Van Helsing on America

This totally hurt my dang feelings until I realized it wasn't directed at me. It's from Bram Stoker (a filthy Mick, and therefore in self-loathing flight from the colonizing British whoremother even as he ran towards the fetid hum of her foul breath)'s 1897 novel Dracula. A novel about a sort of highly cultivated savage making his way from a world of primal aristocracy to a world of manners and money. And this, for Van Helsing (whose small below-sea-level country is colonially post-coital, now given over to the harnessing of wind power and the cultivation of tulips, and who can almost think straight about savages again as a consequence) is how to understand such an untamed human creature--not with scholarship or, strictly speaking, reason, but with big bangs of instinctive insight, with intuitive leaps that threaten violence to the mind of a sane and cultivated queenservant. Even to think about such a creature requires the civilized mind to transgress itself--to enter a new sort of death, an old kind of chaos.

What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my manthought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what it mean—what it might mean. Just as there are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch, then pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so?

Shoot boy, don't nothing but steers and pouf!'s come out of Dublin, and I don't see no horns on you. This is Stoker looking at England looking at Ireland, even as Ireland is beginning to lose interest in this game, seeking new forms of poverty and servitude in the next parish West. And not just that, of course--also seeking freedom and possibility. That, too. We reinvent ourselves as a form of address. Some of us seeking terms of rapprochement with the departed, some of us speaking the outline of something that still forms on the Western horizon.

Gonna have to build your own America, boy. I backed over the old one in my hearse.

Yellow Fever

I awoke at seven to the sound of my sons pounding their way downstairs. I lay in bed and realized I didn't have it this morning. I needed a sick day. I waited for someone to tell me to get the hell out of bed and do my job, but no one came in. I waited for an hour knowing families need breakfast and wives need a morning fire and boys need lunches packed and rides to school. I knew these things. I know these things. But I just didn't have it this morning.

At eight-thirty, twenty minutes before the mad race to school, Joseph slammed the bathroom door which caused the doors at each end of my bedroom to swing open. It was cold out there. Jill walked by one doorway while instructing the boys to pack their bags. I called out to no one, to everyone, "I have yellow fever. I think I have yellow fever." I heard the boys "humph" at the breakfast table. I waited for some kind of concern, some kind of response. Nothing. I yelled, "Heat! I need heat! I have yellow fever." But the word 'heat' sounded more like, "Heeeeeeet. I need heeeeet."

Gracie ran to my bedroom doorway and like a bleating goat cried into the room, "Heeeeet! Heeeet!"

"Gracie," I said slowly. "Tell mom I have yellow fever." Gracie scampered away. I waited. Then Noah walked by and I said, "I won't be here when you return Noah. I have yellow fever."
Noah looked in and while putting on his jacket said, "O.K. Dad. See ya." Like it was no big deal to say goodbye to his dying father. And this cheered me up. I thought, this is how I'd like people to talk to me on my deathbed--breezy, off-the-cuff, "See ya." "Take it easy." "Catch ya latter." No tears and wailing and heavy conversations thick with foreshadowing. How much easier it will be for me to die if folks send me off like I'm taking an afternoon walk. "See ya."

So I got out of bed and put on my jeans and belt and tucked in my t-shirt. I walked into the kitchen and asked Jill, "What are the symptoms of yellow fever?" Jill was busy. She was wrapping sandwiches and the boys were eager for her to finish. "You don't have yellow fever," my son Joseph said as a matter of fact.

"Just tell me the symptoms." I said.

"No." Jill said without looking at me. "I'm not telling you."

"Why?" I asked. "Why won't you tell me. I can handle it. Just tell me."

Noah looked over at me, "Dad. Dad, don't tuck in your shirt. You look ridiculous. Especially with that belt. Dad. Dad, un-tuck your shirt."

"But my stomach is cold." I explained. "I need to keep my shirt tucked-in to keep my stomach warm. I think that's one of the symptoms."

"Dad, you don't have yellow fever." Joseph said with even greater confidence.

I continued to look at my wife. "Just tell me the symptoms Jill. Tell me."

Jill sighed a deep tired sigh. "I'm not going to tell you."

"Why not?" I asked, suddenly worried. "Why won't you tell me?"

Jill stopped her activity, turned and looked at me, which caused the boys to turn and look at me. Jill said calmly, "Tell me your symptoms."

I scanned my body, "My feet are cold.....my back is kind of sore. I feel like, I have that feeling like I need coffee. And....and...I think I'm feeling kind of down, you know...sad."

"O.K." Jill said with some gentleness, "O.K. I know what you have. You're turning forty-three. It's not yellow fever. You're turning forty-three. You need to put on some slippers, make a cup of coffee, and stand next to the stove. That's what you need." The boys stared at me. Jill gave me her maternal look. We all waited for a moment.

"But why won't you tell me the symptoms of yellow fever?" I asked.

Jill turned abruptly, the boys lifted their packs. "Come on Dad. We're late." I put on my jacket and boots and snow hat and drove the kids to school.

The Girl and The Bear Continued

The highway into town was strangely barren, and then she remembered it was Saturday and quite early for travelers. In the three mile walk they saw only one vehicle, a truck, most likely headed to California, loaded with pears. She watched the truck pass with its neat wooden crates and wished for a pot hole that would kick one of those treasure boxes loose and rain golden pears down into her lap.

They entered the town just as the shop keepers were arriving. Some glanced warily at the man with the mule, and the girl in the oversized coat. Others smiled and offered a cheery, “Good morning!” She smelled bread from the bakery and took a deep draw, hoping to taste it on her tongue. As they passed the café she saw a man and a woman eating hot dishes and she wished her father would slow in hopes that they might see the hungry girl and invite her in. There was a Model A pickup parked by the square and she studied it to see if it was the one her father sold. As they headed past the feed store she noticed the Harry and David truck parked with a young man in leather boots and tweed pants, re-working the straps of the canvas tarp. As they passed, the man smiled and addressed the girl, “Well, good morning young lady.” He reached over and scratched the mule’s ears.

“Good morning.” She said quietly.

“I used to ride a mule like this when I was your age.” He stretched out his other hand and began rubbing both ears. The mule’s eyes went half shut in pleasure. “You must feel like a princess riding up there like that.” The young man winked at the father. The girl looked down, uncertain how to respond. “Well I have a royal gift for a young princess like you.” The young man reached under the tarp and pulled out a golden pear, one of the Royal Rivieras her father used to pick when he worked in the orchards. She looked at her father to see if he approved. He nodded, and she quickly snatched the pear from the young man’s hand and hid it under her jacket.

“Thank the man.” Her father whispered. Without looking up she turned and said, “Thank you.” The young man leaned in close. “Certainly, young lady. Now you let that mule have the core when you’re finished. Even mules need a treat now and then.” The young man patted the mule’s head, adjusted his suspenders, tipped his hat to her father, then jumped into the cab and started away.

They walked behind the store fronts and her father tied the mule strap to a young alder. The mule turned from the girl and began to forage among a cluster of choke cherries. The father hoisted the girl to the ground, took the pear from her hand, and dropped it into his jacket pocket. “We’ll save that for later,” he told her. She felt hot tears gathering from the loss, but her father noticed and quickly explained. “Hold on darling. I’m going to get you something else for breakfast. We’ll have that pear for dessert. Now you wait right here.”

