The Arrival

Ellenville


Junkies call it jonesin’, kickin’. I would not characterize the minute tremors I was feeling as that severe. But still, I had begun to notice the absence of a drink. My focus was nil, slightly malaised, slanted off to one side. Anxiety, probably more than I realized, searched the haunts of my stomach—that hawk-eyed predator probing dark spaces where anything pre-cancerous might be holding out. I did not shy away even when it stabbed. No. I nearly welcomed the feeling. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since my last drink and here in Iowa, in my room in Ellenville, I felt strangely alive.

I set my bags down, looked around. Not much to see. It was a dormitory room: two beds, two desks, two chairs. I sat on one of the beds, the one under the window. The view looked out on a main road. Beyond the road a park with a concrete skateboarding rink and lots of grass fronted the Iowa River. It careened, serpentine and ever so slowly, through the park’s green precincts. The room connected with a little kitchen, a stove and a refrigerator, a sink and a table that seated four. I was well situated, and at the moment I felt very happy.

“IOWA SIDEBAR: In Case of a Tornado/Severe Weather“—a notice hung on the back of the door. I read with great curiosity:

"The Iowa Severe Weather System whistle will sound a steady three-to-five-minute warning upon the issuance of a tornado warning by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. Residents and guests are advised to take shelter in the basement and lower floor corridors or other areas without windows."

Tornados. Areas without windows. Without glass. Here was something I had not considered, not even as a remote possibility. In my world tornados did not exist. Twisters. I drew down on the possibility, just for a moment, and finally chuckled at the remoteness of it all. Oh Toto, we’re not in Jersey anymore.

My phone rang and I rummaged through my bag trying to lay a hand on it. By the time I did it had stopped ringing. I flipped it open to see who had called. Glea. I closed the phone and dropped it on the bed. For a couple of minutes I watched out the window as an occasional car or pickup passed by. A lot of famous writers had come this way. I wanted a drink but a voice in my head kept posing the same question. “Why are you here?” it asked. “What did you come here for?”

To drink or to write? I knew what it was asking, and I needed to decide which. I could not do both. I got up and walked over to where I’d dropped my bags. First order of business, laptop. I pulled it out and laid it on the desk. Several pamphlets were arranged in a sort of desktop holder pushed back against the wall, a kind of welcome package. There was one for a pizza delivery place, “Till 1:00 AM: Seven Days!” Good to know. I set that one aside. Another gave the hours of operation for the university’s office and computer lab.

I flipped through each of them until the word “Alcohol” made me stop. I read, “Melrose House Meeting: 5:30PM” and took it as a sign. God was in this place, God in Ellenville. It was now three. After hitting the head and splashing some water on my face, I returned to the bed. My head hit the pillow as if landing on a stone. I pretended I was Jacob. Even in my sleep-deprived and dreamless mind, I could remember what it meant to just pretend.

When I drink alone I prefer to be by myself.

CHICAGO BLUES

I will say (I say it often, actually) my drinking did, in fact, disturb me. I was ambivalent about quitting. I lacked drive. It is hard to know whether mine is an addiction or a weak moral will. When I left Chicago, it was on a clear, sixty-five degree morning in late July. I asked the valet who delivered my car if the beautiful weather was typical. He took the dollar from my hand, flicked his cigarette to the pavement, and snickered.

Night before last I’d arrived in Ohio, a Howard Johnsons just east of Indiana. Conveniently, it had a little lounge attached, a dank hovel with a medium length bar and six or seven candle lit tables, a few cheesey looking cushioned chairs scattered around. Three or four people sat at the bar. The once red carpet had by now been so worn and soiled it appeared in every way more like a dark, odious sponge tacked to the floor.

I was swigging my second long-neck when four skells I’d seen earlier came through the door. I’d noticed them unloading their truck as I entered my room. They must have arrived about the same time I did. Wearing flannel and leather, bearded and loud, they now found a spot at the end of the bar. No one but me seemed bothered.

I wanted to sit quietly. I simply wanted to hear the songs I’d played. Taking my beer, I moved to a dimly lit table in a
corner near the jukebox. The red-orange chair I’d squeezed my butt into hobbled on uneven legs. I tried hard to block out their agitating voices, but the four cretins at the end of the bar were so voluble that others had to talk over them to be heard. The song playing softly was barely audible then and something ugly was growing inside of me. I cranked down another gulp. I sneered at the four assholes intruding on my space. Something about them triggered aggressive and angry impulses. My reaction felt territorial. I swashed down the rest of my beer.

