1991, 2009
I wonder if you know at all what I am like all by myself, beyond the reach of your influence. I wonder if that is what puzzled you about my writing: it contains no part of you – save what has changed me, become me, with or without you – and in the absence of the familiarity that was your reflection, you cannot recognize me. I wonder how many of us really know who each other really are.
THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR GRUDGINGLY EXPERIENCES EMPATHY
1995
He starts the breakfast conversation off with implications of how superior he is to one of his buddies, who doesn’t take painkillers because he’s too macho. Losing my appetite, I remind him that he himself has said he’s too macho to carry my photo in his wallet. He tries to interrupt, but I continue: the difference is who suffers. In the first case it’s his buddy with a toothache, in the second case it’s me. He’s quiet after that. I leave it there for now, but my thoughts are restless. He’s had two wives, and whether or not he carried their photos in his wallet, there’s evidence they suffered. Times like this my heart goes out to them, and I can see why they took their comfort where they could get it, the first with his buddies, the second in a bottle. Me, I take my comfort in writing little stories about what I don’t say.
You would say this could be a poem
for David
2006
I do not ever have to write the words
that I dread writing
I am not in denial
I would throw a handful
of dirt onto the coffin
but I do not want to write
the words
I have many other words to write
but I do not have to write
those words not ever
I have said the words over the phone
over and over
to dozens of people who did not
want to hear the words
I do not have to write the words
Broken
1991 Moments ago, as I rummaged through the dishes in the drainer, I realized that I had dreamed of my favorite glass fractured into large sharp pieces, the thick bottom still in one piece. (A few weeks later, I would drop that glass and it would split apart exactly as in the dream.)
At a wide spot
You know who you are
Remember me when your high beams sweep the shoulder of a new back road you’re driving at the edge of speed and catch a glistening of shattered glass as chilly as starlight, those shards so dazzling they bewitch you to forget they ache to shred your skin.
Think of me when the rain’s begun to fall and you stop to change the flat at the only circle of light in miles of blackness, and the pay phone hunkering there, dry in its glassy cubicle, jangles all the while you’re loosening the lug nuts, jacking up the car, cursing the flaccid spare, all the while ringing that steady, dull, insistent peal that you don’t answer, though you want it quiet, because you know it’s no one calling you.
1993 I dashed an ugly cup he’d left behind to a concrete floor, barely any recompense at all for treating me so casually.
A Gesture of Mourning
For Steve
I was telling your story to a friend at the recycler’s
while I sorted mildewed boxes,
beer bottles all the way from Illinois,
crinkled balls of grimy foil.
Grieving the suicide of another vet who wasn’t exactly killed
in the war that ended twenty years before that spring,
you called form a Motel 6 in Arizona
to say that you had finally wrapped a rubber band
tight below the first knuckle
of your smallest finger, waited for numbness,
and sliced with your biggest knife
through the space between the bones.
There was a cracked jar with the lid still on,
which I couldn’t budge,
but I did collapse the glass into the shards
it yearned to be and sliced a gouge
in the flesh below my thumb.
“It came of like a chicken wing,” you chuckled,
but you forgot to flush the toilet where you left
the tiny segment of yourself, and a maid found it there.
I blamed inattention, but I’m thinking now
that it was solidarity. I watched my blood
pool bright on the asphalt.
“Didn’t mean to frighten anyone,” you said,
and the familiar grimace of regret
seized your voice a thousand miles away.
A man who works at the recycler’s offered
His blue bandana and told me, “No one ever
Cut themselves before when I was here,
not in five years.” I wanted to apologize.
2005 He said that spring breaks everything. “Only the ice,” I disagreed.
2009 So many icicles dangle from the balconies of this building that the sidewalk below is roped off. They glittered in yesterday’s sunshine, and I recognized my own balcony from the street because I know my icicles, the best in the lot.
I remember hurling mason jars at a barn behind a farmhouse back in 1976. I don’t remember why.
Hai(na)bun from the Anti-Portland
for David
2006
Everybody, it seems, knows these places. These vortices, cities of anti-matter, landscapes of dream. I remember one winter twilight when I had been calling and calling you, but you had probably yanked the phone cord out of the jack, tired of telemarketers, collection agency representatives. By then I was hopelessly lost, only a few miles from home. Approaching a familiar intersection from a new direction, I had no idea how to proceed. I pulled over, called once again, and this time you picked up.
-The sign says I’m at the corner of Portland and Greeley, but I know I’ve never seen this place before. There’s a car wash, a Plaid Pantry. Please tell me how to get home.
-Oh, you’re in the anti-Portland.
Like I said, everybody knows these places.
Later, we drove through our city’s dark mirror together, your sense of direction so keen I never thought you could lose your way. But you were in the passenger’s seat, and I was under the influence. Not so much that I couldn’t drive us home, just enough that I didn’t feel like having a conversation with the police about it. You were keeping me off the main thoroughfares, telling me which way to turn at each intersection as we made our elaborate way between two points on the very same street. Slowly, the realization crept up on me that you didn’t know where we were, either.
A vast park on the right, trees both inviting and intimidating, still stark against the late winter twilight sky. A floodlit housing development stretching out to infinity, pristine as if they had just cut the ribbon, held the grip-and-grin pose a little too long. As if not a sneaker had ever left the imprint of its tread in the brand-new mud. Off in the distance, a huge fire blazed not quite out of control.
-Do you see that? I asked, pointing with my chin.
-We’ll have to come back in daylight, you answered inscrutably.
