Pregnancy Massage

I take three large pale green pillows
to each pregnancy massage:

once you're on the table, on your side
I pack you in. One goes under your head;

one between your knees, spacing 
bottom leg from top;

and the third is to hug
to your chest. It keeps

the top shoulder from cranking down
and keeps you modest

when I undrape your back.
That's the theory. In fact

This configuration takes on a thousand shapes:
magnifying the sweep of the spine

into a character written with an impudent brush
on my massage table: this woman is

a cedilla, her calves the only 
exception to the 'c';

and this one an extravagant
'h' in the insular script,

a splendid lumbar lordosis
kicking the ass way back 

while the top thigh 
reaches high and forward.

I never know what you
will write, or whether 

you will hug the table
or the sky. The belly 

argues with its own logic,
yours and not yours.

We all start here, in 
the warm, swollen fruit

of aching flesh,
carried on diagonals

of endless variation.
Above, the ribs rise and fall,

and the strapping-tape abdominals
stagger like a little man 

carrying groceries. But each
of you, having written

a glorious letter of your own,
sighs "oh, this is comfortable!"

As if I had planned it all.
I fuss and tuck and adjust

to support the illusion;
but you are writing this letter,

you are building this house, and these, my hands,
are yours.

Soon

Clouds: not the foreign thunderheads that global warming has brought us, but real Oregon clouds, blurs of shifting silver, white, gray. The rumpled covers of winter, who has just opened an eye and checked the clock, before rolling over and getting in that last hour's sleep.

How quickly it all runs away, winter after summer after winter! Feeling I need to set the house of my spirit in order. I have been gone too long, and everything is untidy and askew. This breath of winter is unsettling, disturbing, exciting. I am ready to work.

I have not taken much seriously, in this life: it's so short, and the sides are so steep. But I do want to make a few things while I'm here.

I need to be careful, to guard my tongue and my time. Too much has gotten away from me: I spend too much time chasing my chickens back into their coop.

This strange, translucent convalescence continues. I grow stronger and steadier every day. I spend my time pounding stakes into the ground and marking them with orange blazes, making approximations, waiting for my surveying gear to arrive. I know the ground pretty well, now. Soon I'll be ready to start.

These days, when I come to the top of a rise or turn a corner, and pause to take in the new country, I find that word on my lips. "Soon now," I mutter. "Soon."

History

Sometimes people seem like blobby, bumbly gray ghosts to me, bumping against each other like balloons. Or like particularly stupid flies who can't find their way out of the open window.

I want to say: think! Think about what you actually want. Not what you're supposed to want, and not what you crave at the moment as a release or a respite. No: what's your heart's desire? I think in most of us it distills to a few simple things. We're making it a lot more complicated than it has to be.

Still. The morning comes quick, with jagged sun splinters, and the day ratchets up and kicks into life, and the momentum of all my past compromises and makeshifts sweeps me into motion, and there I am, running with the tide of it, a little phototropic creature leaning to the sky, but moving always slantways with the current.

I am not big on fresh starts and new beginnings. Americans are too fond of them. "If only we could escape history first," they say, "then we could get on the right track." But we are our history, we are nothing but our history. Our past is all we have to work with. I know the impulse all too well, but I think we had better abandon it. No. instead, say "what is it that my heart wants?"

And do the same with the people you love. You don't have to give them what they ask for. You have to give them what they want. A far harder task, but a far more rewarding one.

Inquire, inquire, inquire. Ask again. Don't assume you know. You don't.

Prospect

Well. We will walk on the long empty beaches, and climb the headlands.

Captain Cook named ours Cape Foulweather: apparently he arrived on a typical day. Foulweather's profile is as familiar to me as my wife's. He rises from a lagoon of sorts -- successive rings of black basalt worn down into bracelets -- and lifts his head up into the sky. We have a gorgeous sideways view of him from the balcony. Often the clouds are low enough -- or the fog is high enough; these terms lose much of their meaning, at the Coast -- that his head is lost in it: you just see his black throat, muffled and wreathed, fading into a bare loom, and then vanishing into the pale shifting gray.

This is all prospective, you understand. We're not there yet. At this rate we won't even make it today. Who cares? I'm on vacation. I am unfolding my time like an origami goose. --Well, I admit I don't really know how origami geese unfold time, but I'm trying to do it as like them as possible.

I have been working hard and steadily for many months: I'm happy for a break.

An Essay on Love

Joy
comes toppling from the crest:
it starts at the full, and by the time you realize,
it is different, dispersing, differentiating,

falling. It is not the more
or the less real for that.

If we are careful
we will not confuse
recollection with collection,
but we need not be persnickety.

