20 February

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

these places

again.

(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.)

19 February

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.

18 February

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.

17 February

Notes for a Pair of Refrigerator Magnets

1991, 2009

What I did got me here

but it won't get me past here.

14 February

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.

13 February

Comparison and contrast

2006

Fifteen years ago

it was a drizzly

February,

my first night

in my new place,

exactly like

this time around.

Back then

it was a garage

apartment coiling

out room by room

from a triangular

closet in the center.

This time

it's a second-storey

corner studio

in an apartment building

that was once

a church.

Fifteen years ago

it was a beer I wanted

more than anything,

and my new house key

was the only means of ingress.

I don't remember if I got

the bottle open,

but I didn't need stitches.

This time around

it was dilly beans

I craved.

I tried boiling water,

the back of a knife,

a sharp rap upside-down

on the counter,

but that jar might as well

have been a fortress.

What the orange

rubber gloves

were doing

hanging on the trap

under the sink,

or why it crossed my mind

to look there,

I may never know,

but I'm hoping

it's a trend.

12 February

Damage Control

2006

I don't recall her name.

I do remember I admired her

as much for inviting her best girlfriends

to the corner table at the Alibi

at eleven in the morning,

where she kept the pitchers coming

while we match serial numbers

and taped the torn pieces back together,

as for ripping up all the twenty-dollars bills

he tried to bribe her with

the night before while he looked on

in queasy disbelief.