Bonta reviews Not Coming Back

I was delighted yesterday to discover Dave Bonta's review of Not Coming Back. Totally unexpected, and the review is such fun!

 "One interesting side-effect of presenting poems in this format so associated with a different kind of media, I find, is that any oddness in the text seems much more striking. 'Spring,' for instance, almost shouts in its white text on a dark green page, and I’m like, whoa! Spring is pissed off."

Aquarius

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

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

Digital Clock 1, Unconquerable Soul 0

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

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

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

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

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

Sacred

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

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

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

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

Lines in April

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Odds and Ends

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

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

Comb-Over

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Rochester's Slippers

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

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

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

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

Tinnitus

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

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

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

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

Spanish Beech Trees and Presidents

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

---

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

The Three-Week Projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Coming Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famous

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

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

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

So: there. I'm famous.

Match

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

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

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

Strung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

A Level Head

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

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

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

The Spring Rains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

et ego in Circadia vixisti

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

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

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

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

---

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

Tryst

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

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

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

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

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