A Fragment of Bright Sky

Morning. Light makes its way in, twisting and turning through the net of new, tawny maple-flower, ducking under the porch ceiling, backing cautiously up to the narrow window, and falling inside. It's Spring. God knows what time it is – it will be another week before my time-instincts synch up clock time again – but at least it's light: the cloud cover is pulsing with it.

I'm of an age, maybe, when most sweetnesses carry twinges with them.

Some have seen a likely lad

Who had a stout fly-fisher's wrist,

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl who knew all Dante once,

Live to bear children to a dunce...

And so one's pleasure in likely lads and learned girls is tinged with that, of course. So much seed falls on barren ground. Still the Spring does come, each time more gloriously improbable than before, and you realize that the current behind it has to be much huger than ever you knew or dreamed.

And I? I stretch my fingers, crack my knuckles, feel the strength and cunning of my hands. I'm stronger and more certain every day.

Despite my poem about visitors, I have had wonderful visitors recently, and one more treasured friend coming this weekend. I am deliberately not learning whether hugs are against some monastic precept, so that I can plead ignorance. She gave me a bit of sky, once, as a bookmark. Sometimes, after a dry season, the blessings come as thick as a blizzard of snow.

The sacred joy that is without suffering. Even to imagine it is to carry a little fragment of bright sky with you.

Visitors

So many visitors

.

to us, unaccustomed to any:

Mr Hatred, Mrs Envy, even

young Overweening Pride.

It's hard to know

how long they will stay, what

they will want for dinner.

.

Outside, the little birds come.

Martha calls them a mixed flock,

apologetically

like a racist speaking

of miscegenation. These

things happen.

.

Easier visitors: but

they rise, paring

peels of air

at a shift of light,

or at the hiss

of distant air brakes.

.

Nothing undemanding stays.

Yellow-Jackets

No sleep in me tonight - or I should say, this morning. Thoughts crowd in on me: yellow-jackets cluster on the hummingbird feeder. I should have been, said, thought, done...

Idle thoughts, but they won't leave me alone. So I drink this cinnamon tea, and let them build a nest.

I've glimpsed Arcturus rising twice, now. Spring. Jupiter and Aldebaran falling down into the west. The sky wheels every night, but it starts sooner every night too. Thank God at least for that. There's a larger wheel driving the one we see.

...Old-Who doesn't speak any more.

They used to have Thunder talk, or
The Rivers, or Leaves, or Birds. It's all
"Cheep, cheep" now. It's a long time
since a cloud said anything helpful.

Maybe. Maybe it's a long time since we listened properly.

You look at their little shoulders,
bent over but strong. Like them you
hunch against the wind and that weight 
pressing down -- Time on its way somewhere,
using us all, people and rocks,
as a prop, as a wobbly crutch.

So I'm reading William Stafford at long last. No one told me he was a comic poet! He makes me laugh, over and over. A wobbly crutch! Very wobbly. Poor Time!

It's barely poetry, in a way: I'm not sure how much his poems would lose if you wrote them out as prose. Or -- this really is a better way of putting it -- they make terrific prose, just as they stand. The poetry is in the thinking voice, and in the kindness. The pattern and texture of his words never run away on their own: no insurrections allowed. There's a strange tendency to think of formal poetry as more disciplined, more strict, tamer, but of course it's exactly the opposite. It's metrical pattern and rhyme that give the pretext for language to run amok, that bring the random, impudent, contradictory impulses in. You have to let the words swirl, if they're going to form patterns. Free verse is for people who don't like their words running away from them.

But that's all by the way. There's nothing stern or controlling about Stafford: but his poems do make sense. They say exactly what he means them to say. So far as I've read, anyway.

And now I think I'll try sleeping, again. 4:30. Good night!

Blogger Dale Favier Interviews the Poet by the same Name

What is your working title of your book?

Glasswork, from the poem that ends:

And finally, having scooped

the pulpy stuff of cleverness away,

you'll come to the almond

amygdala, gleaming, and inlaid

with rage and desire like parquetry,

and hidden under that –

only glasswork made by tender hands,

fragile bowls of sky or midnight blue.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I'm not one of those dignified poets who builds great monuments of public poetry. My poetry is irredeemably personal. Mine has been a messy, heartbreaking life for a couple years, and these poems come out of that. The dominant theme, I suppose, is fragility – hence the title.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry. Confessional poetry.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Hah. Like I know the names of any actors!

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

What? That's some kind of joke, right? “Ow, putting my hand on the hot stove hurts!”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Well, that's the question. I think it was a mistake to make this into a book, actually: I think I moved into poetry books too fast. I think I should break it down into two or three chapbooks, and shop them around that way, enter some contests, maybe. I just threw all my favorite stuff from the last couple years into the pot.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Well, it took years to write the poems, of course. The book I slapped together hastily to submit to this year's Airlie Press contest. See above.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Story? Story? What story? No. But I think I fall recognizably into what you might call the Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Chase Twichell school: or what you might call the White Knight school:

So, having no reply to give

    To what the old man said,

I cried "Come, tell me how you live!"

    And thumped him on the head.

I am interested always in the question, “How does one live?” and “How does one tell people how one lives?” and the further questions of “How does one listen to someone telling one how one lives? And does it make any difference?”

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Machik Labdrön. Next question.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

Beats me. I'm astonished and grateful that people like to read my poetry: I always think there must be some mistake. But here's poem, changed somewhat from its debut on Mole:

Genesis

Cain planted corn and thought,

“I own this land!”

Abel taught sheep to believe he was kind,

and cut their throats.

Eve never learned to turn away

salesmen with catalogs of apples,

a deal of seed, and wriggling discourse:

at night she told Adam how they would be rich.

Never mind who finally murdered whom. It was

only a matter of time.

Dreary

A gray and dreary day: the rain becomes visible and disappears again, but the dripping from the twigs goes on regardless: every end and nub is lit with a dull silvery spark, that winks, falls, and reappears. Somewhere out east, there, beyond the clouds, is the sun, I suppose, or even this light would fail. But it's difficult to believe. In the parking lot of Fred Meyer an unprepossessing young man was shouting at his girlfriend: “it's just fucking DARK and GRAY and it goes ON and ON and ON!” Like she could do something about it.