The father walked across the alley and tapped gently on the back door of the bakery. A square headed man in a white apron opened the door. Her father spoke in a low voice. The man looked at the father, looked over at the girl, then left the door open and disappeared into the store. A minute later he returned smiling with a greased paper bag, rolled tight at the top. Her father took the bag with two hands, made sounds of appreciation, tipped his hat, and then walked across the dirt alley to the girl waiting by the mule.

The father knelt by his daughter, opened the bag, and looked inside. “Now let’s see,” he said pondering the contents, “Oh yes.” He reached inside and took out a round bun with slice of sugared apple baked right into the top. “Try this one.” The girl couldn’t believe her eyes. She hadn’t had such a pastry since her mother had disappeared. She took the sugared bun and without thinking, licked the crystal topping, which made her father laugh. The girl looked up startled; she hadn’t seen her father laugh in a long time. The girl smiled and licked the bun again. “Gracie, you are your mother’s daughter. That’s for sure.”

Her father took out two bread rolls and dropped them in the large overcoat pocket beside the pear. He rolled up the remaining contents of the paper bag and tucked them into the mule pack. “Come on, Gracie. Let’s walk the park.” She pulled her arms from the sleeves and wrapped her mother’s coat around her shoulders. She looked and noticed the hem hung below her knees. She kept one hand by her chest holding the edges of the jacket at her neckline while her other hand held the apple pastry safe within. The father reached down and took an empty coat sleeve and they crossed the road toward the city park. They stepped the damp wide lawn full of tiny yellow dandelions and headed toward a bench made of river rock at the edge of a duck pond. She looked across the mirrored water and noticed a cluster of birds hunkered down beneath a Japanese maple, planted like a giant’s delicate umbrella.

“What are we doing, Daddy?” the girl asked, her mouth full of warm apple filling. “We’re going to see the bear,” he replied while taking a roll from his pocket and holding up to his nose. The girl looked up. She had overheard kids at school talking about a captured bear, but she never knew it was real. She looked around to see if there was a bear walking around the town. “When your mother and I first came to Oregon, before you were born, we stopped and walked this park. We sat at this pond and fed crusts to the ducks. We walked and talked the whole day.”

Gracie never heard her father speak of her mother. Even when she asked he just shook his head and stayed quiet. She wanted to hear more, but didn’t know if he’d quit talking. “Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Can we do everything you and mother did that day?” He stopped and examined her face. Grace noticed his eyes were holding tears. “Yes dear. Yes. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.” He turned and pointed at a bench by the pond. “We’ll start there. That bench. That’s where we had lunch and fed ducks.” They walked to the edge of the pond and sat on a bench made of river rock. Gracie squinted her eyes and tried to see back in time. She tried to see her mother and father sitting on this same bench and wondered what they looked like. Did they smile? Were they laughing? Did they sit close, or at a distance? She tried to concentrate, but she could hardly remember what her mother looked like. They sat down and the ducks took notice and paddled over.

“Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“What did you and mother talk about when you ‘talked the whole day?’” Her father broke off a piece of his roll and threw it in the water, then handed a small piece to Gracie. The ducks quickly congregated around the floating bread and soon they were quacking and snapping at one another. Gracie didn’t want to throw her piece to the ducks. She wanted to eat it. Her father could see what she was thinking, reached into his pocket, and took out a braided roll and placed it in her lap. Gracie smiled and then threw her little piece at a brown-speckled female floating off to the side of the quacking males.

“Let’s see. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about our new life here. We talked about growing peaches and building a house. Mostly, we talked about you.”

“You talked about me?” Gracie could feel her chest beating warm and fast. She wanted to hear her mother’s words. “Yes. Your mother was carrying you, of course we didn’t know it was you, but we both were hoping for a girl. We talked about names and decided if you were a girl we’d name you Gracie, after my mother. We tried to imagine what you’d look like, what color of hair, what kind of eyes…you know, that sort of thing.” Gracie sat still. She wanted him to keep talking. She had forgotten about the cold, she was completely wrapped in her father’s words. Her mother had sat on this very bench and thought of her! Now here she was doing the same thing in reverse, trying to imagine her mother—her voice, her hair, her smell.

Stefana's Native Earth Comes to Find Her

Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh

Odd to come around a corner and be confronted by the face of Andrei Codrescu peering up at you with intense and game skepticism. And, more often than not, met with the VOICE. Codrescu has been at the school where I teach for two days, speaking and wandering the halls, waiting for his speaking sessions to begin. He was lovely, patient, and studiously sane-- only occasionally reminding us that he retains the prerogative to make wild pronouncements and to answer the questions we ought to have asked rather than the ones we did ask.

He made the case in a number of ways that language has as much to do with how you hold your body as it does with words. You can understand every word that someone is saying and fail to answer the real question, or conversely understand very little and come right to the nub by watching as they speak. I went to my doctor this week to have a neck injury checked out. She called back the next day to reassure me that my MRI showed no evidence of a stroke. A stroke? says I. Um, nice--what about my neck? Somehow we weren't talking. And yet the oscillating rhythms inside the MRI tube made me euphoric even through waves of claustrophobia. Made me feel cared for, grokked. Dr. Ghafoor, competent as she is, not at all. I prefer the great womb of the Machine Mother.

Codrescu lives with ghosts speaking several languages from the wreckage of several cities, including Baltimore. Lots of talk of speaking across borders of language and culture and history, always darkness and light in his tone. We ate Afghan food on Wednesday night, the day after the announcement that the U.S. will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to make more ghosts. The wine was Portuguese and pleasantly viscous, Turkish coffee. We started talking about Jim Carroll's song, "People Who Died," and then about that poetic form of listing the dead, invented by whom? Ginsberg? the prophet Isaiah, maybe? perhaps Death Itself? And then about Alice Notley's wonderful haunted book, The Descent of Alette, in which a woman is trapped beneath the surface of a desolate city and beset by ghosts and demons as she attempts to find and confront the source of the evil. It is a book about ghosts, Codrescu, says. First her husband Ted Berrigan died and then, quickly, a new young husband whom she married a year later. His talk is a tower of Babel of names, gifted people who appeared, who appear, for an incandescent moment and then were gone, are gone.

Thursday morning he spoke to a group of students, ostensibility on The Writing Life, but somehow none of us could let go of the topic of immigration and flight, the odds parts of oneself that are lost and replaced by refugees. He is, as it turns out, Jewish, and was bought from the Soviet government by the state of Israel for around $2000 U.S. The school where I teach is full of these stories, full of the children of the Jewish diaspora, and of the half-remembered places and languages they carry with them.

He mostly found his way through the morning by taking questions. When did he start to dream in English? Is thought prior to language? A very quiet, dark girl asked him from near the front, when you return to Romania, do you feel alien? Dark hair across half her face, her eyes moving tentatively between Codrescu's eyes and her own hands. He raised his eyebrows for a moment, took a half-step toward her, and began to answer to her in Romanian. And she spoke back in Romanian.

Stefana was adopted from a Romanian orphanage at the age of six, which I had never known, and which Andrei had no way of knowing. It was her mouth when she talked, he said. The needs of our divided and immigrant nation require us to understate the imprint of place and ethnicity, but our mouths keep the shape in which they were first held--keep this shape across oceans, continents, decades, even generations. The shape can even survive the death of hope and love. I walked past Stefana in the hall yesterday and wondered what that moment meant to her. Was it a moment of being found by something that she thought she had lost? Like losing your glasses and finding them, after an infuriating search, on your nose. Or yet another moment of her strangeness confirmed? Or did the ghost of that moment just enter the room where her other ghosts mill around speaking in tongues? And how do I hold my mouth when I ask her?

