Late May

Now the mock orange sprawls in white blossom
over the white fence collar, leaning at ease, unshaven:
the June rain has not yet imposed its punishment
for extravagant foliation and flower. It will come

– or not, as the new gods ordain. Once I knew
the weather in the seeds of my bones: not now.
now there are steps missing, as I trip downstairs
to death’s cluttered basement: whoops! I land

too hard amid the unfinished projects, a jolt,
a hint of whiplash. Too soon! But it’s always like that,
I guess, so the old books say. Nobody says:
“Oh! Death! Right on time, I was expecting you!”

Wheel, wheel, old gray sky, wheel over my head,
ask for one more day of daily bread,
my intercessor, my old protector,
my forgiver and my inspector,
wheel once more: and then to bed.

April

Dear Prudence, sings a man who left before me
won’t you come out to play?

Fitting Lego bits together, left in a cryptic lay
by a little girl whose intensity puts us all to shame;

April takes stained awnings in its jaws
and puppy-shakes the house until it rattles in its frame.

You thought maybe an simple life would rise before you:
it won’t: we’re only here

to change the guard. We have no use
for captains who can’t steer,

or gold braid, or teachers’ pets: dear Prudence,
won’t you come out to play?

Already Spring

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 

irremediably.

Spring Slash

I am silent when called upon to witness:
I bow my head and mutter, "let each planet
take its course, let every life end where it will; why,
with no writ for life, should I open my palm for death?

Who is calling? You get no more of me
with your mighty obscurities. Say it plain
or get out of the road." My long patience
has run out. The Spring slash is burning, but no voice

comes from it. A beetle makes its slow desperate way
over the moss, while the shadows of birds and clouds
fill him with distress: O brother! We understand as much.
Our call is important to them. Yah. Fuck them.

A wind in the throat of the Gorge: a keening

and a death wail, and whitecaps on the river. It was snow

not long ago, and there'll be snow again before the year turns.

If that's a call I am not home.

The Death of Thomas Painte

Shakespeare collaborated, in this play, with an impecunious young playwright by the name of Thomas Painte: Shakespeare was to take a couple of the silliest romances of the age and write the poetic speeches for them, and Painte was to fill in some touches of continuity and plausibility. But poor Painte died of a sudden ague before the work had fairly begun, and -- King James having hinted that he wanted something new -- the play was rushed to the stage without Painte's work. "Never mind," said William. "The audience will never miss it. I've got some songs that will knock their socks off." And so we have Cymbeline.

---

A ghostly Spring comes: faint clouds of new green appear, in some lights, around the bare branches; fruit trees and tulip trees lay out enormous sums on gorgeous designer outfits, which will be ruined by the first good rain. None of it seems real to me. Here, too, we miss the work of young Thomas Painte. One thing was supposed to be connected to another. One Spring was supposed to promise another. Winter was supposed to yield, not to vanish. At any moment Summer is going to stumble onto the stage with his wig askew, blurt out a few lines, and exit, pursued by wildfire. 

---

But over the housetops, a young birch tree like a fountain, sketched in white, with greeny yellow lines smudged in here and there: so much that ought to be familiar and reassuring, but which only seems sinister. I am not thinking clearly. I may not ever think clearly again. Oh, Thomas: God took you too soon, poor friend.

Early Spring

I am afraid of this early Spring. Apples burning
white hot through the frost; choke-cherries
with faces suffused. The Indian plum
throwing caution to the wind. We have not begun to reckon
what we've set loose. Bareback, we would feel
the muscles moving under our thighs,
the dangerous twitch and surge: but bareback
is a girl's shamefast fantasy, not adult, 
as we have learned to call it. We will miss our girls soon enough.

To the east, clouds never seen before
in this valley
build turreted bastions, fortalezas, strong points,
mass piled on mass, till they topple, and the air throbs
and mutters to itself, and the long summer
heaves up over the ridge. This.
We have called on names we only knew in books
and brought a wind to strip the chamber,
scatter and erase the chalk pentangle,
blow books to the walls and break the windows,
and roll the spitting candles to the clothes.
We've called, and they have come. Prepare your welcome.

Spring Flowers

I have only had one or two good nights' sleep since we switched to Daylight Saving Time. This has been the worst year I recall for that: also the worst year for pollen I have ever known. I walk about feeling that my eyes are huge sorry pouches, bulging with lymph. I look in the mirror and my usual calm clear blue eyes look back at me. Ha.