It doesn't go on and on, of course: in fact we had quite a nice sunny warm-ish day just a couple days ago, which got his hopes up. That's probably the problem.

The uncanny blue of spruce needles, the pale green of the spreading lichen on the steep bit of sidewalk over yonder, and the vague greeny-black of the doug firs standing against the east: all muted, all fading. I'm finishing my second breakfast, unless it's my early lunch: hamburger, sweet potato, romaine salad, all of them plain but for a bit of salt, all of them startlingly vivid and rewarding on this dull, dull day. I am perhaps too fond of ordinary food ever to become a foodie. I like this stuff: I don't feel any inclination to jazz it up.

But I remain moody and belligerent, like that young man: I want to pick a quarrel and have it out with someone. My disappointment is close to the bone, and cold, cold: surely it must be somebody else's fault?

I close my eyes and question my body. The faint silver wavering shring of my tinnitus: the hunch of my shoulders, an uneasiness in my knees. Take a couple breaths, drop the shoulders, move my feet out from under my chair. The anxiety that's left is in my back, in the neighborhood of the kidneys. I arch my back, toss my head, grimace. Sometimes you move just warn off the buzzards. Keep your distance, buckos! This one's still warm and liable to kick.

Sleep

 

William Dement, a sleep researcher at Stanford, convinced me with this book of the importance of light hygiene. I do not sleep well if there's any light in the room. The modern world is full of light sources: clocks, power strips, computers -- even when they're supposedly off, our myriad electronics have little LEDs glowing, red or green or yellow, little eyes in the dark. Real darkness is not a matter of turning off the lights. It's a matter of blacking out your windows and covering up all those little eyes. Dement demonstrated in the lab that even these little increments of light disturb people's sleep: although they're unaware of why, they sleep less soundly and wake more easily in the presence of even very little light.

Sleep gets its own entry in my "whupping the food thing" series for two reasons. First: sleep is the great restorer of oomph, and everything about whupping the food thing rests on oomph. To eat right I need to plan ahead, to not always take the easy way, to throw myself into the fight with some vigor and enthusiasm: above all, to keep out of temptation's way, and to occasionally resist temptation if my planning fails. All those things require oomph, and if I start the day with a meager supply, chances are there won't be enough when my trough times come. If I'm exhausted, grieved, discouraged, and out of oomph by mid-afternoon, the odds that I'll be gorging on ice cream and potato chips before the end of the day skyrocket. I can't afford not to get a good night's sleep.

The other thing sleep does is relieve persistent pain. I'm not sure if it does this by actually encouraging the repair of tissue, or more subtly by somehow resetting the brain's pain responses, but the effect is striking. Most people my age or older are navigating their exercise around some pain or other, their "bad knee" or their "tweaked back" or something: we're working the trade-offs between the benefits of exercise and aggravating some pain or other. The catch-22 here, of course, is that to really get a good night's sleep, you have to exercise. I have clients in whom this has spiraled down to an almost sleepless and completely pain-filled life, getting around by motor-chair because they can't walk on their excruciating knees, unable to drive because they fall asleep at the wheel, unable to sleep because their body is desperate for exercise, and unable to exercise because everything, everything hurts. Trust me: you really, really don't want to go there. And the simplest intervention in this vicious cycle is a remarkably easy one. Block every single damn light source, block it completely. If you want to get fancy, it also helps to quit using televisions and computers for an hour or two before bed. Those are both powerful light sources, and you stare straight into them. I've never managed to do that: I'm too fond of dinking around on my computer in the evening. For me, it's enough to make it dark dark dark. Blackout curtains, clock hidden under the bed, duct tape on the power strip light. Really dark.

What does avoiding pain have to do with whupping the food thing? Well, exercise turns out to be critical for a normal metabolism. Whatever goes wrong with modern metabolism, and disposes us so disastrously to type II diabetes, cardiovascular deterioration, and cancer, study after study shows that exercise militates powerfully against it. I believe there's much more to it than the simple fact that exercise burns calories: the human body is designed for activity, and a whole slew of things begin to go wrong when it's sedentary, a cascade of ill-effects and metabolic abnormalities. My guess is that almost nobody with disordered eating regulation is going to really fix it without becoming active: and that almost nobody sedentary is going to become active if it's painful. So we come back to sleep. Protect it, cultivate it, defend it fiercely. Sleep is your friend.

Other posts on Whupping the Food Thing

The Nasties

I don't really like it when poets get the nasties.
Bleistein's cigar sets Dresden gently burning;
Gjertrud's No-No and her Clumsies bring
the fall of Cambodian leaves in early Spring.
You'll say I'm blaming clots on angioplasties,
but loathing runs in all ways all at once:
because one thing is hunted, one thing hunts.

White Flannel Trousers

I watch myself with guarded interest. I've seen so many of my fellow old-time bloggers hit this stretch, and spin out – when the giddy joy of having an audience dwindles (as the audience does), when you realize that even if, for once, you can say exactly what you mean, in public – well, so what? It doesn't make much difference. And you realize that, in the blogosphere as in life, for the most part, the only people who want to listen to you are the people to whom you listen. Stop visiting them, they'll stop visiting you. There was a time, in the early, heady days of blogging, when many of us thought the rules of the social universe were about to change. Our audiences would grow and grow, more and more people would realize just how irresistibly brilliant we were, and then... well... something would happen. And when it did, we'd be happy.

Well. There is, still, a deep happiness in just having my say. And I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my “fit audience though few.” But the world looks just the same – and history ain't changed – and now, ten years down the road, maybe I feel a little foolish that I ever entertained such notions. And forget, perhaps, to treasure as deeply as I should the people who still do read thoughtfully.

Blogging, it turns out – social media generally – does not scale at all well, and there's no particular reason why we should have thought it would. A sort of membrane forms around a readership, and new people become less and less inclined to cross that membrane: and in the meantime readers fall away, for one reason or another. Blogs become ghost-towns. We post less often, less freely, less engagingly: we visit other blogs less and comment less when we're there. And meanwhile, the conversations have largely moved to Facebook and Twitter. Blog posts become more set-pieces than conversations. And as one's virtual and real social circles converge, one begins to feel the ordinary social constraints re-assert themselves. If, in the interim, we have also grown ten years older, the decay of conversability and one's ability to form new friendships is all too familiar. We've grown shy, within our membranes: we grow less and less sure of our ability to judge what's appropriate, what's funny, what's charming. These things seem to happen quicker and vivider in the virtual world, but they're happening in the meat world as well.