It is by design that most of love
is caught in the nets of memory,
shaped, formed, reformed
by the pressure of the mesh.

Don't fuss too much.
Don't insist on priority
or authenticity. It's all real:
just real in different ways

at different times
for different purposes.

He Neglects to Come

-----

"I will explain in detail. It was a religious song. I placed myself in the position of a milkmaiden. I say to Shri Krishna, 'Come! come to me only.' The god refuses to come. I grow humble and say: 'Do not come to me only. Multiply yourself into a hundred Krishnas, and let one go to each of my hundred companions, but one, O Lord of the Universe, come to me.' He refuses to come. This is repeated several times. The song is composed in a raga appropriate to the present hour, which is the evening."

"But He comes in some other song, I hope?" said Mrs. Moore gently.

"Oh no, he refuses to come," repeated Godbole, perhaps not understanding her question. "I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come."

-- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

August

It's all right, you said:
all your life you have been hurt.

All this sky
and the wafts of winter that come
from gray canvas clouds, like
exhalations from the lobbies of hotels
when you walk sweating by the doors
in August (this month, the month
when the guns spoke and were silent) --

A cool air, a vacancy
where the heat has been taken away,
and you lean in toward the riches
that can afford to spill even this
absence of heat --

As the better sort of servant
I have been everywhere:
the dressing rooms, the spare
refrigerators full of champagne;
the poolsides with fires that dance
on top of sparkling heaps of white quartz.

And I know this: that under the silk
and the terry robes, there are bodies just the same,
scarred and suffering, written over
with the charact'ry of pain.

But this sky, where we began --
this August sky speaks
of winter high up and long ago;
of snow sifting down, and its light
has no kindness.

The fine white criss and cross
might have been written anywhere:
I learn to read with difficulty,
sounding out the words with my fingers.
It's all right, you said. 
All your life you have been hurt.

Dangerously Full

A dark gray morning, promising rain. We have not had a good heavy rain for a long time: and though that's not a really a problem here, at this time of year, it makes me deeply uneasy. So I'm hoping the rain will really come down when it rains, and wash the whole world. I have superstitious conviction that all those unrained rains are accumulating up there, weighing heavily in the sky: something somewhere is getting dangerously full.

It's a strange interim time, neither this nor that. Everything rolls along. My massage schedule is full of regulars that I adore; things go like clockwork at the office. Whence this unease? I accidentally took a video of myself with my phone, and it revealed a grizzled old man with something of the Badger about him, rather than the Mole: loose-jowled, unshaven, bright-eyed; amused and ornery. I have no idea who he was.

In this phase of my life -- whatever it may be: this will be one of those chapters my biographers will fret about a title for -- I have largely given up needling myself about whether other people are right after all. No: they're just not. The way I see it is the way it is.

I can't read novels these days. I think to really fall into a novel you have to have the conviction that its author, at least in his writing persona, has a deeper understanding of the world than you do. I can't find that conviction. Nobody knows shit. I read history, which is a humbler endeavor, and I read poetry, which is humbler still. But before I'm going to read several hundred pages of dense prose about something the author just made up out of his head, I want to know: so what makes you so special? What makes your made up world more worth paying attention to than mine? I've lost that curiosity and humility. I really am a different creature: my phone saw true.

A client in tears about Robin Williams' death: I put my arms around her and told her things would get better. I don't know when I got so clumsy: that's the kind of comfort Ron Weasley would offer. I used to walk around thinking I knew how other people could be happy: now I know that I don't. I don't know that. Oh, I can see it clearly enough: "you are locked into your suffering" -- as Leonard Cohen crooned it -- "and your pleasures are the seal." But diagnosing is one thing: curing quite another. It's probably good that I no longer think I have anything to offer people: that man, Mole, with his squinty glasses and his velour coat, was genuinely dangerous.

Trucks and buses rumble by on 39th; a bearded man in a tattered parka pushes a grocery cart down the sidewalk; a girl wearing khaki shorts and a backpack hitched high, who no doubt thinks her bottom is too big, walks rapidly but unsteadily across the crosswalk; a young man with three-days' growth, carefully cultivated, and a neckerchief --  a neckerchief, for God's sake -- lounges against the telephone pole by the bus stop and manages an apotheosis of fatuity. No, I am not in a generous frame of mind: I'm not inclined to ask my fellow-man for answers. I have my own fields to till.