Spring would be physically difficult for me even if they didn't monkey with the clock: I seem to be one of those people whose internal chronometer never did adjust to leaving subtropical Africa. The light coming earlier throws me out of all reckoning. I wonder whether Daylight Saving Time is really such a disaster, or whether it's just the messenger, bringing all the misery of Spring all at once. At least I don't mind the sunlight and the warmer weather as I used to. I'm perfectly happy for sunlight to be washing the world, and me, and I'm actually grateful for the warmth.

It's been a strange season, nevertheless: oblique lights, unexpected resistances and startling glides. I have been using too much oil during some of my massages: sometimes coming to dry skin seems just too much to take, too sad, too disconnected, too much a prefiguring of death. I want to drench my clients with oil, wash them in it, as they do (I hear) in Indian, Ayurvedic massage. But I just use a little too much, and take it off again with the flannel sheets. People like being wiped down with the sheets: it's a new, piquant sensation to send them off the table with. It will do.

A strange season. An eddy, a remanso in the river of my life. We went walking on the Sandy River last week, and half the trees were fiery with new green, others brilliant with white flower. Half a dozen vultures wheeled over the bluff, the whole time. Martha glanced up at them, and said “We're not dead yet!” in a helpful, informative tone; but they reserved judgment. The only other party we saw was a pretty, plump young woman, in jeans that were too tight, trying to teach her little boys how to skip a pebble across the surface of the river. One was too young, though, and the other more interested in heaving the biggest rocks he could lift into the water, so as to make a grand splash. It all struck me as unendurably lonely, and I imagined that her husband had left her that morning, a note on the dresser, and that she was being brave: take the boys out to the river, and figure out the new life. No reason I should have thought that. But that's the cast of my mind.

I pause. A deep breath. I can hear the ticking of two clocks. A little patch of light makes it through all obstacles and lands on the floor, illuminating a jumble of socks, shoes, and sandals. I'm reminded of the woman who came to a neurologist, and asked him if she were dead. Nothing wrong, exactly, but she couldn't shake the conviction that she was a ghost, not really there. “Do I seem alive to you?” she asked.

Privacy. Completion.

Chögyam Trungpa said something to the effect that Westerners would never attain enlightenment until they abandoned their fetish for privacy. The hardest Buddhist teaching I ever heard, and not one that will ever make the feel-good Buddhist self-help bestseller list. Abandon privacy? Do you know how much that entails?

Take Luisa's last – we are into Holy Week, now, and the Christians are swarming. She imagines Jesus wintering over in the tomb, considering, in his privacy there, the work to come. It's a short poem, only ten lines, and so closely woven that quoting a bit of it would be idiocy. Just go read it, and come back. I'll wait here.

Luisa Igloria: Vigil

I try to imagine a life of the spirit that has no such withdrawals – in fact, I try to imagine any life at all without them – and come to a blank: my cultural inheritance gives me nothing to work with. And yet: the moment I heard those words of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's – probably second- or third-hand, as one does with such teachings – I felt the hammer fall. Sometimes truths fall with such weight, and ring so clear, that you know that simply hearing them has doomed you to a journey. You may put it off for years, or decades, but sooner or later you are going to have to pack your things and go.

Let me hasten to add, that doesn't mean the teacher is right. That's a different matter. They may be disastrously wrong. You want guarantees, you go to some other shop.

---

I drove south some fifty miles, up the Willamette Valley, yesterday. It's slightly warmer there than here: the middle valley is sheltered from the east. Here only the fruit trees have flowered: the larger trees are having none of it. Standing pat: not a bud, not a gesture. But up in the valley all the trees are pointillist clouds of new spring green.

---

Compline: the completion of the day. Prayer, wrote Seon Joon, becomes an enlarging ache echoing in the space between voice and silence.

Paint it White

I want to see the sun
blotted out from the sky.

Mist shading sometimes into rain: the sky a damp, indistinct gray-white. June in western Oregon: the sort of June that seems right and proper to me, Spring as I have always known it. Everything more than a few yards away is softened and blurred a little. That's how I prefer it. I don't like the glaring light and harsh lines of what they call beautiful days. Not for everyday living.

