Soon Now

I have not wanted to walk in the way of accumulation. But it is the way I fall into, being by nature wary and deliberate. I begin most days conscientiously studying whatever language I have in hand, reviewing flashcards -- thousands of flashcards, now -- and doggedly reading my twenty pages. And I set thresholds for buying and selling stocks, and watch the rise and fall of prices. I track my exercise and my domestic tasks. I am like those ants you see, carrying grains of sand to excavate tunnels and build hills. Any casual passer-by might demolish a life's work.

Venus and Jupiter hang a while in the west, these evenings, while the moon falls behind them. They shine over the garage roof. When we're all asleep, the raccoons step cautiously there, and pause a while to consider. They are as convinced as we are that the place belongs to them: the fact that the ground-apes nest in their basement doesn't trouble them. It's a good place to watch the stars, and a staging area for raiding nests or collecting the neighbor's chickenfeed. They gaze a while at Venus, through the tall bamboo, while raccoon-ambitions run through their minds. Soon they will achieve their hearts' desire. Soon life will be right. Soon they will be content.

I wash an apple, my thumbs skidding over the smooth skin. I think a lot about food, these days. The Fat Nutritionist put me on to Ellyn Satter. She has a little set-piece about normal eating, and it actually made me tear up, the other day. It sounded so lovely, so impossible. To feed oneself faithfully. It sounded like a fairy tale to me. 

I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Such things, of course, are not for you and me. We were born for irritation and discontent; for fiddling with latches and broken zippers; for hearing dance music in the distance; for waking up to find ourselves old.

I lift the apple and breathe the faint scent of its skin. Soon. Soon now.

Soon, but what? That, they don't tell me.

Interlude: The Moon And Venus

How fast it can all crumble! And I realize there was never much there, after all. But I'm lost on a bare plateau, in the gray wind, trying to assemble myself and failing. But I can't go on putting off the reckoning. This is silly: it's always been silly. I have the advantage now, anyway, of being able to put aside the pretense that I'm in control or know what I'm doing. That, at least, is one hag that's no longer riding.

First of all I'm going to need to get some sleep, some real sleep. For weeks now I've been waking after four or five hours, and walking my mind in circles about whatever most frets me at the moment. I need to stop that somehow. Everything collapses, without sleep: ordinary intelligence and prudence disappear, and what remains is a paper thing, like a huge wasp's nest, dropping shreds of itself as it stumbles from wanting to fearing and back again. I shamble on, against the gray wind or with it, but I might as well be still. There is no chance, none whatever, of arriving anywhere I want to be, by this means.

Eight fingers and two thumbs: adding carefully, I come up with ten. That still seems to work. And the person I was before has left inscriptions. Not all of them legible, but I do have some guidance. At this point one is supposed to call upon gods or friends for help, I suppose: but I've had enough of the agendas of others. I'll work this out for myself. So a nice deep breath, here. Not too much longer, now. This is an inherently unstable state: it won't last.

And last night the slender Moon and Venus were a blessed relief: still there, still beautiful, lingering after sunset in the West. I had almost thought the sky would be blank, a vapid darkening screen. But it wasn't. It never is. We will do fine.

Day Unwrapped

If the whole day 
lay unwrapped
unpromised
trifled by the breeze 
and free to kiss

if one deep breath 
found ribs 
at ease to fan themselves 
like brand new playing cards
and flowered from the spine

then my hands 
would settle to your hips
like curious birds
my lips would find
three places 

where your throat demands
three murmured passwords.
They would unlock
a box of iron, one of silver,
and then a box of red shot-laced with gold.

The Man with the Lantern

Lori Witzel linked to this fabulous series of accounts of the Man in the Moon, which I knew little of. My Man with the Lantern is a recurrent image I have upon falling asleep: not quite a dream, I think, though it might have come from a dream originally. I am far underground in a system of branching tunnels, and ahead of me is a man carrying a lantern. He appears and disappears, as he goes around corners, but I'm always able to follow the lantern-light on the walls, whether I can see him or not. He half turned once and he was Dave Bonta, but I think that was a nonce avatar: he can probably take whatever form is handy. I imagine he's been Diogenes as well. He's not usually very distinct. 

He is patiently searching: stopping sometimes and scrutinizing the walls or the ceiling. I am not. I am not looking for anything in particular, and certainly not for a way out. I am just following him into the dream world.

A dark May morning, heavily overcast and thinking of rain. I am slow: I slept too long this morning, after a night of wandering from bed to couch, in various stages of half-sleep. Duermevela, you say in Spanish, sleepwake, but we seem to have no word for it in English. 

Shaking off intimations of defeat and disaster, the fret of little-mind about its own precious continuity — as if it could care about, or understand, continuities larger than itself! — and finding, at times, a rightness underneath. I have taken to worrying, lately, in an uncharacteristic, unattractive, and mostly unfruitful way. Not a habit to encourage. No. Return to the sky: bright or gloomy, dry or wet. If I spend too much time indoors I start to believe in a world little enough to understand, a world of sense, a world that can be accounted for and rendered into credits and debits. That won't do.

Hedge Duff

These wood shavings I've accumulated so carefully over a lifetime: a handful of curls, blackened with age. I used to offer them as unimaginable treasure: and I never understood why so few people were anxious to receive them.

But now I understand, vividly and completely, that I have nothing, nothing whatever to give. My poverty goes far beyond what I imagined. I've run up debts it would take lifetimes to pay.

So stop, step back a little, consider. The soap in my palms, and the warm water. The click of a dog's nails on a wooden floor, and the piping of birds in the thicket. The shadows of tree leaves falling on the leaves of the hedge; the shadows of both on the ground; and in their weaving, the small creatures escaping, or not escaping, the chickens.

And these shavings I've gathered? Well, they might serve to start a cook-fire, or they might add a little bedding for the chickens. Oh, Dale, you've listened to the voices in your head for way too long, poor soul. 