The song I had been trying to hear was playing softly, woodwinds and strings, Saxon, folksy, something John Barleycorn. The loud, gruff stupidities rising from the end of the bar, the music overrun and barely audible, I grew angrier, fidgeted, stared. Then it dawned on me, a peculiar self-revelation. Maybe the music got into me, entered in a way that smoothed over my discomfort. Or maybe it was that I knew, if confronted, those four mutts would take turns kicking my sorry behind around the parking lot out back.

Whatever the cause, it was a stark moment of clarity that amounted to this: they were not the source of my agitation. Whatever was going on, this was all about me. My discomfort had something to do with the very fact that I was here. That I was drinking when I knew (even now I want to take that word back, replace it another like “suspected” or “believed”) but yes, I knew I should not be drinking. I also knew that if one of those gorillas caught me eyeing them, there might be an unpleasant price to pay. I did not always get in trouble when I drank, but whenever I did find trouble, I’d usually been drinking. I had no intention of getting my ass handed to me by four local rabble-rousers outside some two-bit Ohio lounge. So I set the bottle on the table and returned to my room, a little sad, a little lonely, dreamless, yes, but none the worse for drunken impulsivity.

The next evening I landed, still in one piece, in downtown Chicago. The only room I could find was at the Hilton. “Probably the last room in town,” the clerk informed me. By the looks of things, she had spoken true. Two other less expensive hotels I’d stopped at had been all booked up. The Hilton’s lobby was packed with conventioneers (a medical convention I’d later learn). I took the room. Once settled, I saw it was nearly time for dinner. I determined first to go for a walk, look around a little, and see where my travels might take me.

I’d heard Chicago was a lot like New York. It’s not. That’s not to say that my discovery of a nearby park fronting horizonless Lake Michigan was not captivating. Certainly, it was very inviting with couples walking and joggers passing by, children playing everywhere. But when I made my way back into the city all I discovered there were depressed little streets and generally poor quarters, empty storefronts, brick walkups, an occasional wine store, auto-body shop, or Chinese takeout. Not far from my hotel I spotted a little watering hole whose signage carried a name I knew. I’d been listening to Buddy Guy in my car, on and off, since I’d left Jersey. It was his name I saw above the entrance. Three times I walked past before deciding to head on in.

I couldn’t believe the luck—Buddy Guy’s Blues Club! When I had first seen it I thought it was a gimmick, that his name had been used only as a draw. As things turned out, he really did own the place. Legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy. Framed pictures and concert posters, a souvenir vendor selling novelities and t-shirts bore witness, as did other memorabilia, guitars the color of “cherry-wine” and gold records plastered all around.

I took a table situated before a well-lit stage where a little blues ensemble, a southern band, was playing, not too raucous, almost gently, brushed symbols and a slide guitar with bass. A waitress approached. Despite my Ohio moment of clarity, I remained incapable of reconciling my presence there in Buddy Guy’s with the thought of a diet cola. I ordered a bucket of frogs-legs and a brown ale.

Several brown ales later, I was feeling light. I paid my bill and left. That I’d entertained the possibility he, Buddy Guy, might be hanging around shaking hands, signing autographs, maybe even playing a set made me feel a little foolish when I considered it. I wouldn’t be hanging around there if I didn’t need to either, if I had someplace better to be. I stepped into a wine store, picked up a decent pinot noir and a corkscrew.

Back in my room I felt tired. I was sweating. The light stabbed at my eyes. They felt wooden and heavily drawn. I felt their weight settled just beneath my brow and distributing itself in a tight pattern along the flinty scar-line just under the skin. I dimmed the light, drew the cork from the bottle, and poured some wine into a plastic cup. I prayed some words. I paced. I drank myself to sleep.

Now it was Sunday, and I was pulling out of the parking lot. By evening I would arrive in Ellenville, Iowa. I debated whether I would drink there. I should not. A voice on the radio revealed that the unusually cool weather would end by mid-afternoon. I saw the valet snicker in my mind and rolled the window down. A wall of red tail lights glared at me. I rolled along in slow city traffic, popped in a Buddy Guy CD, and settled in for another long traveling day.

lo lo lo lo lola . . .

"You are a manly man," she said.

How would it have gone were I to have returned,
"And you, my beauty, are a manly woman?"