Summer will come of course, a few weeks of what people call good weather, and women will wear distracting clothes, and I'll glance at them guardedly, careful to betray no unbecoming yearning. It's wearing, even exhausting, sometimes: even now, when I no longer particularly cultivate desire, the habits of a lifetime still drive me. Wanting, and wanting to appear not to be wanting – how much of the energy of my life has disappeared into that fruitless back-and-forth? Most of it, maybe. What Buddhism has given me, above all its other gifts, has been other ways to think about desire, other things to build with it than envy or covetousness or shame. I'm a slow learner, but that's not the Buddha's fault. The fact that I'm learning at all is what I pause on.

Wilder, deeper, more intractable, is love itself, and grief: I am helpless and blinded by both of those. That, maybe, is the work of another lifetime.

Sunday and Tuesday, Chimp and Orangutan, Cadillac and Tom's

Morning. Finally landed here, at the Cadillac Cafe. I set off for Tosi's, which ordinarily opens at the civilized hour of 6:00, only to realize, on arriving at the empty parking lot and dark windows, that this was Sunday. Of course it was Sunday, that was why I was heading out early: I wanted to get my breakfast-and-writing time in before the morning sit at KCC. But on Sunday Tosi's doesn't open until 7:00, when half the useful day is over. Where else would be open?

Well, no place I wanted to go. I know, night owls feel oppressed by morning people, but let me tell you, the feeling is mutual: to someone who wakes up brimming over with energy and eager to do things at five in the morning, it seems like the whole world is tailored to night owls. Nothing is open. A glorious beautiful morning opens up, it's full daylight, and everyone else in the world, inexplicably, is sleeping. The number of things you can actually do is pretty limited.

So I drove to the ATM, and deposited some massage checks, and then decided I'd drive over to Northeast, KCC's neck of the woods, and see if there was anyplace opening at 7:00 over there. I seemed to remember some places out Alberta or Killingsworth way. By that time it would be close to 7:00, and I'd be that much closer to where I had to be at 9:00.

Nothing. Broad daylight and not a soul on the streets. Downright eerie. Then a gleam of hope came to me: the Cadillac! A little upscale for me, the sort of place where the silverware all matches and the coffee packs too much punch, but at 7:00 on Sunday you can't be choosy. At least they know how to scramble an egg.

So here I am at the window, looking out at trees, across the way, leafing out in the annual Spring insurrection. A yellow chrysanthemum glows on my table. The coffee tastes wonderful, so I have be stern with myself: only two cups of this yuppie-style coffee, or else my hands will be trembly during my massages this afternoon. My equanimity returns. I'm full of good will, even towards night-owls. They didn't ask for their strange affliction. My mind wanders off into wondering about the evolutionary advantages of the variation: did you want some of the primate-group wakeful at night, to keep an ear out for tigers? Did the night-owls wander around, on the night-time savannah, or did they stay put? Did they yearn for an all-night diner? Did they get so bored that they prodded the alpha, to make him wake up enough to take a swipe at them? The stars, the stars must have been glorious.

I come back to this world, this strange world we've made for ourselves. People in ones and twos, scattered about the cafe, drawn to each other's proximity but carefully avoiding getting so close that they might have to speak to each other, or, God forbid, touch each other. No careless nestling and nuzzling together for us, no sleeping together in a huddle, tuning our nervous systems to each other, learning to know each other's smell and heartbeat in the night. No, we keep our distance, surrounded by invisible spheres of personal space, masters of our own loneliness, each of us our own lieutenantless alpha, our own hiveless queen. Well. It keeps me in work: but I wonder how long it can last.

---

And now it's Tuesday, and I'm at Tom's. Never remembered to post the above. Sunday and Monday have become my busy days.

I had to go, but even as I went, I was dissatisfied with those last couple sentences. Chimps may be our closest relatives, but we have other close relatives that are far less gregarious and tribal. Orangutans would spread themselves farther than people in a breakfast restaurant. Socially, they resemble no ape more closely than 21st Century Americans: either solitary, or serially couple-bonding, with the closest ties being between mother and child. And remember they're the cleverest of the apes, after us. And, like us, they don't go into heat (or are in heat all the time, depending on how you look at it.)

But when I watch either chimps or orangutans, my main sense of how they differ from us is the speed at which they live. Turn the dial faster than “human” and you get chimps, quick, busy, sociable, and chattery: turn it slower than “human” and you get orangutans, slow, deliberate, solitary, and taciturn.

Well. Today is an orangutan day: dark, slow, and sad, pregnant with rain and regret. But though the sky is dark, the colors of Spring are rising and glowing in spite of it. It will come, after all, at least one more time.