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.

So. Give up what you have gathered. Shave and wash your face. Or better yet, go back to bed and finish the sleep you've held at arm's length for decades. There are dreams there, waiting to show you things you've been unable, or unwilling, to see. Staying awake doesn't give you a magic ability to choose which dreams will come.

All this time, and all this debt you've acquired, and you still want credit for something? No. Go to sleep, dear, and meet the man with the lantern. Wander under the world's roof for a while. Listen to whatever music they have there, in the light that comes through net after net of leaves, the light that falls from lip to lip all the way down to the criss-cross tunnels. You have nothing to give. But they weren't going to receive you because of your gifts anyway. They're going to receive you because that's the way they are.

Eld Inlet

Belly of canvas over the lurching gunwale
and black sweatshirt curved round breast and head:
you sucked like a hero, three months old,
determined to thrive. The Wolf caught the wind
in its teeth and shook it. Spray rose slow
and suddenly slapped us in the face, but you
were not about to unlatch. You scowled at the weather,
red-browed, and nosed in deeper. The air scoured
us, cloud-white above and foam-white below,
ragged water in greens and grays. No memory
further than this, no landfall or departure:
only your indomitable rooting and the hammer of the waves.

Dispensations

Over on Facebook, in response to a post of Marly Youmans re a Washington Post article re the extinction of poetry citing the census bureau's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts:

Holy cow! We're almost as popular as jazz? That's exciting.... Interesting to read the survey: the only reliable evidence for poetry's ballyhooed death that I've seen. Still, as with all surveys, it's important to see exactly what they're measuring. What's declining in a straight line is the number of people who answer "yes" to the question, "did you read any poetry last year?" What it suggests to me is that the number of people who read poetry *as a duty* is dropping. That is, there's a dwindling number of Americans who feel that they can't count themselves as educated unless they read a bit of poetry. It is an indicator of what's happening to poetry-reading generally, but only a vague one. I suspect that if you were measuring the number of people who would answer "yes" to "do you ordinarily read poetry in the course of week"? you'd see a quite different graph.

What I really like about the poetry-reading world, as I know it, is that there is almost no one in it for the wrong reasons. People read poetry nowadays, not because there's any cachet to it, but simply because they like it. And that is probably very good for poetry, however bad it may be for poetry sales.

In the meantime, my carapace hardens, and my back curves: my delicate feelers grow ever longer and more gracefully from their pediments. As my powers of hearing and sight dwindle, my other senses become more acute: I have never been better at telling which ants are from friendly hills, and which from hostile ones. And I seem to be ramifying: as I listen to music, in the evenings, I can feel my spirit branching and dividing, opening new channels, budding into new leaf. I am subsiding, apparently, backwards, into the kingdoms from which we came. I'm content, and more than content. The moon rises enormous, fifty minutes later every night, and I can hear its breathing, which is something that ordinarily only mosses and lichens can do. These dispensations are not, of course, for my benefit. I'll be called for something.

Not Silly Enough

So I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I got bored after a dozen pages, and then the library wanted it back, because there were a zillion more holds on it. I returned it without regret. It was not so poorly written as some people said. It was just a romance, written in the predictable prose typical of the genre; what I read was unremarkable.

It was silly, of course. Most books are. Most people are. We want silly things. We want the world to be other than it is. We want there to be someone young and gorgeous, who at age twenty nine has a hundred thousand employees -- I may be getting my numbers wrong here, but you get the picture -- and who sees us, not as commonplace, but as extraordinarily attractive. We want our attraction in return to be unambiguous and uncontrollable, something that sweeps us (and our scruples) away in a grand flood. That would be marvelous.

It's the basic plot of the romance novel, from Jane Eyre on: someone from a higher, more authentic, more intense, higher-class world (however we conceive of that; the variations are endless, depending on one's taste and training) will notice that we are special, pluck us out of a tedious low-class world that is blind to our wonderfulness, and bring us into theirs. Where we will shine with the brightness that was always there, but never properly seen.

It's a good plot. It has deep roots, and it's based on a truth that we really don't want to lose hold of. We are, in fact, special and precious, we are radically undervalued, and a world that would appreciate us is possible. These things are all true, and keeping them central is worth a little silliness.

So the silliness is not the problem. The problem, really, is that it's not silly enough. It doesn't say, "what would the world that valued me really look like? What would I really have to do, so that someone -- anyone, master of empires or no -- could see what is extraordinary in me? What perception would I have to cultivate, in order to be overwhelmed by my desire for somebody -- anybody -- outside the covers of a book or the frame of an LCD screen? We need to build that world, to expose that extraordinary interior, and to cultivate that perception.

I don't know where Fifty Shades was going to go: I didn't really think it was going to go anywhere that would help me with any of those three tasks. If I were to propose an objection to it, it would only be that it wasn't silly enough to be really helpful. It proposes a world that's just a little different from ours, an exposure just a little more extensive, a perception just slightly shifted. That is not going to do it.

Now contrast my friend Larissa Brown's Beautiful Wreck: a book that understands how different the world would need to be, how sharpened and cleared one's senses would have to be, how hard one would have to work, before such a narrative could really make sense. Now there is a romance novel worth reading. 

Happily Ever After

A new morning, after a good night's sleep: a strong sense of convalescence. (A word I've never really thought about: I guess it parses to "a coming together of strength"?) Anyway, after many days of short or broken sleep, it is a blessing I know how to value. To close my eyes with no burning, and no sense of uneven relief!

Hammering away at the forge. "It flows from the shoulder; there's a sort of music to it, when you do it right," says Coll. I've always wondered where Lloyd Alexander got that from; if he'd ever actually held a blacksmith's hammer. Anyway. Feeling strong and well. It's possible to feel strong and well. One forgets. 

