Listen

On Sunday, the Gallows Hill Writers presented a reading at a new restaurant in town. One of them was so nervous she didn't notice her own parents in the front row. We all tried to reassure her, but in the end, it was the performance itself that worked.

You get up on that stage and hope there's light on your page (and not in your eyes), and if there's some kind of lectern...all the better. I usually wear glasses too, even though I've printed out the poems in large type. Before I start I spend a few minutes looking out at the people in the room. Once I'm reading, the poems take on a life of their own, pulling the audience along with them.

I move with my voice, speaking at the rate of my heartbeat, and hope that the poems draw enough attention that I slip through the half hour unmarked. I've known musicians all my life, and many have said they play to meet people, to speak without being interrupted.

And for protection. The swirl of lines that permeates the air in the room protects you from small talk's awkwardness. People can start right in asking me what the hell a boletto is, or how I ever thought of licking a horsefly off my arm while clinging to a galloping mare. I'm spared the whattayadoforadayjob and have-you-been-here-long preliminaries. We can get right down to chasing after sound. I thrive on the anonymity of rhythm and riff that sparkles through conversation, the humor that warms it, the undertow of knowing .enriched with syllables of pure joy.

I'm glad to meet you. I could listen to your juicy iambs all night long.



.

Cooking Burdock in a Thaw

The streets steamed all night, blurring carlight and moon, and dogs barked a level path through the neighborhood. At dawn I shut the window against chill that by then had settled on every surface. Washed out and rough with sleeplessness, I prowled my house in the gray air. Fumbling in the kitchen, weeping and blowing my nose, I thought I heard the the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea. Still I haven't heard from you, and what the morning brings is saturated in that blue.

You forgot to take the old leather boots when you left and I put them on every morning just to remember you. The cat curls up by them in the afternoon if they're in sun. I ache and feel a thirst no amount of winter-cold water can quench. The day is night, and night is on the blink

My shirt is frayed and rinsed to paleness, and cold air billows the sleeves as I tread the creaking floor boards and scurff the old bokhara rug I trashpicked from across the street last fall. The air in my house barely moves, a whisper in the room like pampas grass on the moon. I sing under my breath a song that's a hand on my tongue fingering saliva out, that clogs my throat like caramel shedding sugar. That last day, we walked to the gallery where your painting was just taken down while you explained why. I heard in the spaces between sentences the loneliness that had come in with you. Before you, I didn't have that. And now that you're not here, I have the loneliness you brought me.

In the kitchen I brushed dirt off a bundle of burdock root, then cut it into pieces, put it to soak in water with a splash of vinegar. I filled a kettle and put it on to boil. The early train from Chicago whistled in the west, mourning the miles gone, the days, the nights. It pulled at my throat making me answer, and answer. How that jiggle and rock always stuns me, the motion jerking and lulling and going.

I emptied the pan of soaking burdock; then filled it with half the boiled water. While it soaked a half-hour I picked up several lines off the floor, a poem unfinished in the glow of morning, hair in the corners, dust all around, birds at the feeder. And when words came, they pierced like steel guitar in a song about leaving. Fresh frost surfaces fooled me into light again.

Then I dumped out the tepid water of a second rinse, and filled the pot of burdock chunks for cooking, the half hour needed just enough to start a murmur, a full boil of gratitude, with morning's plain white sky opaque and still, day's long miracle still to come.






.

Clover drying, sweet woodruff

Thanks for your letter, darling, I wrote to the niece in Big City That Never Sleeps, I'm impressed by the beauty of your language and the depth of your feeling. She's grieving. The end of her first love affair. She told me that food tastes like dust, the walls of her house close in till she has to run outdoors to breathe. She howls like a dog at the incredible offense of someone ceasing to love her. I tell her she's encroyable, and grip the phone helplessly, trying to force the logic of intensity onto a situation nobody knows anything about. But there's no good way to do it, not even a bad way.

Loss powders me with its dust, a moth flapping against the screen, schwush of leaves, eddy just before the water falls. Night comes on quickly these days, there's no air inside as we close windows to the cold. I write letters, try to finish poems, shoot rolls of film, write songs and sing them. Loud. Clean my house, even the clean parts. Cook. Fill the house with the smell of nutmeg. Roasting meat. Frying onions. Chocolate syrup heating in a pan to be poured over white chocolate ice cream. Homemade lemon curd.

