When I saw that photograph
you took in August, me
sitting in the aspens
reading poems from my first
journal, I'd forgotten there
was once a world without
words. I only looked at you
composing me with your Nikon:
What was it you saw in me
that I did not know? Anything
beyond the fact of the moment
framed, reading poems in the aspens,
giving the words life, if
only for a moment, listening
to the aspens flutter in the
warm wind.
That was the
last time I saw you, you know,
except that cold day I rode the
Greyhound across state
watching the old patched
highway, the trainline and
telephone poles, the cornfields
and the aspens, filling
my journal with words I would
never read because the
revolution had failed, time
and feeling fading behind
bus tires on the asphalt and
the insistence of winter.
After the wedding party and champagne
toasts to undying love and the magic
of finding someone to share this life with,
our indiscriminate yet ruffled philosopher
stumbles out of the country club into
the evening, it's getting dark, the sun has set
as he walks out on the golf course, into
the deep rough grass and under the stately
oaks and maple and beeches, the grounds
festooned with lilac perfume and sweet
honeysuckle, rarefied air ripe for thinking
as he glides over the manicured greens.
He is not alone. There are deer, of course,
in the shadows, chewing on leaves, woodchucks
grazing in the dusk, great horned owls, and cardinals
singing vespers. What is our friend, our thinker,
ruminating on? The problem of being?
The metaphysics of love? The phenomenology of human
experience, his life, this elegant meditation
in solitude? No. He's thinking. He's thinking that --
if we can know anything at all of this man
walking in his ruffled suit and ruffled tie --
he's thinking of relationships, how the subject
always means nothing without the predicate
and the predicate signifies nothing save
to carry the nominative lifelessly along,
no, he's thinking of the endless stretch of
being and thought, the interminable
resistance to knowing anything worth knowing,
and laughing at that, and truth be told, his
thinking returns to relationships because
it must after all return to something, now
under this dark beech, his parents, how they
sleep in their graves in another country,
forgotten and unforgiven, refugees from
this life of anguish, how his brother's ashes
now scattered across the Mississippi
seem to haunt this golf course like some furtive
opossum, how his ex-wife Hannah so many years
removed from that night on the ferry when
she said he'd thought of nothing but his own
private thoughts, that he couldn't feel or make
sense of a simple thing like love as he was
so afraid and it wasn't until he walked
onto the dark wet grass of the eighteenth hole
under the magnificent oak that spread
its wizened limbs like some minister delivering
a benediction that the something suddenly
arose, an uncomfortable feeling, an unease,
something unkempt and disordered, like the
wisteria tendrils raveling and unraveling
nearby in this lush and manicured world, it was,
he knew, or thought he knew, something well, unknowable,
unframeable, something that could not be
parsed in the mind's grammar or a Socratic
question, it was something else flooding his
being, a coldness, a chill, an inarticulate
awareness, a discomfort with no logical
origin, it was a trembling, there, in
the golf course, of all places, it was
something like the trembling tickle of lilac
blossoms on his lips, the delight of that,
the sweetness not of memory or beauty
or heartache but an emptiness, the chill
of the evening and the stumbling skunk
approaching, how his life would never
be the same.
The artists stand before two
large boards of words, black letters
on white tape and white letters on
black tape, they give you a card
and ask you to write a word that
describes you, any word, so you
comply, you write obdurate,
you don't know why, it's the first word
that comes to mind, first word best word,
right?, you love how the b and d
bump into the dull vowels and
bleed the word of any meaning.
The artists say go to the boards,
the black one or white one, and
tear off a word. You want to pick
a good one, like obdurate or art
or comply, but those words aren't there,
you see only the white skeletal letters
of remiss, and you know at once that's
your word, so you tear it off to
reveal a white surface with black
letters, and then the artists say
add the taped word to your card and
come back later to see the message
that's revealed, it's a truth, but
you don't comply, you take your card
and leave as if you're carrying
some passport that will gain you access
to the precious night, unaware
of the obdurate truth surrounding
you.