We drove yesterday on old ragged highways in the hills beyond Corbett and Troutdale, some of it raw with logging, some of it industrial farmland, some of it pretty enough second-growth and pasture. We came across a number of old rusted out trailers and cars, VW buses rusted to earth color and covered with moss. Also church camp after church camp. It's a country suited to the ill-considered, semi-spiritual impulse to bolt and hide. 

I start to mull over retirement, in all its senses. Another ten or fifteen years, and I might be ready to live by some mossy rock, someplace where I could walk in the woods every day. Martha and I -- in what we now recognize as, if not depressive thinking, at least depression-related thinking -- had decided to live in town, rather than out in the country: because we knew we couldn't stand to love a place and then see it overrun with tree-cutters and 7-11 builders, paving everything in sight and stringing wires all over the sky. But the longer you live, the less you need to worry about what twenty years will bring. Even odds that we'll get so far, even now, and decreasing as we go. We might find a quiet corner yet, in view of a river or a mountain or two, and live happily ever after. We might.

Sclerosis

The answer came to me at about three, this morning:
nothing. There is nothing to be done. My work 
lies within these bounds: it is to be as kind
as sense and time allow; to think as hard 
and as generously as I know how; 
to meet each person's eyes 
with an honest gaze. Such commitments as I've made
to the grand world, honor them; but make no more. 
It is one of the corners of middle age (a land 
full of corners): the world is no longer mine to fix.
I am drifting out of it. I belong more and more
to the forgotten times, times that no longer bend
when I push them: they and I are setting, hardening. 
We become the past: the play of light is history 
caressing our long stone faces: the patina
already gathering, the features
already blurring.

Flaw

Sometimes, returning to a zipper, I find
I have forced its teeth to mesh above a fault
and what looks like a life is a long improvisation,
ready to split and open at a sideways thrust.

Even unzipping to the fault is a risk:
there's no way to know how bad the wound --
teeth irreparably bent, twisted, even broken? --
and how to get the runner past at all?

Still, I advertise myself as clever with my fingers,
strong when called for and deft, quick or slow
depending on the tempo of the need:
if not me, then who? So I set to work,

working the little interlocking teeth,
peering, kneading, forcing when I must,
fitting bones to sockets (that I can't really see),
guessing my way, against a rise of panic

that everything is broken, nothing fits again,
that zippers all are false, and nothing holds its form.
Then there is a shift, a smoothening, an ease, and suddenly
the runner slides, like a fish into lake.

The flaw vanishes, leaving behind
a faint kink, a hint of weakness
easily ignored; forgotten, maybe,
until the next strong, unconsidered pull.

Desmoronadizo

Morning: I left you sleeping with the daylight on your face. In the window, not-quite blue contends with not-quite white for a mastery neither seems to care much about: the day feels flaccid, unstrung. We are tired of trying, I think. We need to get out into the hills and the free air.

It is the sort of day that makes you question every decision you ever made: when the fact that you have attained the age of fifty seven without having learned to play the castanets or read Arabic is clear evidence of a wasted life. When the sun does push through the clouds, it arrives with a metallic, ominous glare that's more like summer than spring. My uneasiness increases.

My life is crumbling underneath. It was never built on stable ground -- not something to blame myself for: we all of us start building where we find ourselves -- but I do wonder what happens when it gives way entirely. Not necessarily anything bad. Something new, perhaps. I'm ready for something new.

In the meantime, the dogwood flowers magnificently, and the Spanish bluebells continue their reconquista of the lawn. The solitary crow that visits us now sits in the maple and practices her new call: a clear, ringing "tok!" like a percussionist's wood blocks. Maybe she's been listening to the flickers.

My hands are stronger than ever. I am full of love and tenderness for my clients, my friends, my family. I am deeply ignorant and impossibly young, and it's April.

Blackthorn

Blackthorn in flower: endrino, prunellier;
Schlehdorn say the Germans (the Schleh being sloe),
meaning, to the Proto-Indoeuropean,
bluish, blue-black; skin-colored
for some Africans. Sloe gin being actually,
if you care about such things, a liqueur;
add enough sugar and anything is sweet.

And never mind whether black means
the mat black of the bark --
for canes of authority and beating boys
into whipmasters on their own account --
or the dark, bloom-whispered midnight
of secret fruit among a brawl of thorn, blossom, 
sucker and snow. Who can choose or know?

We must go further back, falling backward,
jolted by the concrete stair of time,
to the first slender wand, the first white star,
whiskered as a kitten and dotted as the script
of Arabian princes, in the first spring, 
before any fruit
had stained the yard.

Shawl

Your shawl hangs blue and gold
and green in the rising sun,

so still that the world
rocks around it,

and the light seems more 
of evening, and the end of time

than of any morning
we will know again.

There are these times
when the light comes level,

through an overmounted press
of time and distance,

but locked—and still—
when I am afraid to look up,

afraid to see what the sky may be doing:
it is too far, too high, too cold.

Muted teal, the gold 
of pollen scattered on wet sidewalks,

the green of ancient copper fittings:
to hang so still now

as if your shoulders
had never shrugged against its weave.

Canyon Road

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/65584

We call them the West Hills, and pay them little mind, except possibly if we're in a newfangled car that will tell us how just much gas it takes (a sobering amount) to roar up the steep slope, at freeway speed, from the tunnel to the Sylvan crest. But on maps they're the Tualatin Mountains, a rugged spur of the Coast Range blocking the way from the Tualatin basin to the valley of the Columbia and its deepwater ports. 

Time was you had to follow the Tualatin River to the Willamette, round about Oregon City, and then head north, past the Falls. It was a long trip, and Oregon City was in the pricey hands of the Hudson Bay Company. So in the 1850s the territorial government, with private backing by Portland powers-that-be, built a plank road, where the Sunset Highway is now. Then you could go straight from the Tualatin farmlands to the Portland docks. One in the eye for Oregon City and Hudson Bay. And probably the reason why I (and most of the rest of us) live here, rather than ten miles upriver at the geographically more sensible Oregon City. Meanwhile, Hudson Bay is quaint history, and Oregon City drifts into the past, a vision of Old Oregon, with a strange sunset patina to it: a vision of the pleasant small-town Oregon I knew as a boy.