Tonight I cooked a pan of applesauce from the new macintosh apples in bushels everywhere, just enough cinnamon to color the juice, a drizzle of maple syrup to take off the edge. It's cooling in a white dog dish in the other room (dish no longer needed by the dog, I have commandeered it for my own use). Later I'll mix a few dollops of it into plain yoghurt and swirl it around for a late supper.

Earlier the westering sun sky painted the walls of this 5-sided room where I work. The few katydids left have lost some of their voice as cold stiffens everything with its arrival. I walk out back to toss apple skins and egg shells into the compost box, hoping it lures our neighborhood skunk for a last visit, or the coyote who has learned to sneak along the edges to avoid light from the house.

I try to lay to rest once and for all something that cannot be laid to rest once and for all. My house smells of drying red clover and sweet woodruff. Like a humidor for expensive cigars, a little bit of hot cinnamon, burnt rice. The branches of an overgrown forsythia scrabble against screens, and mockingbirds on a last romp through the neighborhood call out their cascade of fooling-around imitations.

Finishing a poem is like trying to land a plane. The desired quiet touching down collides with an ultimate updraft of feeling, and in the background, the flying glass, foaming bleeding wounds, and shards lying all over the floor soaking up moon on its way to full. I bellow to the smoke trick with mirrors thing that everyone targets for their rage and fury and whining, and as always get nothing back.

Dear child, you will learn how awful it is to live in the vividness of your heart. You'll thank your stars for it, even while pressing hard against chest and belly to shore up the shreds and tatters, the blazing heat and mess left behind after love has ebbed away. You'll go again and again to the place of falling off, you'll thrive and even prosper. I know you will. I know.




.

Any minute he might walk in


For me, the on/off world with him was never any vivider than that last afternoon. Or at least the one I think was the last. I might've gone to the window to watch him down the street to his car in the soft yellow morning....October, when warmth is married to liquid in a way that heats you all the way in, marinating skin and ribs and heart in that golden haze.

It happens in the commonest of ways. One day the person just isn't there anymore. Nothing was said, or done. He went out the door into the same city as you, and you never saw him again.

When he didn't come back right away I didn't even wonder for several hours more. And then days went by. Weeks. I imagined that the phone rang and rang inside the empty rooms of my house while I was at work. Knowing that he'd call when things were right again, I didn't bother to catch up with him. Probably, I'd already lost him then.

I let go too soon and he went scudding along the edges of my life where he was always apt to be. And even after he moved across the country and started up a life with people I didn't know, still I believed that I'd see him again sometime. Any minute he might walk in the door, call up from a booth in the midwest, drop a line.
For a long time I found in my sleep that I was still living in the long-ago months when he was with me, and would wake with the thought that he'd be waiting in the hall when I came out of class that afternoon.

And even after he had walked on out the door that last morning, I didn't change anything. I left the lampshade cocked, socks balled under the bed, his towel damp from the shower dangling over the edge.

Tonight I washed my hair in a steamy shower to get relief from the ache of weeping from news of his death. I went outside to hang the towel, and the air was thick with mist and something like the smell of beets cooking in very little water. The sky hung low, and the now-faint katydid sound was steady, full of night. It happened at the house of a friend down south. She came home from work and found him in a chair, naked, a faded turquoise beach towel dropped to the floor beside him.

Where?

Sugar Ray

Get Lost

Spending time with dogs turns me into a nosy snuffling creature susceptible to everything around me. Sugar Ray the lopsided boxer and I went for an early morning walk in a half wild area near home. The place makes no sense. You can't get from one part to another efficiently, it's a lousy shortcut, has no paving or signs or even places to sit dryly. No swings, no slides. The paths are narrow and twisting, worn into existence by whoever has walked through. It has woods, pond, brook, fields, lawns, and boggy areas. There's nothing to do there.

We went early to have the place to ourselves and avoid the day's heat, but even so we met half a dozen others, not all of them with dogs. And redwing blackbirds in full voice happily challenged the tensile strength of reeds at the pond's edge. Bullfrogs made their rubberband thwipping sound. Herons galumphed through mud seeking breakfast. A circling of hawks overhead floated in air currents.

We walked for an hour, then stopped under a willow for awhile. Moths and butterflies fluttered aimlessly, flies and grasshoppers zipped past now and then. Someone walking through grass close by skush skush skushed into a distant whisper. I let go of the leash and the dog sloped down toward the pond. With a two-part sigh he dropped into the shade of a grove of maples, his nose an inch from my foot. The air hissed, moisture molecules swirled before my eyes, intensifying the smell of dirt, stone, leaf mold. Quiet set in, and I lolled, blinded by green.