Entries from Day One of Last Summer's Greensprings Retreat

--There is a sugar pine behind the work shed, behind the trucks and rusting shuttle vans, behind the decaying mill house where the caretaker's son kept catalogs of women's lingerie. I carried a Mexican blanket, folded it beneath the cracked bark of the sugar pine and lay down. I lay down and read Nikos, his pilgrimage on Mt. Athos, his masculine yearning for God, for purpose, for a worthy adversary. I placed a soft, rotting log beneath my head and slept. I dreamt of a gash across my chest, three inches in length. In the dream I squeezed it and thick, paste-like, flesh came out. Dross. The dross around my heart.

--At the prayer I met Frank. We embraced in silence, old friend that he is.

--We were called to find a sacred moment and return to it. Many images came, but they fell away like tired relics. My soul did not want to travel further than last December--the family retreat in Carpenteria, the soft beach, the oil derricks, the sky bruised purple, soft as plums. I felt the pleasure of my family, happily warrened in our yellow tin condo. I sat in this memory, in this prayer, and felt the call to rest, to trust. It is the call from God, from reality, that never ceases: "Trust. Rest. Wait. Let life overtake you."

--I retreated to my car, the gluttonous Ford Explorer, forest green. I sat in it as I've seen homeless men sit in their cars--all their possessions spread across the back seat. I sat and ate my turkey sandwich: sourdough bread, cheddar cheese, the pickle surprise--it was as sacred as Christ's body. I sat waiting. Homeless.

--The chicken's are back. Beautiful. Grace would appreciate them. Her favorite book, Extraordinary Chickens. Grace appreciates the wonderfully absurd. There is one here, an Aztec King. Black and golden, it's headdress fanned in all directions.

--The teachers, my friends, are soft and precious. It takes some restraint to keep from barking profanities (though I know this too would be met with gentle appreciation). I wish for fewer words, less precision, less purple, more desert sand and rock. Stark. More stark.

--I napped in the Explorer and dreamed of Mt. Athos. The Grecian light. I want to see the light, the sunlight on the monasteries, the Greek sun on white walls. I want to drink coffee with black grounds stirring at the bottom. I want to see olive, laurel, and cypress trees backed by the Mediterranean blue.

--The mountain is cold today. Shrouded in clouds visiting from the ocean. All retreats should take place on the sea. The sea is as close as I can get to God incarnate. There is no sea here so God has sent the coastal fog, the grey clouds heavy with salt water. It is a blessing, given in response to our yearning.

--A few weeks ago I found myself crying in a dream. I had lost something, something dear to me. It was lost and could not be retrieved. I stood on a dirt road and wept. I awoke in the middle of the night and my chest, my chest was heavy with grief.

Girl and Bear Continued

It was her father who had taken her to see the bear, a year after her mother had disappeared, leaving only a sliver of packing paper that read, “Gone back.” It was a stone-white morning, before the birds began to stir, when she woke and saw her father sitting in the corner, watching her with his red rimmed eyes. “You look like your mother,” was the first words he spoke. Then, “Come. Let’s see the bear.” The girl sat up without speaking and studied the room--the stove dark, the larder empty, the fiddle strings torn from their pegs. “Alright,” she answered, in the flat tone she shared with her father.


The girl pulled on her boots, though they were stiff and crimped her toes. She shivered to the creek and scrubbed her face with water that burned like snow. She hurried back to the cabin, though it was as cold as the outdoors, and took the wooden comb with the missing teeth and quietly brushed her tired hair, just as her mother had done, then strung it back from her face without a mirror to fix it. It was October, and the days had been warm, but the cabin was tucked in the thin canyon above Wagner creek where it remained covered in shadows long into the afternoon. Her winter coat was too small for traveling so she opened the trunk, without asking, lifted her mother’s heavy coat, and wrapped herself inside like an Indian girl.


Outside her father prepared the mule with leather satchels on the haunches, a folded army blanket for a saddle, and a braided strap for pulling. The girl came and stood by his side without speaking. When all was fixed, he set her on the blanket, just below the neck, and placed the knotted mane in her hands. He paused and took in her mother’s jacket, then lifted the dark oily strap, and led the quiet beast along Wagner creek, toward the highway. The girl knew not to speak, but after awhile her ache could no longer stay quiet, “I’m hungry,” she said, and then stiffened, uncertain if her father would turn angry. But he was too tired for anger and with weary eyes he said, “I know, dear. I know.”


Down the road they traveled, their thoughts soothed by the mule’s heavy feet. They came out from the trees and walked the dirt road between orchards. Halfway to town, father spied a patch of blackberries at the edge of a pasture. “Wait here,” he instructed, then carefully climbed the stone wall and walked between a handful of sleepy cows with smoking nostrils, until he reached a tumbleweed of vines. She waited while the mule nipped at the roadside clover, her stomach crying for food. To keep warm she rubbed her legs against the animal’s bristly belly and buried her fingers deep within the mane.


Her father returned just as the sun began to glow behind the Siskiyous. He opened his hands and gently offered a palm’s worth of red and purple speckled berries. “They’re past season, but it’s something. At least until we get to town.” She lifted them carefully into her own hand, and as the mule began to walk, she placed the berries one at a time into her mouth. Some were bitter, others washed out, but the last one was perfectly sweet and she rolled it with her tongue until it fell open.

Rondo Unleashes a World of Hurt on His So Called "Buddies"

Rondo’s tallywacker was still smarts from the nip of the pekingese. He gingered himself into the broken circle of homeless men, allowing the queerness of their predicament to grow unchecked. It was Coco who first tried to broker the distance, offering up the Hamms he’d been nursing, but Rondo wasn’t having any of it. He backhanded Coco at the elbow and the luke warm libation took flight.

“Jesus, Coco!” he punctured the silence. “Jesus H. Coco. I don't even know where to begin.” Rondo paced aside the truck stop dumpster like a dog gone mad until he finally ascended the crate box, beside the fire barrel, and commenced to dole out the expected come uppings.

“Buddies?! Buddies for life? Isn’t that what you said Wolfgang? Well, where the hell are my buddies now? Where are they Shep? Wang-she? Calypso? I am so sorely—I see that smile Shep and I've got half a mind to shank you right now!" Rondo waited for the buddies to collect their composure.

"As I said, I am sorely disappointed. God gives a male one secret pleasure. One solitary digit of comfort. Though the whole body betray the man, the Lord provides one faithful Ebenezer, a staff of pride that might be raised in times of joy and times of sorrow. An honest man might expect that when he proffers a commitment of fellowship, swears an allegiance of friendship, treaties—in good faith I remind you—with men akin to his own situation, congregates his affections and entrusts them to his companions under a promise of 'buddyhood'—that man might expect his brothers in arms, his spiritual intimates, to vault all obstacles. Most particularly when that man is in perilous danger of losing the holy sepulchre of his own existence, his spiritual gift, his visible sign of the Father’s heralded love.

But no! The faithful soul who trusts in the treaty of buddyhood is a tragic figure indeed. That's what you've reduced me to my buddies. A dime store tragedy. The man who stands before you is bereft of all faith in a beneficent deity, a man hallowed empty by the cowardice of a people he once claimed as kin.

