Leave taking

 

5 August 2022

There’s paradise in trouble, more so after you leave the parking lot. It had gestured at permanence, the lines, the spaces they created, even the numbers that marked those spaces between lines. But even a new driver can negotiate an exit, barring engine failure. His voice soft, home sick, mine the same, but infused with maternal confidence. He sends a photo of the Washington monument from the plane. “I only call it National,” I said to him. “Reagan fired the air controllers.”

You sound sad, a friend messages me. To message is to write a note inside a confined space and send it inside a blue square container. I am sad, but happy that I’m sad. To love is to miss. Wouldn’t want to miss that.

Current events are a paddle, like gossip yet less intentional. In that current I remember going backwards in my canoe, watching the Potomac river run toward me as I flowed away from it. “Up down,” it says in Greek, though you wouldn’t translate it that way. “Knowledge is not wisdom” is my mis-translation for another fragment. To misread is to step in that river twice.

Paradise is also banality, the open garage doors, the rusty locks, the old newspapers, the cat on a trashcan owned by the city and county. No meditation on suburban life is complete without a flag.

Spit your breath out in a wheeze. You’ve been holding onto something. If you take away enough carbon dioxide, you can push it back in the air. As we do our churning in yoga, I notice my fixed leg shivering. The speed demon uses a walker. Elsewhere I see someone with one crutch, two crutches crunched in the back of my father-in-law’s old room. Religion is a crutch, my mother said. “I thank God for you and mom,” said my father. I was the odd number between their lines.

A night-blooming cereus appears on our lanai, bearing bulbs of wet light. Up the hill, others are dead, or dying, or brown with feathers of white. The shadow made by mine makes so sense from this angle; one cactusy arm turns down in relief. What appears to go up appears to go down. That’s a good graph for it all. Measure a curve as a right angle. Grammar matters less in poetry, our Greek instructor says.

Lilith and the grim mien

 

Lilith seemed reluctant to walk this morning. It was hot, and she was cozy under her blue blanket. She also recognizes the signs. The signs are bigger than usual, and her crate is nowhere in sight. One of two large black bags says "yellow" in Chinese, or so Bryant tells me. He doesn't read Chinese either. The overflow is in Priority Mail boxes, set by the door, ready to be sent.

 

As we turn up Kahekili, Lilith and I, we spot a middle-aged white woman of grim mien with two large dogs. Her husky lies down on the sidewalk to signal interest in Lilith. The retriever has just made work for the woman with her green bag. As we get closer, she pulls her dogs away with some difficulty. I laugh. "It's not funny," she says.

Little SMS in a prospect of palms

 1 August 2022

Those days the mind was a stock market for wild animals, until the doubly metaphorical became fact. The bull inside gored my skull from within, leaving a hole through which I rushed like a waterfall through a long shutter speed. The blurs are jewels, water unfit to drink because it’s flat. Render the photographic subject flat, prop him up like a cardboard salesman by the curb. When wisdom literature comes closest to confessional verse, then you’ve gotten somewhere. Excise the pronouns and continue with the parable. You’ll find that seed somewhere for the Buddha and remain immortal in your anonymity. (It's the best kind.) But you’ve got to dig to get there; the boneyard yields nothing as it is, except stench. The former president failed at the words “defiled” and “yesterday.” Put them in the tiny trash can to the side of his screen. It’s not the words that incriminate; it’s their very sound.

I prefer stills, though they suffocate the sound. To measure time in saccades, rather than in legato vision. It’s the lack of transition that’s true, not a seamless swerve between incoherent moments, incoherent because past. The historian lived in another century, but walked the streets and heard the honks of horns. That other century invested in a different account, but there was no making a living there. The brain drain was open. One man said he’d never thought about the pluperfect before. For me, the dative of respect was the mystery.

What we can’t talk about includes our individual experiences of office culture, the way you develop like a long vine in your youth and are then pruned to near nothingness as you get older. That sentence reminds me of someone else’s prose, but that’s appropriate, because he wrote about such things, the careers that blossom and then don’t so much fade as go away. Get your ticket now to irrelevance; it’s a better gig than you’d ever imagined it would be. You still have to brush your own teeth, but there’s no syllabus to follow, if you were even to read it.