So. It is time to climb out of the river and shake myself, spraying water over all and sundry; time to forget my dignity and chase some sticks; time to remember how brief all of this is. I have to grow old, but I don't have to grow timid.

The words, the words are as young as ever, and the sun is as fierce. Welcome the sixte, whan that ever he shal!

Zodiacs

Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Decoration for Book IX, The Thalians Choose Home

. . . six remaining children glimpse a sky
Where unfamiliar constellations rule
A dazzling zodiac - the Nine-tailed Cat,
The Throne of Fire, the Fount of Anguishing,
Un-mercy's Seat. I might go cruelly on . . .

     *     *     *

. . . Better to dream and say
That sparkling zodiac shows sympathy
For trial and weariness, presenting Hope
In Silver Feathers, Gabriel in Light,
The Mother's Arms, the Father's Sailing Boat,
The Seven Triumphant Against the Waste.

- Marly Youmans' Thaliad


The nod to Dickinson is entirely in place: the rhetorical move is pure Dickinson - fix your eye determinedly on your goal, and walk resolutely backwards. "I might go cruelly on," - and linger, that is, on the horrors of apocalypse - but instead, having given us the wrenching episode of "The Profane Madonna," we are going to swerve into innocent pastoral. The apophasis loads the innocence with unspoken nightmare, but it also tells us in so many words: this is the antidote for making up nightmare: we make up a lovely story about it. In the good zodiac there are still seven children, there are are still loving parents, and all is as it should be: and in fact we are about to meet the good, but faintly present and soon removed, father of the third covenant. All this is full of high theological doubt, also very reminiscent of Dickinson, and very canny about the narrator's implication in the story.

The broken covenant, and its restoration - the blind, profane madonna and her adopted son, determined to make a mother-and-child story regardless of what has to be ignored or fought to make it so: I took this to be the maybe best that could be done in the unredeemed world. To move to another, we need revelation. And we will get it; or at least Thalia will.

Thaliad: Upside Down From Us

Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Decoration for "Gabriel the Weeper"

We found a sourwood tree that had been killed

By something, but the leaves still drooped in place,

Though every one had faded into brown.

When we came closer, leaves burst into wings –

The tree was green, the death was butterflies,

Alive and pouring like a waterfall

But upside down from us.

So says Gabriel, the weeper, before they abandon him. His abandonment is one of the discomforts of this epic. The gloss tells us that deserting him “sealed the end of innocence” for the children: but you know, I don't trust that glossator for beans. What innocence, and how sealed? It feels less like a sin to me, in the narrative – no one more than briefly really tries on guilt or expiation for it – less, I say, like sin than like sacrifice: and if one is to look for the meaning of that sacrifice, it has to be in the difficulties, the contradictions the sourwood tree.

First of all, it's lost and falsely found:

… One day I walked

Up there With my father. I'm sure it was

The place. It could have been... It looks the same.

We are sure that it is not the place: Gabriel of course is simply desperate for any shred of anything like home. Home is gone forever, and Gabriel can't, or won't, still his grief.

The tree is not really dead. There is a sort of miracle that returns it to life: all its dead leaves fly up to heaven, and it's green and living after all. But brown butterflies are a far cry from, say, the brilliant butterflies that populate García Márquez's Soledad. These, coating the tree, giving it a deathly look, are more in the register of moths: and what might with a dab of color or two have been a joyful ressurection remains a disturbing inversion. Death and life may not be what they seem, but there's nothing reassuring about this upside-down waterfall. One thinks more of ashes rising. Gabriel, I think, had to be sacrificed in a more ugly sense, a sense that Homer's audience would have grasped at once: the gods aren't satisfied yet. The fire wants one more.

The deepest kinship of this epic, formal, emotional, and moral, is with the Aeneid. There comes a time, reading that poem, that an acute reader suddenly realizes that Augustus Caesar was sold a bill of goods, and that Virgil, despite all his show of politically correct patriotism, was not really sure that Rome should ever have been founded at all. A similar dismay and foreboding runs through the Thaliad: its beauty is wounded and dark, from beginning to end.

Not Quite Spring

Late last night, Jupiter, still brighter yellow than makes me quite comfortable, falling towards the west, toward a rag-bed of cloud, and Sirius, with the purer flame of a real star, climbing up under Orion's feet – the sky wheeling forward, or the planet wheeling backward, whichever you like – the not-quite-Spring of late February in Portland. Spring stepping uncertainly towards us, coming down the Valley from the south, but winter has no intention of quitting yet. There's snow and frost still waiting, up the Columbia, for an east wind to come down the Gorge and blast anyone who thinks of budding. The wiser plants are making excuses and stalling for time.

I sit hunched over my coffee, staring at my hands. I have a new client tonight: these hands will be under a new pair of shoulders, lifting the scapulas: tracing the sweet spot under the scapular spine, where the muscle hugs its hollow in the bony plate, down to where it runs under the deltoid. I imagine it would be the choicest meat on the human frame; and it comes with its own serving platter, the shoulder blade.“We'll eat you up, we love you so!” And Max said: “No.”

No. And I wonder, again: are we massage therapists the ones who really get it, the ones who understand that it's always only touch? Or are we the dimmest ones, the hopelessly literal ones who can't really grasp a metaphor? I was touched by his concern, says our neighbor, and we, with a faintly wrinkled brow, answer, no, you were touched by his fingers.

Morning floods into the sky up over the eastern horizon: fills the thin places with light, soaks slowly into the thicker cloud. Sheets of light must be spreading overhead, now. Just barely south of east, where the firs are thickest, for brief time: the red fragments of a sunrise. But they wash pink as I watch, and quickly the color goes entirely. That's all the glory for this morning. The eastern sky fills with heavier cloud and goes a sullen, cold, dark blue. A winter sky. It's not spring yet.