She has one of those lives,
you know, house in the country,
flat in the city. She writes poems,
drinks coffee, unrushed, always
stylish, lost in thought, her attention
never broken, her kitchen filled
with lemons and vintage tomatoes,
and when she takes a lover,
one in the country, one in the city,
her loving is slow and deep,
all hay fields and gloaming, all
ardent and exquisite, strong hands
molding her man's muscles,
and if they want to take her hard and
from behind she finds another
among the cappuccinos and cut
daffodils reflecting off mahogany pools,
the used bookstores and patisseries,
among the meadowlarks and
the old disheveled barn behind
the stone and glass cottage.
And so when you enter her lilacs
and cobbled drive, or meet her
at the park with deer and copper beeches,
you are mindful, self-conscious,
astonished by her apricot skin, her
bountiful hair, her honey sweet
hibiscus hair, and you know
you are entering her world, her poems,
you all mud-skinned and anxious,
thick-fingered and callused,
stiff, all slapdash and rat terrier,
and sure enough after the mornings
of lush cotton sheets and ruddy
pears, lunches of avocados
and cold Gorgonzola salad,
dinners of cold chicken and yams
and soft furry peaches that tickle
your teeth in their golden flesh,
you see them appear in her notebooks,
gradually at first, neat poems written
with a poised and perfect hand,
you see intimations, intricacies
of the familiar, suggestions of
your intonation, your petty crimes,
traces of your hands, and hers,
the sound of your breath
in the deep meadow night,
the way her bed creaks in her flat,
how her kisses steal her away
from her words, her shuddering
lips, you know then as you take
once last look at the pond and
its dragonflies, the choking
water lilies, the insects buzzing
in the cattails, in your last days
of reading Rumi and that none
of this, nothing, is about you,
you are not the paramour, the
Lothario, the sad philosopher
in these poems coming faster now,
you are the restlessness, the
scruffed and noisy sound of leaving,
unkempt doubt washing over you,
you know then that you won't
drown yourself in sorrow or
long after her meditations
in black leotards, no, you will
no longer lust after that lotus pose,
her calm presentness, no, you'll
wear wrinkled shirts, eat hot dogs
slathered with ketchup and onions,
you'll avoid bookstores and
swear off coffee shops and
organic food, you'll survive,
traces in print, clues, evidence
of some intimate endearment
and passion now suggested and
so easily forgotten, save the
faint whiff of lilacs and coffee,
sweet clover and the mad
honey of haying.
That year he lived
as a vagabond holed up
in that fourth floor
attic on South Rose street
with the rollaway bed
and toaster oven and hot plate
drinking Schlitz
tall boys and smoking Old Golds.
He worked in the
lumberyard from dawn to dusk
unloading boxcars
and drank Mogen David with
Cactus Jack in
the railyard weeds. At night, sweating
in the attic,
he read philosophy he didn't
understand, that
and Rod McKuen's bad poetry,
ate TV dinners
from the toaster oven and
listened to
Patsy Cline and Dylan on his
hifi but it
was afterwards, every night, after
reading the words
he did not understand, or
understood all
too well, as he lay naked in
the darkness of
the attic, the day's heat
enshrouding him
in sweat, his brain a bit boozy
from the hours of
lifting lumber,
it was then that he listened to
the world's loneliness,
the woman below visited nightly by
the 2 AM drunkard
who banged her against the headboard
and then departed,
the tick-ticking of someone' s
oscillating fan,
insects clicking
against the streetlight's glass,
distant cars
climbing the graveyard hill where junkies
and stoned lovers
smashed empty pints against headstones,
he could hear the
anguished cries of those Dutch emigres,
his people, family, the generations
of men seeking
asylum from their madness and finding only
fear haunting
their minds behind the stone walls and
the caged windows
and the single electric cords hanging
from the ceilings.
