C'mon now touch me babe

BEGGAR'S BANQUET

I’ve heard that you should always have a plan B. I didn’t even have a plan A. The only thing I could admit to for sure was that I had gotten romantically hung up on a beautiful and deeply wounded woman who, up until that week, I never knew existed. And, that in some eerily providential way, her life had crossed paths with my own. It all seemed dream-like, unfathomable. How else could I explain encountering the box, then meeting her, and the Fab Four’s arrival here in Ellenville? It was all too creepy.

It had been a good day, up until a point. Allison (and Angus) had both come to class. Everyone had the opportunity to speak, to share about their week, and to say goodbye. Allison exchanged smiles (and notes) with her classmates. I expressed my gratitude for each of them. We would meet again later in the day, our class gathered with all the other classes—“Poetry,” and “Memoir,” and “Fiction for Dreamers” among them—at a banquet, the week’s closing ceremony.

I admit I got a little misty, listening as the speaker read a poem her class had composed for the occasion. “Why stories,” she asked. “Why poems? How can we justify such trivial pursuits in a world where people are beheaded by zealots, slain over drug turf, where death seems to gain the upper-hand every evening at six?” The answer, it seemed to me, was self-evident. I looked at Allison and I was crushed by want. I turned, glanced at my watch, leaned and whispered to her. She nodded and I rose. I adjusted my tie, shook hands all around—an occasional hug—and off I sped across the floor and out of the hall. I wanted to get over to the Melrose Group for another round of very important goodbyes. Allison and I would meet up later. I had a good idea where we might confront the four dingleberries and get her voice back.

The long corridor that led to the elevators was carpeted in stainless brown plugs. I loosened my tie and ducked into the men’s room, the door swishing shut behind. The tiles gleamed; every surface had been buffed. I was alone and it was silent—the air-conditioning whirring in the ceiling vents. I did my business and ran the spigot. I thought I heard some feet patter past, but no one entered. I turned the water off. Again I heard a scurrying past the door. The lights dimmed, then came back up. I moved to the door.

Crowds of people were charging past. I stood in the open doorway, floundering, at a loss as to what this all might mean. The air-conditioner humming behind, feet shuffling the carpet in front of where I stood, suddenly I heard the shrill crescendo from without. Sirens. I entered the herd streaming steadily toward the stairs. A dull whistle buzzed the outside of the building. A razor-like wind, the sound contracting and expanding, gusting fiercely. Then it dawned on me: tornado! I half-smiled, half-shit. I surveyed the tide of faces all around me, each one more somber than the last—bodies giving way to a fearful undertow—not quite panic, but close.

I followed down the stairwell with the rest. Once at the bottom, out through the door we all poured. How strange to find it dark. Though it had been nearly a week since my last drink, it felt as if I’d lost several hours to a drunken tear. It was two in the afternoon, nearly black as night—and cold. People rushed for their cars but to no purpose. A long line of traffic clogged the one thoroughfare in and out of Ellenville as cars inched their way toward the Interstate. I recalled the warning tacked on the back of the door, up in my room. I jogged off in that direction, dodging passing bodies at every turn, scanning the crowd for a glimpse of a beautiful woman with an enormous dog as I went.

This sudden turn seemed the strangest thing to me. Looking all around, only confusion, people of every size and shape running past, heads bobbing, bodies weaving. This was the closest I’d come to anything dreamlike in some time. The line of traffic along Dubuque wasn’t moving. Folks wanted to get home. I wanted to get as far out of town as possible, until I could be certain disaster would not visit this inherently good hamlet.

The siren began another pass, a gradual heightening. Dogs yowled in response. I wanted to raise my voice in unison with theirs and cocked my head against the rising pitch. The sound felt like something solid and it mixed with the wind that whipped us all. A shrill and sensate wail started thrumming in my head. I imagined a hilltop, one as high as Ellentine Road, its peak set against the sky like a towering brass reed set to cut the wind so that even the air was sliced in two as it flew screaming past. The howl grew so fierce that I was about to cover my ears when I heard something filter through. It was faint. I did not acknowledge it and stayed my course, heading steadily for the Mayflower Tower with every step. But again I heard something and this time I turned.

Now, what did I know, except books?—not just books, but cases of them, a library full lining every wall in my house. And here I was among all these people, people swarming in every direction, seeking refuge from the threatening tornado. Here, when I looked around, it wasn’t shelves I saw, not the backs of books with faded spines. Real live people were all around. It occurred to me that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch some of them. A chugging and a periodic POP drew my eyes to the right and the orange color registered. In the traffic, a pickup, three roustabouts sitting shoulder-to-shoulder inside the cab, one in the bed behind. Yes, them.