Dishes

Illustration: Dale's rage against the machine

But – first things first. This is still, and forever, going to be long, laborious haul, with no shortcuts. I have a more helpful frame for it now, though: I no longer in any way see my difficulties with food as a manifestation of my poor character. I see it as a distortion imposed on me by industrial capitalism. They skillfully turned me into what Pollan calls “an industrial eater”: and every painful step towards eating real plain food, with no sauce but hunger, is a small act of defiance. “The food thing” falls into a pattern with a multitude of others: I have been conditioned to overconsume in many, many ways; I've been conditioned to believe in consumption as the beginning and end of my happiness, when in fact it's just an endlessly steepening toboggan slide towards a concrete wall. A wall of illness, of hopeless debt, of isolation. Make no mistake: that's what the consumption slide aims at.

That's grandiloquent, perhaps: but so are the extravagances of much of the food writing I've encountered since I began this, with its extraordinary emphasis on every meal being a peak experience. Every meal will not be a peak experience, no matter how much you spice and titillate it: all you can do by trying that hard is jade your palate.

No. I'm not looking for more ecstasy than an ordinary yam will sometimes supply.

Some years ago now – after many abjectly-failing attempts to “eat healthy,” – I realized the problem was larger than I thought. To eat healthy, I was going to have to cook. There was no other way, despite the swarm of people trying to sell me things to eat: the one thing no one was actually trying to sell me was healthy food. (There's a good economic reason for this: healthy food is unprocessed, it has no value-added, it has no brand or mark-up. A french fry you can sell at an enormous profit: a potato you can barely make a few cents on.)

And to cook, I was going to have to have a working kitchen. One that stayed clean and uncluttered, day in and day out, week in and week out. I had never had such a thing. We had a big kitchen, in the house where we raised our kids, and a quantity of dishes, and we operated on the simple principle of going until we ran out of clean dishes, which took about a week. By that time the kitchen was a huge mess, and cleaning it was a titanic enterprise, even with the dishwasher we then had. We'd limp along a few more days by eating fast food alone, and then we'd finally tackle it. It was a much more laborious system than actually washing up twice a day, and we knew that, but knowing something doesn't mean you act on it.

I was deeply embarrassed by the state of my kitchen, but I was also in a state of learned helplessness about it. And there were so many other things I was trying to make myself to do, by sheer force of will, and since they all were higher prestige than the lowly act of washing up, by the time I came to the sink my oomph was exhausted. I just looked at it all, pulled a package of something out of the fridge, and shuffled back to the living room to eat it, with my fingers if need be.

So when I finally had raised my kids; and when I finally had work that I loved, which nurtured me rather than depleting me; when I finally had some fragile self respect growing in my industrially-blighted soul – when I finally had these things in place, and decided to eat healthy, I didn't start with the food. I started with the dishes. The first thing I was going to do was acquire the habit of a clean kitchen. Every single damn day, I was cleaning that thing.

It took years to root that habit. Literally. But I have it now, and it's so strong that I find it almost impossible to go to bed with dirty dishes in the kitchen. It feels wrong, now. And now, for the two of us, we have exactly four plates and four bowls in our cupboard, and some eight mugs or drinking glasses, which keeps us on a much shortened leash. I usually wash up twice a day, now. It's not a very big deal. A few minutes' work. But the expense of spirit, the force of will that it represents, is huge.

Fallow

A wet colt trembles

pushing for the teat;

snail paths, old tears, run down

from the corners of his eyes.

There is no sky but iron,

there is no rain but pours;

the fields are pale yellow or red

as withered grass or leaves.

-------------

(Bosworth-Toller: FEALO, fealu, feale; def. se fealwa; adj. FALLOW, pale yellow or red coloured as withered grass or leaves, dusky, bay? flāvus, gilvus, fuscus :-- Fealo líg feormaþ and fénix byrneþ the yellow flame consumes and burns the Phœnix, Exon. 59a; Th. 213, 1; Ph. 218: 104b; Th. 396, 8; Rä. 16, 1. Fealu busius? [= fuscus?], Ælfc. Gl. 79; Som. 72, 81;Wrt. Voc. 46, 38. Se fealwa holen the fallow or withered holly leaf, Exon. 114a; Th. 437, 19; Rä. 56, 10.)

Thaliad

I've been reading Marly Youmans' epic Thaliad. Lovely, lucid blank verse: hardly ever a foot wrong. It's strange to read modern matter in so sure a classical voice: the effect is like the reflections of the sun, playing on the ceiling of a lakeside house. Where is the light coming from? What is it that is moving?

I hope readers will not be put off by a modern poem being called an epic. “Epic” has come to mean “gargantuan” or “undisciplined”: it's used of great sprawling things, and, particularly in modern poetry, of monstrously fleshy lyric poems stuffed with obscure allusions, and no narrative skeleton to hold them up: things like Pound's Cantos get called “epics.” It leaves us no name for the Thaliad, which really is an epic: a rapidly running, easy-to-follow narrative poem. Those who don't like poetry can ignore the fact that the right margin is ragged, and read it as a quick short utopian/dystopian novel.

In any case, my response to finishing this poem was – as I know it has been for others – to turn immediately to the front, and begin to read it again. Epic is always an attempt to find origins, isn't it?

Such time, such toil, requir'd the Roman name,
Such length of labor for so vast a frame.

But in this case it's the origin of something that's not there yet, of something made up. What does it mean, to undertake a retrospective on the future? Where does that phantom come from? Is the whole epic untimely ripp'd? I can't settle. I feel like Ran, patrolling against what he doesn't and can't know. But having finished, I turn at once to the beginning, to read it again, which is of course what one always does with a genuine epic. They begin in the middle of things because they understand that everything is in the middle of things: they're structured as a wheel, and its first revolution is only to orient ourselves. More anon, I'm sure. My first journey in Thalia's footsteps has been, of necessity, silent.

Reading Michael Pollan

I more or less knew all this about industrial food, of course: the corn belt made into a vast featureless starch factory, the corn hybrids that won't “come true,” the steers early-weaned and force-fatted on the feedlots, the industrialization of the certified organics. I have a bit of history with all these things. My expensive education was paid for by a grandfather who was a pioneer in corn hybrids. (In selling them, that is, not in creating them. Slogan in the Depression: “DeKalb corn will lift your mortgage!”) One summer in the 70s I worked on farm which must already have been, had I known it, old-fashioned: they still had much of the ecosystem right there – pigs and chickens to manure the hay and alfalfa, hay and alfalfa to feed the cows through the winter. The old man there, who had never learned to read, had homesteaded the place some seventy years before. I worked in a food co-op around the same time, so I had a sense for what real food looked like. When I first set foot in places like “Whole Foods” my nose told me they weren't. Nothing stank. And everything so glossy and pretty! No. And I had a room mate to whom none of Michael Pollan's news would have been news at all: a grange activist, way ahead of the curve. I wonder what he's doing now?

