Month: August 2008

A powerful woman impressed with the truth. When I looked up he was in the bread aisle covered with cow splatter. One million or half of that divided two ways. Broad stairs in a public building. The way her eyes widened, like mirrors, like silver plates on display, listening. One had the impression that he was a devoted husband which late-breaking revelations tended to impair.

Vermont was a glossy future, a complicated past. Ammunition left out overnight, that was the present. The news wasn’t all bad but as always quickly devolved. It was a good cup of coffee, which helped frame his thoughts about how the day would unfold, and he couldn’t get it back. He wanted to write something fun, action-packed, but instead had all these fair stories. It was quiet as the light broke and breathing was difficult. It wasn’t yearning or it was but in a way that tended to bind him.

He wrote as always a matter of avoidance, or elision maybe, yet valued the mode for what it also revealed in spite of itself. Spokes on a wheel always reach the center, the greasy revolving heart. After, when he woke up, he felt efficient, optimistic, and there was no clear reason for it. Dwelling on the condition of the house – i.e., decrepitude – was no antidote but still. The new bed was lighter, and felt like floating.

He tore what he believed were weeds from the garden and his son sobbed, betrayed, calling them flowers, or what might yet have proven to be, and this was one thing he didn’t want to say, “go into.” There was some reference in the dream to a monastery, space, a deep commitment made manifest and having nothing necessarily to do with writing.

Warblers, then turkeys, then the silence that always follows a biped. In the only dream I remember, fog, a schoolyard, a pile of stones. Efforts are currently underway to work the phrase “unrequited hunger” into a story. I still can’t remember what word it was from yesterday, the M word I wanted.

Nor breathe much, nor read small words. Nor find words, particularly, they’re too much like periwinkles stuck to rocks when the tide lowers. You don’t call, you don’t write . . . Now it’s upstate New York, just touching Canada.

At once the conversation turns to oil. I want to step delicately into the blurred tornado. Please, no more “statements,” “speeches.” Rosemary, olive oil – I still love you, still want to be held that way.

“He wrote” . . . at least he wrote. The rising sun made the road appear pink, white, gold. He was aware of color now in a new way, could look at a thing for hours trying to see it, really see it. Oh there was also a dream in which he forgot a necessary text, but which one?

Time slows without aspirin or buckles. Later, at a certain height, it was gray, or at least monochromatic. The road, of course, “macadam.” On which not traveling was impossible, nor recommended.

The lost word, somewhat like “magnon.” “Magnate.” Yet also reminiscent of lichen, milking. The phones ring, the mail bears with it the smell of cloudy trails. You could go on forever, in this mode, but why. When what you want is closer to meaning.

An evolving understanding of what rain is, can be. Crackle of thunder, half-filled jam jars dropped from a great height. It whispers is what it does. And you have no desire save to listen. The narrative jumped all over like a snake faced with hot oil. Hoof prints, plain yogurt. The sick dog wandered all night where the moon bled through.

“Magic,” “matron.” “Mission?” The many courses No will take. Allow yourself the bible, won’t you? Falling to sleep with the Song of Songs in my head. Spiders scuttle over the clods, the white bubble of their egg sacs pulled behind. Today grief, tomorrow fried bread.

Before I woke the twenty sentences were writing themselves. A linen head cover through which piled clouds were faintly seen, then the sudden – the jerking – drop. Ah, but soon it will all be over. “You know best, mon capitain.” But ask: are angels ever hungry?

I’m in the market for a team of oxen. Next Christmas Eve I’ll going shopping against all wishes, stopping at McDonald’s to lend a hand with the rubbish. I’ve got this torn green t-shirt and with my black leather jacket, I look good. I look like “getting out.” Yet for the right book would stop, go back, or even stay. The mating song of blue jays, how the light can be in June.

Yeah yeah – avoiding the subject, who doesn’t? There was a small fire in one corner which necessitated the removal of an entire wall. Revealing at last one’s powerlessness over architecture – I mean the true poverty, the illusion of, choice – also corn cob insulation. But in this new house still standing, which was next to door to E.D.’s – or was it hers? – not clear – I found a room which nobody else had found nor occupied for decades, many of them. Newspaper clippings hung on the wall, there was a piano that hovered in the air, its keys attached to no visible instrument, two doors and many windows. There were also plaster busts of her that when peered at closely made you want to look away.

I was loved at times but never liked and the difference is not negligible. You don’t “unlearn” certain behaviors, you leave them by the side of the road. I too want a high room overlooking the world, an awareness of this ongoing confrontation with eternity – more than just a sip of the nineteenth century brew.

Rain, settles, the idea of progress. Or aging, lilac, going against the mold. With my coffee in the morning I’m happy, like trees. Cloud scud, then silence. In no need of a container is the new.

Broken mugs remind me of you, also bookstores. A quiet moment on cobblestone, where it was always Sunday. The mail never came, nor leaning out windows. It’s this, the sound of it falling. One can always – can one though – believe.