My feet changed direction. Looking round, I spotted a familiar face, and then another, and another. A girl carrying a guitar; purple hair. A man in a blue jumpsuit, hair pulled back behind his ears, his step determined—the Melrose group, where I'd planned on being by now if not for the threat of a twister. My eyes drew down on the jalopy chugging along six inches at a time. I could see the Ohio barroom. I remembered every orange detail, and tasted the stale scent of an old spongy carpet in the back of my throat. The music they’d blotted out with stupidities, crassness—their assault on anything civilized, anything lyric, harmonies, guitars, voices—a song began to play in my ears. Everything faded to something else, distant—they alone, these strange new people, drew into focus. I flashed back to purple days, days of wine, red things. Days of short skirts and girls whose kisses I scarcely recall, a boyhood and an age of becoming. Thighs. Backs of white calves. Heat.

Round Here

After a Fight on a Last February Wednesday

If I lost you
I would be like a lonely recidivist
sentenced to a place where there is nothing good
to touch or hear or see or taste.

If I lost you
the desperate psychopath,
would break in all over again,
out to steal this light.

Once beautiful together, have we
suddenly derailed,
lights dim and flashing red?

It’s true. I’ll beg.
Turn these bars to air, once more,
white crinolines fluttering in spring,
breezy lace curtains
shadows hopping sprite-like in

the light of you.

* * * * * * *

What is it about this woman, other than the fact I find her mesmerizingly beautiful?

Even her soft laughter—beautiful. But also tender. Its sound is worked into her anger like a vein of running water. Her eyes—beautiful too, beguiling. Within their translucent hues she hides and discloses all at once.

Her reticences are part of that same confusing lack of finality. If I wait she will arrive. But, I still talk over her, never meaning to. Her voice bubbles up in starts and stops, and I haven’t learned their cadence quite yet. Listen, John. Listen.

The insights she shares speak intelligently about the multifarious world. I think she and I share a plane of experience. We see the world, not exactly alike, but in much the same way. We have felt the sting of fear and the staunch courageous stand. We have felt the surge of anger in the blood and the tender drift of caring that unfolds in tears.

“We.” It is that one personal pronoun that speaks to our pluralities. Old familiars occupy the space between when we sit around coffee, always too strong. Perhaps our feelings have been brewed that way as well. Her silences are movements of the self, her words are rungs to climb. She encourages me to rest, inspires me to action. I can be who I am with her. She can be who she is round here. And, I guess, we will sometimes fight as well.

Crazy

She would later tell me that she thought I was crazy.

Though I did not intend to mention it, had not even thought of it, when she finally showed up, she and her dog, both being very surprised by the fact that I was there, on the side of Ellentine Road—I spilled my guts. Not only did I tell her that I did not think her story was a work of fiction, that I believed the events actually happened—to her—I also told her how drawn to her I was. I took her hand, looked at her and said, “Allison, I am enamored.”

She pulled her hand away. I’d made a mistake. All of it, I thought, was a huge blunder. “I apologize,” I said. “I made you uncomfortable.” But before I could retract what I had said or in some way qualify my feelings for her, she scrunched up her lips, exhaled, and resumed chugging up what had to be the steepest hill in Iowa. I jumped into the air, raising her story over my head, waving it. “I know who they are,” I shouted to her.

She stopped. She turned and looked at me. I held the story out and again I said the words, caringly this time, “I know who they are, Allison. I’ve seen them.” The dog and she walked back to the car. She opened the door and pulled the seat forward allowing Angus to squeeze into the backseat. Then she planted herself in the passenger seat and pulled the door closed. I stood there for a moment. This is good, I thought, looking in through the window and smiling. She gestured to me as if to say, “What are you waiting for?”

I got in and looked at her. I ached. Amazing. But so sad. Allison didn’t ache the way I did. It was plain. She suffered. I handed her the story she’d written and she lifted each page looking for my comments, which at some point I’d stopped offering. After three pages I had intuited by the writing itself that it had been no fiction. “Did you want me to know?” I asked her. She bent her head to one side as if to say, “I don’t know.” Then she began to cry. I touched her arm—smooth, sculpted. My heart was breaking. I looked at my watch. I had half and hour in which to get to class. It was Friday, the last day. I would leave for home on Sunday.

“C’mon,” I said. “We shouldn’t be late for class.” I started the car and headed off with this beautiful and listless pixie at my side.