Not well, I suspect.

Operator, can you help me place this call?

The Old Woman

By the time the habit of loneliness settles in and all around, it is like having already starved. There is no more hunger than there is life to be hungry for. It is a deadly habit, having exchanged black for the occasional gray that intensifies and recedes around the early white lie. Sometimes it is a desperate call, moved by terror, of the senses that hear the air strung with maleficence, that see the lonely squiggles pressing themselves against the television screen, trying to get out. Trying to get out the old woman picks up the phone where voices used to live.

Hello It's Me

THE CALL


I was caught off guard when I heard her voice on the phone. “How are you, Michael?” she said. “It’s Glea.”

I knew her voice, but hearing it felt alien. It sounded to me like a voice one would avoid if they could; a voice belonging to a neighbor who’s been crouching in your garden every evening at dusk, watching as you walk around your kitchen in your underwear; the person who you knew had poisoned your cat, though you could not prove it, and who called because they knew you knew but couldn't say anything about it. I couldn’t tell right then which of us was being creepy.

I responded with shortness. “Glea.”

Glea Carroll of the McNally Agency had been a great support when I was marketable. She stayed in constant contact, putting me in touch with publishers and editors, people she said she knew I’d click with. As my agent Glea facilitated many good things for me. But self interest clung to her like the smell of something burning. I was never crazy about that part of her, and now that I was no longer a hot commodity I discovered my instincts about her had been justified.

“Michael, I know I haven’t called. But I have been thinking about you.” She must have detected the blank recognition, the plain lack of response in my voice.

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” I said finally.

“I realize it’s been some time.” She spoke in clear, distinct tones.

Damn, I thought. I hoped like hell she didn’t feel sorry for me. I wanted to savor my resentment. Across the room the cat began hacking and then puked on some papers I’d laid down when the phone rang. “Goddamit,” I growled through crooked teeth.

“Is this not a good time?” Glea asked. “Should I not have called?”

“No. It’s fine,” I told her, “my cat. How have you been?”

“I’m well,” she said. Glea , always proper, never said "I'm fine," or "I'm good."

“I’m also well,” I responded flatly. “To what do I owe the honor, Glea?”

She hesitated, only momentarily, and then explained why she called. She knew I’d been in a rut since the accident. She thought she had something I might be interested in trying. “You’re not drinking?” she asked at one point.

“No, I’m not drinking,” I said. I was lying. I’d turned into a morning drinker. Mostly wine when I stayed home. Beer if I walked down to play the juke box at the Top Hat where Milna poured drafts and flaunted her huge rack behind the bar. On days when I’d stop caring altogether, often after not sleeping, I’d drive instead of walk. The accident seemed, at those times, remote. Maybe I was remote. The walls of my apartment looked pale to me. “Why do you ask, Glea?”

“I have a contact at Iowa,” she said. “Do you think you’d consider putting together a workshop for them? They’re interested in having you. I can put you in touch.”

In touch was something I hadn’t been in a while. I touched my face. “Teach what to who?” I asked.

“We can work all that out,” she said straight forwardly, as if she had all of it already planned. “You’re a name. Published. And they’re paying.”

The offer was a far cry from television interviews and book signings. I looked across the room and squinted at the stack of bills on the desk. “I could use a change,” I told her. “Iowa. How much and what do I need to do?”

“Let me make some calls,” she said, and we ended it there.

I scribbled her name on one of the refrigerator lists, then grabbed my keys. It was Friday. Milna typically wore a skirt on Fridays. She’d be working till noon.

All I have to do is Dream

Shadow in Dust


I no longer dream. Sometimes too, I garble my words. My teeth are skewered. I grow self-conscious whenever I have to speak. When I type, I sometimes finish only half a word or add an extra letter, like an extra “c” in the word accident. At night, when it comes time to turn down the sheets, I am reminded of the accident. I fluff the pillow and I lose strength, suddenly blighted. I lie down and close my eyes. It’s the same as when they’re open, only darker, degrees of transition that never find an end.

I used to dream—of tigers on the moon, and rabbits that know things without being told. Of being outside in my underwear. Preparing to sleep, expectantly (expecting what I did not know)—I miss that feeling. Once I dreamed I’d won the lottery and this man in a suit and I were posing with an enormous cardboard check. Lot's of zeroes. I’d wake refreshed, eager to meet another day. Now waking life and sleeping life are the same crossed mish-mash of moribund nothings, a day-time / night-time dreamlessness.