for jk
This is no ancient mariner, no
clam digger, it's a man with a blackberry
texting from the ocean's rim
among the children with buckets
building castles to ward off the waves'
slow scrawl, scratching glyphs in the sand
with driftwood sticks and seaweed
flags. It's the issue of being and
time he's considering, the shimmer
and shadow of minnows in the shallows,
the hissing breath as the gentle waves
recede, it's the scattered path of footprints
fading in the wet sand, the steady
pulse of the slow waves themselves,
the slow combers unraveling into
foam, how that sailboat anchored offshore
rises and falls, how the amplitude of
dolphins swimming up the coast, diving
and surfacing, their slick gray skin and fins
perfect in the ocean, how the sun overhead
seems to arc across the sky, the faded
gibbous moon sinking in the eat, , and
here below his wet and callused feet
scrabble over so many shells tumbling
ashore, sand dollars and sea stars battered
and chipped, the sweet suck and pull of the soft
sand that buries his feet.
And what of the thoughts of this man, the
dialogue unravelling in his mind
as he scours the shore, where is the record
of his great meditations, his postulates,
his arguments, his inner sanctum,
his truth?
You can hear them in the salty hiss,
the skittering legs of the plovers,
the bounce and clang of the harbor buoy,
the fading cries of seagulls -- there is no
"I," no sense of one's self, one's being
nothing remains here beyond these
measurements, these particulars, the
space between his steps, his fading
footprints, how the water's foam seems to
sink beneath the sand, and disappear.
I dropped by that Starbucks on the shore to
drink coffee and who should I find there but
Memory drinking a decaf caramel macchiato
and nibbling apple crumb cake, he'd gone bald
since I last saw him, now he wore thick glasses
and a wrinkled raincoat, like some washed up
philosopher. LIfe hadn't treated him well, he'd
been reading Levine and fhe next thing
he knew he was in Shelbyville working
the Kwik Trip Lotto and hot dog carousel.
I felt bad, standing there with my Venti
coffee, my bermuda shorts andf flip flops,
I'm on vacation, I told him, could I
join him? He shrugged his shoulders and said what
he always said, "it's a free country, suit
yourself." There were some awkward moments, there
always are, I told him I'd made it, I
manage accounts for a large data processing
firm (it sounds like I'm on a game show, I laughed,
but that's what we're required to say), I get
four weeks off a year, can you believe it?,
I'd quit the booze after the divorce and
found someone who gives me my space, she's
just returned from some spa in Taos and,
hey, wouldn't you know it, I'm writing a novel.
Well, it's mostly vignettes, slices of life,
but I know they'll add up to something.
It's my chi, Donna says. I asked him what
he'd been doing with himself all these years
and he said, well, since the Great Disruption
he'd lost his house on the gulf, it was just a
shack, really, but still a shock, now he just
combs the beach -- really, I comb the beach
looking for anything of value. I collect
driftwood, I find coins, I study the waves.
You remember that time when we plucked conchs
from the shore when we were kids? He'd spent a year
in Petoskey working in a lumberyard
and living in a trailer under a radio tower.
He'd foud his way to Cairo where he
planted trees and sold books, he'd given up
the writing and figured he'd get a houseboat
and just drift away until he found something
new. I grew uncomfortable, suddenly,
thinking of Donna back on the beach
flinging sea stars into the surf, I've
got to be going, I said, I fetched sixty
dollars from my pocket and said here,
get yourself something to eat, maybe at
that little crab shack up the shore, and then
I walked off, a little self-conscious, he'd
lost it, it was sad, even poignant, I
felt an ache in my ribs, the smell of lilac
and curried chicken sandwiches and
words floating in the wind, just out of reach,
but I kept walking into the sunlight
and the faint sound of the surf hissing,
and the smell of hibiscus and that sweet
dying of the gulf. This would not be the last
time we'd meet, I knew, but it would be our
last together here. I hoped he'd understand
but knew, of course, that he wouldn't and that
he'd grow to begrudge me in the future,
as I too would begrudge him.