When some weeks later she finally got around to telling me she thought me crazy, her reason was that she believed only a "nutjob" would want to spend time with her, much less want a committed relationship with her. She had a point. But I couldn’t help myself. I was enamored, truly. Maybe it was pixie dust or something very like it.

He Was a Friend of Mine

After Watching the Very Recently Late David Foster Wallace Give a Reading on Youtube

“There’s an extended halt to the action during which I decamp.” Words written by David Foster Wallace. Sadly prophetic. Some Harpers piece on baton twirlers. He made others laugh.

Suddenly I want to ask, why didn’t you just use the name "Dave?” Or even Davy, or the e.e.-cummings-lowercase-thing dave, or after a six-pack-and-a-half, Dave-the-Rave Foster Wallace? No judgment here, bro. Just a thought is all. Your choice, David Foster Wallace, seems so formally elongated, almost academic. Wouldn’t more casual have been easier for you? Less pressure, less invasive public expectation, therefore less evasion on your part; less adjudication by a world impossible not to disappoint and by which we are mostly disappointed.

Saliva issues. Drenched bandanas. Hugs. Too few hugs.

Too few hugs.

I think of your wife, DFW. I could have taken that call. It's what I do. “911. What’s your emergency?” I go through the 911 script. The millionth time. Straight forward. No big words.

“My husband hung himself.” I check my hearing for the stratitude of her claim. I review not only her words, but the way they are served. And suddenly I see her. Oh, I don’t see her, not right then and there, but I see her. She is severed from her last breath by, what for most of us, will remain unspeakable. She’s seen it. She’s been hit.

“Okay,” I say, because I think "okay" is a comforting word. My sense of things tells me that it has the same effect as reading the words “Dutch Noodles” on a menu in a roadside Pennsylvania family restaurant. I repeat it, deeply, sonorously, “Okay.” I am conscious of the effect my voice transfers to hearers. Its monotone is cool and easy. Its timbre (unnoticeable is the trick) lends a body to the voice. “I am here,” it says—like music, all by itself. Suddenly, I am the Adagio, that part that lingers long after Barber has decided to be done, once and for all, with some fixed sense of “what should be.” Of some final thing, a finished project.

“The saddest piece of music ever written.” That’s what some scholars claim for Barber’s Adagio. I make it a point to tell that to my composition classes, true or not true. (In addition to working for 911, I also teach.) “The violins” I say, “draw you out from inside.” I motion with my hand. “They can kill you.”

She, the wife, will need time to heal. For him, the husband, the deadline is passed.

Lay your hands on me, please. Touch. Touch and go. A curious phrase. A furious craze.

I watch DFW on Youtube, “Thanks a lot,” says David, dave, Davy, as he steps, unassumingly, away from the podium.

Prayers, family. Writing, and prayers. Violins. Laughter. "What's left of before."

None of it "okay."

All the leaves are gone

MID TO LATE SEPTEMBER

Perhaps it happens overnight
that leaves begin to sense it,
that suddenly their hour is short

The process of tinge hovers on the periphery of season
they do not see until it is upon them,
an immanence they have no name for

they themselves would tell it if they could,
of late, instead, the leaves grow kind of moody

. . . Go ask Alice

CHESSHIRE CATS

eyes alert

quick as cats'

the chess players

bump and bang and parry-check

close-mated war-board

two face off

one's rooked

one strikes

august heat, night on a savannah

hunters crouched in tall grasses

Waiting for you to . . . come along

Waiting

Allison. That was her name. And the day she entered my classroom, Monday, she was wearing a spaghetti-strapped sundress, dark burgundy to blue, a busy pattern of red and white flowers spread over her fit and slender form. She took a seat to my left, and her eyes, blue enough to contain clouds, were most often cast downward. Though I resisted the urge, my head would start to turn in her direction whenever she moved, even if only a finger. I could barely think and so assigned her a place on the periphery of my conscious mind. If I engaged her in any way directly, I feared I’d be unable to teach.

Because her skin was white white, she looked delicate, even fragile, porcelain. And this was so despite the fact she out-muscled most of the men in the room—her shoulders beautifully orbed, her upperback bare, diamonded. When class ended and everyone had left, I just sat there listening. I listened to the low-heeled clacking of her sandals as they receded down the hallway. An airy rush, the outside door pulling open and swinging shut. Silence. Absence. A week later I would still recall the backs of her calves with pleasure.