Shep! For Godssake Shep, you sheepdip! Can’t you set your Norwegian snuff aside for a hare’s whisker? Is it too much trouble to lend an ear to a fellow soul cast upon the capriciousness of human friendship? And you, Wolfgang! I’m ashamed to say, I dappled my eyes a time or two when you spoke of the blitzkrieg of remorse that raked your childhood. My heart reached out to you my Germanic friend. But now I count it a point of shame. No more Wolfgang. No more shall you feel the comfort of Rondo's loyal heart.

Sure, I was in need of coin--like any man in my situation. The nightclubs no longer desirous of the pluck and strum of an Alabama banjo. And sure, I was grateful Wang-she, when you told me of the potential to earn a few dollars at the Sweet Dreams Rest Home holiday festival. So I went, and I played my gift like the lil' drummer boy before the baby God incarnate. I caressed them to tap and sway to Alabamy Bound, and When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam', and Alabama Jubilee, and then finished her off with Old Folks at Home (in Alabama).

Then, as you all are well aware, the bitty with the white snowflake pekingese stood and let that cattail of a dog run and take hold of my John Thomas with a vengefulness that I've only seen in my darkest visions of Hades. The dog hung their, mind you, while the bitty, and the nurses, and my so called 'buddies' stood agog." Rondo went silent and looked down at his bruised jewels.

"We thought you'd handle him yourself Rondo," Chauncey mumbled.

"What did you say Chauncey? Did you say handle! Handle! Goddamn you Chauncey, to Satan's lair. In case you haven't noticed Chauncey, I'm a professional.--course you got no idea what that means, so I'll enlighten you: When you're playing Old Folks at Home (in Alabama) and your comin' round home to the final lick, you don't stop to wrastle a pekingese. You finish whatchya started! Why? Because that's what the public expects. Because that's what a P-R-O fessional does. But that's not what a buddy does Chauncey. Hell no. A B-U-uddy, upon seeing his companion distressed, lends a hand, reaches out and removes the offending mutt. Displaces it from his friend's Yankee noodle. What other meaning could you possible interpret from our Saviour's admonition to 'Love thy neighbor?'

I guess that was too much to expect. I played my tune. I turned the corner toward Alabamy. I finished what I started and let the pekingese dig is damnable fangs into my manhood, and swing his furry headed body in a most hateful tempo. There I stood. Playing my last licks. With a pain that only Christ Our Lord can contemplate."

Rondo stepped down from the blue plastic crate. "Well it's over. Yes sir, it's over. I am no longer anyone's buddy. I return to my selfhood from which I'm quite familiar, thank you. I enter the citadel of my own soul, no less lonely then when I first journeyed forth from the womb--hope in mankind being my only loss." Rondo picked up his canteen and took a long swallow of his own urine mixed with Grey Goose vodka. He gave the buddy circle a final look, "I guess what I'm trying to say is: Screw you guys."

He turned, lifted his banjo case, then ran, into a dark field of forget-me-nots.

The Girl and the Bear

There was a girl in a cabin who would lie on the floor and think of the bear. She would lie under the wool blanket on the red fir planks with her mother’s quilt and a flat brown pillow and she would think of the bear, on the ground, in the lamp-lit park, shackled to a tree. The girl lay on the floor because she had no bed, and she lay in the dark because there was no light, no electricity, no matches to strike. Dark and still, her father asleep, she lay thinking and feeling and remembering the bear, all alone, beneath the moon.

Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

Not Tonight: Anti-Erotica To Keep You Out of the Mood

Beneath the Denny’s grease traps the two heavyset women leaned into one another until their sweaty brows touched and the stiff hairs from their nostrils intertwined, like squid tentacles on a plate of boiled spinach.
_____

The surgeon began to have second thoughts about the mixed species transplant he had performed on himself. At first, the thought of replacing his penis with a live banana slug had filled him with an exhilarating sense of completeness. Now that it was a reality, he began to harbor doubts—the constant slime trails on the underside of his corduroys, the late night leaf feedings, and now this burning, foaming, mucus filling his swimsuit. He high-stepped from the salty ocean, ran into his beachfront condominium, and quickly dipped his slug-genital in a glass of cold milk. He sat on the linoleum floor and watched the frightened black eyes as his “penug” stretched its tiny puse face, struggling to breathe. He reached down and gently caressed its slimy head, “There, there little buddy. There, there. Daddy’s gonna make it all better.” Suddenly all the doubt and uncertainty was lifted and the surgeon realized he would make mollusk love to himself that very afternoon.
_____

When their mouths finally parted, she looked down and noticed her tiny feathers of flaking skin were now dangling from the herpes boils at the corner of his mouth, and she knew, just as she’d always known, that this was true love.
_____

Some of the nurses speculated that the two men with Alzheimer’s were unaware of their actions, but the young gay nurse had seen their hand-holding and knew that Earl and Mortimer were finally coming out of the closet. That night, as the rest of the orderlies drank coffee in the lounge, the male nurse gently removed the catheter from Earl’s penis and attached it to Mortimer’s. Then, while the two men looked on, the nurse detached the colostomy bag from Mortimer’s side and, after a small incision, inserted Mortimer’s tube into Earl’s colon. The nurse beamed, “There. Now you two are truly a couple.”
“I can’t find my cows!” Earl called out.
“I’m late for work,” Mortimer whimpered, “they’re going to fire me.”

"We die of too much life."

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

Starting Over

One time we made a boat.

I woke up in the rail yard on a floral quilt pulled from a Motel 8, my brain swollen thick, my chest anchored in silt and shame. I sat up to relieve my sore hip and the sun skipped off the Bacardi Gold and struck my eyes blind. I raised my hand, picked up the half empty bottle and hurled it with a powerful self-hatred. I had never been to the abandoned rail yard and yet the place was familiar—the disorientation, the head full of tears, the dull repetition of failure. I stood, buckled my jeans, and spotted the freeway duplex where I’d once dropped Wantu. I stepped through the weeds and junkyard earth, climbed the bank, and knocked.

He came to the door grinning in his orange winter vest. I inquired about the bird and he pointed to the overpass. I narrowed my eyes and saw a flutter of grey just beyond the railroad cars, alighting in the narrow space between concrete supports. I asked, uncertain, if I could come in. He turned and walked, leaving the door wide. I followed him through the bare gypsum hallway into a dining room with red brick linoleum, a pinewood children’s table, two pine children’s chairs, and a chain link chandelier with pentagons of plastic amber. He sat in a chair that fit him and poured chocolate milk into two tarnished baby cups. I sat into the other seat, my oversized body squatting like some kind of obscenity. He slid a silver cup. I held it and deciphered the engraving: Julia Margaret Campbell 5-23-52. We thank God for you this day!

I emptied the tepid chocolate and suddenly lost all purpose. What was I doing? Why had I come here? What did I want? I blushed, feeling lost in my being, when Wantu said, “You want to build a boat?” I stared at him not knowing how to react. He stared back. “Sure,” I shrugged. He stood and we walked downstairs through a darkened garage that smelled of burnt leaves and orange peels and headed through a hand-cut doorway out to a field of star thistle, glittering glass, neat stacks of railroad ties, and wrappers fluttering like racing flags. We followed a thin rabbit trail down to a creek I never noticed before, a creek with clumps of cattails and wild willow branches growing thick along the level bank. The water was thin and sickly, clotted with plastic bottles, a clump of faded panties, a leg of jeans, submerged shopping bags, and other signs of the careless human beast.