Quixote at Sunrise

But I chose this. I chose to be undermined: why?
Because I too was afraid. Because secretly I too
thought the stories were too good to be true,
that there was a dark vein running through the marble.
I wanted a scoffer at my side, someone to explode
my extravagance of cheer, Panza to my Quixote.
And so we have traveled, decades in company: 
I supply the hope, he the despair. It works
in its fashion. But there are times, 
on the windswept crest of the hill, overlooking
the camp of our enemies, when I wonder,
have I chosen wisely? Would it have been better
to have a squire who believed my foolishness,
and handed me my lance with shining eyes?

The Palaces of our Ancestors

A pale morning: white sky, slightly triste; the firs so still that a crow launching itself makes a startling sway in the branches. An equal and opposite reaction, just so, but you don't often see it so clear.

Last night I cradled your head in my elbow and worked your neck with my other hand, and suddenly I longed to be done with service. Always the tenderness: but as time goes I understand better and better how little I can do, and how quickly it fades; or worse, sometimes, how it turns on itself and runs backward. We are strange creatures, with our little monkey desires and our fits of orgulous grandeur, our loneliness and our long parchment checklists for determining under what exact conditions we will accept comfort: checklists so long they get underfoot and trip us, as we peer at their fine print. We go stumbling along the halls of the palaces built by our ancestors, hankering and dreading; terrified of cockroaches but comforted by loaded machine pistols, seduced by glimmers of anything like admiration in a new eye, and indifferent to years of loyalty. 

I am tired of playing the fool, but it's the only role I know. And everyone agrees I'm perfect for the part. (And that's true too, nuncle!)

A Poem For One Who Decided To Hate Everybody

A sudden check, a falter, almost a stumble,
oh my dear, for the loveliest eyes, and 
I reach for my purse to scatter -- what currency?
Nothing avails both here and there.
If I flung this gold over the river,
dead leaves would fall on the further bank.

The bridge can be neither yours nor mine.
Forget the silly arguments from design,
Plato's maunderings laundered by Aquinas;
there is an argument deeper than those.
Someone is building these bridges, or
hints of a crossing. I know it is neither of us:
who has that kind of strength? 

You asked how I could believe:
I could only answer, how could I not?
It is the impossibilities, the echoes 
of that beloved voice, the lives that have crossed
from here, to there, and back. You hear of them
in the beetle-backed gossip of old poems,
and you know it's true: 

There is not braggart or bluster 
in all the world, with heart to make that boast.
Still. We began, and we end, in the sadness
of a stranded shore, and useless coin.
Sleep, then. You see him more clearly in dreams:
walking carefully underground, holding his little lamp.

Don't try to keep up: you can't. It is not for this life
to catch the one who wanders in the earth, 
or even to find the bridge traced in the air,
the lines glinting where the sun catches them,
invisible else; you can look through a long lifetime
and still fail. But long after, the footfalls
echo in some other dream, and make a music

in the mind of another someone
maybe not wise, nor good
except at listening. But start there, and catch
a leaf that rustles from the canopy.
You cannot spend it on that side,
but you can know it came from this.

Her First Dread, The Sun

Consider cydia deshaisiana,
how her first task, on birth, is to gnaw her way
into a womb. The womb closes:
the cool darkness is grateful.

There she begins to weave,
using hooks on her anal
and four hind abdominal prolegs,
binding herself within.

Only a sudden warmth
will make her spasm, blindly,
seeking a change, a coolness,
a shadow she can only imagine as the inverse

of her first dread, the sun. And
with luck, say, her shudders, kicking at the walls
at whatever cost, may roll her
to a damp and cool place.

What makes her begin to wonder,
to dream about the outside? What
revolution, what reversal of polarity,
takes possession of her mind?

Carefully, she chews a hole
plugging it at once with silk.
She is not ready to leave, but
she knows that when grown to a moth

she will have no jaws.
The day comes
when she craves the light
and she pushes through the silken door.

She will live only a few days, outside:
silver gray, pattern-winged,
fragile and confused.
She has just one more yearning:

to find a place like home,
to pump her swollen belly free,
and to lay her wondering, jawless chin
on a sweetly-scented rind.

Captain's Log: Fool's Day

I have seen it before, surely I've described it before, the nearly lost ship rounding the headland and gliding into a sheltered bay, with water pouring from the scuppers: the sudden quiet, the gentle rocking, the empty shore: backing the sails and dropping anchor. Clouds racing overhead and tangling with the trees on the cliff tops. There, branches still whip back and forth with the wind, but here there is only the occasional gust. 

Much to do, everything to do, but the immediate danger past. Send a party to scout the shore, post a watchman or two, and send every man else to his exhausted hammock.

Where are we? I hardly know, and hardly care.

Oh, my dears, I have wrestled so long with shadows. I've worn myself out against phantoms and tricks of the light. I'm tired of fighting long wars on borders that no one else can see, defending countries that no one believes in. It seems to me that I have done my best to keep faith, but the conviction of failure, of dereliction, grows on me. I have understood everything wrong. Or I would not be here, stranded on an unknown coast. This loneliness speaks for itself.

Well. I tire of myself, and shrug all this ship-captain grandiosity aside. I command nothing but this unwieldy tub of muscle and fat: a temporary and unenviable command. When called upon I'll gladly resign this commission, but till then, I must order things as best I can, and even do some good, should the opportunity arise. Back to work, and the pitter patter of the day, the little clawed feet trotting over the deck, the ordering of small things for small results! On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Born Guilty

We're born guilty, stupid and guilty, and with luck and hard work we may slowly struggle out of the evils our elders taught us, and that they take for granted. 

