-heaven, and though I understand – as I ride beneath them on Lincoln street – why some people call them “stink-palms,” it isn't an unpleasant smell to me, though it is a dangerous one, an invitation to nostalgia and grief. It's the smell of the fullness of summer, and I've never belonged in summer. I'm a creature of winter, of shifting, indirect light, of fog and rain, of the clarity of long-running rivulets. In the direct sunlight I am a swollen, awkward, blundering creature.

I carry four things in the left front pocket of my jeans. The fob that magically opens the doors and enables the elevators of my office building; the small key to my bicycle lock; a wooden skull, a bit smaller than an ordinary marble, carved for me as a good-luck piece by Clint in massage school; and a red-orange beach agate, like a little sun. I've lost the pale blue-green, almost turquoise, sea-glass I used to carry in that same pocket. Time goes on and things get lost.

Nothing magical in my right front pocket. Keys and change. Wallet in my right back pocket. That's it. Martha finds it comical that when I put on a clean pair of jeans I methodically put everything from the pockets of the old pair into the pockets of the new pair. I'm not sure why. How do other people keep track of their stuff? You have to do it somehow.

The enormous relief of the fifth of July. It's like the day after Christmas: a year before I have to do this again! My two least favorite days of the year, days on which failure is guaranteed, when the fact that I am not what was wanted or expected is made clear and put on public display. I don't struggle against it. Two days of misery per year, that's not much, in a generally happy life. It's like the county taxes. You just pay it.

Summer begins now, in western Oregon, summer for real. I'll survive it. I have the four things in my pocket, and I have friends, even if they're far away.

Twinkling of the Treats

Possibly the most effective step we've yet made in getting our eating under control was undertaken with very little thought: in fact, mainly by accident. Martha asked what I was thinking, and I – caught a bit off-guard – answered that I was gloomily considering that I knew what the next step was, but that we would never take it: we needed to get everything we thought we shouldn't eat out of the house, and, when we did bring home something to eat that we thought we shouldn't, to toss all the rest of it out when we were done.

I'd been thinking that for a while: there's the times when we're just jonesing for cookies, or chips, or General Tso's chicken, when it's really hard not to go out and get it. But those times don't account for most of the junk eating we do. Most of the junk eating happens just because the stuff is there. We know it's there, and that knowledge twinkles somewhere in our neural networks, shooting off reminders. “There's half a bag of potato chips in the cupboard! Chips in the cupboard! Chips in the cupboard!” Only a matter of time till a reminder hits a big clot of hunger or anxiety or mere boredom, and – bang! Eating the stuff. I'd even find myself thinking “I'd better clear this stuff out of the house” – dutifully eating it so that I wouldn't be tempted by it any more. (Yes, I know. Welcome to my brain.)

But the thing is (I went on), we never resolve on these things at the same time in the same way, and I couldn't see it ever happening. A longstanding part of our couplehood has been supporting each other in self-indulgence. We both needed to think this was a good idea at the same time.

Martha said, no, we didn't: that if I needed her to hide her treats from me she could do it easily. It would even be rather fun. And from that moment, treats disappeared from the house.

That must have been two weeks ago, and I haven't eaten a treat since. No ice cream, no cookies, no chips. And – this is important – not because I've resolved not to. I've made no resolve. I've wasted no mental energy on that. I can have all the ice cream etc. I want: I just can't store it.

It turns out that, while I crave a treat desperately if I know it's in the house, I have not, so far, actually wanted one so much that I'll go out and make a special trip to get it. The mismatch is ludicrous and I'm startled by it. It's as though there were an inverse square of law of treat attraction. Not only that, but my brain obviously takes ownership very seriously. The cookies in the store are not only far away – they don't belong to me yet. Which means that, while they may show up forcefully in my consciousness from time to time, they don't just sit in there twinkling. It's the damnedest thing. If I own them, some portion of my brain, it seems, thinks about them continuously. If I don't own them and don't see them, though, they really truly just vanish from my mind for hours and even days at a time.

The fact that they may actually be there, in some cunning hiding place of Martha's, doesn't register at all. The craving seems to hook to a concrete and definite recollection. Abstract and general knowledge doesn't offer the purchase of a specific memory of a specific bag of chips in a specific cupboard.

This actually all makes a fair amount of sense if you consider that mostly what primates do all day is wander around looking for things to eat, or figure out how to get to things they know are there, or divvy up treats amongst the band other under more or less threat of violence. Hunter-gatherers do a lot of spotting treats and mulling over how to get at them, or how to get them away from competitors. Most of us great apes seem to have moved into the evolutionary niche of finding particularly clever ways to get at scarce energy-dense foods, which possibly helps explain why we're so high-strung, and so socially high-stakes. Gorillas never went that way – they still just munch leaves all day – and they're notably sweeter-tempered and easier-going than the rest of us. Human beings went that way with a vengeance, though. It doesn't make a lot of sense to snatch leaves out of each other's mouths when there's abundant foliage all around. But a honeycomb trove? A tender young lamb? That's worth fighting about, or kowtowing for.

(Yes, I have been reading Robert Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir. Oh my God. What an amazing book!)

Enter July, Full of Tongues

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

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

Here comes July.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Franklin's Lament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reward Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retreat of the Angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rind

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

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

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

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

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

Paint it White

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

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

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

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

Skin

for Jessamyn Smyth, on her birthday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

River God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Significant Figures

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

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

---

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

---

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

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

River-Wrack

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raft

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

Brewing

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

You photographed his hands:
pale, freckled, vulnerable fish

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

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

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

creatures of seventy seasons,
barely long enough

to imagine love, let alone
unfold its heavy banners

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

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

There is no record to set straight:
this fermentation

began long before
the continents came adrift.

Straw

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

– Dick Jones, “Stille Nacht,” Ancient Lights

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

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

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

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

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

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

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

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

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

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

Glimmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eddy

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

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

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

Patterns

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Ode to a Sky-Lark

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

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

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

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

Aftertaste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collecting Light

“Light,” he whispered. He would collect, slowly and laboriously, a sufficient radiance.

-- A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage

So Pip's story goes on, to the scary parts: where he goes about collecting light. Of course he does, because that's what human beings do: but Pip's working under such a deficit that he has no real thought for what it's going to do to other people, and to himself eventually, if he simply makes up his own rules and plunders it. Here's where the book turns into a book about me, and I find myself reluctant to pick it back up: at twilight the camellia on the cover hovers like a ghost on the end table.

---

Two fish, one eager and one weary, circle each other in the bowl of my stomach. One thinks, “it is a new day: anything might happen!” and the other thinks, “it is a new day. Anything might happen.”