22.12

I recently went on pilgrimage to the place on Earth where I feel closest to God, a valley in Kings Canyon National Park, in October after the tourists have left but before the snow falls, and during the height of fall. I've been there three times before, but never so deliberately to sit and meditate and do nothing else. Other occasions, I was still unfamiliar with the place, worried about the extent of the valley, too late to get a campsite, too lonely to settle in, too shy to seek company. I had excuses. I made them up when I didn't have them. But this year, I was willing to be content. I was prepared. Food I had plenty. Shelter and warmth. Clothing for all contingencies. You can't know how reassuring a walk through the woods can be once you have your gear totally dialed in. With the correct hat, shoes, pants, gaiters, and shirt, you can be as content in the mountains as in your own living room. Nothing will get into your shoes or poke your legs or burn your balding head. You can be totally present. Totally secure.

I kept a list of every creature I saw and could identify. Ants. Squirrels. Deer. A fox, far away and moving fast. Fish of some trout or other. I took in trees like conversing with an individual. I lay under a giant in my campsite and imagined the world tipped sideways, myself walking up the immense trunk. I sat in a meadow and listened to the wind soughing through the valley, skittering through the blades of grass.

With a dumb suddenness, the sort that sometimes grips you, shakes you like a table cloth, I decided to go for a swim. Walking through a low natural arch of close-growing trees, the forest opened up to reveal a new view of the cliffs which crowd the valley, and I was so crushed by the sight of it that I collapsed, my legs literally swept from beneath me by the immensity of what I saw. I swear on my honor that I swooned.

Thirty seconds or three minutes later—the details are unclear even now—I noticed a fly on my cheek. Another was crawling on my arm. Three more were on my shirt when I looked down. Looking down, I saw that I had practically knelt in bear scat. Vaguely I remembered two years before when I had practically stumbled into a bear cub and mother in the early morning on this same hike. But I couldn't bring myself to lose that sense of beatific calm which had settled on me. I'm not playing word games with you. The only English word which suffices is beatific. I was unassailable. Replete. I wished the flies a very happy feast and continued my carefree way to the river, where I struggled for an hour to remember the entire text of the 23rd Psalm.

There is no place as safe and happy as where you are, if only you are able to accept that you are meant to be there.

18.2

[I should have been putting the year on these and now I can't. It's 2023.]

Middle-aged women are broad. They spread, like skies—

Some like cumulus, low down and bustling even when the earth grips them, holding them stationary, their roiling face confined to the valley of their birth. Some high like cirrus, a physical thinness so far away, aloof, that they can communicate broadness only through impression and intuition until you fly up into them and find that the many hours it takes to cross their expanse will force you to admit it. Some again like rain, the impression of a single momentary reality no wider to my eye than the next droplet, a narrow thought so at odds with their peers until you meet them again in Tangiers, Mumbai, Puerto Vallarta, and they are themselves the same, drop to drop, a narrow self welcome broadly to the whole earth the same. And some, like my mother, are an infinite expanse of cloudless sky unknowing of the passage of time but for the cruel eye of the eternal-burning sun scorching its way through their open spaces, orienting, marking time, an unforgettable reminder of exactly what it is and has always been and always will be, a violence to the self unwelcomed (but somehow you look at it and the miracle is that you cannot, will not, have never marked it's track because the broadness of her is that most miraculous substance—air—in which no outsider can leave its mark, only stay for its time, and, when the sun has passed and and the winds have blown and the trees have heaved their daily stuff, go again, her self become crystalline, the stars to show).

25.1.23

I kept your dress that really did me in

Because of how it fell around your knees,

A flutter that it whispered in your spin,

The swishing sound it sang with every breeze—

I kept the pattern, glowing out of night

Against the tow'ring cave walls of the church,

A mock engraving richly flowing bright,

To strike me with a sickly stomach lurch.

I kept the needle strung along the thread

To tie me back from freely falling through

A stark abyss that opened in my head;

The helplessness of never loving you.

The dress now gone, not kept at all,

The thread now snapped, I freely fall.