By mid-week, I’d started imagining the kinds of music she’d listen to, the movies she would most enjoy, what spending a day with her would be like. The idea of sharing time with her, of touching her, impeded my concentration. Even simple tasks like reading grew cumbersome. I had grown incapable of maintaining a casual conversation for more than three minutes without finding myself distracted because some phrase used, or some passing resemblance would bring her to mind. I appeared to be an idiot, even to myself. Now it was Friday, the last day of class. This thing had gotten out of hand. I determined to take some action.

Word was, if you waited long enough alongside the hilliest road in Ellenville, in time, she and her dog would come running past. The hilliest road in the city was situated just beyond the Prarie Ridge Mall, along Ellenville’s northernmost boundary. I grabbed a file stuffed with students’ stories, swept my keys off the desk, and headed for my car. It was nearly nine. I’d be there in fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. I pulled out of the May Tower lot and headed downtown for gas and a little grub.

Now, there were not a great many high ridges nor much steep terrain in Iowa. Cornfields comprise a good deal of the turf. But when I got past the Prarie Ridge Mall, my car began to climb and cough and I thought blood would seep from my pores in fat, pressurized drops. Ellentine Road was the steepest hill I’d ever encountered. Driving up its spine was like driving in the direction of the sky, as if the all too visible heavens were my final destination. I feared my car, nearly perpendicular to earth by then, might tumble backwards at any moment. And though that thought was disconcerting, it was not enough to stop me.

I pulled onto the shoulder about half-way up what was, I guessed, the one mountain in Iowa. I wondered how Allison could run so much, so hard. Something had to drive her. Unbounded energy seemed to fuel her beautiful and busy legs. I imagined her calves churning like pistons, her thighs surging with strength. This much at least had changed, I’d forgotten about feeling depressed. Being out here with the sense of some approaching unknown, some potentially new and wonderful thing, raised my spirits so that I grew keenly aware of everything around me.

She got legs . . .

NUMBLESS

Her legs were not very long, though neither were they very short, each sculpted limb, thin-skinned, roundly muscled. I wondered if she knew that her dress had ridden up. Or more accurately, I wondered how much of her might be wistfully and secretly aware. People—we hide things. But there I was eyeballing her thigh, holding an appropriate silence, a silence mixed with the pain of pretending I did not notice the whole fleshy scene. I watched her. Her dog watched me.

Not that you can blame a guy. Yet, after having read her story, “The Story of a Girl,” I withheld any present inclination to move things up a notch. I suppressed any words that might burst open with sudden and resident desire. That was my “stuff.” I’d have to deal with it. As for her “stuff,” I suspect even now, that she yearned for nothing more deeply than the freedom to own the fact that she was beautiful. What I was learning however, was that as beautiful as she was, for her, “beauty” had resulted in only pain and trouble. I could see that she had learned, of necessity, the safety of “alone,” the untouchability of “ugly.” And as I read her words I came to understand that the thing she wished for more than anything, was the same thing she feared most of all—connectedness, union with another human being. I imagined I could hear the chambers of her insides echoing desolately. She had retreated far within and remained alone. I recalled the image of her leg and yearned for her.

"Ached" may be a better word than "yearned" for what it was I felt. In fact, I’d started to ache whenever this enigmatically beautiful woman crossed my path. It was physical. It was not long before this physical aching began consuming my nights as well. I remained unsure whether it was her presence or her absence that proved the heavier burden. Words continue to fail. “Beautiful” simply can’t cut it. Yet it’s as close as I might come. Even now, I cannot pin down a name for whatever resonated out of her streamlined features, her porcelain frailties, her mouth so like a doll’s tipped with wings. I felt a strange familiarity between us whenever she was near, and acted as if I’d known her better than I did. This was so even though I’d never really conversed with her except in the most casual exchanges. Those few times were matters of polite and necessary teacher-student brevities.

But it had been a week since her dress hiked up in class, a week since I’d read her story, and in that time she’d not returned. I had seen those four fools roll into town in their rickety tin can of a truck, looking just as gruff and stupid and making as much of a racket as when I’d left them back in that Ohio lounge. I was growing sick.

I’m not going to tell you that I never drank again. But during my time in Ellenville I decided that I needed to make that call, that I had to decide exactly why I'd come to Iowa. I needed the money. That was true. But still, this was Iowa. Many “greats” had passed through these precincts as they undertook to learn their craft. I was on hallowed ground and I knew it. I needed to honor the artists and the craft, the writers, the poets. Only, it hurt. Without a drink I was less numb. My guard was down. I was numbless.