We stepped like cranes until we came to a clearing bordered with tilting oaks and clusters of washed-out foxtails. He pointed to a log--a clean, skinned, beeswax trunk--sitting in a nest of its own golden shavings. “It’s cedar,” he said with pleasure. Once he said it, I tuned my senses and noticed the warm fragrance. It was like breathing a mother’s prayer, and it gave me a sudden urge to surrender tears. I walked over and placed my hand on the primitive vessel. The boat was seven or eight feet in length, shaped more like a bathtub then a canoe, it’s edges heavy and thick, the inside pounded like a copper kettle, the heartwood as red as sunset.

Behind me, Wantu stood sticks within an ashen circle of stones. He gestured to the oaks and I walked over and collected the dried branches. He made a cone of kindling then placed a ball of dried grass at its center and lit it with a cheap yellow lighter. The grey branches were soon aflame and Wantu walked back along the trail returning with chunks of splintered ties. He placed the tarred wood on the kindling until the fire turned tall and blue and smoke billowed thick like a steam engine. Wantu stood back and smiled. We then walked to the water’s edge where he showed me an aluminum stock pot, the lip as tall as Wantu’s waist. We filled it halfway and then I waddled it back to the fire where Wantu helped me position it on a platform of cement blocks until its bottom was wrapped in flames. Then Wantu gathered stones as big as cantaloupes and dropped them into the pot. I looked at him questioningly.

“To soften the wood,” he said and pointed to the boat. He stood and waited for me to piece it together.

“We pour this into the boat…,” I started. He nodded. “Then we dig out the wood?” I continued. He held up the sharp rock and smiled.

“Ah-ha!,” I grinned, grateful for a plan.

We sat and waited for the water to boil. Wantu pulled out two dimestore, corncob pipes from his vest. They were new with tiny stickers on the stem that read “Made in Taiwan.” He pulled out a red foil bag and poured a mixture into each bowl. I looked closely in my bowl and noticed what looked like dried apple, splinters of cinnamon, and clove spikes. Wantu handed me the plastic lighter. I lit the concoction and took a hard draw. It burned my tongue, bit my throat, and fumigated all the oxygen from my lungs. I stood reflexively and began to cough. “What the hell is this?” I sputtered. Wantu, pipe stem clamped at the edge of his mouth, looked at me, eyebrows raised with concern. He reached out and handed me the foil bag. The red package had an ornamented pine tree and read: Christmas Seasons’ Old World Mulled Wine.” “Wantu, this isn’t tobacco! This isn’t for smoking,” I admonished him. “This is for wine. At Christmas time.”
“But I like Christmas,” he said apologetically. I was stunned.

“You like Christmas? Fine. It doesn't mean you have to smoke it." Wantu looked down. “You are right. This is terrible,” he shook his head with a pained look. And then, for no reason at all, I started to laugh. And then Wantu looked up at me and laughed. We laughed and looked at one another and before I knew it, I had started over again.

I Resign from the Theism Club

I'm reading the not-very-good but really sort of compelling book Fight Club. (I know. Most of what I learn seems to come from books, both negative and positive lessons. This even though I'm around people almost all the time. Could this mean something?) And so on page 140 someone says to the main character, who at this point has some fundamental misunderstandings about who he is, "What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God."

Now of course I've heard this before but this time it's caught me off guard. My dad was remote, angry and disapproving, uncomprehending and disappointed, unpredictable and almost only present when he was either furious and abusive or fatuous and drunk. There was absolutely no pleasing the guy. That's my God. I have been puzzled at my inability to close my eyes, back when I really tried to do this sort of thing, and imagine myself in the arms of God. That's not my God; It wasn't a huggy God. It did It's best to be nurturing, or sometimes It did, but the basic work of being all-knowing and all-powerful left It frazzled and irritable.

There's more to the future of my theology, I guess, sort of. I could find spare parts and build another God, maybe a really good one. But I don't think It would be all that compelling to me. Nope, my God was really big and angry and disapproving and It worked out great for me for a long time. I could build another one but it would be sort of like an Amazonian rainforest dweller going to elaborate lengths to build a can opener.

So I quit.

Nared and Filfin Contemplate the Mind of God

Filfin: I don’t understand why he won’t tell us the plan. What’s the point of secrecy? Is he afraid we won’t follow the plan? Or maybe we’ll disagree and subvert the plan? I mean, the way Baby tells it, we couldn’t change the plan even if we wanted to, so why not just tell us the plan so at least we don’t have all this uncertainty.
Nared: I know what you mean. Like our lips being sewn shut. What is the point of that? Why not let our mouths work free?
Filfin: Exactly. I’ve got two teeth hanging out, for no practical purpose. I mean, even if I wanted to bite something, or tear at a wrapper, I can’t do it. They’re sewn back into my lips. Why not just leave them in my mouth? Why bother to give me two teeth and then prevent me from making use of them? It’s like God’s trying to be cruel.
Nared: Don’t say that. You know that’s not true.
Filfin: The truth is Nared, I don’t know. I know Baby is always quoting that rabbit book and saying “love makes us real” and “real is something that happens to you…” and other things like that. Can I be honest? I have no idea what Baby’s talking about. Have you ever read the book? The Velveteen Rabbits or whatever it’s called? For two days I poured over that book. Let me tell you Nared, I felt nothing, nothing but nausea--the burn pile, the sick boy, the Nursery Fairy, the tattered rabbit--Baby thinks it should give me some kind of comfort, but to tell you the truth, I just had more questions. Like why does the boy get all working parts? Why isn’t his mouth sewn shut? Why are some of the characters made without hind legs or at the mercy of some winding key? And why do the loved ones get to become real? I mean, why is that supposed to make me feel better? He’s a soft rabbit for Chrissake! Of course he’s loved! Is it Mechanical Mouse’s fault that he’s made of cold metal? None of it makes any sense.
Nared: Yea, I know.
Filfin: Why is the boy’s love the only thing that counts? Why isn't the boy, Bobby or whoever, why isn't he thrown on the burn pile for not being loved by Car or Boat? And really, Nared, when the Nursery Fairy comes in and makes the rabbit real, I mean, didn’t you find that forced? I just found that completely unrealistic, I practically blushed with embarrassment. There’s no mention of Nursery Fairy anywhere in the story, and then all of a sudden in the final chapter, just when the story feels like we’re getting down to the hard core truth, here comes Nursery Fairy to take away the painful absurdity and make everything come out alright. I’ll bet you anything that Nursery Fairy wasn’t in the original text. I’ll bet someone added that in to keep the terror at bay.
Nared: Yea. I know. It didn’t do much for me either. I guess I just don’t get the question the book is trying to answer. Like when Nursery Fairy says, “You were only real to the boy, now you shall be real to everyone!” Baby is always quoting that line to me like it’s supposed to give me hope or something, but I always think, Wait a minute, wasn’t Velvee real to Car and Boat and Mechanical Mouse? Who says he was only real to the boy? I mean, does Baby believe God has ordained some kind of hierarchy of beings where those who don’t have sewn mouths, or dangling button eyes--those who are born with greater symmetry and a free range of motion--have greater worth? Is that the “God’s plan” that Baby is always talking about? I mean, if it is, then I guess I’m not interested.
Filfin: So you think there’s no plan?
Nared: Well…Well, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you see this long arm of mine? The one long arm pointing upward in a kind of celebratory manor? Well, I’ve always felt that I have this one long arm for a purpose. I mean, I know the girl laughs at it sometimes, but I have this feeling, this deep feeling, that one day there will be this situation where a creature with one long arm and one short arm is going to be needed, needed in some important way, and it will make sense, and I will feel my purpose and I will understand a little of what God is thinking. You know what I mean? It doesn’t erase any of my questions, it’s just a feeling I have about my one long arm, a feeling that this arm is not a cause for ridicule but a sign that there is a greater mind at work. That probably sounds ridiculous to you…
Filfin: No, no. I know what you’re talking about. I’ve often felt that way about these appendages on my head.
Nared: You mean your horns?
Filfin: They’re not horns really. I used to think they were horns until I felt Rhino’s horn. His is hard and sharp. Good for defending or attacking something. Mine are completely soft, impotent really. I don’t think anyone could really classify them as horns. At one point I thought they might be ears, you know, some kind of special hearing devices that could pick up some kind of special sound or signal that other’s can’t perceive.
Nared: So they’re ears?
Filfin: I have no idea really. They could be. Maybe one day I’ll hear something through them, something no one else notices…I don’t know. I guess it’s possible. Or maybe they serve some other function. I don’t know. And that’s the pain of it all. I too have times when I feel that I’m made for some deep purpose…but, mostly there’s just this pain. A kind of shame really, at who I am, how I’m perceived, a deep self-loathing at my crooked arms, the head appendages, the soft pink rump. I would like to feel this “real love” that Baby speaks of…but most days I just feel like shit. Really Nared. I wake up, I see myself in the mirror, and I just feel worthless, and I just wish I could get five minutes with God or the Nursery Fairy or some kind of Higher Power and say to them, Please. Please. Tell me the plan. For God’s sake, just tell me the plan. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t try and mess it up. If it’s the burn pile for me, O.K. I can accept that. Even welcome it. I just want to know.