Scrawled Heart

The trouble with feeding baby mammals
with an eyedropper or a syringe
is that the formula is likely to end up in the lungs
and pneumonia ensues.
The pet clinic gave us a smaller syringe free.
One cc. Easier to wield. It was wrapped
in pink post-it: "for baby squirrel,"
followed by a scrawled heart.
He is naked, the color of
a pair of gray velour shoes,
and his snout is strangely dragonish:
he is blind and ungrateful,
but he wants desperately and entirely to live,
and maybe we are hoping he will someday tell us why.

Dragging the Map-Lines

A life gets slowly out of tune, imperceptibly, till the sound of your body -- you suddenly realize -- is a distressing discord: you are lost, because you've been tuning all the lesser strings to this one: every reference is tainted, as if your ship had been dragging the map-lines behind it. What to steer by?

This is not some haught philosophical proposition: this concerns a sink full of dirty dishes and a crisper drawer of broccoli with an assortment of little flowerheads winking to yellow -- a pointillist painter changing his mind -- and the drift of treats into necessities. (I will die if I do not have a blackberry milkshake. Really?)

And so -- a half-waking, a lift of my shaggy head, a puzzled shrug. I put my long orangutan arms up to the branches and pull myself higher in the tree. What one wants, at such a time, is a vantage point, and a breath of cooler air to clear one's head.

Out of tune I may be -- I am -- but the muscles ripple under my fur: I am hugely, hugely powerful. There is time, still. There is time.

The God of Slats. Broughton Beach, July 2014

Say, then, come along, we'll sit by the windows while the sun goes by. Shadows crawl up and shadows crawl down: the blinds swing, and their multiple mouths smile, or frown, twenty at a time: sketches, gestures in time and sunlight.

Forget all that I said. Forget wondering why my heart still snags when a woman takes off her dress at the beach, forget "born to guilt and working towards innocence," forget even the battered straw hat I hold in my hand while the wind cools my scalp, forget the sand that made its way into my shoes.

What I want is as simple and as far away as that -- that touch, your worn hand in mine, and the slowing of the clock. I never wanted so little so much. And the whole day empties, empties. If I could put it into words I wouldn't be here, would I? I'd be holding your hand in the banded lightfall.

It seems simple -- that's why people do that "born innocent" thing -- but it is enormously complex. You used to be complimented when people said you were a complicated, you said; oh, it seemed dark and interesting. But now you just want to be simple. Realizing maybe for the first time what a complicated project that could turn out to be. It's often easier to tie a knot than to untie it, though we're seldom clever enough to remember that at the time.

That woman taking off her dress, even she aspired to simplicity, of a sort: she had the gestures that were supposed to say "unstudied" down, the gaze down and aside, the turn to the river -- as if the old man holding his hat, and the young men frozen like pointers, did not exist. Which to be fair we scarcely did: it was not anyone mortal she was undressing for.

We have to fashion our gods of the materials at hand: here is the sand god, the driftwood god, the god of rusted fire-barrels, the god of bottle caps, the god of broken glass. Here is the god of banded lightfall, who rules the holding of hands, and here is the god of slats that bend when the fan blows.

A quick gesture to avert the evil eye: so quick that if you didn't grow up with it you wouldn't catch it. And a real gaze of hunger, beyond the tall grass and the bike path, now: she wants a shadow to fall across her skin. That one, that one, dear, I know. Oh yes.

And when it does come, it flees, it scampers down the long steep sandy tunnel of time, till all you can hear is the distant skitter of little clawed paws, far below. What was it that came by so quick? Was it your heart's desire? Was it really? Did its shadow fall across you, really? It's too long ago even to know, now. You know only what you told yourself to remember.

Lift your eyes, and look across to the dim gray-green of the Washington side: there would be shadows under those trees. And maybe a frayed couple holding hands, there, where you could imagine a coolness coming off the river: a breath that belongs to both and to neither of you.

Apparent Motion

And embarrassing how often I find I have driven entirely off the rails, no longer moving at all, my eyes still flicking to some ancient jerking cartoon song, and I, I, alone and as lost as ever. I never knew what I was doing. How the sky wheels overhead! a waxing crescent moon setting, meaning it has been haunting the sky unseen all day. I have heard people, grown human beings with real jobs, wondering where the moon has gone that they glimpsed in the west at evening. They think because it's new it should be rising, I guess. I don't even have the heart to tell them.

The earth, the earth is round like a ball, or like a shoulder, or like a smoothed pebble, and as I turn it -- thus -- the moon (the which we figure as this fingertip of chalk) appeareth to rise and set. And so the sun too appeareth to rise and set, but all this is the spinning of this lovely blue and white roundness, and all the things that show shining in the west, all of them, are dropping from our sight. 

