I am unsure of the rationale of memory: Why, just now did I recall the way my mamawused to microwave fleas she found on the dog? How can I still see kudzu clamor over the carport with its smart sedan, sense grayness under old, old oaks? Of all things flea-murder starts the flood: a scabby cockroachin the night; the sweetness ofthe dining room curtains; thunder, spring frogs, lightning bugs. I’d never seen them before, never had […]
And that’s the problem with working with memories. It’s work. But I am tired of this lake, these trees, am unamused by the Ship Canal Bridge, despite a trick of angle that makes it seem that the carsare miniatures racing across the roof and not a mile out. I do not care if the red kayak is coming or going, am not curious as to why the tableof dental students is laughing, doubling over as they toss a box […]
And at Land’s End, the land did. With just one whale breachingoffshore, as if conjured up by the commotion on the beach, not causing it. Unassuming, barnacled and gray, in alien skin, unaware of the sunburnt hordes of tourists, allpeeling red and mas cerveza.Memory tends to improve a place: The scale of a sunset over granite. Similarly, the landscape of some faces.
And at Land’s End, a pelican fell. Bird of my childhood, I watched them skim the Gulf each night, I wore the smoke of my Granddad’s stogie as we walked down towards Bon Secour, never arriving, never meaning to. Maybe it’s for the best I won’t go back before the house is sold; memories have undertows and I’ve never been good at holding my breath.
Really it’s a question of weight, so easy to saturate grief and let it sink. More challengingis to let it be, i.e. not to pour another drink; hardest yet is to let it free.
(And in our bones are arches:) Cathedral spaces, relics of our own, aqueducts– canaliculus, lacuna– at our core we are more antique Roman than Danish modern. That belongs to the birds; we’re built on living stone, they are sleek yet filigree, architectural marvels, impossible to tell that they’re hollow until holding one in hand.
(Continuing on this theme of breakage:) Bones heal but one still can feel a fracture, years after, when the weather shifts. I carry rain like a heaviness, really, it’s fluid mechanics: even in our hardest places, there’s room for expansion.
Hot tea on a warm morning; the morning breaks, slowly. This mug is chipped, some rustic clay, hand-painted in Mexico. A cartoon humpback hovers over an azure ocean, laid down cleanly in one brush-stroke. Beside El Arco de Cabo San Lucas, thin thoughts of birds fly in front of a lacquered orange sun. If drawn with beaks they might intone truth is beauty, but out of the mouth of these birds more likely a complaint: the heavy […]
There’s more than one way to start a fire, and more than one way for it not to take. You say, oh, you never know… but I’ve spent, cumulatively, days out in the cold warming soggy twigs and burning birch paper to get a spark to grow. Remember that house we found in Manzanita, right out of the 70s, all driftwood and macrame, with a wood -burning stove? You read while I fiddled with the damper, opened the draw. […]
Already the fires have started out East: an acre in Monitor, at least a thousand near Malaga.You could see the smoke for miles apparently, a bruise developing.Burn piles and dry brush, unheard of on this side wherewe live in practically a floating city; can’t go a mile without crossinga bridge, the peril here being that everything is built on filledland, layered on top of small personal histories, but at least when it gives way, eventually, we’ll all […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 