Still. Food was always TBD. I was literary guy: my job was to master Old English prosody. I kept eating what I'd grown up eating, to wit, as Michael Pollan makes so brilliantly clear, vast piles of No. 2 corn in all its cleverly engineered variations and transmutations: feedlot beef and high fructose corn syrup, and all the bizarre range of fillers, emulsifiers, fixatives, preservatives. All based on plowing massive amounts of fixed-nitrogen into the soil.

I think I basically knew how much time and effort it would take to do food right, and just never had the oomph to face it. Oomph is a precious commodity, after all. You pick your battles. I'm not saying I was wrong. And I could just leave it, not trouble the last few decades of my life with it.

What gets me, though, is not the health implications. I'm still reasonably healthy at 54, and I don't see what rational person could not see that as having won the game already, whatever comes next. No, what gets me, oddly enough – because I'm a city boy through and through – is what monoculture does to the land. I've driven across this country several times. I know what industrialized agriculture has done to it, and I hate it. It seems to me that – to use a singularly inappropriate metaphor – we're eating our seed corn. Gorging and choking on it, actually. Global warming? Pfft. Oh, it's real enough, but its disasters are minor and manageable compared to what we're doing to our farmland, and to our farmers. My farmer up in Yelm, Washington may not have known how to read, but he knew how to make a fairly unpromising patch of rural ground produce chickens and pigs and cows, and go on producing them indefinitely. How many farmers still know how to do that? Not many.

Every time I spend a dollar, I'm voting for the kind of world I want. I've always known that, and in many things, for decades, I've steadfastly preferred the small, locally owned, and quirky enterprises over the large, corporate, and uniform ones. But I have been, all my life, supporting industrialized food. Not sure I can keep on doing that, now that Mr Pollan has really rubbed my nose in it.

Breaking

I'm afraid to reach into my memory. Neurologists say that every time we call up a memory, we overwrite it. Our most frequently revisited memories are the least reliable: the most thoroughly revised, supplemented and amended by what people tell us did happen, would have happened, must have happened. And by our own speculations and reasoned extrapolations. It's efficient, but it's a system for storing useful information, not for recording events. The more we revisit the past, the less we will find it there.

When I first tried to rescue a wasp from a swimming pool, I found that by reaching for it, I pushed it away, farther out into the water. It couldn't be done one-handed. Retrieving a memory, I think, will be like that. I'll have to reach both hands, and slowly bring them together. Then throw the whole handful of water up over the cement lip of the pool. With luck the dazed wasp will be there, gleaming gold and black, its abdomen jacking in confusion. With luck it will crawl out of danger, dragging its stuck-together wings.

We were proud, touch-me-not. I only remember us having people over once. They were a stiff Quaker family. Their father and my father had a grave conversation. We kids played quietly. It was a strange thing, having people over. We played matchbox cars. The undercarriages of mine were painted yellow, and those of my older brother were painted red: that way there could be no doubt or contention about whose car was whose. Red was obviously the better color, but he was the older brother, after all. The Quaker kids – what cars did they get? We didn't have colors for them. And they didn't seem to care for the cars anyway.

“He was as white as a sheet,” the next-door neighbor said, confidently. Was I? All I remember is the stillness, the house empty when it shouldn't have been. I was supposed to stay with the neighbor, but I didn't like it there, and I slipped away and went home instead. I had never come home to an empty house before. Trepidation, but also a shiver of freedom. I was unobserved. My life was my own. For the first time. I wandered out under the row of birch trees my father had planted, and looked at the dangling catkins against the blue sky. “I can choose,” I said. “I can choose to remember this moment of this day, forever.” I was seven years old. I was right I still remember. Seven. Catkins against the sky.

That is to say, I remember something. That's the handful of water I fling onto the patio beside the pool. That's the year my parents were divorced, the year the house went quiet, blessedly or achingly quiet.

I only remember the brokenness, not the breaking.

Climbing

Rose at six and walked down to Montavilla Park to look at their play equipment. I want something I can climb on. It was mostly, of course, lilliputian. There was a rope I could climb a couple feet on, with my feet braced against ribs of wood: but I couldn't get through the space at the top that let you onto the platform. And some vertical and near-vertical poles: but not above ten feet tall, and anyway, I'm not strong enough yet to climb hand over hand. It was quiet; nobody in the park at dawn. The cold of the metal sank into my hands and throbbed.

So, failure, in a way: I was looking for something, somewhere, that I could climb for free. The monkey-bars that I remember from my youth, which were probably just this lilliputian. Taking my own advice, remembering what joyful movement used to mean to me. I always, always hated running, but I loved to climb. I'm mulling over bolting some metal pipe to the beam in the erstwhile garage, that I could hang from and pull myself up to. Wondering whether any of the trees in our yard could bear the weight of a climbing rope. How did I let a capacity so central to my identity – that of being able to scale ropes, trees, anything that afforded hand- and foot-holds – disappear?

Failure, in a way: but still, my hands have had a workout – they'll be a little sore tomorrow. So it's a success, really. I've worked a little more on reclaiming my ability to move myself. And I walked briskly back, going back and forth along the odd little terraces between 86^th and 83^rd Avenue: I think it counts as half an hour of exercise.

Friday

Morning. Friday, of course, so I'm writing only to myself. Another quiet winter day: gray sky, still air. The net of twigs between porch roof and window sill is motionless. A far-away crow flickers through the tiny-tiled mosaic of sky beyond the net.

I said to a friend who is torn between beloved places: I'm lucky, only having one home, and knowing what it is. I never really thought about that before.

I may love tales of wandering, I may love handling languages and stories from far away and long ago, but I'm no doubt where I belong. I belong in Portland, Oregon, and I would rather live in a scruffy suburban cottage here than in a house in the Greek isles overlooking the sea, than in a Venetian palazzo full of art. Someday I'll live in the city again, perhaps. And someday I may make another road trip, another excursion or two. I still greatly desire to see the southern stars. But this is home, forever and for good.