The end of the line, before we admitted defeat and turned back toward anything resembling something we had ever seen before the last half hour, was a monstrous parking lot looming with big metal containers, the kind you barely notice stacked like shoeboxes on trains and freighters. Ordinarily I love scenes like this, but it was too dark by then, too late, too weird, too close to home.
We'll never find(A haibun is a literary composition that combines prose and haiku. A hay(na)ku is a three-line, six-word poetic form, the reverse variation of which has three words in the first line, two in the second, and one in the third. This hai(na)bun is my combination of the two forms.)
When no one knows where I am
1991, 2011
That first time, I was seven and I didn’t tell a soul. I made a pilgrimage across the biggest city in Vermont to Cassler’s Toy Store for a troll with purple hair.
In Springfield, Massachusetts I walked down the block to the drugstore lunch counter to buy a bowl of chicken noodle soup I could have had for free at home. It’s the sort of thing the grown-ups do.
When I was ten I ran away to the woods behind our house on the Monkton road. I hid for hours under boughs draped to the ground, waiting for the search party that never came. I returned along the trail of footprints I’d left in the snow to find my father lacing up his hiking boots.
I used to wander down the railroad tracks along the river late at night, lucky to be alive, my folks would say if they’d found out, but no one in the bushes by the rails waiting to murder me knew I was there.
I searched the dark midsummer streets of the second biggest city in Vermont when I was seventeen, in tears. I never found the rose-gold Spanish brooch my mother sometimes let me wear.
On my way back down East Mountain it was getting dark and the sky-blue blazes led me into a swamp each time I followed them. I remember wishing just this once I’d told someone where I was going, but I hadn’t, so I walked back up the trail until I found the place where two trails of blazes forked, and ran down the other one singing the Doxology all the way to my dorm room.
One winter afternoon in Cincinnati I ate a pint of Jamoca Almond Fudge at a Bergman matinee, then walked toward home through the early dark past a jeering gang of men in denim and metal. I imagined my body in the morgue with Jane Doe on the toe tag, since no one knew where I was.
In the hills above what, at the time, was the world’s busiest lumber port, I hiked from my new job to the college where I sang alto in the community choir. I watched the faces in the cars blur by and thought maybe they know where I am, but they don’t know me, so they don’t count.
I remember a meeting that was interrupted over and over by phone calls, the best thing about it. One by one, each subcommittee member got a call, except for me. “You’re next,” they joked and I laughed and didn’t tell them no one even knows I’m here.
There’s a patch of ground on a slope overlooking Lake Baikal, a narrow twisting path through the tropical forest of Little Corn Island, Nicaragua, an empty compartment on a train hurtling through a snowy night toward Tarnow, Poland, a steep stretch of road spilling down out of McLeod Ganj, India to the terraced valley below where tiny fires sparkle like gemstones, a balcony in Siem Reap, Cambodia overlooking a garden that’s a wetland in the rainy season. All over the world, no one knows where I am.
Q&A
2002, 2011
I like to think that the answers to most, if not all, of my questions are in my journals from the last 35 years, but today I was fortunate enough to ask the question on the same day I answered it, nine years earlier.
I’d been trying to figure out how to post something – a poem, a photo, an essay, even one good sentence – here most days, which means sorting through all the possibilities far enough in advance that if any modification is necessary – and it usually is – I can give that the time it requires.
I was reading everything I’d written on 18 February over the years, and I came across this note from 2002: I can scarcely believe how easy it is to clearly state what I want and then go about discovering that I’ve done it, gotten it, often beyond my wildest dreams.
I realized that the one thing I hadn’t done was clearly state what I wanted, which I proceeded to do. I wouldn’t say I’m beyond my wildest dreams quite yet, but I have a plan, which is more than I could say yesterday.
Ferocious Kind of Love
Tarnow, Poland, 2009
It’s February 14th and all those fuzzy and shiny symmetrical hearts remind me of my friend who’s going to have valve-replacement surgery in a couple of days. We’re nine time zones apart, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. We’ve always talked on the phone, even when I could bicycle to his house.
When I called him yesterday, he said, “It’s a pig valve.” It wasn’t a statement I was expecting to hear, perhaps not a statement anyone is ever expecting to hear.
“A what?”
I may have been a little sluggish on the uptake, but he wasn’t. He said “pig” again in English, then repeated “pig” in Russian. I knew he was going to ask me how to say pig in Polish. I remembered how to say “pork,” but not pig. My students get the English mixed up, too, they assured me when I asked them later.
When I heard the expression, “Free as a wild pig,” in Polish, I pictured the emancipated swine flapping unlikely wings and getting effectively, if perhaps not gracefully, airborne, waving goodbye to whatever ties pigs down.
Another of Poland’s porcine residents is known as dzik. Everyone I’ve spoken to here can recite a children’s rhyme about the dzik’s bad disposition and sharp tusks, and the strategy of climbing a tree should one have the misfortune to encounter the beast on an otherwise pleasant outing.
I renamed Valentine’s Day “Javelina Day” a while back. The words aren’t quite anagrams, but they’re sneaking up on it. I doubted that the creature also known as a peccary had ever appeared on a greeting card associated with affection. But the nearsighted, diffident javelina may soon be winding up its stint as the antidote to Valentine’s Day.
Suddenly, I’m picturing a dzik with little lacy hearts impaled on its fearsome tusks as it rampages through displays of chocolates and champagne. Lately, it’s a ferocious kind of love I’m looking for.