They insist: it's right and proper that dripping heads should be displayed above the city gates, and we take in their explanations, how without the heads everything would be much worse, how the heads brought it on themselves by being a sort of people we would never be: and we nod and learn how to cut off heads ourselves.

But comes a time when we pause, and eye the saw dubiously, and dare to think that it might be nice, to come home of an evening and walk under a clean gates that smelled only of sunwarmed stone.

From that moment, we become dangerous: we are outlaws in our hearts, and we no longer saw through the cordage of our batches of necks with the proper zeal. By that time, of course, we are worn and tired, and weighed down with the accumulation of our half-understood sin. There's not much to fear from us. But we still make them uneasy: they still look at us sidelong and suspiciously. 

It's lucky for them, lucky that we don't live very long, lucky that we get so tired.

Too Smart to Bother with Details

I never was able to write cursive. Even to think of it, now, after all these years, makes my throat constrict and my heart race. The pencil was ordinarily my friend. I worked math with it: I was good at math. And I wrote with it: I was good at writing. Well, I was good at printing.

When you write a letter, in cursive, you need to hold the letter you are writing in your mind. But as you approach the end of that letter, you need to begin to hold the next letter in you mind as well, because you're going to transition from one to the other. The end of the first is going to have to become the beginning of the second. I could not hold both in my mind at once. I could not make that smooth, slow transition. Either I was writing 'm' or I was writing 'o': if I thought of 'o' too late, I would find myself ending my 'm' at the baseline, already too far forward, and having to laboriously backtrack to find the beginning of the 'o'; if I thought of the 'o' too early, I left off writing the 'm' too quickly, and went straight from its second arch to where the 'o' was to begin. I was left with a strange character, which looked rather like a Greek 'eta', but nothing at all like any letter in the English alphabet.

Under the stress of this impossible task, I leaned in to the paper, writing darker and darker, jerkier and jerkier. I'd go back and add the missing third leg of the 'm' by viciously scoring the paper. The task enraged me. Partly because it was so unnecessary -- the ligature between the two letters was purely ornamental, adding nothing to legibility -- but mostly because I could not do it. I was the worst in the class. To add insult to injury, my teachers concluded that, because my writing looked hasty and slapdash, the problem was that I wasn't concentrating. If I just slowed down and tried harder, I could do it.

No way to explain. If I had gone slower, bearing down as heavily as I did, I would have torn the paper to shreds. I took the coward's way out: I pretended to think the whole thing was beneath me. I had more important things to do than to learn cursive. I couldn't be bothered. A boy will take any available role -- clown, criminal, supercilious creep -- before he'll take "incapable" or "incompetent." The die was cast: I was The Boy Who Was Too Smart Too Bother With Details.

Well. I've paid, for taking that role: paid materially, paid spiritually. It's a little late in the day, at 57, but I am ready to abandon it now. I was not too smart. I simply couldn't do it. Whether it was some odd short-circuit in the motor center of my brain, or a crippling anxiety, or merely trying to learn the task in some way that didn't suit me: the simple truth is that I failed, and I was ashamed.

Cloisonné

Joy flecked with garnet or with turquoise;
grief that persists; after every iteration 
the distress is deeper laid.
I find that I have less and less to say. 

The anger subsides, and the past takes on an air 
of inevitability. But that's what the past does:
 its face enamels into mask. Historians 
make their living by demonstrating why

everything had to happen just the way it did: 
armies of apology. Until, if you're not attending closely, 
you decide that everything that was awful 
is okay. An excuse of cloisonné: 

bruise and blood turn into mosaic, 
little bits of blue and scarlet glass.

Swoon, My Dear

Swoon, my dear, in sorrow for yourself;
lick the tears from the corners of your mouth.
Here is where the last melody 
stirs the lovely hair upon your scalp:
grieve for the laboring wings a-beat to south.

Peer, sweet one, in the mirror of your worth;
fog the glass with the sweetness of your breath.
Each perfect line will blur to gray,
each sigh obscure a fine delight;
mourn a while the reflections of your death.

Why should not sweet girls be sad? Here
is the figuring forth of delights you never had.
The busy sawing of the violins,
the braying of the horns, they'll never guess
the opportunities you missed for being bad.

Hokulei

Hokulei, winter king, goat star,
so many names, so many glances, yellow 
as an old ivory domino handled over years;
Hokulei, bring her home across the water,
Hokulei, bring her home across the sky.

Capella, little goat, springing stone to stone,
coldest star of winter, last to leave in spring,
counterpoise to Vega, one last favor:
Capella, bring our sister from the island,
Capella, bring our sister to the main.

Alhajoth dearest, Alhajoth who nursed 
heaven alone and hunted when he 
was hidden from the old one's rage at time:
Alhajoth, bring her home across the water,
Alhajoth, bring her home across the sky.

Early Spring

I am afraid of this early Spring. Apples burning
white hot through the frost; choke-cherries
with faces suffused. The Indian plum
throwing caution to the wind. We have not begun to reckon
what we've set loose. Bareback, we would feel
the muscles moving under our thighs,
the dangerous twitch and surge: but bareback
is a girl's shamefast fantasy, not adult, 
as we have learned to call it. We will miss our girls soon enough.

To the east, clouds never seen before
in this valley
build turreted bastions, fortalezas, strong points,
mass piled on mass, till they topple, and the air throbs
and mutters to itself, and the long summer
heaves up over the ridge. This.
We have called on names we only knew in books
and brought a wind to strip the chamber,
scatter and erase the chalk pentangle,
blow books to the walls and break the windows,
and roll the spitting candles to the clothes.
We've called, and they have come. Prepare your welcome.

Outpost

Walked across the valley of 82nd Avenue and up onto the eastern slopes of Mt Tabor, yesterday: Mt Hood white and vast, its foothills (for once) clearly delineated. You could see the form of every rise leading from here to there. I imagined walking there -- I often imagine such things -- in bits: driving out to however far I got last time, and walking on from there. Like so many projects I imagine, the overhead would accumulate to intolerable levels before it was done.