Not that it will remain. Its destruction goes on apace: this recession has slowed it, but not stopped it. But I've lived with that all my life: hill after hill logged, lopped, trashed; mile after mile of breathtakingly ugly strip installed, full of corporate outposts, each with its own logo and distinctive building-plans and parking lots, dropped in here just as they might be in Phoenix or Miami. Many of them not even aligned east-west, or squared with the street they front on, as if they're eager to display their contempt for the local and the homely.

The sky, too, has changed. I wonder if I'm the only person who has noticed it? The clouds are not as vague and formless as they used to be. With the climate change, we get more of the beautiful cloud-towers of the continental U.S. Thunderstorms are not quite so rare. The sky is clear more often. The shift is small, but I'm quite certain of it: these are the not skies I grew up under. They're wilder, deeper, more beautiful, and more dangerous. You can put change in motion, my dears, but you can't control where it goes. These are skies of disaster, but they may also be skies of a new covenant, someday.

Well. But I'm an ordinary man, trying to work out the end of an ordinary life. I've dodged disaster so far, and my worries are about whether I'll work out what to do with my chicken stock before it goes bad, and whether I can find socks that I'll really like. I float along in the dream of America. And outside there, today, not breath or or twitch of wind, not a single distinct form in the cloud-cover. Sleep, dear ones. Sleep.

Just Friends

                                                          U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 

We took the ridgetop trail, in spite of the grade warning. It gave us a precise number – something like 30%, I don't remember exactly, but I peered about that flat Tualatin wetland and said, “I'm all agog to see how you can get that steep of a trail out of this country.” The whole trail was marked as maybe a quarter mile long: where could you hide such a thing?

We took it. It did take us along the top of a ridge, strictly speaking: a finger of ground a couple dozen feet higher than the marsh, that groped out a couple hundred yards, ending in a faint bulbous flourish. It was studded with doug firs, second or third growth trees. A ridge. Okay.

It overlooked the flats, but not with any very grand or open view. We retraced our steps and wandered out onto a platform that stuck out over the marsh itself, which was more interesting. I've never learned the names of waterfowl, but I always like to look at them. Occasionally a cloud of geese would rise, making a racket – for no perceptible reason – rise, make a broad sweeping circuit, and come back to settle again. A birder with a straggly gray beard and a battered hat, with the brim folded back in front, corrected Martha, when she called them Canadian Geese. Crackling Geese, he admonished her.

He and his younger oriental wife drifted off – we were to catch up with them again, trying to photograph a white-breasted nuthatch, a bit further down the trail – and we lingered on the deck a while, in thin, unexpected, watery sunshine.

“What did he say they were?” I asked.

“Crackling Geese,” said Martha.

“Though I suppose, really, a hat like that doesn't actually make you an expert birder,” I murmured.

“Oh, it does too!” hissed Martha, indignantly.

Gray owl pellets on the gray planking, full of tiny gray bones: we gazed up into the leafless trees above us, but saw nothing. It was not much of a day for spotting things, really. A quiet, melancholy winter afternoon. The only sight I was really taken with was the dark green Tualatin River. They had built an overlook high over the water – they were big on overlooks, at this refuge – and the Tualatin is one of those rivers that always looks as though it has a secret destination. Wherever you are, it's just hurried away from you around a corner. I don't know what gives it that particularly vivid color, a shadowy emerald. The Clackamas has the same color.

I've never let myself grow attached to these rivers. Too close. Someone's going to ruin them, someday. I keep it casual, friendly-like. If anyone asks, we're just friends.

Palely Loitering

I used to watch the stars

wheel on their grand ecliptic, tethered

and dragged on the celestial rim:

the illusion of their movement

did not free them from it.

I used to watch the shadows

on your sleeping face, dream

chased by dream, and imagine

I could unbind

the knight from the mere.

Hugs

This post of Gretchen Leary's made me wonder again about touch and aspies. People on the autism disorder spectrum are often thought of as being averse to touch, but I've been struck by how many massage therapists (I among them) seem to be over on the aspie side of things: a bit geeky, fascinated by how things work, a bit literal minded, a bit peculiar. When we're lonely we're often very literal about it – we want a hug. You don't need to chatter to us or make promises you might or might not keep; you don't need to map out a whole delusory universe in which we understand each other perfectly and our thoughts will never diverge. Just a hug, huh? It doesn't need to go anywhere or mean anything beyond itself. It's not a binding declaration. It's just a fierce, loving clasp, a spark of the sun brought to earth, a moment of communion.

For ordinary folk, it must be a little weird and a little unnerving. We may hug slightly too hard, slightly too long. It means both more and less to us than it does to you. The Christian mystic Charles Williams was notorious for hugs like these.

People – especially people who don't get it – will tend to construe them as sexual, or perhaps as displaced sexuality. And of course they can be infused with sexuality, like anything else. But it's as often the other way around: for us sex is often a displaced ecstatic hug. Eros in this case is just one more of those metaphorical interpretations, replete with social obligations, with which neurotypicals love to saddle raw experience.

God, how I craved touch, when I was growing up! My mother was very physically affectionate, but no one else I knew was. I used to love going to the dentist, the doctor, the barber: I was going to to be touched by someone else!

I knew, of course, that this was very wrong and weird of me, that it was something to be ashamed of. I would not have dreamed of telling anyone.

Then came the revolution, the hippies, the alternative free school, encounter groups, all that. I was delighted. Everybody was like me! it was just that some people were, like, way uptight, man. And my mission in life would be to get them to hang loose and be cool.

It turned out not quite to be as I imagined, and over the years I gradually faced the fact that I really was weird, even if I needn't think of myself as wrong. Not everyone needed a hug as much as I did. Some people didn't need them at all. To some people hugs were inseparable from a whole encrypted universe of meanings and repercussions, which was downright scary. I grew somewhat wary of touch, though I craved it as much as ever.

Well. You know how the story ends. Fast forward to to seven years ago, when I finally filled out the application to massage school that had been stowed in my sock drawer for years. I was too old, too fat, too male to be a massage therapist: I knew that. I knew I'd never be able to make a living at it. I knew I'd be a pariah at school. I knew it would be one more stupid mistake in a life of stupid mistakes: but I did it anyway.

