Directives To Self

In the spring--next time it comes around--go to the pond one bright midday and look for the swarms of new tadpoles, the ones that are like loose commas or spattered ink blots just beneath the surface of the water. You used to do this as a child, you remember the muck-smell and the impossibly gentle touch of twenty or thirty wriggling bodies in your palm, the cool water, the smells of life and death. When was the last time you did this? Feels like forever.

Then, it's been forever.

You also need to lay down in the grass before the snow gets here. Just fall onto the grass and let the earth clutch you as it spins. Feel the orbit, the almost unimaginable sweep of rotation, in your soul, the awesome faint rushing that is like being born across the snowfield on your father's back, or in your mother's arms, or pulled in the sled with your infant brother toward your grandparents' old home at twilight.

These are requirements. You cannot continue forward until you go this far back. At last you've reached the age where there are things you have not done in recent memory. The age where you find what you forgot you had.

A Graduation of Sorts

Today, I officially become the senior employee in my department. The last person who had been here when I started the occupation has now left for another job with another company. It was harder to watch her go than I expected, harder because nothing that happens here is supposed to really matter to me (my own rule, not theirs). But I liked this woman, a lot, not because she handled part of the load, but because she was such a good person. Nowadays everyone comes to me with their questions, and nowadays I seem to be full of answers. I was dragged kicking and screaming all the way, but after four years I have become an expert at my job--the English major who chronically skipped his classes has become a billing coordinator with over a hundred hours of unused vacation time.

Still, if you peel back the cover, or if you wait until nightfall downwind of the den, I promise, there is an artist who will emerge. He is always, always there.

Spiritual Volcanism

I exploded this weekend. My Adam's apple went sailing over the wall. Hair flew like ticker tape. A pair of lungs--I guess they were mine--inflated to the size of zepplins and burst. Ribs showered the football field, two states away. All of the smoke and ash that had been jacking up the pressure rose into the stratosphere, a dark column of confusion. My funny bone zinged across the parking lot, skidded to a halt in the shadow of a Tacoma's tire, spun there, spun and sputtered out like a firework flower. In the center of a charred circle of pavement my translucent ghost swayed and wavered, a little shell-shocked but so relieved. Now it's Monday; the flesh comes back like footage of detonated sandcastles played in reverse, and this time, I hope, there will only be little eruptions, or better yet, sound seismic doldrums prevailing beneath the sleepy desert.

Summer Is Dead

Finally, the weather shifts. I love October--only in this month do cold, gray skies and rain seem appropriate. Now I can feel justified driving to Martins and picking up a gallon of cider (Kercher's October Gold is the best). The enormous pumpkins on the front porch have stopped sweating. The trees behind my office are green and gold; not gold trees and green trees but both colors on the same branch, evenly mixed, evoking the clothes of a jester, something carnival anyway.

Rejoice. Autumn has risen. From here on out the days will grow garish and crisp, and then into the leaden dusks we'll slide...

The Rant

This is nothing new to anyone who has had even the remotest contact with the internet, but I'm moved this morning to proclaim just how much I loathe email forwards that supposedly contain outrageous or fascinating "facts". Almost invariably they're a mishmash of exaggerations, skewed statistics, or outright fabrications that have been circulating the internet for the past ten or fifteen years. The gall of these inflammatory lies is irritating... There is always a vague yet recognizable "source" named (CNBC, Oprah, or my personal favorite, "scientists") followed by some hokum editorial statement such as "You won't believe this but it's completely true!" Morons receive these emails and, lacking any natural defenses, quickly become infected, swelling with uninformed emotions until they burst and release duplicate copies of the virus to everyone in their address book, at which point the disease finds a few suckers more and circulates again. If you're unfortunate enough to be in the address books of more than one of the infected, you can have your inbox bombarded with the same ridiculousness two, three, four times a day. Perhaps even worse than the pseudoscience are the email forwards stuffed to capacity with hyper-religious content or patriotic sentiments so grossly intolerant and perverse they'd make Dubya blush (I've been involuntarily subjected to a number of email "stories" that end with a message which can be approximated as "learn how to speak English and love Jesus or else stay out of my country!").