In the phrase “coming civil war,” where do you mark the coming of coming, or the going of it? The violence is either random or accomplished at the behest of larger forces. You don’t need an actual politics, if you have hate on your side. You only need the instruments, the occasion to go to the mall. Shopping is a form of destruction, yes, but the destruction of shoppers reduces the equation to nil. Self-contained, like an era, the mall houses my worse memories, not as they happened, but as I tried to get away from them. Memory itself became the problem. If I do something today, I will remember it. If I remember it, it will have been lost. If it is lost, then so am I.

But that manner of thinking can’t survive serotonin. Meditation creates space, as do the meds. Space opens choice. You can now say yes or no, getting on with your life until it gets smaller in the mirror, mattering less as pain than as pain’s history. He remembered finding his lost glasses a year later in the archives. The archives is a lens, but the cap is usually on. Ornette Coleman’s hands arrange photographs before the lens turns to his fingers sifting out black from white keys. I don’t have the sound on, so his fingers move without singing. My daughter just sold some stocks. The printer hums to itself. Lilith sleeps beside me, half-covered by a green pickleball shirt. Details absorb you when you need them most. I'm the one who can't be absorbed.

Mapping the field

31 July 2022

You can find me behind my thoughts, in the back of the warehouse. A refrigerated truck spews condensation into the alley, like talk balloons without words. Silence is like that, always suggesting, seldom delivering, taking the middle spaces between idea and deed, where Greek sentences so often sit, trying to balance the two, knowing them part of an ethical conundrum that even a cave can’t fix. You can find my feelings there, if you care to look, though of late I’ve been hiding them again from the workplace I left behind. But that was a literal leaving, like my son’s this Wednesday, not the remnant trail advertising a perfect mantra to heal your aches and pains. We advertise our lacks, the holes in our texts, the oranges that fill our hearts too full to remain unheard. If this is not poetry, what is it? Meditation is poetry, and that’s why we try so hard to let it go. Sweep out the corners, let them fill again with dust and bunnies.

Another Russian assault on eastern Ukraine. Everyone is encouraged to leave. Leave-taking as trigger, whether forced or not. But at the end of a missile there’s more to your trauma than absence or loss of person (including self) to time’s flows. He suspects we don’t have polar bears at our zoo, and I laugh at the thought. But we saw a motorcade for the new tiger the other night, filing past Ala Moana, shopping mall that fronts the Pacific Ocean, as if that were possible to do.

Lilith stares off the bed at Maeve, staring back through the screen door. They expect something of me. Maeve has disappeared already. When you exit a depression, you know impermanence has its virtues, despite those eyelid slide shows and sore arms. Does capitalism cause depression, as the new study of studies suggests? Yes, money is bad feeling, to say nothing of faith, but with my medical plan I can buy my drugs for a reasonable fee and feel better, which is not to say peaceful, for another day. Too short a lease would be shorter without.

Symptoms of trauma: pecking away at your laptop, plucking for hours at a ukelele, beating back the clouds from the Japanese movie about the films we make after our deaths. Choose one moment to direct. Pick your actors carefully. Turn the camera’s crank, making that sound, as of fast, high-pitched train tracks. Gaze into the camera, as if it might keep you on the other side of the clouds, even as you know it will not. Is there audience for your film? Does it matter if the reviews come back negative, or come back not at all?

And then you met me. And then I met you. The and does not add one thing to another, but suggests a turn in time. Because if if had supplanted and, then we’d not be here, would we? Suit up for your morning walk with the dog. Palms are crackling. We think the wind is blowing the right way.

Erasures

15 July 2022

We witness after before before: the bent, ruined carriage where a woman and her daughter were in the photograph we see now. Photograph from above, mother of daughter, carriage beside them. We don't see what the words record: body parts in the street. We see only objects. Stand-ins, voters by proxy, shareholders of a walk down a street somewhere in the Ukraine. It must have been sunny.

Both photographs are of things we don’t see, but know were present. Images of absence: the stained white wall between photographs. It’s at once what’s censored and most there. “Cause of death still unknown” in at least three instances. The disappearance of poets goes without saying because our mouths are taped shut. Silence is more of a temptation than speech.