And I’m always tired. I’ll sleep two days straight and still be dragging all the time. I raise my head sluggishly. It’s heavy as a sack of sand. My body is a bag of pains. I sag where I should hold tight, and I’m stiff where I am meant to bend. It was a bad accident. There were days I wish I’d up and . . . those days are mostly over.

Not only don’t I dream. I can’t read the way I used to, or write as well either. They had to put my left eye back in place. There’s a little silicon sheath inside my skull that holds it up because the socket’s gone. I drag my eye around, rolling it along this Saran Wrap hammock in my head. The eye grows tired and then my right eye strains to compensate. There are scars inside my face, more taut and knarled than the ones on its outside. I forget quickly so I now keep lists and hang them on the refrigerator. I hang them there because I kept forgetting where I had put them. Now I have one place for lists: food to buy, things to do, bills to pay, doctor’s appointments.

My first book made enough that I put a down payment on this house. Now the banks are looking to take it back. I’ve sent the cleaning girl away for good. I keep the curtains drawn. It’s dark in here most of the time. A friend who’d visited when I was convalescing brought me a gift, a plaque to hang on the wall. He laughed and I pretended it did not sting. “Dust is a Protective Coating.”

A thin layer covers my shelves and all their bric-a-brac, little shells and figurines. My favorite is a skeleton in a priest’s frock—a Day of the Dead statuette from Mexico. I can’t bother myself about dust. When the phone rings panic spikes in my chest. I typically will not answer. I’m afraid most of the time. It seems my agent, the one person I’d welcome a call from, forgets things too. She no longer remembers my name. I am told I have grown overly sensitive. Memory and language ebb and flow. I am shadow mantled in dust. Worst of all, the blow to my head knocked the dreams right out of it.

Baby I'm Amazed

I Thought She'd Be Amazing


I thought she'd be amazing and she was.

A lingering sense of unreality clung to our initial moments together, probably because I had doted over pictures of her and flirted with the idea of meeting her a thousand times before. Meeting her scared me so that I determined to enter fearlessly. That fear factor may have, in all likelihood, been part of the attraction.

Sitting in front of her then, face to face, held a thousand trembling pleasures. This went far beyond the safe distance provided by a photograph. Desire, uncertainty, even a sense of dangerous risk. Awe. Competing flourishes of sense and senselessness. All these skirted the short breaths of yearning, yearning that found its source in her. And she wasn't even trying.

There was "presence" in the room with us. Her smile disarmed me. Her genuineness engaged me. Intelligence danced in her eyes and made me, made me want to give to her nearly anything she asked. She thought "nearly" a healthy witholding. As a result I wanted to give her even more.

I don't want to overdo it. But I will say I let my guard down. I emptied myself of as much resistance as I could and handed it to her. She was stern, but nurturing too. I wanted to be what she told me to be. "Strip," she said, and I did, willingly, gratefully, devotedly.

I thought she'd be amazing and she was.

You Know and I Know

Unspeakable

No one says what’s real.

When they do,
we run for cover.

No one says what’s true.

Double-truth-lies:
These are told
exclusively by lovers.

Fact: there ain’t enough self’s in the world
willing to forego the you’s,
and all the you’s fall in line, loveless casualties
that never win self's with which a life gets lived.
—No one suspects anything is wrong
with lithium and tears.

Like the first morning . . .

On The Way Back From the Bathroom


Outside, the moon descends
along rails constructed
in such a way that first
it rolls left across the sky
in a steady declension of four degrees.

At its western end it drops,
reverses its route, rolls right
and downward again. It will
continue this way all night,
along an alternating
and constant slope,
and I watch it crossing back and forth,
dropping down,
over and over,
from the open window
where I have stopped on my way back from the bathroom.

I wonder if this is magnificent.

In the mean time, the shelves along the wall remain filled with things I’d hoped to get to but never did. To learn Italian. To speak French. And while there is some regret about those things I never took up, I must tell you that I did once make the time to share a drink with a wooly white mammoth in an Andover train station.

Until then I’d not realized
how precisely
a white wooly mammoth might
press rings of smoke from a droopy bottom lip,
even while steadying a rather thin tortoise-shell
cigarette holder in a hoof,
a bent crumble of cool ash dangling at its tip.