Every view of Mt Hood was slashed with power and telephone wires. It's strange to me how aware I am of that cordage up there, and how oblivious everyone else seems to be. It's not even that I mind it, though I do, sometimes. It's just so present to me: the sharp black cuts dividing every city sky into sliding parallelograms and triangles, hypnotically tangling and untangling as one walks. I'm not sure that most people even see the sky at all, day to day.

Of course, thoughts like that tend to veer into nasty self-congratulation and self-reification. Best to cut them loose.

You, sitting sideways at the top of the half-flight of stairs in your bathrobe, consulting the calendar on your laptop. I was reminded of how Martha used to sit in front of the furnace vent in the little hallway on Milroy Street. Sometimes you can feel the current of time pulling on you and pouring past you: it's like sitting braced against the current of a river in the mountains. No problem; no problem; but any moment of inattention could be disastrous.

So I attend: and the stars come and go, and the planets shift. Orion walks over the southern sky, with Sirius bounding at his heels, over the heads of the douglas firs. The moon rises fat and full. My hands pleasantly sore from days full of massage: the lingering scent of lavender or bergamot or palo santo. Jupiter caroming off Leo and vanishing to westwards. I suppose it's more accurate to think of the moon as falling behind, but I usually think of the stars and planets as scurrying ahead, losing their footing, and then sliding down the slick western slopes of heaven. Not as much traction as the moon.

I stretch, crack my knuckles, shrug. A deep breath. I am the lieutenant of a missing captain. No message, no marching orders, but I'm still under military discipline. -- Unless I've simply been forgotten, and the army is disbanded, and everyone else is making their way home.

Smudge

Mervyn Peak, study for Glassblowers

I suppose I should read up about beauty, and I suppose, having had that thought, I will; but at the moment I have thoughts whirling that I'd like to set down, unformed and uninformed as they are. I don't think I've ever read a satisfying or even intelligible definition of beauty, first of all. And second of all, I don't think I've read a philosopher who placed the experience of beauty at the heart of her understanding of What We Are Here For and What It's All About, which seems odd. Unless the capacity for perceiving beauty and the capacity for formulating philosophies are mutually destructive. That strikes me as facile and unlikely, the sort of thing that people say when they're looking for excuses to shirk. Probably though I am just ignorant.

I certainly have encountered this in fiction. Mervyn Peake bodies it forth, along with much that is beautiful, much that is puerile, much that is unfair. Those of us who do put beauty at the heart may not make terribly good advertisements for the beautiful life. We tend to screw up and to swerve off into the weeds.

An unsatisfactory welter of catch-phrases rises around me. Keats saying that truth is beauty: that's always irritated me. Truth is truth, beauty is beauty, what do they have to do with each other? Accuracy is beauty, maybe, or necessary to beauty, but that's different. The smudginess characteristic of people Trying To Be Artistic is maybe the Beautiful's version of original sin. You can smudge your way to Pretty, but not to Beautiful.

Begin when all the rest had left behind them
Headlong death in battle or at sea.

It is not accident, I am quite sure, that my first real hints of literary beauty came obliquely, in translation. You prepare yourself in the right ways, when you're picking up a translation. You know it's not the real thing, that you're going to have to open your eyes a little wider, that you're trying to see around a corner. (You always were able to see around corners, a friend said to me, the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me. But I digress, unless I don't.)

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine. Have I not kept the vow?

 Well, no, not really. But I haven't forgotten it, either. I guess that will have to do.

A Curl To The Left

I want to say your cruelty redounds upon yourself,
but two problems. One is I suspect
this sense of "redound" is out of date;
and two, while true, it's really not the reason

not to be cruel, or not the one 
you're built to understand. Try this:
the sunwashed wall one summer morning
longer ago than all you still remember

and the crumpled paper blown
at a canter
down the dry Modesto gutter.
There was a shadow of acacia

moving on the Spanish plaster, and you
thought, quite suddenly, that there might be a place
the complaints of your mother might not reach.
And after, when you had drawn 

an opening curve with tiny beads
of shining red along the line, that place of peace
became a counterstory, the positron
hypothesized but never seen. (Still

never seen, known only by the trail
of bubbles curving to the left: but without
them how to make sense, make balance
of all that negative charge?)

And I would ask you now, forgetting
what redound may mean, to hold 
in one small hand 
the enormity of that defiance.

Tell your mother to go to hell,
(as she surely has: it wasn't far to go) 
and follow that haunted curve
left, that unfamiliar, frightening curl,

the unwinding of all she drew so tight.
Pull the hair tie loose and shake your head
so that all that glossy hair swings as it will:
left, and right, and left.

Disassembly

I was just sort of twiddling my foot in my hands, and I twisted too hard, and some of it came off. Such a strange sensation; as when you pick at a scab and feel it lifting. Not just my toes, but the whole end of the foot: it came off clean at the end of the metatarsals — at the ball of the foot — so that the toes were all still joined together. Not so much blood as you'd think, and the nerves gleamed white.

I knew, of course, that I should put it back on, and maybe go for medical help, but it was such a novelty, and it was so interesting to see my toes from angles I'd never seen, that I kept delaying, turning it this way and that, handling it in much the way, when I'm doing a massage, I handle a client's foot. It soothed, somehow, a longstanding ache of curiosity. I've always had a bit of a yen to disassemble my body, and look at all its parts closely. It was a chance I didn't want to miss. So I'd fit it back on — it went on neatly — but then I'd take it off again to look once more, and examine it from one more angle, and put each toe through its range of motion.

Worry got the better of me eventually. I fit it back on and held it on. As the severed nerve-ends rejoined, it all began to ache, and then to burn. I got a little anxious about infection. And would it really knit properly? It was all getting puffy and red. And it was really hurting now. How bad would it be hurting in an hour?

