Recoil

Small towns can be rough. Especially when you've fucked up and rumors abound. Even years later, somehow you're still a marked man. I am getting used to the peculiar phenomenon I like to call the "slow recoil." You meet someone, they seem to enjoy meeting you, then, maybe at the end of the conversation, something flicks on in their eyes--a look of surprised recognition--then, almost as quickly, the light goes out. And the next time you see them, there's no connection whatsoever—maybe a smile or a few words, but you can see that they have placed you, remembered what they heard about you, and have decided to leave you alone. I don't blame them, really, though it disappoints. You got to do what you got to do. Nevertheless, it's a brutally subtle exchange that does quiet damage to the heart.

Electric Fence

A friend writes in his morning lines, “Light, there is so much of it. Even the wind is full of color this morning.” I read a book on Miles who says, “Prejudice and curiosity are responsible for what I have done in music.” Last night on the golf course before dark: clear, windless. The day’s heat evaporated, leaving the night sky free and light. Clouds standing on treetops like a summer hat. We didn’t stay out long, just enough to stretch our legs. Today we drive down the Parkway to Graveyard Fields for a picnic by the falls. The river dropping down through the stones in thrown cupfuls. The trick is to be at peace with the world. Or at odds with it, bristling like the neighbor’s dog at the perimeter of its electric fence. Prejudice and curiosity. Wind full of color. Coming upon who you really are. Voyaging out in the day, returning home safe. Light throwing itself at the window like a sparrow.

from the archive

Treading Water

About through a nine-day holiday break. Haven’t shot myself yet. Don’t know how to use guns. Have spent more time with a leaf-blower in my hand than I normally care to. Trying to cut down on drinking is like shouting after a horse galloping past, "Slow down!" Ten days out from oral surgery and my damn molar still hurts. Just learned of a young woman's suicide. She was overseas, unhappy, on her own. My boy is making a timeline for the Muslim Caliphates and Medieval Europe; our dog is chewing on his pajamas as he copies down notes from the computer. Took Ali out for dinner for her 46th birthday. The hostess sat us down at a tiny table by the front door, next tor bar. I told her I had secured the reservation weeks prior, that it was my wife’s birthday, etc. She apologized and told me all the other empty tables were reserved for parties of 4. She’d just seen me hug the owner, an old friend, who I refrained from calling over so to make the woman pay for her transgression. Luckily, the owner saw me fuming and went over and solved the problem. The gin and tonic had some sort of pear and spice in it. The rain has glazed the driveway. There was a short morning meeting of crows by the golf course this morning. They filled a small tree with their jabber. Then they flew off to their designated spots. There’s a neighbor who lives on the corner up the hill whose property feels and looks like country life—dog tied to stump, tractors in the lawn and a car half apart in the driveway. Country music blares on the tiny radio. When we cleaned out drawers in the front foyer this morning Ali found that she owned a dozen handbags. She just went shopping with a friend; I warned her that I would throw out any new handbag that came through the door. I spent the morning deleting all extra spaces after sentences in an old essay of mine. Quite an accomplishment. Just so I don’t go back and re-space the sentences later.

Crippled

“The last time I saw you, you were a cripple.” This from the mouth of an old friend, wife of a writing pal. She was right about not seeing each other for some time—going on four years—but it was the “cripple” part that turned Keith’s head, who looked over from his conversation behind the conference table with trademark raised eyebrow. What have you done now? Let’s just say I burned some bridges. Or that it wouldn’t be the first time someone from that period in my life felt they could take verbal swipes. Later, at the reception, she seemed open, friendly even. Had she just been stating what she saw as the plain truth? “We weren’t sure you were going to get out of it,” she said. Get out of what? The rut I was in or the wheelchair? “Here I am,” I said, meaning for better or for worse, like it or not. “You were like family,” my pal said when I confided how much their hospitality had meant to me back then. Past tense. The last time I saw you…Then I turned into the arms of an old student—a “kindred spirit,” she said—genuine worry on her face, with forward facing questions, and so, thankfully, walked confidently into those.

Driving River Road

I want Hopper here with me riding shotgun. He’d know, like Walker Evans, to look for the past inside the present: to be keyed into the dilapidation and see it, like I do, as a form of beauty. And I am not talking some knee-jerk nostalgic impulse—though I have enough of those—but truly beautiful by being so lived in, so ignored, so resilient. Even as the riverfront rapidly gentrifies closer into town, out here it moves slow. The biker bar has a hipster makeover. Kayak manufactures move in alongside plastics warehouses and sewage treatment plants. If I had Hopper along for the ride, I’d let the man meander, give him time to spy just the right plein air. This morning I found a postcard from my father at the bottom of a moldy box. He'd gone to see a Hopper show and so wrote: "Hopper had the draftsmanship early; what took time was that sun-washed American melancholy, those big-band solitaries, that Texaco station about to be swallowed up by the gloom of the woods."

Wind in the Trees

The wind pushes the tree tops around like upside down mops. No crows in sight, for now. As I write this, as if psychic, my puppy brings me her stuffed toy—a crow that, when pressed at its center, emits a realistic Caw, then another Caw, then, a beat later, a sharp Kee-Waak, the crow’s warning call. Or maybe it’s Hello there! Or: Fuck-off, you dumb human attached to that even dumber quadraped. But back out on the road, for the most part empty this late morning, wind and rain keep the dog walkers inside. Maybe it’s the news about the Paris shootings, but I keep looking up at the swaying trees to see if a bomb’s about to go off. Still, a man’s got to be walked by his dogs. What would we do if a tree did come down? Which way to run? If I look up again to see how the tree’s falling, it might be too late. Or I might just run right into its doomed trajectory. The dogs strain on, oblivious, excited by the wind and the rain, or by my hurried step, or by some strange smell new to their encyclopedic snouts, propelling them forward like fish in a silty river brought high up its banks by the rain.