The moon sure seems a little slower than the others: because it really is travelling, right around us, going to the East: not so fast as we are spinning, not near so fast, but fast enough -- it keeps up enough -- to seem to lag behind the stars, a handsbreadth maybe per night. It is not lagging; rather, it is falling behind our spin more slowly than the stars, if you like to look at it that way. If you like to look at it at all. Do you like to look at it? Do you like to imagine that it's real? Do that, sometimes: because it is real. 

I too am real, a real animal, even if I am an untracked train car, a sometime wreck. My chest rises and falls some twelve times a minute, and my heart beats some five times per breath, falling behind, maybe, like the moon against the stars, or else -- you can always lay the string end to end the other way -- catching up with the unmoving flesh. And my eyes blink. You can tell I'm alive, no matter how still I hold myself: how the blood kicks with each squeeze of the heart! And that's not even to mention all the gurgling and fermenting in my midsection, more the work of my resident bacteria than of mine, sure, but still ordered and marshalled and delimited by my digestive tract -- yards and yards of smooth muscle, doing its work with no more than a casual nod to the voluntary motor system in passing. 

Now -- to the purpose of our rather speech -- supposing other people to be fixed -- they are not, I know, but suppose -- then my heart might be said to advance a handsbreadth, every day, though it appears to lag. So if you see it shining in the west, don't look for it later on at night. It will have dropped from your sight: it has been in the sky all day, but you've been too blind, my dear, too blind to see it. It is only an ocean of potassium and sodium, after all, washing against calcium shores. How I love you, and miss you! 

So I set one wheel after another onto the rails, heaving her up, under the stars. No, no, no moon tonight! You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?

Rally and heave, heave O! we sing. Round and round and round she goes, back on the track and away she rolls!

Note

Elsewhere, I wrote "I am far, far happier than I was when I was younger. Probably people who had happier childhoods, youths, and young adulthoods find it harder to leave them behind: mine were full of death and dismay and a great deal of pain. So I come out on to this clear sunny sunlit water with a feeling of extreme gratitude and relief. I can't see or hear as well as I could, my mind is a bit duller for cutting a mathematical equation or learning a new language, but there's a constant upwelling of happiness in me, which either was not there, or that I was too anxious to feel, until I was well into my forties. I'm steering towards sixty now, with not a whisper of regret for temps perdu."


I thought perhaps I should say that here, since I do so much mining in the vein of "carefully caught regrets," here; I do so not because I am filled with regret, but because I, like all writers, am a shameless opportunist. I dig where I see something glitter. But my primary, overriding emotion is joy, a sense of the extraordinary abundance that surrounds me, the luck that has haunted me almost all my life. I have a knack, a talent, for happiness, that exceeds that of pretty much anyone I know: and I have been handed extraordinary materials to put that talent to work on. And so I wander out at first light and look at the sky, the perpetually astonishing sky, and it is the first morning that ever was, and I am the first person ever to look at a sky, and it is open, open all the way up to the stars, and past them. And I hear the morning birds as well as I ever did.

Recumbent

Image found by Lori Witzel & gothicked by Andrea Lipomi: thanks!

Liberace and the Scent of God

Liberace: Allen Warren

Seeing the perverse is central to understanding people, if only as a corrective: ordinarily we start off with "this is how people ought to be, what ought to motivate them, what ought to satisfy them... things that don't quite fit this model, we'll ignore when possible and vilify when not." Starting with the perverse is starting with what's real: what are people really, what actually motivates them, what actually satisfies them?" We're all too apt to keep passing on stories about how we all ought to be, ritually reinforcing each other -- even as our strategies for motivating and satisfying ourselves fail and fail and fail.

I have always identified as queer, from the moment I saw Liberace's TV show long ago in the 1960's: the gorgeous sequins and extravagance, the lispy limp-wristed flamboyance. I loved it before I understood it as a sexual category. I loved it, even though none of those things are part of my own character; even though I am "heterosexual to a fault," as one of my friends remarked of me, and my tastes tend to be mainstream, boring, vanilla. But I understood, viscerally, what Liberace was doing: he was pushing the boundaries, he was saying "find room or make room, because I am exactly what I am. Remake your categories: don't try to remake me."

The Buddhist in me says: we are unhappy because we are on the wheel: because wanting by design cannot be more than temporarily satisfied: and the science guy says the same. We are not happy because we are not designed to be happy. We are designed for our happiness to melt away as soon as it draws near: desire is the mechanism that keeps us perpetually striving and edging out the evolutionary competition. But the pervert in me is not so sure. He says: "maybe we are unhappy because what we are taught to pursue is not what we really want to catch?" 