And so it also seemed the silent beauty of this strange woman had infiltrated bits of me I’d thought long dead. It frustrated me to think that she was gone now, gone just as suddenly as she’d appeared on that first windy night by the river. Everything seemed twisted; I was living between two selves. What is more, I’d stopped believing, shunned everything I’d been taught was true and good, things like “love wins the day,” the notion that the universe honors good intention and hard work, that the bad are punished and the good are rewarded. Karma, resurrection, colored eggs, reindeer: they all seemed part of the same puerile fantasy.

I knew for some time that love had failed, over and over and over again. Love does not win the day. That's what I believed. Dreams do not come true. Actions speak louder than words and most other things. I could handle the fact we all die. The thing I couldn’t take was the idea that I'd realized all these lessons far too late, too late to make a different kind of life, too late to stake a new claim in this dog-eat-dog world where subterfuge and cruelty win power and status and wealth while the rest of us mope around wondering what went wrong. Some people said the world had gone bad. I sided with others who insisted it had always been this way. And really, it didn’t matter much to me. Not now. The whole kit-and-kaboodle felt like a last attempt at a sad reminiscence.

I am always surprised to find that life can go from exhilaration to despair in the span of ten minutes. “Despair” is actually a shitty word for the pit of darkness it claims to account for. “Despondency” may come closer to a sense of the thing. But at some point words always fall short of the thing they describe. When I think about it, I didn’t just one day lose my ability to dream. No, when I think about it, I must admit that I no longer wanted to dream. Somehow I’d grown convinced that dreams were lies, bulwarks against the painful, despairing-and-despondent truths of our sad and ultimately dreamless lives.

And that’s where I'd gotten stuck. But all those feelings hadn’t really taken root, not fully, until I realized she had gone. I read her story over again, feeling alone and helpless, much the way she must have felt. I imagined her body, light and quick, running down the road in her athletic gear. And as I read, I knew it wasn’t just a story. I knew those four dickwads had done unspeakable things--to her, and probably to others. I also knew that she was beautiful and intelligent, silent and driven, robbed of her voice. Still, she could write. I wondered too, whether she still dreamed and if so, what kinds of things she dreamed about.

It would be crazy for me to say I loved her. I had yet to hold a decent conversation with her. I imagined the kinds of conversations we might have had. I wondered, as I lay sleepless through the long hours of the night, what her voice would sound like. Our tastes, i guessed, would be different. She was younger. I’d talk with her about my marriage and divorce and the loss of a little girl I had promised to love yet could not love enough. Those things. I wanted to cry, only, I could not. This limbo is tearless as well as numbless. I am alone with my thoughts too often. I would try to find her.

Helter Scherherazade

Her Story

She began her story in a prolific voice. She ended on a devastatingly tragic note. “The history of human speech is really the history of voice,” she began, “and the history of voice is really the history of everything. It resounds in the unfolding of a singing universe, echoes in a cockle shell of varying scale, a rotating octave out of which it blares forcefully—palpable, operatic, beastly. It extends out of the beginning of things that carry their own ends in finite and numbered breaths, the dying dragon, the hero’s song. If we cannot hear it, I’ve always thought anyway, one might as well not be born.”

I read straight through. I laid the last disturbing page on the table. Exhausted, worn out, I closed my eyes. How terrible, violation and silence: violence. How wicked. The writing vivid—beautifully rendered evil—“The Story of a Girl.” I didn’t see it coming till they held her down. Over and over they thrust their arms down her throat, their hands, knuckles and wrists elongated, fingers thick and groping. They wrenched out the one thing that, by nature, seemed wholly her own.

“Down her throat they plunged, grabbing hold, first one till he tired, then the next, each one trying harder than the last to dislodge it. Cold to her tears, glad at her humiliations, eager for her gurgling cries—the more she struggled the more they punched and twisted and banged.”

And then it gave. One of them finally drew it out of her, blood dripping, roots dangling. I continued reading, turning page after page. I could see him and he looked like he’d gone mad. Light glimmered in his cupped hands like song itself. He lingered there, hovered above her body which had gone limp. Her mouth moved but she made no sound. I saw his face, saw all their faces. My heart banged. Never had I seen anything as sad, her face, her hair matted, her eyes running the color of blood. Beauty made to feel ugly, joy murdered, goodness left for dead. I touched my cheek. It was her cheek.

I knew them all. I’d seen the four of them before. They had raised an ugliness in me then, but that seemed inconsequential compared to the gaping pit that, then and there, alone in my room, opened in my chest. I was shaking— impotent rage. The image of her face, the way he bent over her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear, folding the light of her voice in the dark hollow of his hands.