A Sacrament

A bridge across the Susquehanna is not a sacrament, and neither is a highway with Amish buggies to slow your way into Lancaster, PA. Got directions at dusk from a very old young woman missing her front teeth, she paused a long while from putting her baby in his carseat to puzzle out the way to Water Street. Last light on dark 19th C brick is not a sacrament, falling night is not a sacrament, and neither is a cat stuck on a steep slate rowhouse roof, even if it's stuck there until somebody lets it back in.

Waiting for the band to come on is not a sacrament. An accordion under one arm and four beers in the other hand is not a sacrament. An accordion is not, a Guild hollow-body six string is not, the worn scar below the f-hole is not a sacrament, and the singer's reluctance to speak or make eye contact is not a sacrament. Nothing is consecrated by a three-step sway aloft on a boozy waltz, and nothing changes when the singer closes his eyes and his brother leans into him for the chorus, because singing to the punched tin ceiling that shines two stories above an audience passing round a bottle of Maker's Mark is not a sacrament. Stomping out a waltz is not, certain people touching each other who otherwise never touch because your heart is too good for this town is not a sacrament. The sound of too much sound is not a sacrament, when it's like holding your ear to the ocean and you're pretty sure you're hearing the world's highest octaves for the last time, it is not a sacrament how imaginary harmonics become indistinguishable from actual harmonies. Sweat and fatigue late at night with the presence of other bodies moving and the smell of beer is not a sacrament. It is not a sacrament when the Maker's Mark comes by again now almost gone and sloshing golden hot and dark in your throat and your heart is too good for this town could be nearly anyone. Your booted heel stomping onetwothree, onetwothree against the floorboards is not a sacrament although it could almost be a voice and the voice could almost be a tall man with hair in his face thinking your heart is too good. Gratitude is not a sacrament, loneliness is not a sacrament, silence is not a sacrament, and neither is a bridge across the Susquehanna.

Jack Shellac and the Vegan Vow

Jack Shellac woke unusually late and tried to recall the face of the werewolf hunkered down in the corner of his dream. He lay eyes closed, fully awake, seeking to re-enter the night’s images. He noticed the carnal hunger in the dark of his belly and felt a kind of clarity he hadn’t known in months. He let the hunger spread, clearing the myths and fantasies that cloaked his will, until he was left with the plain truth: he would break the vegan vow he’d made the previous summer. He knew now he'd lived half starved because of the smell of patchouli on a young woman’s pits.

She’d picked him out of a crowd of drunk vagabonds, lechers really, standing at the edge of a makeshift concert--three young men in cutoffs, hemp leis, beaded dreadlocks, playing a hacked version of Marley through a row of tissue box amps wired to a car battery. They stood on an oil-stained rug, Pakistani he figured, stood on it like it was an elevated stage. They spun and swung their matted locks, raised and swaggered their axes, lurched at the half-dozen dancers like they were head-lining in Kingston. The dancers, forest hippies—dirty hair, brown dusty skin, brown clothes--danced half-naked, lines of sweat streaking light across their faces. Jack and the drunks from the river bank stood at the creek bank, unmoved, like free-range cattle. Jack had no feeling at the appearance of this spontaneous gathering, his ears working, outlining the mathematics of the beat.

He didn’t know when or why the young woman with the nocturnal eyes came to him. He couldn’t recall whether his embarrassment at her made-up name (Morning Glory) was in reaction to her obvious need or from some sense of propriety his parents had tucked into his bones. What he did recall was the way she whispered, “I can heal you,” and the smell, the alluring scent of un-bathed female, like peaches split open on the ground. She told him it was patchouli and lifted her arm so he could smell it. When he bent toward her, she kissed his dry crown and beckoned, “Come with me. I’m going to heal you.”

He took her hand and walked. The sharp smell of ponderosa pine cleared the Wild Turkey from his eyes and he looked at her soft shoulder blades and realized he was looking at a gift. This was just like Mother Nature. How many nights had he begged and pleaded with her for a sign? He’d fasted, sang to her in the sacred woods, gave up every man-made pleasure, and yet she’d remained full of silence. And then now, now that he’d cursed her, called her a lying whore, threw Oscar Meyer wrappers in her rivers, carved his name in redwoods, shat and pissed on squirrel nuts and molehills, gave himself over to rye and sugar water, now she turns to him and gives him Morning Glory? A doe of a girl, with warmth in her eyes, and rose lips.

She was a gift. Maybe the last gift of female attention he would know on this planet, and his knotted heart went slack with gratefulness. She walked him into a clearing that smelled of charcoal and summer urine, and then to a set of safety-orange camping mats, duck-taped into a hobo’s California king. She laid him down on that foam mat at the base of an oak tree and he looked up at the branches tied with dream catchers, tiny Tibetan bells, and satchels of lavender. He choked, in shock really, at the cold ball of silver studded through her soft pink tongue, then lifted his cheek to catch the strands of beads that hung from her ears and neck, felt them brush across his flat face like summer rain. He lifted his hands, touched her oily hair, pulled at the dark dreds, noticed his fingers wanted to play her, find the melody, pluck out some kind of African blues.