29.12

Can I ask you anything? We've never been that sort of friends. We share but we never pry. There's . . . Decorum. But don't you ever get fucking curious? I fucking do. I'm a sicko for answers to questions. I'm a little freak for getting to know people.

15.12

So much depends

upon "The Red Wheelbarrow"

included in every textbook

the first words we see

19.9

What a nice day

I want to fall in love

I want to have a reason to shave

I want to paint my fingernails and sing in the rain

I want someone to tell me about their childhood without my having to ask for it

I want long summers,

Dark winters,

And warm, friendly hugs

I'm shouting at the sky and wishing for things

If the weather does this to me, just imagine what you can do

Be an unseasonal thunderstorm

The taste of ozone after every blast

Sound of thunder rolling in my ribcage long after you're gone

Bright in dark

Be a Santa Ana wind

A reprieve from heat but hot even so

The promise of fire where none was asked for

Make me worry

Be a cold coast fog

Jewel the trees, crown the grass

Cloak both good and bad and thus preserve the mystery

Interminable, uniform, close

And gone again, suddenly, burned away by the eye of an unblinking sun

Be the weather

Be my love

 

4.2

I have forgotten

How to write

Where I put your last letter

The words to your favorite song

The feel of your hand on my knee

How I'm supposed to make pie crusts

Why I've got to bathe

Your grandfather's name

Your email login

Your wit

It's really too much to lose,

These memories, this mother

Did she know? How could she—

That in losing her,

I lost my audience,

My past, and

My mind

Because how could she?

I've forgotten it myself.

11.8

Do you know that singularly unpleasant too-hotness of a dreaming person as they lie next to you in bed, their skin radiating against you with dry heat so pitiless that you feel you must move away or die and yet you must not, since you will wake them or lose this small contact with them and either outcome is sacrelige since all you want is to protect them and preserve this moment and yet you're dreaming and suddenly the sailboat you're on is sliding on its keel on the dry land and it has slid, quite without warning, into a crowded gymnasium and you're the only one who can keep it from crashing into someone or the wall, and you're going to be in so much trouble no matter what you do?

Anyway, I do.

2.23

You know you've come a long way toward adulthood when your favorite shirt is something appropriate to wear to work. You know propriety has you in its grip when your favorite shoes are conventional. You know you've made a wrong turning on the path from childhood when you delight in finding the last bagel in the conference room.

2.10

Oklahoma folk don’t care nothing for a storm. There’s respect enough for God and the Devil and good, rich soil, but these things are permanent, and it’s the permanent things that seem to register out there.
That’s where my mother was raised, out somewhere near where the collective memory of short-lived humanity fades into an even plain of old fences cutting up older land with lines that run straight east-west and north-south with nary a curve until they hit the edge of the forsaken lands of points nearer the coast where the Earth forgets its manners and has the all-fired audacity to roll up and down from time to time. Too changeable. And that’s just why storms don’t seem to register, neither. There’s just sky, out there. Folks’re too full up of it, since they get it all the time and everywhere, stretching east-west and north-south and heavy and the same.
That sky what never moves, that was my mother’s birthright, and it wormed its way under her skin until there was some measure of her that was permanent too. Most everything not nailed down to her was leached out and replaced with old, red dirt and a steady, whistling wind, I think. Or at least, she gave off that impression.
You don’t believe? You’re lookin’ at me with a curious eye, friend.
Alright, I’ll prove it to you. Time was I couldn’t stay home from school less I had blood flowin’ out my boots, but there you have it. Illness was always too transitory. Anyway, I had one day when the old boots were full up, metaphorically speaking, and she kept me home so I didn’t die on the way to school and arrive a corpse. So there I was, trying to learn how to breathe again when every breath was agony, and my mother was cleaning the house. Every now and again, she would vacuum by a window and say something like “huh.”
You’d huh too, and worse, if you saw the rain goin’ by horizontal. Now and again, a gust would roll past that threatened to invite itself inside, but she didn’t react. You might wonder why.
Having moved from Oklahoma to the rolling hills of Missouri, she had carried Oklahoma with her. ‘round her house, folks waited to head for the storm shelter “until you have to worry about the youngest flying away,” and even then they went with great reluctance. The storm would be gone again, sure enough, and the sky would go on like before.
She leant over me.
“Can you walk?”
“Hggghh.”
“We’re going to the basement.”
It wasn’t until the door closed that I realized just how loud the house had been singin’ in the wind. I sat on the bottom step, wrapped in two blankets, while my mother rearranged the cans on the shelf with a sort of cooped-up energy. But it weren’t five or six minutes before she sniffed, loud, like sayin’ somethin’, and she headed up the stairs.
Well, the house was still there, and the sky was still there. Some might even argue God was still there. But the tornado that had threatened for the last five hours had took some trees from the yard and no mistake.
Ah, well. Trees aren’t permanent anyhow. Mom is.