Okay, that's my rant.

Translation

You, whose name means "honest child"
and I named for a god
of war

might enter peace
talks to
prove how apt your denomination

and how I live mine
down, leaf & stem twirled
between

harmless thumb & forefinger,
light steps
over holy ground,

wafers of diplomacy set on
my tongue
abashed to speak with you alone.

A One-Gin-&-Tonic Night

The workshopping session at The Bucket went well, I think--though I probably should learn to raise my hand and wait to be called upon. Then again, three cheers for juvenile enthusiasm, right? So, I took everyone's comments into consideration and revised my poem considerably tonight. I think I've punched it up a bit, but please feel free to comment (Note: The two If's in the later stanza are supposed to be indented, can't figure out how to make that work on the blog though):



Tempus Fugit


Is it safe only to look
at the now?

I have heard you expound
the evils of the backward glance,
how unwolflike
the clouds of futile If's.

Then, no clarion,
a horn on a pole in the distance
warned against the skies:
wait to unfold
my map,

do not number the eggs,
do not dwell on the wishbone
wondering if it should have been spared.

It leaves now
the only plot of relevance allowed.
If
I listen to that horn.
If
I don the pelt and fangs.

Softness, rather
lays me lengthwise into both
the lost days and the coming.

I look into them,
Time's limpid pools
and count koi
heedless of prayers and regrets, yet
weaving both together

and in my hand
a string,
a key,
a kite with an infinite tail.

On the Last Day of September

The backhoe rested its muddy treads on firm earth beside the soybean field. Days before it had gone back into the woods to dredge a fetid bog, and a dried cake of muck clotted the massive steel belts, turning them a pale brown. Resting there, driverless, its arm like the neck of a dinosaur rose up and crooked down to the bucket with its pneumatic mandible. I walked around it, confident as though it were dead, the little cabin locked tight and another padlock on the gas-cap. The weight... The weight was a soundless presence under the blue sky. The very silence of it exuded a form. It neither shifted nor creaked in the stiff wind but resolutely slept. And as I rang my knuckles against the bucket it did not ring back nor make any sound... only resolutely slept. And for that it seemed the machine was not meant to move at all, a statue only, something incapable of motion, a bone of the earth cracked and thrust up into the sunlight, or the fossil of the first mammoth redwood trunk that grew for a million years and now had weathered away every weak ring and fiber, leaving only this craggy relic of its most impassive heart. It was a stone arch in a desert valley. Immobile, and never meant to move. It shrugged off the wind and was. Beautiful and uncaring as the stone breast of a mountain. The treads could have been a single fused mass, rigid as bricks and mortar, welded vertebrae. I hoisted myself onto the machine's back for a moment, enjoying the vantage of the rippling soy--bronze, but nothing like a statue--but I must also have felt the remnant ghosts of violent mechanical life remembered in the metal, for I suddenly grew disquieted and climbed reverently back down.

We made this beast, it works for us. But in the snarl of armored hoses and the bucket's toothy maw lies the harsh truth. This was a creature of the Inanimate, made to rend and demolish without pain or regret, to do the work of fifty heartless men. Or fifty with a purpose. Or one building a world. Like most awesome, inhuman beings it was only safe in its dormancy--awake and roaring it would return to existence a dangerous toy. Later that evening a lone man with a flatbed trailer arrived to take the backhoe away. We all stood in the driveway, safely distant, watching it rumble toward its perch, where it teetered briefly on the trailer before folding itself once more into sleep, a dragon gone to roost. And when the tiny mammal crawled from its head the others clapped their favor for him, filling the dusk with transient sounds, constructed by fragile, fluttering hands.