He did not seem to mind that I stared,
morbidly, into the disproportionately
large, unpigmented eye jellying behind
the monocle he wore, its cord attached
somewhere inside his thick and flowing mane.

This event occurred, actually, during a particularly monotonous cross-country tour Myrtle and I purchased when we were first married.

“Clink.” The moon drops
down onto the next silver rail
and the clock across the room blinks,
“Go Slowly Along Your Way.”

Beneath the red rise of mercury
I spot a woman in the field
adjacent to our own.
She is playing a tuba
and I smell blueberry muffins in the air.
The sky rumbles with tuba: blurts Tuba Tuba Tuba.
I shut the window and draw the curtain before moving back to bed.

As I pass, books whisper to me in languages I do not understand
and the bronze Shiva occupying the top shelf begins dancing,
arms wriggling and alive like snakes.

“Stop shuffling your feet,” Myrtle croaks at me. I peel back the blanket, slide in next to her, cradle her gently in my arms. Her booty is pudgy and warm. “I love you like a blueberry muffin,” I say. I whisper the words in Italian. I repeat her name, so fluidly, in French—“Myrtille.”

It occurs to me that this is magnificent.

This is so even when Myrtle says nothing in response.
It remains the case even after we forget each other and fall asleep,
lulled by the cadences of the mammoth moon as it drops and rolls,
all night long, through the tuba-blueberry sky, white clouds
wound like wool around the narrowing encroachments of
another morning’s gray approach.

They say it's yer birthday

Today is the 25th of May, the birthday of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Raymond Carver. Happy birthday guys.

Jump

One Life No Net

I’m not built for this kind of thing anymore. Wind slices my cheeks in quick flurries— thin little razors. Gravity pulls me through a wall of air with two fists. My body could almost climb its way back up along the nothing of this fall. But air is not “nothing.” There’s something Zen-like about air in relation to bodies. Everything is falling, everything lives and dies in a state of falling, and physicists have formulas to prove it. They simulate orbits and collisions and spinning bodies on computers, and these are wondrous things that resemble Balanchine’s L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, dancing squirrels and cups and teapots, all held together in the frame of a stage where they leap and twirl—sheer magic. There’s love between falling things. I spread my arms, legs together, tapered, as if executing the perfect reverse three-and-a-half somersault--with tuck. Glee moves in and out of these limbs. This body. All bodies. Here. There. Mine. Hers. I close my eyes. Try to forget her unforgettable face. Will she cry? Will her features solidify angrily? Will she feel empty, unable to move, like Joyce’s Eveline?

I close my eyes for a moment, and when I open them I am halfway to the water. There is a little tugboat in the area, off to my left. I am reminded, vaguely, in a flash, of some golden childhood story my mother read to me. Some people on the deck are watching, pointing. The sun shines brightly against the flecked water which resembles a beveled coin, a silver fish-scaled river. An hour before I’d witnessed the morning sun burn clouds off the tops of the cliffs from my perch in the bridge’s northeast tower. At some point, as morning traffic began to build on the span above me, I stood. Leapt.

Now every sound has been replaced by rushing air, a roar so fast and furious that were those nearby cliffs to instantly crumble—the avalanche would raise a noise like this one beating at my ears. I see that I am about three-fourths of the way to the water and, suddenly, I think of my cat, Diego. Diego leaps up to or down from refrigerator or cabinet top with the fragility of a first fledgling flight, tender padded touchdown, his paws. Once he leapt out a second story window. My sister ran downstairs, screaming, much like this wind in fact. We raced outside expecting to collect a bag of bones. Diego sat contentedly. Nine lives they say. Flight. I begin to wonder. How many lives? Just one I think. Perhaps I will break the water at a “just so” angle, like a diver slicing in unharmed. Perhaps I will burst into feathers, like a bird in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The water approaches faster. The faces of the men on the tugboat grow clearer, each intensely fascinated, none horrified. I recall a Zen saying: Leap, the net will appear. Not this time, I think, suddenly upended.

Forever Young.

Burn

The object of the exercise
was to write
about becoming a tree
who’d been planted by a boy of twelve,
one Tuesday in March,
in the evening hours after a large, satisfying dinner; a tree
who, as a sapling
had overcome several horrid deprivations,
lies and drunkenness and poverty,
dying lawns with cigarette burns all over the place.