It occurred to me then, that it was unusual for part of the body to just come off like that. Maybe it happened to lepers — to badly frostbitten climbers — but why would it happen to me? There would have to be some reason. What had I been doing lately, that would account for it? Nothing. Really, nothing: in fact, I was lying peacefully in bed. And the pain was going away already, instead of mounting. It was fading. I could even — I tried cautiously — I could even flex them: that was how fast the tendons had joined back together!

I was relieved that it was all healing up so well, but as the relief grew, so did the conviction that there was something here that really did not entirely add up and make sense. I pulled the covers off my leg. There was a further puzzling thing: when had I lain down and covered up? In fact — in fact — it would actually all make a great deal more sense if I had only been dreaming that the end of my foot had come off. That, really, would account for the whole thing: all the confusions admitted of a single solution.

I looked at my smooth, undamaged foot, in the dim morning light. With a slight sense of intellectual shabbiness — of not rising to the challenge — I decided I'd take the easy answer. I'd call it a dream. I'd deny the reality I had been experiencing. It was too full of contradictions, too disturbing, to be real.

Since when is being disturbing, and presenting contradiction, an argument against something being real? That was pretty feeble. You'd need a better argument than that in court!

I tabled the dispute, in order to go to the bathroom, and brush my teeth. The light of morning, the new air through the window, distracted me, and drew me on into the world of eggs and sausage, the world of morning showers and the planning of lunch. I was hungry, and tired. I would think about it all later.

The sense of defeat lingered, though. It lingers still.

Frosted Earth

Reading Barbara Guest's biography of H.D. It's a strange book -- she apologizes, rightly, for not being a professional biographer -- but illuminating in all kinds of ways.

It takes me back to Yale in the 1980s, which I recognize now as the center of everything I dislike about contemporary poetry in English. I took a course in "Modern Poetry" there -- by which of course they meant poetry which even then was two generations old. The only poets I much liked were T.S. Eliot and H.D. and William Carlos Williams. There was much, frankly, that I loathed, though I read it conscientiously. I didn't, and don't, understand why moral, political, economic, and sociological questions were all ruled out of court (tacitly, of course, no one ever said so. They just looked pained, as though you'd farted at the dinner table.) And the contemporary poets that were admired, at Yale -- above all, John Ashberry -- I could not read at all. I'm someone who reads difficult stuff. I read Derrida with pleasure: I still think he's nearly as smart as he thought he was. I read Hegel and the Frankfurt sociologists. I read Eliot's Quartets with great pleasure, and Blake's Zoas. I'm not an idiot. It was not Ashberry's difficulty that impeded me: it was that he said nothing that interested me. Nothing at all. I got to the end of an Ashberry poem with relief: it was never, "oh, I must read that again!" or "oh, I must memorize that!" -- it was always, "oh thank God, I'll never have to read that again as long as I live!"

And I wonder, now, what might have happened if I had been exposed to good contemporary poetry at that time, thirty years ago. I might -- who knows? -- have undertaken a career as a poet. Instead, it put the seal on my conviction that poetry was dead, that contemporary people just didn't have it in them. It was a silly thing to think. But there, after all, I was, at one of the great literary centers of the world, and they were presenting frosted earth as their version of cake. So screw it. I'd learn other languages and read their old poetry. English was a lost cause.

So I have come to contemporary poetry -- the poetry of my own American generation -- very late and haphazardly. I don't know if I have any talent for poetry, really: I seldom write poetry that seems as good to me as my offhand blog prose. But there are flashes, here and there. And I wonder if I could learn now, late as it is. This isn't swimming or opera singing or ballet, where you have to take up the discipline early. Poetry is more a collection of magpie nests. And I've been picking up shiny things for a long time. So maybe. We'll see.

Mud Room

I have much, much further to go than I ever thought. That's clear, now. The loneliness is crushing, sometimes. Often. Usually. And I really didn't know that. I used to be scornful of people who were afraid of being alone. Now I realize they were a step ahead of me: at least they knew they were afraid. I hadn't even got that far.

They tell stories of the old yogis who would meditate alone in a cave for ten years; think they'd achieved enlightenment, and come on down to the village, only to realize, after five minutes in the company of others, that they'd fooled themselves again. All the obscurations, all the fear and desire, returned with a rush, in the presence of others. Back to the cave, back to the meditation.

And I could not care less about enlightenment: the word has no meaning or allure at all, to me. I really have locked myself in the mud room.

I am so tired, so tired. I don't want to start again. But there is a little tune beginning -- there is someone picking out a tune on the piano, hesitantly, with one finger. If I'm further behind than I ever thought I'd be, in this life, it's also true that there's more occult help waiting than I ever expected. Further behind: but that means the way is better marked than I had thought, and that there's more company ahead than behind.

From the house, voices and laughter; from the woods, what might be calls or cries. And I with the boots and the coats, unable to go in or to go out.

But Spring, or whatever it is, is building up under the clouds and making little mumphy noises on the south slopes of the hills; woman are braving the cold in elaborately patterned stockings. There's tiny daffodil on the front lawn, alone on the moss, looking a little desperate. It's hard to settle to any work. I keep reviewing my life, as if there was some lesson there. I turn it inside out and backwards, just to see. What if there was a villain in my story, and it wasn't me? I keep trying to unwind, to untwist, but it ravels again, faster than I can unravel.

I live in dreamscapes, now. Maybe I always did. This jail, this neither-in-nor-out, will vanish with a waking, or a falling asleep: I'm old enough now to know that much. You don't get in, or get out: the world refolds itself, somehow, and what looked like an interior becomes an exterior. You become uncertain, and move to the other side of a heavy invisible curtain, and you realize that the air has changed, and the season.

Seven of Wands

I drew the Seven of Wands twice, which I could tell disconcerted my reader, though I couldn't tell why. Once with the Tower, and once with the Fool. As far as I could tell, she thought the message was "damn the torpedos!" and it perturbed her.