Once again, happily this time, I was very very wrong.

Outsideness

Morning. The coffeemaker is bubbling happily at one elbow, an apple with two bites out of it at the other. The dishes from the bacon and eggs are washed up.

Eating at home. I'm restless, uneasy, trying to pretend it's all right, that my soul is not in peril. I'm not sure. No windows to the world. I get up and try the blinds – this window looks only onto the porch, but still, that's more outside than this – but it's still pitch black out there. That won't help. It's outsideness that I need, not my own reflection. Maybe I need to go for a walk first thing in the morning?

I return to the little table, and the coffeemaker, which is nearly done. The perking has stopped, but it's still dripping a bit. It is a friendly little machine. Black & Decker, half off at Fred Meyer: $20.00. I feel a little guilty about spending money on such a thing – which is funny, given that eating breakfast out every morning is a much more expensive and luxurious proposition. But restaurants hire young women whose job it is to make you feel like the expenditure was a good idea, and the most natural thing in the world, and they mostly succeed, with me at least. Black & Decker hasn't gone to the trouble.

Still. The little machine has already paid for itself: here I am, eating breakfast at home for the fourth time this week. I am restless, disturbed in all my habits, and anxious, as I said, for my soul. I have been telling myself, souls that eat breakfast at home do not necessarily die. But I haven't convinced myself yet.

So I will simply rest in the anxiety, until it goes away, or achieves clarity. Or until my soul dies. Whichever comes first. It's the adventure God has sent me: appropriate to the diminishing scale of my life.

Still no light outside, although it's nearly seven. This is intolerable. There. I've opened the blinds anyway, and turned off the overhead light: now at least I can see the loom of the trees against the night clouds, in the oblong bounded by the porch ceiling above, and the windowsill below. That's better.

The Day Begins With Women

A brave concourse of crows,

asseverating something,

and beyond a clotted mess

of branch and wire begins

the thaw of darkness; light

in the standing pools of the sky.

I would not begin to say

what raw, scraped arms might circle me,

what lips might brush my ears and

tell me this or that, take up maybe

the selfsame topic that so moves the corvidary:

but I know the day begins with women

heaving red earth

and hauling themselves out of quick-dug graves.

Their skin is painted with the clay of sleep,

but their eyes are licked clean:

they glow like flaws

in the glass of old windows catching the sun.

Somebody Else's Story

Ambulance. Siren: a quick stutter and then a slower whooping. Through the intersection – red lights flashing – around the bus, and then disappearing down Division Street. Somebody else's story, with any luck: not mine.

The air is cold in my nostrils – no heat today – but the coffee is warm in my throat. My mood shifts between melancholy and savage bitterness. I am a bit dangerous, these days. But I recognize that I am in one of those precious bardos, in-between times, and that I dare not waste it. I found myself writing on Facebook, the other day: I feel like my life is responding to the reins again, at least some of the time. I was afraid maybe that last fence had finished it. I wonder what the devil he meant by that? I like reading that guy's posts, but I do wonder who he is, and what he means by it.

Sun just scraping her way over the OHSU building, there. I hope her breasts are not too abraded from dragging along the wet grit of the rooftop, poor soul. It's a hell of a job, crawling along the squashed ecliptic of the southern sky, this time of year. I imagine she took the job in high summer, thinking it was all going to be splendid chariot-driving on the Empyrean highways. Bad luck, sister.

Still. My body is deliciously sore from various impromptu exercises, and I have an odd conviction that I am a beautiful, gleaming, half-lit creature, vanishing from the water to be glimpsed in the air. There and gone.

I stroke your hair, hold your face between my hands. Just a short winter, this year, dear.

Against Inauguration

I wonder if anyone will have quite gotten what I meant by yesterday's poem. As I read Barack Obama's inauguration speech, and read Blanco's and others' inaugural poems, they're all about the ideology of America – its “dream” as we like to say, infusing the word with various ironies; but whether we declare the dream reached (reachable – semi-reachable – nobly unreachable) or abandoned, we all seem to agree that having one is a good idea. I'm proposing (in that poem at least) that it's actually a curse, not a blessing. That we should dedicate ourselves, not to propositions, but to each other, whoever the hell we are and wherever the hell we came from: that we're Americans, not because we hold any particular set of beliefs or ideals, but simply because we live within the borders of the United States. I'm proposing that rather than start over again and get it right this time – the immigrant's perpetual yen, and his downfall – that we work right here right now with what we have: that we accept our history and all its implications, rather than repudiating what doesn't fit “the dream”: in short, that we try – for once – gentleness, acceptance, and staying at home. And looking after all our inconvenient, needy, irritating relatives, rather than opting to ditch it all and start everything all over again.

PS: For an almost exactly opposite, and much more thought-out, response to President Obama's second inaugural, see Peter Stephens' wonderful essay.

A Jar of Poison

A jar holds summer’s peaches, summer’s sun
As if no time has passed: so hold the dream...

– Marly Youmans, Inaugural

“A new nation” – what is that

but for a married man to mutter,

“a new wife”?

Perhaps any man

will conceive with liberty if he can;

but isn't the better part of him

dedicated to the awkwardness

of those bonds which connect him with another,

rather than to any proposition?

A jar of summer peaches, you said,

but maybe it is a jar of poison

we are keeping on our shelves.

Gray Silent King

“Do you want some of these?” asked the waitress, displaying a handful of little plastic coffee creamers.

“Yes, please,” I said.

“What for?” she demanded.

I had to think. “Because they make my coffee less bitter,” I said.

“OK,” she said, a little grudgingly, and dropped the lot on the table. Six of them; one more than I usually consume in a morning. Because another reason I want them is that I track how many cups of coffee I have drunk by how many little creamer-corpses I accumulate. I nest each empty neatly in the last: when the resultant structure has five circular ribs, it's time to stop.

Fog and a heavy frost: so heavy that it spurted from my scraper like a jet-ski, as I cleared the windows of the Honda. The tops of the doug firs are barely visible – pale ragged turrets against an even paler sky: sometimes they fade away altogether. I am uneasy this morning, full of doubts. I need to stop and think.

January: the month of the gray silent king.

Order

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

I dunno. I just don't do justice. Justice requires evil. I prefer compassion, which does not require indifference. It doesn't require anything. You can do it at home in your night-clothes. But maybe it's just that I know I'd never qualify as a just man. I am compassionate though. That's like falling off a log.

