Month: June 2016

I say “no” a lot, or am perceived that way, and yet my “no” is in the nature of the “no” black bears embody, i.e., it is an insistence on a “yes” that remains obscure to – yet not unappreciated by – the one who wants to visit, have the vision, et cetera. Chrisoula cleans the house but leaves Husserl where I left him, on the dining room table with directions to the funeral home for a book mark, and is this not the wedding all over again. I knelt to pray, conscious of those who watched, and knowing that my father needed me to be elsewhere. The water was cool, the cup smooth and plastic, somewhat reminiscent of the 1970s.

I was only briefly writing in the old hayloft, most of the day passed teaching and driving and wondering when I’d get around to reading Henry. Shall we next inquire into the origins of extremism, which transcends race and religion? “Everybody does it” is a valid data point but there are others and one wants to be thorough, one wants to be aware of when they are not aware. You have to play the guitar you’re given, not the guitar you can’t afford.

Three times in five days now – about thirteen hours or so in toto – given to the turnpike which runs east to west, beginning of the day and late middle, and using the rest areas to pee and stretch but not buy food. He died early in the morning, his son was present, the one who later said at the funeral “we’re free spirits here,” and urged me privately to cherish whatever moments are given, no matter how hard they are, no matter how much I wish they had been given otherwise or to someone different. One parks where crows are visible picking at trash, one wonders at the language they use, and briefly envies the form of their intelligence, however unknowable, however marred by our innate habit of projection. So I am a monk after all, thank Christ.

The rooster begins carrying on at two thirty, a sort of kamikaze crowing, given the willingness of foxes here to hunt on the village side of the river. One does appreciate a comfortable rocking chair, one does want to put their feet up. Discerning writing projects is an art unto itself, the form they will take is often obscure, and decisions to have to be made before beginning, which few of us are willing to accept much less actually make. Hamburgers with bacon, trading garden lettuce for eggs, and Chrisoula’s famous eggplant pizza, among other delectibles.

Sooner or later we learn to navigate funerals, always with an eye on the one we won’t navigate. Not every stage needs a singer! If I never see a black bear again it will be okay because they’re there, and their thereness is sufficient, it’s more than sufficient unto my here (which is their there – you see?). Well, goodbye, don’t forget to write.

Wanting what is not presently here fills the gap – is essentially what is here – which means there is no gap – which we don’t want to see because what would we do then? The nothing-to-do is always confused with what is presently being-done perfectly consistently. You can’t talk to eddies in the brook, but now and again they briefly embody otherwise, most recently and notably as Emily Dickinson. “None suspect me of the crown” indeed.

Recently I am aware of that which is forbidden – certain women, certain spaces – and it makes me smile, it makes me order hamburgers, it makes me change the batteries in the mirror ball. For example, the upper room, which I left to itself for six months – then entered – the old hayloft, and it takes a long time to walk across it, and some part of me cannot handle largesse, cannot say yes to the blessing. Where is the forest to which to run if not in the interior and if it is in the interior then why do I so often lose it? Foxes swim across the river, laughing on the other side because I’m still too damn scared to get my feet wet.

Hey look, the man without shoes now has six pairs! Suddenly I can’t remember did she write about black bears, and not remembering is a form of emptiness – a gap – that is here but still, did she? He can’t leave the chair now, has a way of humming that replaces speech, and still I understand, and still I sit quietly waiting. Thursday never comes, nor does tomorrow.

What really blows my mind is birth – not the body being born – but suddenly waking up to this self, to this world, to experience. “I was just stopping by,” he says, adding “I like what you’ve done to the place but what are you going to do in it?” One can’t get any clearer or cleaner so when it comes to soap and meditation, have fun, play, invite a friend but for Christ’s sake stop thinking something right or necessary is happening. I do know that she wrote about her “freckled bosom” several times, usually with indifference, usually knowing that a man wouldn’t have had to worry that question.

Saddle up, we’re going for a ride! You may have noticed that consummation isn’t my strong suit but hey, the textual – the wordy – foreplay is kinda divine, yes? Carey and I talked about the prophylactic nature of boredom, which remains the mode, sort of. What “I” am is this yearning to yearn for experience admiring itself. Given, accepted, given back, et cetera.