I’d been drawn to that kind of thing before. So in the morning I ambled past the factory walls to a splurge of bramble near a runoff pipe where I sat down to write, pencil, paper, a bit of quiet. And that's when my present girth emerged, rumbled audaciously. That's when I struck roots--pounds of stilled intention--down inside the earth.

Time sped along.

By noon the sun had pinnacled overhead, and I revealed spots no longer sprouting green. I’d thinned on top, brittled. I heard my shuddering twig-ends ticking together whenever birds took rest in my extended arms.

Soon, it seemed soon, the orange-orbbed sun edged a shrunken arc of western blue. Its lights drew long. It sunk behind the circling waters of the world. Directly, I thinned into an overgrown wind-rattle, winter thistling etched out against the moon.

Still, my inner rings were something—I am the final object of my own leafy desires—something, yes, beautiful.
Popular trends that once threatened my sense of self now had no affect, Japanese reds, the current poplar chic. I'd grown solid overnight and I liked that.

My friends think I’m crazy, hankering after this old post,
dead wood snapped and dangling. But I refuse to leave.
It’s in the way one clings, you know, that makes us who we are.

Sap still oozes from my skins.
The grass beneath me is sticky with the stuff.
Light a match. I’ll burn.
Probably for weeks on end.

Whenever I want you . . .

All I have to Do

I was not made for the hand’s of love,
nor for her lips, nor eyes, nor tongue,
The last time that I rode love’s hips,
I was plucked out, her firstborn young.

I cannot say why this is so,
yet, so it surely seems,
that love plays an evasive role
in all my loving dreams.

Dream on! the passing troubadour,
warm heart and traveling feet,
Dream on! he sings and moves along
to the time of his own heart’s beat,

Dream on! he sings, with a smile that’s sad,
Say true what your heart must say—
Dream on I will, and swear an oath,
to win your hand, your lips, eyes, tongue, one day.

I Am A Rock . . .

The Dying of the Night Dispatcher’s Angels


Eleven-thirty, back in Jersey—
he's got to get to work on time.

From the under ground he has dug up more than one bitter passage: what's left of fifty years--a residual hour of fear. That is the misdiagnosed sadness everyone detects--life's lonely work.

But, soon he arrives, on time, at the government job he dislikes very much. He receives his briefing, and takes the seat where he will answer the troubled night-calls of the world.

“I am an idiot,” he thinks, staring at the dirt in the grooves of his fingers. It is late by then, and he wants to laugh, reminiscing first about a dream, then a girl, then music that ends it all triumphantly, gloriously, angels singing, like in a movie. But the stupid phone rings, like a body in a dumpster, throat cut. It gurgles like a sucking wound whenever someone calls.

--nine-one-one: what's your emergency?--
-------------------------
(post-fact-oh conversation)

“You could see his Adam’s Apple hanging out,” the cop describes the scene to him afterward. He tries not to listen but the cop keeps on. “He did it to himself," he says. "All alone. Cut his own damn throat!”

He's fifty years old
and he is sad that he feels nothing,
believes nothing.

In the morning he wipes the station with a cloth,
shoves some papers in a bin, waits for his relief,
and repeats the awful words,
“Alone. Alone."

Have I told you lately . . . ?

Night Full of Absence

Time moves as slow as stone without you near. I find myself in this strange limbo of desires—to be close and yet not to push too near too fast. I was saddened that we argued as hotly as we did, troubled, enormously. And yet a faith sets in, that our friendship is stronger than either of us suspected, strong and sure, even when we are not.

This short period that feels so heavy brings to mind how deeply you have sent your roots into my life, reveals what a deep mark would be left were you to pull them from its soils. I have been seized by obsessive need, to talk with you, to listen, taking comfort in your voice, even knowing there are no words adequate, none soft enough, none strong enough, for what I long to hear.

Our words rise and fall behind language, like the ground of all we see and feel. Ours is the language of eyes through which the heart burns, of knowing without grasping, of hands that touch wordlessly, in the surging silences of jungles and deserts and enormous skies full of clear, throbbing nights, nights whose skins stretch thin, skies so filled with playfulness that they will themselves to the air they live in, hoping for fire.

I remain incapable of expounding any of these visitations, these spectres that rise up in so many bodiless nights, hours full of rushing spaces, your eyes nowhere to beguile me. I am flung outward by words escaping to find their place in your hands and your limbs, these words heavy with life like vines.