Facing sunlight the photograph blurred. Traffic picked up despite the weather. We are on it he wrote and that was the last anybody heard. Gold rush, open land. It was like setting sail into a blush of paragraphs. I am far from land, lit up by desire.

The syndrome, the dynamic, a discomfort. Strings broke on his guitar and he played on anyway. Self held at what distance complicates any response. Yet at dawn he knew himself the way a cork hobbles, no longer.

A ladder. Horticultural inclination. A crow turning its head, right, left, while flying. Bean stems, lady bugs, stone.

Or else what was the unasked question. A definition that longed for plugs. The hide moldered, was pulled on by dogs. He dreamt of erasers, and communities where they weren’t needed.

In the sweet biannual truck pull. Of dust and then. A long swelter, a groove that fought for its own tongue. Bright as lasers, burning through you.

Bats, butterflies. Where the road bends an old injury not recalled. The water at twilight soft pink despite its black. Blueberries, aridity, a slow dance in the nattering.

Of matter. Begone. The hill they circumambulated. With yearning mostly, sometimes a map.

At an hour when the speckled rainbow. Rising through cold water to a shining like flashes. Going back after for a square of blue glass. Polished to a dull, left there as evidence. The old days, what were they anyway?

The garden rows between what rain. Sunflowers smaller, sticks for the dogs. Blackberries fat as a baby’s fist. Your voice over the distance, like gravel, like a river. Who walked ahead of us, their feet in the grass?

You wrote, he wrote, and the story wrangled both. A hill that elevates in only one direction. No one named Emily ever used that envelope. Coffee grounds, pesto, and the best kale ever. You questioned me in the night but in what language, tired?

Sooner. And sun, wind, and all the other grails. Dreaming of pasture where now the bears lump. Shadows over the driveway, the road, the neighbor’s barn. Is it a New England way of loving specifically or death?

Between the squash plants (yellow flowering spirals) a garter snake. Thinking, deliberate. Milkweed, last year’s Monarchs. Gossamer. First clouds, then blue, then a hawk drifting gyre.

The canoe falls over with a thump. No blossoms yet on the west-bending sunflower. A broken heart, unraveling hymns.

The dimensions aforesaid. Norse myths, effeminate gods. Why else but for desire would we. Uncoiling where the the purple announcement. Left in an email, it withered, a scribble.

Recall the scythe, lanterns, pipe smoke. The old man smelled like wintergreen. Or watercress, wheat.

Hills unfurling the burgeoning melody. Since when when last you asked. The knives were dull, in want of polish. Petulance, in place of what.

Considered as a whole, the fragments shy. A honeysuckle midriff matters how. Playing cards blow. And all at once now a breath blown spry.

Or classical influence. Photographs in the mail. The herpetologist called and called until at last he gave up. In Ireland once, where it never once rained.

Form, too. Words rolling like bricks before a bulldozer. He fixed the hay rake, one eye one the sun. Maine is a place, but also an idea.

The afternoon, children’s voices. Leaving the church, every mourner stopped to glance at the sky. Certain doors squeak, certain weathers recall the past. Paella one way then later another.

Chairs falling over. The central nervous system blown but capable of recovery. He wrote late, envisioning an audience camped out between the hills.

Where at last we recline, liars to the end.

Later and later the birds would begin their morning vocalizations, and he noticed that the sun was now setting earlier, too. It was August, one of his favorite months, because of its inevitable inflection of sorrow. He had never enjoyed school nor particularly cared for being home but the summer’s wane touched him, moved him.

He feels it even now as an adult. The rooster’s throaty howl, the mourning dove’s plaintive mewing, all outside in misty dark. Every fifteen minutes or so he hears a car out on Route 112, almost always leaving town. Growing up, that should have been the music of promise – you can get out of here, you can! – but it too was stained with loss. It was like there was a quota of escapees, and each one leaving that wasn’t him was one less chance that the next would be him.

And the clock was ticking. The clock was always ticking.

(He writes) after waking up unable to breathe – a new physical ailment mirroring the predominant one (other than broken bones) of his childhood, the neighborhood asthmatic (though years later he learns that no doctor ever diagnosed him, and still won’t). His illnesses – which are different than his injuries – always own a moral, a spiritual component, that no medicine has been able to address. The zafu covered with cat fur, the crucifixes in basement storage. He reads about poetics, its intersection with ecology and ecologically-minded politics, then some more on stump removal.

By then the sun is rising. One can make too much of this – an excess of which he is frequently guilty – but the one constant in his life – his only real practice – has been writing words. It is to that he turns now, exhausted, hardly held up by coffee – not to prayer, or meditation. The twenty sentences are not exactly holy, but he sticks to them. He is bound up in them. He is not going anywhere but in the twenty sentences can at least say he is here.