In the old field given increasingly to forest, an abundance of fireflies, a stunning abundance. What helps is not planning, even while planning, if that makes any sense. One night I was not alone, most nights I am. They are calling to each other, they are making sense of darkness. Who goes in for life, goes in for a funeral.

What we read by, find our way by. One dislikes bridges and canals but not engineers, not the workers who construct them. Ireland is not whole. At night when he sleeps he moans a little, and when I walk with him to the bathroom, his skins slips around beneath my hand. Gravity, entropy, et cetera.

Can you find the beginning or end of anything? Jake used to whimper in his sleep and I’d pat him, settle the dream, and he’d wake and look at me, which settled me. As soon as we name it, it’s not gone, but we’re not seeing it anymore, we’re seeing the name, we’re playing hide-and-seek with words again. Any act of will is violent and it is hard to see this and even harder to accept it. The pine trees of Cape Cod teach me how to obey.

Wake on Wednesday, funeral on Thursday, yet another sojourn down the ever-crowded turnpike. Holding her hair back as if knowing watching matters. You insist on us in ways that confuse and frighten me and I wish you wouldn’t but don’t stop, not on my account. Writing in the dark at 3 a.m., thinking I should maybe criticize smokers and other addicts less. This is my little green light and this is the darkness we’re up against.

My new office is the old hayloft, my new coaster a chunk of marble countertop dug from the trash pit unexpectedly discovered out back. Every generation has a different idea of what is necessary, what is dispensable, that’s what time is for. The middle ground asks me to stay, to make no demands of it, and to give it away, no matter how confused the giving makes me. North means intimacy, north is okay.

We are working on the gutters now, and on the stairs rotting away after decades of rain. I am often translated literally, which is a mistake, since believe me, even I don’t know what I’m saying half the time. The coffee was bitter, but that’s what coffee is, or is it just that at a young age my parents taught me certain values? We call this low-resolution simulation home but it’s not, it’s what’s already passed by our home.

Can thought go backwards – not think about the past but actually go backwards – or is it too subject to entropy? Michael argued there is no such thing as front or back, only spacious awareness, position-less awareness, to which I always responded, okay yes but it seems there is and, Wallace Stevens and his ice cream notwithstanding, “seems” is the show, “seems” is what we’ve got. Well, I am happiest when sex is a shared meeting beginning and ending in – gently annotated by – kisses. Jas talks about his pending vasectomy and halfway through says, you’re the first guy I’ve talked to who hasn’t cracked a joke, to which I respond, I never joke about penises, and Jas says, men who can’t joke about dick don’t have a lot of dick to joke about.

Those dreams of anger wake me still and I sit up in bed, listening to the neighbor’s window fan, and wondering what has happened to make me so casual about moonlight. The letters come and go, coming and going comes and goes, and – oh hell, you know the drill. She bought me a coffee and even though it wasn’t what I wanted, I drank it, and even though I’m tired of this kind of dialogue, we walked in a big loping circle around Northampton, talking about marriage and raising families and how exhausting it is to love the word “Christ.” One feels threatened by certain biographies, yields, is brought to heel accordingly.

He said my lips were too thin for anyone to want to kiss, it’d be like making out with a pencil, but what can you do, the body you’ve got is the body you’ve got to both love with and let be loved. I stay awake after, stargazing, happy in a non-specific way. A little before six a.m. the ducks begin their guttural quacking, hungry and aware of the light, not unlike you-know-who. My new office is the old hayloft, I write beneath narrow wooden beams sparrows once rested on, and dust motes still drift through the familiar sunbeam, me.

Merton again, as if my plate wasn’t already full. Yet at last this longstanding confusion between eros and agape clarifies a little, and a way in which the artificial division between them might be bridged appears, albeit dimly, albeit distantly. You know? That which is complex is essentially illusory, yet there’s no harm in what is not real, and anyway, as Saint Thomas said (here paraphrased), the limit of our knowledge is to know that we don’t know God. The swallows at dusk, their graceful swoops above the garden.

In some respects the work is one of translation – this belief system into that or rather the language of this belief system into the language of that. But one grows tired of it, and of the deepening uncertainty for which wordiness is only sometimes a salve. If only I’d taken up woodworking! The birds come closer to me – chickadees especially – and it is hard now to be unhappy, even when I’m unhappy, but loneliness – in the ontological sense – retains its teacherly prerogative. It’s okay, it’s how it goes, but still.

