Month: August 2017

(i)

We hollow rotten wood from the west-facing wall of the barn and suddenly reach the nineteenth century frame. We are quiet before the hand-carved joinery, the massive beams resting on stones so large and heavy they were surely dragged by oxen. When at last we speak, our sentences are short and efficient, as befits men who have caught a glimpse of what language can only hint at.

(ii)

Yet later, out front, reframing the rickety stairs, we end up talking about farmers we knew in the early 1970s, men our fathers called to build pole barns and haul calves from struggling cows, who could measure with their eyes a 32nd of an inch, and for whom a team of oxen would stop, turn and start again on syllables so gently uttered it is hard to imagine a less-adorned intimacy. We agree that we were fortunate to know these men, and the world they made that was even then departing, and wonder what, if anything, we might have done to preserve it. It quiets us, our complicity. How blunt our hands are! And how elaborate the semantics by which we justify their emptiness.

(iii)

Main Street – which is behind us as we work – runs west and east on a slow curve, like a resting bow or a woman’s shoulder. Scudding clouds forecast rain; the north wind is voluble and cold.

(iv)

She lives at a distance which saddens me, a grief made starker by her poems. When I am sad I consent to longing, which is to deny the boundaries and constraints that naturally attend existence. In time the longing becomes bitter, and the bitterness becomes toxic. It takes a long time to walk off one’s dream of a different woman and a landscape in which loving her is viable. You have to ask what makes a dream like that possible. You have to go very deep into loneliness, very deep into despair. You have to find out what necessity truly is. And when it is time to come back, you have to come back, whether you are finished with the inquiry or not.

(v)

In time my feet hurt so I take the road that was made to lead me home. Chrisoula sits on the stairs, hands folded on her lap in the dusk, and rises to greet me. “Thank you for fixing everything,” she whispers; her hair smells like smoke and sage and something fainter I cannot say. I want to spill my unworthiness here. I want to tell her my life is a series of losses and betrayals no measure of love can either halt or redeem. But my tongue as always fails me. My beginning and my end remain hidden, unmapped.

(vi)

We go inside and sit at the table. Our reflection in the windows is wavery and thin; we hold hands saying grace. “Bless this bounty and may we not forget those whose hunger tonight will not be met.” Do you know how sometimes when there is no light you can still find the way? “Forgive us our sins that we might in turn forgive one another.” The bread steams when I lay the knife against it. “By your mercy are we fed, by your justice do we live.” I fill Chrisoula’s plate with food; I fill my children’s plates with food. “Alleluia, alleluia.” Amen.

(i)

We try to gather all the apples but of course you cannot gather all the apples.

(ii)

In the morning, tracks of animals weave in and out of our little orchard as if to make clear how confused we are. How hungry we are and how lost? Well, hand-in-hand anyway, like dolls who don’t know who made them. The geese cry out as they pass overhead, their guttural cries as deep and wild as the sea our ancestors crossed to get here. A man who can’t remember his dreams has reason to be wary of speech, but on the other hand, the night never passed any quicker than with you.

(iii)

Remember when we used to wonder if we lived under a bushel? Now we wonder if some old woman came by with a lantern and decided we were unworthy. Asleep when we were supposed to be awake? These roads were last paved in the 1960s, and the bells do grow silent when I step into the steeple’s shadow. Morning passes trying to get the old Massey-Ferguson to start, and when it does, you realize it’s too late to start haying. You and the neighbors can’t agree if it rained last night – you are pretty sure it rained – but who can forget the story of the day their father died?

(iv)

A riddle: say that when you open your mouth, instead of words, little glass rainbows – like tear-shaped prisms – tumble into your open hands. You can’t hold them all, and you can’t kneel to gather those that fall because you’re afraid of losing even more. Are these gifts to be given away or is somebody trying to tell you something important about your heart?

(v)

Distance is a word that explains what we can act on, or what we are in relationship with and so might choose to act or be acted upon by, but “far away” is a story we tell so that our attention won’t wander when we need it most.

(vi)

When I look up, the field is full of shoulder-high goldenrod swaying in an August breeze. Yellow was the answer just long enough to clarify that yellow – like red and blue and purple before it – is never the answer. My feet are shoeless and pale, like a blind man’s idea of the moon, or like walking’s idea of a loveless marriage. When I look up again, my daughter is talking quietly to a horse, and the horse is listening as if to a secret, as if to a language it never imagined it would hear again.

(vii)

My throat is falling snow, my tongue is a russet glow in the hemlocks, and January is the chapel where I was taught to pray without anybody noticing. It comes to this, for those of us to whom it comes. Godless and alone, and happier than the tribal scriptures implied was possible, I turn back to the only monastery that will have me.

(i)

I remember waking to chicken feet scattered through dewy grass, and I remember long nights of howls that even now haven’t ended. What is the purpose of psychological pain? Who doesn’t want the address of the interior Cartesian Theater so they can burn the damn thing down? The chickens did not willfully climb into the coyote’s waiting teeth and whatever the moon wants, it does not want for canine wails. This is for those of us who leaned on the window sill praying, who knew that life was utterly neutral, and that neutral was as close to fair as anyone with an imaginal soul could get.

(ii)

Well, the lilies are mostly gone and we are nearly ready to bathe ourselves in the streaming light of the Perseids. May all beings be safe and happy, preferably snuggling on back yard blankets under skies of trailing fire! When isn’t August a love note from the one who sees us through winter? Tractors pulling hay wagons back slowly into the barn, and we set up the radio to listen to the Red Sox while sitting on the back porch. Moths flutter around the Coleman lantern, a reminder we have entered that stage where you no longer need to touch to touch. And down by the horses, the kids’ voices float through the dusk like strings of holiday light. Perhaps it is the stars who gaze at us and not the other way around after all.

(iii)

In the hay loft at night, thin bands of moonlight extend across part of the floor, and you sit quietly pretending not to notice them. Was it always like this to fall in love? To notice beauty, to long to possess beauty, and then to let beauty pass because what else is possible in the world of coming-and-going? All that persists is the reference point, by which all else is made relative. Or something like that.

(iv)

There was an enormous quartz rock in the pasture and when the sun was just so in the sky the glassy stone would light up with shimmering rainbows, lovelier than church and more stable than any breathing. Later there were words, and later yet, sentences, but even now the vast interior library is simply a record of what light insists is possible. What can be said has been said a thousand times but even the author of Ecclesiastes found a reason to say it again. This is for those who study, who leave home to become students, and who eventually disappear while seeking increasingly obscure – but not unfructive – texts.

(v)

Chrisoula knows I am writing and brings me coffee – black with a little stevia – in the hand-made mug I bought for her at the Snow Farm seconds sale two, maybe three Christmases past. Briefly I set aside the world – which is this writing, this way – to say thank you: thank you: thank you.