---

The Order Of Their Going

It was snowing in tiny flakes - 
albino gnats - today,
but the ground swallowed them.
Its dark wet tongue 
took them all. On the river

barges are dusted with snow; 

gulls are hunched on the pilings;

snag branches rise and fall

with the breath of winter. 

I gathered brass flakes as a peace-offering

and opened my shirt at the throat:

but it seems I am sorry 

for the wrong things, and in

the wrong order.

The Context of the Second Amendment

What was the second amendment about? Two things. One is that the early Americans wanted to always be in a position to overthrow the government. They had done it before and they might need to do it again. The other is that they wanted to secure their right to fight the Indians, locally and at once, without getting permission from any central authority. Much of the bad feeling between the colonists and the British Crown stemmed from the Crown making treaties with Indian nations and attempting to enforce them. As the colonists saw it, if they were liable to be murdered in their beds, then they shouldn't have to wait for any central government's permission; they should be able to call up a local militia and go clear the savages out.

That's the context of the second amendment. Here's the wording:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Short and sweet. We're talking about the security of a free state, not the security of individuals, and moreover, we're talking about militias. Protection of the home against thieves, rapists, or robbers was not a primary, or, so far as I can see, even a secondary interest of the law. It's about raising troops: and it has one eye to uppity Indians, and the other to uppity central governments. If you and your neighbors want to stock a local armory with some cannon and muskets, says this amendment, then no one can stop you, so long as you're well-regulated, which means, I take it, that you have a captain and officers and behave reasonably. You can't just tear about the country pillaging; you have to be responding to threats to the security of the state.

This emphasis on militias will strike the reader as odd, if he's not aware of one further piece of context, the one that makes all of this come into focus and make sense: this law was intended for a country that had no standing army. Early Americans disagreed with each other about as much – probably more – than we do, but on one point they were nearly unanimous. A standing army, they thought, would never do. It was an invitation to tyranny. It's difficult for a modern American to comprehend just how unmilitarized this country was, before the 20^th Century. For all intents and purposes, in between wars, the army simply disappeared.

To my mind, the second amendment has been overtaken by events. The Indians have been thoroughly subjugated, where they haven't been exterminated. The second amendment, as license for local warfare, has been so thoroughly successful it isn't needed any more. Nobody frets about Indian uprisings any more, or is ever likely to again.

As far as overthrowing the central government is concerned, events have been even more decisive. As the speed with which an enemy could reach and attack us increased – it would have taken months or even years for any credible enemy but the Indians to bring an army within reach of us, in the 18^th Century; now it would take a few hours – it became obvious that we needed a standing army, and moreover, we assumed an ever-escalating number of foreign commitments and interests that needed military weight behind them.

We now have, not just a standing army, but a perfectly enormous one. It's replete with intelligence and surveillance capabilities that are far beyond the means of any private citizen. Its equipment is the envy of the world. It could crush any internal uprising with ease, no matter what kind of small arms our civilians might be toting. We long ago lost the ability to rise against the central government. Even if we were a people of great hardihood, fortitude, determination, and discipline – and we are no longer notable for any of those qualities – we could not stand against the resources and expertise and organization of the U.S. military.

So the second amendment has lost its political meaning. It retains only those subsidiary meanings about the private ownership of weapons that it has accreted over the years. The right it was concerned with was the right to conduct local, ad hoc warfare. I don't know if I would ever have thought that was a legitimate right, even in the 18^th Century: I have a rather conservative cast of mind, and a preference for slow and orderly decision-making. But in any case, I don't think it has much light to cast on present-day issues of gun control, which are not about militias, but about whether people have a right to own convenient means for rapidly killing large numbers of their fellow-citizens in domestic – and totally unregulated – situations. I don't think the second amendment addresses this. It's a new situation, and it requires a new conversation.

Dearest

Dearest:

The days fly by, stiff and unyielding: I try to set aside the dread that makes its own disasters. I reach for you, and hesitate.

When you sheet home a sail and it fills? That feeling? It has been missing from this last week. I can get no way on my life. It pitches and yaws and spins.

But the fear is all for other people: I have none for myself. I am indestructible, a deep-rooted blackberry in the alley of the world. Let them go ahead and try to pull me up! They'll only tear their hands.

I broke a plate the other day, one of our four remaining Churchill blue willows. Now we have three, and one of those is cracked and due to shatter. I imagine adamantine dishes, formed of blue clay and fired in the deep places of the world. I am tired of things that must be handled tenderly. I want just a few things that will not break.

Still, sleep-short and sore-eyed though I am, never have I felt more ferocious, certain, immortal. I weigh ten thousand pounds: I am made of metals heavier than you have ever imagined.

I am not the solution to anything. I am not the door into summer. I can't be transplanted or remade. This is all, only, and every.

So much love, dear. Today and every day.

Ridgefield

Cold, brilliant blue sky. At 3:00, when we left, the sun had already vanished behind the trees that loom over our little crooked house. But we drove off in brilliant sunshine.

Half an hour north we were startled to find ourselves in a snowy landscape, the doug firs all trimmed, the meadows and roofs and lawns freshly laid with white. The sense of unreality deepened as we turned off onto a snowy lane that led to the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, drove up, and then down a slope to a maze of little lakes and marshes. This part of the refuge you can drive through, so long as you stay in your car. The waterfowl pay the cars no mind. Neither do the muskrats, who went about their business as if we weren't there, at times couple yards from the car, munching something they were finding in the frosty grass, or dropping suddenly into the creeks alongside, or popping back out. The eagles were a little more wary. We saw a pair of midsize bald ones, though, and an even larger, blond bird, that I can only suppose was a massive golden eagle, cruised directly over us, at roof-height. Are they moving south, again? I had never seen one here, until the last couple years. The water was half iced over, and it teemed with ducks, geese, and swans; the reeds and woods were full of smaller birds that flickered and vanished when you looked at them.

The sun set red through the trees, and strange lights rose from the water and the snow. We drove at a footpace, with the windows down. The beauty of it all was terrifying: so lonely, so unexpected. At times great flocks would rise from the water, all crying at once, and we would stop the car to listen to them.

So. A new year: a cold, lonely, and beautiful one.