The second floor is a blessing but the stairwell is forever a reminder that the world is full of gallows and somebody somewhere is always being made to ascend. You can easily go mad on the trail of justice. One studies a pile of dense theological texts, mostly Christian, and thinks, not again. Chicory by the highway, daisies surrounding Dad’s tiny raised bed garden, and the frail pink blossoms of the stubbornly abundant thimbleberry, all tickling the interior conviction that one is loved, held, grace-gifted, et cetera. Deeply, foreverly.

What we wait on is the everyday – the ordinary – returned to us is in its unadorned uncomplicated and thus clarifying simplifying essence. The narrative is nondramatic, and stillness – the seamless whole, the center-that-is-everywhere &c – precedes (by incorporation, by creation) perception. Bread calls on us to bake it, as poems call on us to write them, and we sing when we drive and insist on the heart as a metaphor, and none of it is a metaphysical problem, none of it needs to be solved or amended or repeated or undone because it’s just what is, it’s the holy sufficiency perfectly sufficing. How sweet and clear and satisfying when attention at last sinks into itself, not unlike the way when we trace our reflection in the water with a finger, the reflection disappears, transforms, is replaced by other, equally lovelily, patterns. Just this.

What does a “theory-free description” look like anyway and can we describe it? Punctuation is the means by which both time and space enter the sentence. The book was closed, now it is open, and without my glasses, the text resembles still baby spiders. Nothing happens, including birth, including death.

Oh please read carefully! He wrote he wrote and thus touched infinity. Reflections in the lake can be described, but are we describing the reflection or that which is reflected? A miracle with your name on it waiting for you to remember your name.

The muskrat came up from the river and ate clover a few feet south of the garden. Amaranth is both fun to say and to see growing in the side yard so that’s nice. A plan bereft of geese is no plan at all. The falcon passed over the meadow and with it went any sense the afternoon would not be touched abruptly by death.

You take my breath away which is not, all things considered, a good thing but still. Neighbors make inquiries, old friends reestablish contact albeit through outdated channels. One is puzzled to discover their intense alliance with cause-and-effect, especially given the relative absence of any good reason for it. No more metaphysics, okay?

There is no invitation in these sentences, no breathy yes, and yet. It’s been years since I indulged ellipsis. In the lacunae one has no body and the orgasm is both endless and endlessly shared. Or not, I never know, being wordy but not wise, and given mostly now to walking alone.

Jesus is neither cause nor explanation but can in certain contexts be an example, broadly understood. The Buddha was not a Buddhist. Talking about Thursday the seamless whole briefly reminded me breathe, touch water, get naked, whatever works. We’ve already met so what’s the point of either calendars or maps?

A little wind ripples the meadow and one feels regret at their commitment to undo it, to lay it out in sheathes, to gather them in like a threshing God. This summer I am bent on accepting brotherhood with all snakes, which is to say, I am officially beyond motives. One neither forgets nor accepts the text, being nothing other than the text re-cognizing text. Thank Christ for Lilian Alweiss, though one does wonder about her tendency to eschew periods, or forget them from time to time, in her desire to render the obscure clear.

Dusk falls while I mow their yard, the kids watering flower gardens, Chrisoula overseeing. Butterflies go nowhere, nowhere becomes a butterfly. How easy it has always been for me to talk, as if silence invented me just to better know itself. Feynman on the space shuttle, on fucked-up bureaucracy really, and dreams of countless rabbits, and at 4 a.m. a thunder storm through which I slept happily.

How simple it is to see beyond time, like pushing one’s hand through their own reflection in a pond. The heron laughs at all our poems, being a motivated killer like everybody else. Leftover lamb with spinach, garlic, rice and curry and it doesn’t help, not at all. Tom laughs when told I ordered a scythe from a guy up north, saying “don’t forget the black robe.”

The old fence is not salvageable so we move on to another plan, not without regret. At night the river is audible in a way that makes me wonder why we bothered inventing cars and trucks and planes and so forth. Strange to think how reluctant we are to die when we did not ask to be born, and cannot in any way account for what came before or what comes next. Stars falling, filling her mouth, and later the quiet song of those kept apart at last together.