2.9

The Don’t Do It Gang

Radio serial theme music.

Narrator: This is the continuing adventure of the Don’t Do It Gang.
Chorus: Don’t do it! Don’t–don’t do it!
Narrator: That’s right, kids. The Don’t Do It Gang is brought to you by K-PURE and the Chaste United Network for Noble Youth. This week, we catch up with Bertha and Marjorie after school, shirking on helping their kindly parents.

Sounds of birds and crunching leaves.

Marjorie: Bertha, wait for me! Why are you going so fast?
Bertha: I don’t want any boys to follow us! All the boys in our class are so dull.
Marjorie: Yes, I’m only into older boys. Like Timmy Hornbuckle.
Bertha: Timmy Hornbuckle? Is that why you asked him and Jummy Trunkuncle to meet us at the reservoir?
Marjorie: Yes. I’m hoping Timmy will kiss me . . . again.

Music sting.

Bertha: (Gasps) He kissed you!

Both girls titter.

Bertha: Well, I’ll distract Jummy if you want. Just imagine if our parents found out!
Marjorie: Ugh. I can’t imagine what Ted would do.

Footsteps still. The birds are muffled and there builds a low droning hum.

Bertha: Oh, I forgot your step-father. (She shivers aloud) He’s so weird.
Marjorie: Mother thinks he’s so great, but she doesn’t know he’s been gone from the house for hours in the middle of the night all last week.
Bertha: But how did you find out?
Marjorie: On Monday morning at four o’clock, the hamster was screaming in the front room, and I went to find out what was wrong. I saw Ted pulling into the driveway in his ratty yellow Beetle. The clock started ringing and it just wouldn’t stop, and I . . . I . . .

Clock reverberates.

Bertha: Oh, Marjy!
Marjorie: The hamster was still screaming when Ted came in. He stopped and took his glasses off, and then (breaking) picked up poor Coffeecan and winged him out the front door like a baseball pitch.
Bertha: Oh . . .
Marjorie: Mother saw his empty cage in the morning and said it was the cat who got him. But I know the truth.
Bertha: That Ted! Poor Coffeecan.
Marjorie: He always was so Chock Full o’ Nuts!
Bertha: What will you do?

Low, insistent strings from the orchestra.

Marjorie: (regaining herself) I don’t know, Beth. He told me to come home straight after school today to help him move that nasty sailboat of his, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t be alone with him; Mother’s always at the quilting bee on Thursdays.
Bertha: Well, you can distract yourself with Timmy. Come on, then.
A few fading footsteps.
Bertha: Come on, then, Marjy! W–wait. Marjy, what’s that!?

Music sting. Fast footsteps.

Marjorie: Oh, oh no!

Strings to fever pitch.

Both: It’s Timmy Hornbuckle!

Both panic.

Bertha: Do you think he’s dead?
Marjorie: Timmy, Timmy, wake up.
Bertha: There’s so much blood—
Marjorie: What have I done?!

Background sobbing.

Narrator: That’s right, children. This is what you can expect will happen if you’re as sexually libertine as these girls. Marjorie has clearly killed Timmy with her disgusting licentiousness. She should have remained pure and helped her step-father, who is obviously a stand-up citizen and not guilty of any crime. Now, because of her kiss before marriage, she’s pregnant with Timmy’s child.
Marjorie: Bertha, I don’t feel so good.
Narrator: That’s morning sickness. It only happens to women who can’t wait for marriage to kiss.
Bertha: What’s happening!?