The questions may have nothing to do with each other, but they are twined, in my mind. The Buddhist answer is orderly, scientific, obvious, right. But I have always been prone to this swerve into revelatory ecstasy: what if it's God who is right, what if happiness is possible, what if there is some way that our secret desires do in fact map to the contours of the universe? What then? And it always resonates, there are always others who lift their snouts when that ephemeral scent is on the wind, and we exchange quick, puzzled looks.

A Prayer for Those Long in the Sun

A peach pit long in the sun
abandoned even by the ants,
its sharp edges dulled with fondling --

all the flesh of grief and anger
eaten away: only the hard
core of vindictiveness left --

when the day of your death comes
is that stone really what you want
to be found, clutched in your hand?

They taught you it was magic,
and so it is, but not the way you think.
It will not

protect you from your enemies:
it will eat your soul at dusk
and deliver your children

(do you think they are not listening?)
to the same fate.

Clarification

Being one who wanted always

to prod the polish of a painting,

and prick myself on its stippled skin;

to bury my face in a fall of hair;

to lay my head, entraining

to the thin cotton and the nippled hint;

to thrust my fingers in the floral foam

to feel its dry and grainy clasp –

given all this ache and lapse,

tell me again, bring it home,

tell me how it happened that we alone

must carry the weight of our people's sin?

High Eighties in the Valley

Dreaming of the life departed, the life to come. It is disquieting, this trace of bitterness that has come into my life: I do not want to nourish it. Still it brings visions with it, and a certain understanding of other embittered people, an intimacy with them. I weigh it my hand, thoughtfully, as I would a handgun: not something I've ever liked or approved of, but an object of a certain fascination, nonetheless.

Put it aside. The day is brilliant, if foreign: a strong simple sunny day. The radio announcer said high eighties, with no trace of the usual incredulity in these parts. Just the facts, ma'am. High eighties in the Valley.

I breathe deep, let my shoulders open, pull the air up into my chest, push it down into my belly, let the ribs ease. I am ridiculous, as solemn and slow as a chilly insect on a twig, stepping carefully, once, and swiveling its antennae. Not at home in all the heave and thrust of summer: this season is not ruled by my gods.

Except, maybe, Vega. But then, everything reverses at night, all the loyalties. She comes out, comfortable and easy, riding up over the parti-colored pickup truck, ducking under the maple tree, cruising at last in the high fields of the sky. You are still blessed, she says. And I ask why, and she says, don't ask questions.

You know, I could become a Christian and pray to the Virgin. I bet she doesn't treat her people this way. Ha. Quaking in my boots. Ask a real Christian, boy.

I suppose she's right: she usually is.

Lots of love, dear ones. xoxo

Messages

A girl I was hopelessly in love with when I was thirteen is in town: she wants to have coffee. If convenient. How many eddies does that raise, in the current?

On my morning walk, I saw the crows scolding and dive-bombing a cat unmercifully: she crept under one of those little rental "smart cars" to get away from them. First the fireworks, now this. The car was very low to the ground: she was just a blur with a twitching tail, under there.

Americans waddle by, with their huge bellies, their teardrop upper arms and thighs. They look so kindly, and so frightened. I want to reassure them: it is indeed a very dangerous world, but it's still not as dangerous as that.

One of those mornings, when every mouth in the restaurant is opening and closing, and every leaf on the trees outside is lifting and dropping: all the world is murmuring, murmuring, but none of the messages are for me. But the wind still brings them to me, leaves them on the mat, and expects to be praised for them.

A dream of faded fabric, of smooth buttons under my fingers, the braided threads rising to my fingers' mouths: the coded braille of sewing machines. More misdirected messages I can't decode, don't know how to forward.

Still, the love itself is very simple. The dishes longed to be washed, and now they drowse happily, dried and safe, on the shelves. Their voices, at least, speak to me clearly. They thank me, in the varied tongues of china, glass, and steel; sleepy voices, like the evening birds.

Independence Day

The end of summer is contained in this, its hottest day.
Cupping a hot-feathered crow in both hands you lift it to the sun,
and the shadow that falls is the shadow of winter,
the touch of its slender black fingers on yours
is December's touch, the rise of darkness, the wind lifting,
the pepper-blinding sleet.

The torn flags struggling from their poles
tell a different story: freedom would be destruction,
one free breath and we would fall, to be next year's
rotting cloth snagged on the blackberries –
a cotton spiderweb on the thorns –
grayed with dust and wet with tire-splash;
an immobility compared with which this struggle seems
at least a ghost of liberty.

I have come all this way to tell you: we held the pass
till the Persian satraps fell out with each other:
your homes are safe, and the winter flows from
the summer from the winter, still, and you are safe;
but no one else is coming home. We are the winter
in your heart of summer: we are the flag that struggled free.