She fancied herself a healer, though he knew she was an L.A. refugee--no place, no people, only head-shop rumors--and yet, she did resurrect the warrior, the old spear straight and sharp, which was a kind of supernatural surprise. He gave himself over, and felt the death ache separate from his body and head for the junipers where it hovered, watching, waiting, like a sick animal.

In the morning he woke with her visage dark against the early light. Her services complete, she gave final instructions, “You need to stop eating meat. It’s blocking your energy. Your third and fifth chakras have almost completely stopped functioning.” He sensed she was referring to his heart and maybe his groin and told her he thought he’d done alright last night. She smiled at him, told him he did fine in a way that let him know it was a one-time service. “You’re gonna have to take care of yourself now. You should go vegan. And no more booze. Buddha said that.”
“Buddha said no booze?”
“I think so. It was either him or Laura Schlessinger.”
He lay back, smiled at the feel of his spent body, then made a vow to become a new man.

Darśana, Leonard Cohen and Levon Helm

I recently got to see two of the great aging bearers of the (North) American tradition of words and music. And see is about right because in both cases I didn't get to hear much of them. I may have told you that Magdalen got a migraine within a few minutes of getting our chairs set up and hunkering down for the Leonard Cohen show in the rain. We got to hear "Dance Me to the End of Love" and then "Take This Waltz" as we headed for the exit, Magdalen weaving limply on my arm and the rain beginning to fall in sheets on those unlucky ones who weren't under the pavilion. I was surprised how little it mattered to me, actually, and how almost proud I was to be outside the feast. The main thing was I got to see the man. He was dressed in a black, wool Italian suit. Jowly and thin as he was he carried himself with great strength and flexibility and even power. As we walked past, he knelt on one knee and held his finger to his lips, dropping nearly to the bottom of his gravelly range to whisper across the night, "Take this waltz./ It's yours now,/ It's all that there is."

For Hindus, enlightenment can be conveyed by seeing a great master or by seeing the divine in a person. It's called, apparently, and not in Roman letters, darśana. And these two experiences helped make sense of it for me. I was oddly grateful to see Leonard Cohen, and his image on stage has taught me something about how one holds oneself when one is a pilgrim but finds oneself in the black Italian suit of a cabaret singer. And how one holds oneself when one is a sensualist whose body is aging and failing. Stretch, bend, invite the body to continue finding postures for the eternally youthful, eternally restless soul--these postures must change as the body changes, they will be abbreviated, more cautious, but they can work just as well as the postures of the young body, confounded as it is with so much energy and so little decisiveness or knowledge or stillness.

And then this past Sunday I got to see Levon Helm. He came on stage with a young forty-year-old's thick head of white hair but the stooped shoulders and wiry, slightly bandy-legged gait of a much older man than I'd expected to see. His singing voice is strained and scraped but normally very strong, or at least very determined. He sat at the drums, suddenly full of strength and succinct skill, counted off the 9-piece band and lit into "Tennessee Jed". Only after Helm had pounded away at four songs did the guitarist, Larry Campbell, who had been singing lead so far, allow as how we would have noticed that "Levon hasn't been doing much singing today." None, in fact. There was no vocal mic anywhere near him, because his doctor had forbidden him from singing. Helm didn't even talk in the course of the show, including at the end when he walked back and forth at the front of the stage touching the hands of maybe a hundred people in turn, while his bandmates and the stage hands looked on, seeming puzzled and maybe a bit put out. Everybody wanted to touch him. All the younger performers mentioned him as they played their sets. We all felt the significance of being near him.

And at the end of the show nobody seemed bothered that he hadn't sung. We had gotten to watch him, his obvious physical pleasure as his wonderful band played these songs that are his but also belong already to the American tradition. The songs and the feel of his drumming under his voice are all now a part of the lineage, they are more than just a man or the work or the voice of a man. If someone is playing "The Weight" in the next room, you can feel Levon Helm's presence coming through the wall to you--that restless sweet talk on the snare as his drums leave space for the chorus to catch up to the beat. It's what Frost said about how the "sound of sense" of a well-formed sentence can be heard just as clearly from the next room. I mainly felt grateful to be in his presence. And his presence is actually more proof than I needed of his existence. The sight of him showed me that I already knew him quite well. I can feel his existence every time I cop the descending baseline, the one that weaves hillbilly-wise down to the truth of the chorus, and that I recently took my turn stealing from him. Twice; in two recent songs. Thanks for giving me something to steal--honorably and goddamn well for good--from you, Master.

I'm taking both your waltzes, and I hope that someone will take them from me.

To One's Self

Dear Self,
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?

I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?

I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?

I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.

All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.

And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K

Myles Murphy and the Build-Your-Own-America Kit

When I was in my early twenties a towering and ambiguous friend sent me a peculiar present. Three 90 minute cassette tapes recorded front and back, more than four hours of original music. Titles were recorded on the folded up paper inserts but outside that, partly visible from the outside of the case, there was also a large geometric pattern done in water colors and cut into three parts with 1/3 included in each case. And the most amazing part was the box. The cassettes were--entombed? enshrined? installed?--in a triangular cardboard box that sat upright like a pyramid, painted all over with trippy neo-Navajo designs in red and black and green.

And on the tapes were these brilliant meandering songs, mostly fragments of legends about odd characters. Dan the Pharmacist Fan, Elvis whom everybody loves, the Thunderbird. But also there was ambient sound, bird song, car engines, the sounds of things being found or knocked over or thrown together, rattlings and shudderings and quaverings of all kinds, the equivalent of thinking aloud. The vocals were not only sung but also moaned, whined, slurped bits of odd dialogue read in hysterical voices from all distances, from around corners, through improbable substances. Sent to me on my birthday. The whole thing was a token of grudging respect, or a capitulation to the need to be understood, much more than it had anything to do with affection. Or at least with personal affection. I was something of a second or third-string recipient but was finally deemed the most likely to understand the music.

I think maybe I do. But it took years for me to be able to listen to it as a whole thing. Partly because the sound quality is very bad but as much because of the heterogeneous, meandering quality of it. It kept needling me, more or less night and day, with its prickly brilliance, its oblique self-importance, its heedless facticity. Myles had made this music and given it physical form as well and now it irreducibly and essentially Was. It contained not only music but Facts of all sorts, pleasant and unpleasant. It is a shrine to omnivorous Americanness. And I now think I see why it was such an affront to me at the time. At a time when I was very self-protective and assembling my own fantasy version of the world, The Box accepted and held out to me everything: drugs, homelessness and insanity, bravado, self-destructiveness, restlessness. Cruelty as well as tenderness, tedium as well as wit, discord and melody, huge raw civic conscience and the anger that arises in those who have it, pettiness and charity.

So I played the first of these tapes as my daughter Emma and I drove down to the Smithsonian American Art Museum this morning to walk through another brilliant and heterogeneous version of America. I turned Dolby on and off, fiddled with bass and treble, gave her synopses, repeated good lines, trying to make it clear. I wheeled her past the faces of John Brown and Joseph Smith, the redwhite&blue collage with Obama's hopeful face, busts of Lincoln and Jackson, WPA cityscapes, weathervanes and walking sticks, statesmen and madmen and prophetesses and kept women, Sodomites, saints, suicides and dandies. All the parts have to be there. And arriving back home I see that my room is another version of the Build-Your-Own-America Kit, and my heart yet another.