*

That's when it hit, out of nowhere. The thought. Cold sweat running down a tall slender glass, sudsy. I could smell it. Her story had twisted my thinking. The taste of a drink infiltrated my body. Craving reared its head, bared its teeth. Inside my body an unnameable tangle of wire sought relief. (I thought I’d gotten past this thing.) I stood, walked into the kitchen, ran some water, splashed my face. With intention, I drew deep breaths, turned, leaned back against the counter. Why are you here? The question presented itself as it had before. To drink?

It took a minute, but I stood my ground and soon it came clear. It was only a story! How could I? I snickered, turned, and set some water on the stove for tea, grabbed a cup out of the cupboard. And just as I had nearly returned to myself fully, a ruckus grew outside. A jumbling rattle clanked and pinged. I turned to the window. Walking round the table, I peered out. Rank unbelief nailed my feet to the floor then. Impossible, I thought. It could not be. Them.

Houses of the Holy

STRUCTURE

People sometimes tell me I’m a "people person." I laugh to myself whenever they do. I understand their reasons for saying so. I can be garrulous. But they don’t know how things really run inside of me. There are different levels inside of me. When I say I am a structured person, I don’t mean that I do things in an orderly manner. No. When I use the word structure in this way, I am referring to a dilapidated house of wooden crates and planks, warped and molded and glued together, melded by twisted, rusty nails, oversized bolts. My inner rooms are an amalgamation, a ramshackle clubhouse where people hide inside whatever room they choose.

One room is all purple, light and dark, and there are bowls filled with little bits of paper laced with drugs. These bowls are placed politely on doilied tabletops as if they held sweet candies wrapped in cellophanes. There are windows in that room, and trees outside, a park where children laugh and cry and shout.

In another room there is no light. This is where the half-people gravitate, those half-people whose transitional floors gave way too soon, planks crumbling beneath their feet before they had time to cross from adolescence to adulthood. So they fall into that gap, one that opens somewhere between a pimpled, glad invisibility and the somber space below, a dark space where they land, bodies thumping, among the shriveled skins of dried up selves piled around the room like buffalo hides.

There are rooms where people die too early and others die too late. Rooms full of sadists and idealists. Rooms where pretending never stops. Most pleasant are the kitchens, or the rooms with the overstuffed chairs. Some have greeting spaces and staircases. I have built this house inside of me.

It seems that I’m involved in something new, though nothing yet is clear. One thing not yet clear is whether this flimsy house will be demolished, or if I’m only adding on another room. There are levels here where what you see is seemingly what you get. And there remain too, sublunary hiding spaces where people (people like me at least) really live. For a long time I’ve been thinking that once a room is built, it’s built.

I’ve been trying to exercise too. It’s not my nature. I’m doing it because the world "out there" requires physical continuity. I’ve never been physical. When I was a child I could not run fast, could not skate gracefully. I lacked balance. Others seemed born with it.

When I was capable of real sleep, I’d have this recurring series of dreams based on real-life events. The dreams are set in the same summer I learned to ride a bicycle. My father had rented us a bungalow near the beach. That summer stays with me even without dreams. I’d fish for minnows in the bay. I'd stuff bread inside a milk bottle that I’d sink, a rope tied round its slender neck. Fat minnows swam in after the bread and I’d pull the bottle in. I discovered places crickets lived, in a nearby vacant lot, all sandy dirt and rocks, tall grasses clumped around.

One morning I walked up on a yellowish ball of larvae swarming alongside the body of a grasshopper who’d been nicked by the tire of a passing car. Apparently, her pregnant belly had popped. There they were, her squirming babies baking on warm tar. I killed a praying mantis too, behind the house that summer, just because. I hear talk about alcoholic behavior. I sometimes wonder if that’s the kind of thing that’s meant.

* * *

In place of sleep comes gravity; gravity and an unqualifiable peace—both fill the air I breathe, here in my bed, sober, detached. And as I put some sober days together I am finding this truth, that the more I let go the more I tap some hidden and sustaining principle. It’s as if when I do my part, taking care of what’s in a day, tilling the garden as it were, of my own hidden life, then whatever it is that’s out there smiles on me; not in a way that “honors” my daily endeavors because I deserve a reward or something—no, more in a way that these two operating principles, letting go and empowerment, simply resonate with one another. At Melrose House they say: “Just do the next right thing.” Not easy for a putz like me, but I’ve been trying it on for size and well, so far so good.