This garden of feeling we have cultivated makes a place for the sun, for water and salt and earth. We needn’t touch them, the years, to feel them, how they have flourished within the borders of this garden's rock walls. These several years sing sonorously, steadily, cemented and meshed together like the letters of a cherished word, a secret word, a word held between us like a prolonged breath, like wet, imprecise kisses, lips groping among last things, braced in waves that en-trance the constant moon, waves ever changing the lettering of the world, the many ways that love is spelled.

I'd wait a million years

TURN AROUND

He was three hours into the four hour drive home when he called her.

“Hey,” she answered.

She always answered with that initial "Hey," and whenever he heard her say it he was drawn to a territory that felt warm, familiar. In that space distance held sway, but the distance bordered a tract of heart that had known her voice long before he'd heard the sound of it.

“I almost called to tell you to turn around.” She spoke with a natural air.

“I will, you know.” He did not need to think.

“Don’t,” she said when he told her how far he’d already driven.

After they were done talking he recalled her face, her hair. He replayed her voice, “Hey,” and took the next exit, looking for a turn around. “Crazy,” he said.

To turn around then would make a four hour trip into another seven hour drive. Only the day before he’d driven from North Carolina to spend the night with her in Virginia. Now he was back in Jersey--and suddenly heading south.

His back and his legs had stiffened by the time he pulled the car along the curb. She’d left the door open and he let himself in. Drumming music and the hum of a treadmill flowed up out of the basement. So he dropped his bag near the door and went for a walk. The January air felt sharp when he breathed it in and the evening turned to dark. He was happy looking at the houses, recording the names of streets he passed.

In less than an hour he was back and watching television when she emerged from the basement dabbing her brow with a towel. They talked a little and she left to go shower. When she returned in slippers and a T-shirt they called out for Chinese food. She stood at the sink rinsing a plate. He leaned down and kissed her shoulder. She smiled.

After dinner, he stretched out on the sofa and watched her sink cross-legged into an overstuffed chair. The day had ended. Neither of them said very much. A toned thigh stretched out from under her shirt. It was the shirt he’d bought her, the shirt that sported the Chinese character for “Strength.”

He’d been staring at her. “What?” she asked.

He wanted to tell her about what was going on inside his body. “You’re beautiful,” he said instead, and made a less than heartfelt effort to ignore the perfect length of leg stretched over the opposite knee.

She looked back at the television, and he succumbed to a swell of desire so strong that he had to close his eyes to hide it from her. “Strength.”

What he was feeling then was something he hadn’t felt for a long time, a longer time than he’d like to admit. He wondered what the Chinese character for "Craving" looked like.

Soon after, the television went off. They both agreed it had grown very late. She made sure he had enough blankets in his room and said goodnight. She looked up as she turned, half over her delicate shoulder. The full smile of her mouth blossomed and he almost wanted to cry. “Good night,” he said instead.

He turned out the light. Desire tore him into a thousand tiny shreds. His ex-wife never moved him so deeply. Nor had other women, women he thought he’d loved. This was something else, something beautiful and mysterious and full. He surrendered to it's resonance, released his heart and soul and body to its airs. Sleep finally overtook his rigid body, his lips pursing together, a final note holding, a last breath full of her name, the name he turned around on his tongue and blew back out into the night.

Goat's Head Oops

Goats

I’m not built for this kind of thing anymore, I think, hand pressed hard against my side. The cops had already cleared, leaving a floor full of broken glass and blood to clean up.

Bars—funny places. If you work in one, you know what the camouflaged stink beneath floorboards and in saturated spots in the bathrooms smells like. You know bars are filthy places. Even now, little flies flit around rows of bottles stacked behind the bar and ignore the blood spattered on the wall. I catch myself asking if flies get addicted to alcohol. Barflies. Ha ha.

I love bars. Always have. I think of this particular one as my church—here twelve years this February coming. I’ve bounced in lots of places. Once picked up a part-time gig in Denver where I had to wear a frilly shirt and bowtie. They had a reel-to-reel instead of a jukebox and played the same shit songs over and over, 80’s shit songs that made me tired. I’m no good when I’m tired. So this place is my church. It’s where I feel like I belong. I’d be cranky all the time in a nightclub or a place where bouncers wear frilly shirts and bowties.