A Scene from Old Weird America

I took the boys to church yesterday. After opening hymns, the call to worship, and a reading from Exodus there was "special music" listed in the bulletin. Our town's former chief of police walked up front--bare footed, wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt opened up to reveal a necklace of wooden beads. Now, it should be said that when this man was chief of police the rest of the force despised him and he was basically forced out because the sergeants beneath him said they had no confidence in him. Why? The story they sited was an incident where a robber ran into a house and took a woman hostage. The police surrounded the house and then called the chief. When the chief showed he took off his uniform, put on civilian clothes, handed over his weapons and walked inside the house to talk to the frightened fugitive. An hour later, the chief walked out with the woman and the robber. Apparently, this act was totally against protocol and the rest of the force resented him for it.

At church the ex-chief stood in front of the congregants with palms open, turned outward. His wife sat next to the piano with a middle-eastern hand drum, the pianist (the town mechanic) began to pound out an island melody and sing out in Hawaiian. Immediately, the fifty-something ex-chief began to do a hula--hips moving side-to-side, arms and hands rolling like the waves of the ocean. Smiling broadly, the Chief stepped toward the congregation, holding his hands over his heart and then opening them wide in a gesture of welcome. He made signs of the sun and moon, boats paddling on the ocean, skies opening up, fish jumping, birds crossing the sky. At one point the chief cupped his own heart and then held it out for all of us to see. The movements were so lovely and vulnerable that if the chief had been a young woman we all would've fallen in love with him. But the chief is a white man with a balding head, a hairy paunch, and tattered mustache and so the dance, at first, was simply odd and startling.

In the front pew, the chief’s teenage, autistic son, who normally fidgets and whispers and counts fingers sat mesmerized watching his dancing father. I too sat mesmerized--at times with horror, at times with restrained, snot-blowing laughter at the strange audacity of this guy dancing a hula in church...but the more the man danced, so honest and full of heart...well, I noticed a strange joy, a joy that burned off the shame that often shrouds my interior. I wondered, once again, about the many fears and prejudices that hem me in. Why are they there? What's the evolutionary explanation?

After church, when I asked my sons what they thought of the dancing chief, they smiled and said, “that was cool,” and I could see they meant it. I recalled this past fourth of July when these two middle school boys ran from our house to meet their friends on a terrace at the local college, to hear a salsa band play. I remembered them scanning the clusters of people, then excitedly rushing over and grabbing the hands of their dance partners, making their way to the dance floor, eager to try out their new Latin steps, while fireworks sprayed the black sky.

Some Stuff About Home and T-Shirts

Man, I wish there had been food for you. Leaving for a trip is always stressful, as much as I don't believe in that word, and I didn't do anything about leaving food.
I'm back at this desk looking at that ugly tree blocking out much of the world up against that house that blocks out much of the rest of it from here, and I realize how much of my mind is controlled by that tree. Some sort of scraggly cypress that doesn't belong here and has a vine climbing up it and strangling it. Impossible to ignore. Clear incitement to leave this desk and mobilize.
I had a dream this morning in which I met Patti Smith and she seemed to recognize me and gave me a big hug. We walked around a sort of industrial building by a rural highway, talking comfortably and in detail about things I don't recall. It seemed very normal but I was also intensely grateful for the warmth and the recognition. I told her how I saw her once in City Lights Books in San Francisco and how I was embarrassed to bother her, and about how I just smiled and bowed and turned away. She didn't remember of course but said that oh I should have come over and spoken.
America is very much on my mind, my need to regard America not as a finished thing but as scattered parts of a Make Your Own America kit that I'm working on. The girls and I stopped for ice cream in Lewisburg, PA this afternoon as we made our way back down to Baltimore from Rochester. It was a muggy Sunday afternoon and the place was swamped with post-church Americans and non-post-church Americans, so that nearly everybody was wearing either an unbuttoned dress shirt or a t-shirt with an image of the American flag on it. One said, "Tattered Glory, 2008." Not sure what that meant. Another said, "The Best Things in Life Are Free." That I get, although I wondered if the shirt's owner and I could have a real conversation about what it meant without both of us getting all embarrassed and reactive and tongue-tied and dumb. We all stood there sweating sea water and amniotic fluid, thinking about our horse in the race, waiting for our ice cream, rehearsing our orders. The ice cream was really good.
The mountainous parts of PA and NY are gorgeous, and this morning as we drove down a mist lay in the low areas which always makes the hollows look deeper, the peaks look more distant, higher. Beautiful and deep, so much beyond what you can see.
Stopping in these places reminds me so much of the earthiness and suspicion of the people I grew up with, and of how I love them and hate them. Of course there is no them, exactly, but there sort of is when they're in groups.
I'm going to go out tomorrow and buy a t-shirt with an American flag. Serious. And maybe I'll write "The Old, Weird America" across it. That phrase, half from Kenneth Rexroth and half from Griel Marcus, has been so much on my mind.
I think of Bob Dylan saying that he was born a looong way from home and he's been trying to get back ever since. Exactly right. So it's good to drive, even to the wrong place, good to see things, even if you hate some of them, good to be challenged with the raw fact of what exists, maybe especially t-shirts with American flags. American Fags: feels like that's the team I got drafted by long ago and I'm gradually coming to see the backwards logic of it. A fag and a Jew, I am, in the long, woman-hungry body of an American Southerner from California.

A Morning at the Wulf's House: Birds Come and Save Me

We needed to know if what he said about there being no food in the cupboards was true; after the search we no longer questioned his other instructions. I stood in his room and tried to imagine what it was like to be him and I realized that his interior landscape was much wider than mine and that I was grateful for his friendship. Noah walked in trance-like and took the guitar and mandolin--his only greeting, "Geez Dad, there's a lot of picks." Within minutes the downstairs was filled with the Tennessee Waltz. Later, when Joseph awoke and ambled outdoors I said "Good morning," then pointed to the tire swing, "look what I made for you." Joseph smiled and thanked me with genuine gratitude because he knew I was lying but also knew that I would've made him that swing if he had asked me to.

Gracie and I jumped on the trampoline--first as rabbits, then as monster and trickster, then as dad and daughter, but suddenly the feel was not right and Gracie went inside for a moment then opened the door and said, "Mom talked me into coming back out." We lay on our backs and looked at the broken tree branch and then looked at the cat playing dead and then tried to bounce on our backs. When we went inside for water Jill said to me, "I saw you watching me shoot baskets the other day." Once again, I realized that Jill has all of my numbers and I went to her and kissed her and when our lips parted she breathed on me and it was like driving through a field of blackberries and I wanted to crawl down her throat and rest my head on the dark clumps within her lungs and then she pouted and said, "Everywhere we go there is coffee. There is always coffee." And this made me think of coffee. And so I went to the freezer, as instructed, and took out the yogurt container and plied the lid and smelled the frozen beans and it made me happy to be an addict. I made the coffee, as instructed, and then greeted Benjamin at the back door and watched him feed the dog and stared at his pony tail and wondered about the comfort that his long hair provides.

I walked upstairs and Gracie followed and we stood in each of the girls rooms and looked and Gracie said, "I wish I lived in a girl house," and I felt sad for her and when I saw a cluster of feathers in Maggie's room I sang her a song about cardinals and blue jays and yellow finches coming to save a little girl and she sang the spontaneous chorus with me, "birds come and save me, birds come and save me" and this was about the one millionth time that Gracie has broken my heart.