Memorial Day
I’m sitting in the kitchen. It’s late morning, the time when I often feel a weight of sadness. It’s as if my body has to go through this to get to anything else. A daily crawling up through the mud. Outside, it’s cloudy, a somberness that matches my body.
My fingers smell like the blue disinfectant I’ve been soaking Halle’s foot in. The stuff has also turned the silver fur on her foot lightly blue. Tomorrow she’ll have the outside toe of her right foot amputated. A persistent infection that’s affecting the bone. Jeff jokes, “If you don’t start greeting us when we get home like a normal dog, we’re going to cut off your toe.” (But last night she did give us a particularly attentive greeting. She’s feeling vulnerable these days.)
The sounds of Arlo fussing upstairs. He’s just woken up from a nap and is not happy. Halle barks at a passing dog and Arlo cries harder. Sometimes things just snowball.
But now it’s quiet. Everyone seems to be in separate corners of the house. The air is subdued. We are subdued.
Friday
The Poem as Self-Haircut
Looking in the mirror
is confusing.
The words need
to angle backwards
away from you.
Cut too much
and you’ll need to keep
going. There’s never
a clear ending.
Some of your best
lines shear off
and clog the drain.
Syllables explode
silently in the wastebasket.
You’ll find them
in the corners of your house
for weeks.
Save them in a bag.
See if you can weave
together something
worth wearing.
Thursday
These days the invisible
is gaining prominence.
It makes us nervous.
We feel we might jostle it
without knowing.
We’re so palpable and thick.
So obvious.
We feel we must
cut off our hair,
apologize for colors,
beg forgiveness for skin.
Outside, birds fill the spaces
we have hushed.
The invisible keeps us quiet.
We hear its voice
coming from inside our houses.
It has a sound like teeth.
We wear masks so it won’t get out.
Friday Night
It’s almost eleven, and Halle snores in her bed on the floor of the bedroom. I am only partially here, partially awake. If I focus a bit more I can feel the part of myself that’s curled up approximately under my rib cage, asleep or hiding, occasionally ravenously hungry. But most of the time I pay little attention to it or it to me. It is lumpish and heavy. It aches. It drags my eyes shut at night.
Ether
This place is foreign to me. I’m here, we’re here; we’re making a home. But I’m not at home. I’ve the sense that I’m trying to slide myself into this history, to proceed along with it, but keep slipping out again into a kind of timeless ether.
It’s an odd thing to pull oneself out of a place where you’ve put down roots to gamble on this new place resonating with something in you, perhaps finding a part of you that’s been ignored or supressed. I’m not a Mainer, or even a New Englander, but I am, perhaps, someone who needs the long pull of beach and turbulent sea as a kind of emotional expansion. Maybe I even need the strangeness of this place. I’m out of joint with time, yes, but to feel more tethered was always only an illusion. For some reason, I’ve sought this out at this time of my life, when most of my friends are settling deeper into their homes, wrapping their families around themselves.
Kennebec River, Bath Irons Works in the distance
Totman Cove
8:00 and Orion is already above the apple tree. It’s a windless night, and I can hear the waves from Totman Cove, a mile away. It’s an endless breathing: gather, spill, pause; repeat. It began somewhere hundreds of miles away, as a flurry off the Azores, maybe, a current of energy sent traveling the water all the way to the coast of Maine, to break on this beach. Somewhere along the way what began as a push of wind resolves into rhythm. But it doesn’t end on the beach: now the energy’s airborne again, insinuating into my ears, my brain. The storm in me begins at sea.
Phippsburg, Maine
Shortly after we moved here a mouse died under the floorboards of the bathroom. We breathed it for weeks, small doses of death, like inoculations. We imagined the small, quick creature rendering slowly to air.
Phippsburg is a peninsula, a craggy finger reaching out from the coast of Maine into the Atlantic. Like every place in New England there is the sense of history, but here it seems especially weighty. The peninsula is stippled with family graveyards. The dead make their presence felt. They have left us their houses, their crumbling battlements and granite slabs.
Winter comes on and it’s dark at 4pm. The mouse scurries in our minds.
Phippsburg Congregational Church
Stuff
What do I take with me? Apart from everything or nothing. Things I don’t keep pull on me. What is this empathy I extend to them? An old letter tossed into the recycling. A shell abandoned to the garden. A hat I never wore. There are gravities here. I let go of them and I let go of….what? I don’t want to say pieces of myself. But it seems I’ve extended myself by means of these things. Or they’ve extended me.
Attributes of Things
Put enough
pieces
in proximity
and a gravity
takes hold.
Possibility tightens
as truly as a wrench:
a wheel might not be
just a wheel, or
a gear a gear, but
velocity disassembled.
Sovereign Lake, Canada
Skiing is intimate travel. Your body constantly adjusts to the demands of the trail; you feel every contour. Even the downward slopes are a shifting dance with gravity.