“A womb serves no purpose to a woman,” the elected official opines. “It’s a sanctuary.” Her body has already been exploded into pieces, those that are hers and those that are sacred. A man put his child in a dumpster in Illinois to protect him from bullets. The dumpster-womb held the boy until the rain ended. It was a sacred space.

Is it worse to play the Uvalde audio, or to erase it? We know children were screaming, but somehow not hearing what we know absolves us of suffering. Our suffering, not theirs. They were trapped in a classroom-box as now in silence. A cop is seen inside the school, holding his big gun, smiling.

Laughter is the explosion of smiling. Links have been located between terror and humor. Kafka laughed, while the Mona Lisa smiled. Civil defense sirens are public laughter designed to protect us from the weather or each other. What we fail to see will hurt us tomorrow. Communications systems were migrated so that only the relevant texts went missing. A lousy excuse is a veil over excresence.

My friend gets “deplaned” for wanting to shift items from one bag to another bag. The other passengers look appalled. She and her dog spend the night at a motel, where she meets a woman who (also) lost her son at a young age. Silence is best guarded by those who don’t know. The rest of us walk around the block, whispering to one another, knowing time erases our guilt.

Where words are considered cudgels. What happened is as ordinary a question as there is, but it’s taken for violence. Do not ask and you will not hurt anyone. But the hurt has been accomplished, one suggests. It’s flown to all of us out of the eyeball of a minor god. Portable rocket launcher sits in a field beside an old barn. We see it from above, without the means to erase it, unless in the download. That comes after the twisted metal a mile away. Men clean out used tanks for the next crew to die in. Little boxes.

There is such pleasure in words. Dydasko means to teach. True and Caprice Dydasco play soccer.

Facebook polemic

There is no shame in dying, at whatever age. There is no shame in how we die, though some deaths might be prevented, were we to talk out loud about them. The shame is in the silences around the deaths. Can we not speak of them, rather than googling awful gossipy websites? Can we not use ourselves, poets, as examples of the suffering our sick culture creates and then refuses to treat in a compassionate way? Can there be compassion without speech? (I think not.)

 

Note: "speech" in the last sentence is intended in the sense of "communication," "opening up conversation," not in the sense simply of talking.

The man in the garage

Behind the parked pick up truck and next to the black and white Aussie shepherd who'd been asleep in the garage the other day, a man sat draped in a folding chair. Mostly belly, he wore US Army shorts, a Wrangler cap with American flag, and he spoke with an unplaceable accent, heavy on the d's, but hardly Brooklyn. He held a red disk in his hand that Lilith pulled me toward; turned out to be a dish of food for his dog.

 

The house was his grandmother's. She and his grandfather bought it in the 1920s. (She died last year in her late 90s.) They came up from Hilo when it got hot, grew vegetables, traded them for milk and cream with the Shipman dairy folks up here. They'd owned a furniture shop (and the building) in Hilo for 80 years. He'd grown up on Oahu. Born at Tripler, he said, because his "real" parents were in the military. His adoptive parents and most of that family hadn't treated him well, though his grandmother did. "You've done more for me than any of my kids," she'd told him.

 

He'd gone to Ohio to meet his birth family; that went well. He saw his parents' graves there, met three aunties at a motel. 

 

He'd been on disability for a long time; had always had seizures because his "real" mother was an alcoholic. His adoptive mother took 15K of his government money. People really shouldn't do that to each other. They all breathe alike, put on their clothes alike, go to the bathroom. He doesn't really understand it.

His parents recently sold a couple of their properties, are working on fixing up another couple in Hilo--he lives in a place on the grounds where his parents do. I didn't ask what would happen to this lovely green house surrounded by gnomes and statues, a garden and large woodpile. A large window opens to the main street (as it were), framed in green, friendly in aspect. A water catchment container sits off to the side of the driveway, wooden and on stilts. The man misses the old days when everyone knew everyone else and you could barter goods. Things are so expensive now.

 

I said good-bye to him and the dog. As Lilith and I headed down the lane, I heard him saying kind things to her. She'd just been fed. She was a happy dog.