Tuesday, September 23, 2008

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.

Monday, September 22, 2008

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.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

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."

Friday, September 19, 2008

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