I was thinking that very thing when I heard glass crunching under somebody’s boots and turned to see one of the assholes that had started the whole damned ruckus. The cops had missed him somehow. He must have landed unconscious behind a speaker or under a table. But now he was up, charging me, grunting, half-limping as he came on hard. Only, I did a little sidestep, extended a leg and down he went, glass scattering beneath him and sounding very much like marbles dropped on wood.

I’d noticed his bunch when they walked in. I hate when guys like them come in, guys with something ugly behind their eyes. Borderline types that don’t know when or how to die. Back when I didn’t know shit from shinola I took little notice of things like eyes, but after a couple of brouhahas that ended in a whole lot of stitches, I learned. Today I can separate the goats from the sheep. Goats have eyes that sit dark and blank, a little cloudy so you can’t see if there’s a person inside. This guy: goat for sure.

He was up as quick as he went down, his beard scraggly, graying. I could see he was crazy and suddenly I felt damned tired. Exhausted. Everything slowed around me. His hand reeled up with a blade. I grabbed his arm, two hands. He knocked me back against the bar. I ran the edge of my boot down his shins, better’n ten times, and I was shoving his arm down and away and growing real tired when I felt the blade slip in. It was warm. Didn’t hurt. I’m down on one knee then, bleeding. I can smell the place. It’s dark, filthy, and smells a lot like goat.

Last Night I had the Strangest Dream

Beléndez At the Dodge: gOld Soul

A young
Neruda,
this poet
in a chair that rolls like

a mechanical horse,
a jungle path called exile,

music,

constant accompaniment,
the parrot and the cat,
monkey and the Andean asp,
all that rises in the caw-and-hiss of a
sleeping night caught in an updraft of
dream, tropic stall of northerly wind
somewhere over Central America now,
a small place near the sea, conch and coral, salt;

dream fills the spaces between, sprouts leaves
that perfume the air with spells, dream-worlds
faintly tipped in Mazatlan gold, in blood,
like claws taken in the hunt and adorned
to be worn, still warm, hacked mitts
slightly smaller than the poet who was,
he claims, no bigger than a mango in his
birth, no smaller than his own early shadow
in this long, late light.

Watching the tide roll away . . .

Monterey

August. I am sitting on the dock, reading, and you are lying on your turquoise towel, face lit by the sun. The lake rocks around us, ever ever, quietly.

These are the same green hills Edith
Wharton camped in while fleshing out the Ethan Fromes . . of the world.

Earlier, you said you would like to own two dogs, and while I was taking my walk up Chestnut Hill I thought about whether a dog might not have made Ethan's life bearable, if he'd have aspired to break away and marry better than he did.

Of course, Edith didn't marry all that well either, her shameless husband-in-the-garden-dancing, naked, in these hills of lunatic beauty.

All of this makes me aware of my own happiness. I am happy, happy and very much at peace here with you.

Then, from . . across the lake a dog yowls. Another answers from , , some distant compound on the far side of the hill.

Drawn from my book, I set my eyes on you. You are breathing and I am breathing and I see what lies inside of you, hordes of summer flowers, hyacinths, and long horizons steeped in light. I see past the gentle reckoning of your thighs, the soft rising and falling of your stomach. My eyes bear down on the steely water of the lake shining through you.

You wake to see.

I have taken away my clothing and I am dancing all around. All my beauties and uglies are turned silhouette against the sky.

You must raise your hand to shield your bleary eyes against the sun.

Skirting the edge of the dock, I am dancing until the light locks up, until it is grown so solid I can no longer move against it. I am immobilized, belighted. My shadow breaks away, bounds over the rocks, climbs up into the trees and disappears. I expand like heat, and you are like an echo, like signaling flecks of sun on water.

The lake tips.

In the cool dark hours, the absence that my shadow left rouses me from sleep. I hear, its footfalls on branches, just outside our bedroom, the leaves it rustles as it sniffs its way through the lightless halls of night. You remain quiet, ever ever, and touch me with your hands so I can close my eyes. They curl up on my face like two old dogs warmed by fire.

This is how it is to love you,
which I do.

What it is ain't exactly clear

Lied To

Something's gone haywire.

It becomes most apparent around people,
in airports or classes or on supermaket
lines--the great disparate judgments of
insides by outsides, mostly yours on
yours added to theirs--as if yours were
not sufficiently your own, not sufficiently
point and counterpoint, like blades that
repel though smithed to clash and cross
and make a furious noise, a noise that
slides along the self-loathing of
avoidance, because you thought it would
be easier than this and you were wrong.