When, at night, I lie in bed I think about the day. That Monday’s instructors conference, or how far I walked, how many bars I counted (Seventeen. This is a college town for sure). I think about writing again, and my first class. My first class; I must admit it went well. Imagine my surprise when she walked in. Her hair was up, and she wore a flowered dress. Stunning really. I held my breath. I’ve got a good poker face.

And her dog—no one in the room batted an eye. Apparently she takes it everywhere she goes, that enormous, broadly muscled beast. Her silences. I’m unsure which is more ominous, the dog or the quiet that surrounds her. Everyone in class but me seemed to already know: she cannot speak.

“Have you ever felt really empty?” She handed me that note a few nights back. I had not recognized them then: the first six words of my first and only book. She’s a fan. How Glea would laugh at that notion. Maybe not. Glea’s the one that got me here after all.

I’m the one who can’t believe I still have fans, but in fact, ninety-nine percent of my student’s are there because they loved the book. My book. I don’t want to screw this up. God, please, don’t let me screw this up. “Let go. Let God,” they say at Melrose House. I close my eyes. Something near to sleep arrives. Gravity. It is quiet.

I-i, II-ii, III . . . M M M

Who can calculate which there is more of, water
or blood? Salt and brine, or a sanguinary course
of heat? Sky and cloud, or the oxygen blue pulse,
in-beat of a circuitous and ceaseless rondeau? Source
of poetry, moon-drawn, displaced by the falling prow of

the sky, the rolling wave of the planets, the rush, the lull,
iced and thawed in the history of numbers, seventy beats,
One-one, Two-two, Three . . . a thousand thousand thousand
shark and flesh infested Oceanias. Only a slight hint, a
scent, bare and funereal, of salt-blue, of red that breaches

the shore, the rising tide of all that is, everything in
this one instant, breathing, beating, effervescent baptism,
crumbling mountain of ash and salt, the flood that overtakes,
that sucks the air from our mouths, that liquifies the ground
beneath our feet, broken shells, endless undertow, spume.

This Magic Moment

Wine


Sometimes, they say, you can taste chocolate in the wine, pepper, eucalyptus. Critics suggest wine has "structure." Nonsense. Not to say some wines aren't a bit like turpentine while others flow like silk, but after a bottle (or two or three) why would a palette care one bit? It does not take long for the head to turn to effusion and whimsy. Whenever I drink wine I taste something broken: bone, blood, steel. The wine I drink has teeth in it—my own.

Yes, I know, the accident again. It is always with me, even when I don't notice it until, turning, I catch my reflection in a shop window, or until a certain slant of sun reminds me that all of life is a Nothing's short reprieve—no more, no less.

More than one person has asked, "Did you see a light when it happened?" Emphatically I tell all of them no. No, I say. There was no light at the end of a long tunnel. Nor did I see my own face laughing at any point, my boy-body riding on a park swing at four or five, or myself all pimply faced and a shy high school freshman, a first kiss, a fight with my father. My life did not flash before me. "That's a bad sign," at least one person has informed me.

What I knew at the moment when my face was actually being destroyed, the only thing I knew, was "the real," which I have ever since believed has its own significant power. Nature. Life yes. Death yes. Yes, when the corner of a concrete slab busted through my car window, me suspended upside down, the car overturned and spinning, and when that slab, overcoming the shield of my flailing hands, my arms, as it momentously began to purée (I heard the bones cracking) my cheeks, the only thing offered me was an obliteration not to be denied which, in and of itself, once come, was not as bad as it sounds. Black I tell them, is what I saw. Nothing the thing I experienced first hand. I surrendered. I was overcome. Lights out.

Obviously, I survived. And when I hear this spurious talk of wine, these are the things I think. An empty bottle weighs twice as much as when it had been full. It is filled instead with craving and consequence, with shame and despondency. Someone has said, "Live the life you have imagined." What happens when you look around to see that all the rot and poppycock of your life is in fact the life you have imagined, the one you have built, the one for which you alone are responsible?

* * * * *

The early morning sun was high and bright. Iowa in August is nothing if not hot. "Sorry I'm late," I said to the table full of strangers, a cafeteria-sized room so brimming with light that it washed out the color of the walls. A woman wearing a nametag (I hesitatingly clipped mine on), well spoken, well-dressed—also drenched in light—welcomed everyone, raised excited and expectant hopes for the week. She gestured from behind a thin podium at the front of the room. The sound system recast her voice in metallic, muffled airs.

There were tables all around just like ours, circled with men and women, nametags matching little folded cards on napkins. The man to my left scooted his chair over to let me in. I was dripping. I clipped my nametag to my sweaty shirt and smiled nervously, a little absently even. My thoughts were elsewhere.