An enormous slorp and a baby crying.

Marjorie: (Screaming) God, why!?
Narrator: Too late to ask him for help.
Marjorie: (Screaming) I’m not ready to be a single mother!
Narrator: It’s a shame, really. Two lives ruined, and it could have all been avoided. Just . . . Don’t Do It.
Chorus: Don’t do it! Don’t–don’t do it!
Narrator: Join us next time, when we learn about the horrors of the m-word.
Male voice: (Screaming) My eyes!

The low drone returns, louder than before.

Narrator: Until then, remember: (through teeth) if the urge to get off the nut comes on you, don’t do it.

2.5

Now, you've used the past tense to refer to your wedding plans, which can only mean one of two things: you've discovered the inanity of social institutions and decided to forego them, OR you decided, for financial reasons, to enter a green card marriage with an entymologist from Bolivia, but you slowly realized that they were actually a secret agent working for the Argentinians the whole time and waiting for the moment in which they could bomb the Bolivian embassy in San Francisco, at which point they would leave you penniless and heartbroken in La Paz with their mother-in-law, waiting for them to return. They're the only two reasonable options. Enjoy picturing your South American honey pot in either strong, capable hands and husky voice OR elegant arms and ear poking through careless curls variety.

My Mother; 18 January, 2020

My mother was an Oklahoma-born farm girl who never showed of moving irrigation pipe, even if she complained about it when she couldn't even get me to make my bed. I didn't know how good I had it.

My mother walked the mile to school half the year, not because she had to, but because it was easier. She roamed far from the house with Blackie, ran in the Cimmaron, and saved a bull from his date by befriending him. Grandpa never could say "no" to her. But she was never constrained to Oklahoma. She was always keen on a road trip, and she saw more of the United States than most. She didn't have to be in Oklahoma, but she took it with her. Oklahoma was always home. 

My mother played basketball in highschool. Her eyesight was so terrible that her main strategy was to run faster than everyone else down to the far side of the court until the hoop came into view, where she could rely on her height to lob the ball in. She was an accomplished glazier. Her stained glass still enriches our house. She had a green thumb. Once, we grew enough okra to feed most of the state. I should know; I had to weed it. She was the best nurse on Earth because she spent more time with her patients than she did charting, and that's saying something: she was a meticulous and exacting charter. Her house was always as beautiful on the outside as it was on the inside, as much as I complained about the work. But work was simply work, and there was nothing be about that but to apply a little elbow grease. She was never afraid of things she couldn't control. She scoffed at tornadoes, sickness, and the end of the world. She feared only not making the best of the time she had with the people she loved.

My mother earned her nursing degree and worked nights in the emergency room in Oklahoma City. She met my father the week she gave up on men. She married him and threw out his platform shoes thirty seven years ago. 

My parents moved to Michigan so Dad could earn a degree in Pharmacy, so he could work while she earned her NP. But we made it harder on her. Katy was born when Mom was thirty. I followed, and then Philip appeared. He was unexpected, but he was always her favorite. If you need proof, there are twenty photos of my birth and well over a hundred of Philip's. The cards were always stacked in his favor. Or maybe, actually, it was just that keen insight of hers. Katy might complain about the disproportionate responsibility she bore as the firstborn, but now my sister is the head of the association of Adventist librarians, so I would argue Mom knew. She taught me how to read before I ever went to school. I always used to hope that it was to give me a reason to sit still for once, but now I'm teaching people how to read and write for a living, so it shows how much I know. So, this business about Philip really sounds more like my mother taking care of the most sensitive and insightful of her children. Mom never played favorites. She just knew what we needed.

My mother was the best. I know I can never repay her, but—I wish I had been given more time to pay down the debt. 

I didn't know how good I had it.

1.13

Open Letter

To the white dog of medium size I saw on the corner of sixteenth and Grand being walked on a green leash last week during my break at two thirty pm:

That was my enchilada, you piece of shit. I hope you're allergic to chives.

1.11

The smallest measure of salt
Is not a pinch after all.
It's less than a grain
'cause I tell you again
when you spit in my soup that's assault.