A pleasing result, since as a rule I am, as Humphrey Cobbler would say, rather inert. Maybe I'm going to turn my personality inside out. Upon discovering a young man siphoning gas from our truck last night, I found myself (vainly) pursuing him, with the clear idea that I was going to cuff him and tell him that I was going to blow his brains out if I ever saw him in the neighborhood again. I do not, of course, possess a gun, and I would not blow out someone's brains for a few gallons of gas, if I did. So it was startling to have the words form so clearly in my mind, and to discover such aggressive intent in myself. The idea that he might blow my brains out -- a much more probable event -- didn't occur to me.

It is Spring, obviously and undeniably Spring, here. I have known days this warm in winter, before, but I know in my bones that this is global warming: there's something in the sequence of this weather that I have never known in my home country. Something has pivoted, irreversibly.

More Like Sky

for Nic Sebastian

It's only the dull ache where the spleen
and uterus used to be; the omentum
scraped away; so much ruin. We'll take
the peace we can get; the clay we can work
with stiff fingers. At the end of the day
they are blue with the cold of Raynaud's syndrome,
and the silver rings take their tint:
more like sky than humanity.

Still there is a candle burning,
lit for the massage, and the warm terracotta faces
with lips pursed in wonder or surprise;
the fine cracks in an ill-considered glaze,
the circus animals for a grandson's birthday.
All these things are stubborn,
human-colored still,
earthy,
and broken.

Valentine

I know the walkways of your heart's garden: the little benches,
and the compost heap. I know where the flies cluster thick,
and I know the interlace of briars and the tracery
of bachelor-button stalks; 
I know the spiderwebs against the white sky. I know
just how the soil streaks your temple
when you push your hair back; how you wield a trowel
like Clytemnestra, overhand, putting paid to old King Ag --
but there are places, dear, where the paths climb up
and vanish under hedges, where the fenceposts stand
drunk and disorderly, and the wires are twisted,
tourniquet-wise, for ease of trespass.
What goes in and out of this garden? It's not for me to know.
I sit prim on a bench by the ordered path,
glad for a rest.

Sopesar

This New Yorker article on psilocybin, by Pollan, gave me furiously to think. "Existential distress" is probably the technical term for what I am undergoing. I am acutely aware of my mortality and of my inability to get a purchase on my daily life. Not only do I not know how to live my life: I'm going to lose it soon, and the whole thing will have been a botch from start to finish. "The food was awful, and the portions were so small!"

It's a disagreeable thought, and therefore one that I take out of my pocket often. I frown at it, weigh it on my palm, and put it back.

A mystical experience would probably cure what ails me, both the larger angst and the inability to carry out any of my numerous schemes for getting myself to eat better food and less of it. I've probably packed on a dozen pounds over the holidays, to the point where my shirts don't fit and my balance, when I stand up from sitting on the floor, is altered. I hate that: I hate it much more because it seems emblematic of being out of control, because it injures my vanity, and because it bodes ill. That's how it starts: you have difficulty getting up off the floor, and pretty soon you don't sit on the floor any more, and shortly thereafter you couldn't get up even if you did. And so on. 

The larger problem, of course, is that I believe in everything: I believe that I exist as sovereign and independent being; I believe that I'll be around after my death to regret it all (but not to do anything new); I believe that I have a free will that I can't exercise (how's that for a superstition? Roswell aliens are an excess of sober good sense, compared to that.) I believe all those manifestly false things. A good mushroom trip might do a lot to disabuse me of them.

The rain falls steadily: millions of pale meteorites glimpsed against dark firs, millions of tiny impacts on pavement and puddle. I stretch my orangutan shoulders and my wrestler's neck, take a deep breath, and manage enough distance to at least grin at how seriously I'm taking myself. I'm just one of those pale streaks. You could take each to be going to its own personal disaster and dissolution -- but why would you want to? It's a momentarily entertaining conceit, but there are more interesting stories to tell.

Rising Sky

I walked down past the five cedars, last night, thinking: "this is basically it: this is the last but one of the phases of my life. Now there's fifteen or twenty years, with luck, before one of us is dying and the other is caretaker. And that will be the last phase, because I don't imagine either of us will long outlast the other."

That will be a busy and heart-wearing time, whether I'm doing the dying or the looking-after. So this, really, is the last time to think, and to put straight whatever is remains crooked, if I can.

It is time, above all, to jettison everything I own or do because of the hypothetical future in which I will have come into my own. I've already come into my own, as far as I'm going to do it. And this time will pass in a twinkling, like an ace buried in a card-sharper's deck. Now you see it, now you don't!

So. Pass as much time as possible under the sky, with the moon and stars. Forget all the sowing and self-training and accumulative strategies. This is harvest time. Work hard to bring in what I've already planted, and feast when the work is done. Other people are doing the planting now, for other harvests.

(Of course, I could be wholly wrong. Life has a way of overturning expectations, and if new responsibilities come my way I hope I'll meet them boldly and wholeheartedly.)

Looking backward, it's clear how heavy the hand of necessity has been. Looking forward, I can imagine all sorts of creativity and bold movements of the will: but looking back I mostly see things that I was driven to do by fate of character. I could not really have done anything else. So pride and regret would be equally misplaced: I did what I had to do. I was a slow, deep-thinking boy, easily flustered and easily deflected, stubborn in my perceptions, deeply loyal in temperament. Bad at resisting carnal temptations, but good at resisting spiritual ones. The stories pretty much wrote themselves, given that. And here I am, the same boy, costumed absurdly in a pot belly and a white beard: if I'm in the script even as an attendant lord, the prompter seems to have forgotten me.

The tide's coming in, but that's nothing to fret about. I'll go on doing what I do best: appreciating what's beautiful and close at hand, walking under the stars, reading about far countries and distant times, and letting the rising sky lap against me.