I had noticed some curious structures as I walked along my chosen route—hexagonal frames of metal-sheathed, glass-paneled domes, modest semi-circular buildings set like giant buckyballs here and there around the campus lawns, all made of glass. Inside each one, visible at their centers, stood a vertical firebrand, a dark post with a flame on top. I imagined them the red eyes of leviathans peering out of time. Each structure looked identical, fragile, insubstantial.

"Those are the Author's Houses," the man I sat next to told me after the Instructor Orientation had ended. "The few fortunate students admitted to the university are each assigned a house. It's where they'll write their stories. We are very lucky to be here," he said with conviction. His nametag said Bill. "Thanks Bill," I said.

Drawing a handkerchief from my pocket, I patted my brow and turned to my right where an attractive, modestly dressed woman was sipping a glass of water. Her name was Gladys, and I learned she and her husband had moved to Ellenville from New Jersey. "There's an inherent goodness here," she said, nodding, smiling. I did not know how to react to any of it, the orientation, the Author's Houses, inherent goodness. I asked for directions to the men's room and excused myself.

These Author's Houses, as my tablemates had called them, did not appeal to me. Too symmetrical. Too something. Lovely in a decorative kind of way, perhaps. But I thought, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, give me monsters that burn and howl, not these burnished domes of glass. Small blessing: they'd remain vacant for the summer, save for the red flicker of a dragon's eye in each.

Stepping outside, I once again felt the heat of the sun beat hard against my frame. No matter. I had another meeting to attend, at The Melrose Group. I thought it a simple twelve-step meeting place, but its compass was broader than that. Before the week was up I'd learn that Melrose was actually a halfway house for people struggling with feeling problems of every kind, a self-proclaimed nut house (how they'd laugh about that).

Still, as I had not yet been alerted to that fact, I sat, calmly watching an old man the color of putty scoot his chair in and out under the wooden, candle-lit table that ran the entire length of the room. An incessant tick rippled his cheek just beneath his right eye. A girl with garish blue hair entered carrying a guitar case. The door swung closed behind her. Others arrived, some sedate, some bent as if weighed down by something hung around their necks. A couple of others looked at me and smiled as they passed. One of them said, "Welcome." Her voice rattled like pebbles in the bottom of a coffee can. I nodded at her, attempting a smile.

Melrose House itself was old. The wood-paneled walls and faded carpet set the aged tone, along with stairs that creaked and small, framed prints hung here and there on the walls—a sunny cottage, a vase of flowers. Frayed cushioned chairs abutted low corner tables set with ashtrays. Once white curtains trimmed the windows in lacey patterns and the long wooden table at the center of everything had been set with baskets of paper flowers that were touched by the candlelight.

On the hour a bell chimed. The girl with blue hair read a preamble. A few introductory remarks were spoken by another person, a man in work clothes, his brown hair pulled back behind his ears. Other people around the room took turns sharing. When my turn came I simply introduced myself as an out of towner, grateful to have found a place to come and spend a little time. "I did not have a drink today," I said.

"Hi Michael," several of them responded in unison. "Welcome." The man with the tick on the right side of his face clapped his hands together.

At the end of the meeting everyone stood. We held hands and said a prayer. When we finished, the fellow with the work clothes looked up. "I love this program," he said. "Since I've been coming I've remembered how to screw." A few of us laughed.

"I'm coming back to this group," I said aloud, and more laughter erupted. The old man with the tick clapped his hands.

That night I said a prayer. But, It wasn't the kind of prayer you think of when you think about prayer. No. This prayer was not capable of being spoken. I was out of words. And, even if I wasn't out of them, words seemed somehow inadequate. Words themselves would have thought too much of that moment to stain it with their residues. Silence proved the only reverent response.

Nor was there any conscious effort on my part to pray. As best as I can tell it, I felt still. That's all. And I seemed to be setting something out, presenting something almost physical to life itself, a gift. At the same time, I was receiving something. I had no idea what. To this day I do not know.

I nearly slept that night. I lay back quietly and listened. The wind was passing outside the window. A halo of moonlight danced along my hands. I thought of Gladys's words. "There's an inherent goodness here," she had said. I thought, too, about my parents, my brother and my sisters, when we were all very young. Here it seemed my life did flash before me.

Sweeter than wine, I thought. A long time passed before I could say anything. Then words came. "Thank you," I said out loud. I whispered it more than once. "Thank you. Thank you."