Eighty degrees already at 7:00 a.m. and moisture rising out of the ground saturated clothes, skin, hair. The place was full of green blood. My belly rumbled emptily, and I put my face in the grass, sniffing, wallowing, licking at rough edges. Plaintain, chicory, gentians of several shades and sizes, cattail grass and white sweet clover all giving off dew. In this part of the country grapevines take over in the summer, blanketing everything in their path, making it look like the cover of R.E.M.'s "Murmur" album. I savored the smell of broken grass blades, stems leaking into mashed-down fern, spores puffing up the air, a glassed-in heat saturated with chlorophyll, bug irridescence, pollen, I succumbed.

I lay there so long I felt leaves begin to grow inside my mouth, a net of silver fret my vision. The dog scooched over, touched his wet nose to my bare thigh. I hummed low in my throat, moving in a face-down shimmy as sweat got the better of cloth in the rising heat. The buzzing over the pond grew louder as we sank lower, lazing in a green light reverie. Then I rolled over and looked up through veins and spines of maple, knew the deep awful peacefulness of nothing, and nowhere to go. No clocks or maps, no mealtimes, entertainments, or love affairs. Nobody could possibly come up to how those oaks and locusts in the wet yellow air spread me out and buttered the landscape with my waning powers of volition. The day inched forward busily, but Sugar Ray and me stayed still until those keys of stone underfoot that seem to turn up wherever I lie on the ground to do anything roused me from oblivion.

Afterwards, sipping coffee in the sunny kitchen, still in the nowhere fugue I walked back in, I wished that I could fly, and live in ponds, make a whole day of flitting gracefully between trees in a clump, with rabbits and ground hogs deep in, the sounds a loon makes over water, far from other humans, deep down where darkness thickens as it sinks, in the mysterious passages and uneven ground of the place I long for day and night, the quiet heartbreaking sense of belonging that I seek everywhere always. Always.



.

The Physics of Street Walking

In the early hours of a June evening, I find myself wandering the streets of Maritime Town, weeping. The air so good I could eat it, loss batting its feathery wings inside my ribcage. I came here to get out of my life for a time, and I've fallen in love. The sea, the fogs the sounds of wood on rope, on metal. Thunks in the fog, the creeee of sea birds, little peeps when distressed osprey wants you to move off a bit. The people I've met here over the years, the dogs and cats. Streets in The City an hour away. Bookstores. Music. Sea.

All this has gone in deep, and tonight, just a few days before my departure I am walking through town in a fog so thick I can't see more than a few feet ahead. I've come here every spring for 13 years; it is my second home. I've been to people's houses here, to their summer cottages, church suppers, funerals. I've been invited to a writer's group, to give readings of my own work in Large Nearby City.

I come in May because "there's no one here" then. At night the only place open is a cafe on the main street, run by a Scottish couple where the live music can be anything from a capello voice to didgeredoo, guitar, taber, and dulcimer. The people of this town are shy, and it's hard to live here. The people who stay on year after year have a "something" that I'm drawn to, and most come from somewhere else. Tonight the lights from the windows of Simple Times Cafe bleed into the murk as I walk toward them after having covered most of the streets.

My hips are sore [this old part of town is built on a steep slope, running south from the harbor] from uneven pavement and hills. The fog has condensed all over my windbreaker and hair and skin. There is a small group gathered around the singer/songwriter from Toronto this night, and the front doors are wide open. If I go in the proprietor will come over and sit with me. He'll pour tea into my cup and ask me if I'd like to try his new chocolate cake, or leek soup, or gingerbread, or whatever he has made that day. The room will take me in and surround me with the warmth of laughter, singing and low conversation.

But I walk past without going in, because I'm not one for goodbyes. For me, life is a continuous length of material with different patterns and weavings and colors. And time spent here is a continuation of everything else I do, even the train ride, the arrival back home and return to work. Even a memory, suddenly dropped into a day or evening, of a small place somewhere else in my landscape that belongs to me as surely as my fingers and feet do, and that whenever I need to go there I can, no matter what time of the day or night, no matter what I've done and said and become in the meantime, and when I do it'll be picking up the conversation where I left off. And I will be at home, as at home as I am anywhere.