The Spring Rains

The spring rains continue, the real Oregon spring rains: cold, obstinate, and unhurried. No need for theatrical downpours or thunderstorms. These aren't piddly little continental rains that throw a tantrum and cry themselves out: these are rains that have settled in for the long haul. They have the whole Pacific Ocean to draw on, and months before the less-rainy season arrives: there is really no particular reason that they have to stop before July. They usually do, from time to time, but it's a matter of grace, not of necessity.

Deep breath. So accept the rain as a given, and go on. I don't usually bridle at it this way. Usually the rain makes me happy. But I'm off-balance, wanting to ride to work, but not wanting this head-cold to flower, wanting to change my life so that I live in the bright sunlight, convinced that if only the sun was out my will would work properly. I'm one of the least superstitious people I know, but my life is riddled with superstition.

Suppose that I lived somewhere the rain never stopped. I wouldn't pound my head against the wall this way: I'd simply accommodate it.

Tomorrow is my birthday: I'll be 54, which is a pleasing if rather large number. It means I've lived 9 six-year lives, or 6 nine-year lives: it means I'm twice as old as when I had my first child.

All my life before I had children is vague, hazy, unreal to me. I confess that sometimes childless people strike me as irresponsible and clueless, not really grown-up. What they do has consequences only for themselves, or for other people who – supposedly at least – can look after themselves. It's not an attitude I foster, but it's one I can't always avoid. Childless people aren't really any more in control of their lives than we are. it's just a little easier for them to pretend: to pretend that they make their own schedules and choose their own pastimes. But every adult has at least one wayward helpless person for whom they're held accountable.

The rain goes on. I keep an ear cocked for my cell phone. The cold is getting into my bones: I can feel the chill in the radial and ulnar bones of my forearms, and in my shoulder joints. It's as if my body was framed up with scavenged wire from freezer shelves: stale, icy and slow to move. The cold seems to come from the inside out. I huddle my coat over my shoulders and scowl. The warmth is grateful, but I'm moodily aware that I'm cold, not because it happens to be raining, but because I'm deconditioned. Sure, I have yet another plan for getting myself back in shape – this one predicated on eternal rain – but I more than usually acutely aware that this game of aging is one of losing one's conditioning and getting it back again, phase after phase, over and over, until finally the phase comes when you can't get your conditioning back, for one reason or another. And then you're truly old. And a bit after that you die.

Well. That's a gloomy point of view, and I can comfort myself with the fact that my father is not yet, by that reckoning, old. And if I'm counting properly, he's 27 years older than I am. And even my mother, miraculously, is still alive and well, though she is truly old, and has been for decades. So apparently I'm built of sound genetic timber. Still, I yearn to be back in shape. I hate this. I hate having to stock up on oxygen with a couple deep breaths before I can tie my shoes: I hate the faint lurch I detected last night when I was rising from my knees during a massage. I should be able to breath even when I'm bent over, and I should be able to rise from my knees as easily as a ferret lifts its head.

Extrapolation, Incompetence, Spring

I'm reading Jonathan Carroll's Sleeping in Flame. Such a long time since I've read a novel! The first half I enjoyed very much. But now we've come to the magic, and suddenly, from being sensitive and nuanced, it's become clunky and over-explained. I watched Clare Dunkle do the same thing in the progression of the Hollow Kingdom trilogy: from the first volume, a magnificent, eerily haunted gothick-cum-Jane Austen novel, it dwindled to two ordinary fantasy-kingdom genre novels. Once the secret is out of the bag, the bag collapses, and the secret, in the light of day, is not all that interesting. Why would it be? In itself, it's neither real nor emotionally right: it's just something someone made up. The systematic explanation of the rules of someone's magical world are far less interesting than the Oregon State Department of Motor Vehicles pamphlet explaining the rules of the road. Those at least encounter reality and reflect it.

You can feel it, when someone drops the shaping imagination – what Coleridge would have called the esemplastic imagination – and shifts to the busy-work of hammering out their system. The tree of their creativity has been girdled, and it's only a matter of time till it dies. I hate watching it. That's one of the reasons I quit reading modern fantasy: it got to be too depressing, watching those moments of high, intense imagination collapse into traffic manuals. They switch from what had to have been, what could have been no other way, to what might have been, to something merely possible. Any hack can play with that. Nothing strangles the literary imagination quicker than extrapolation.

---

I firmly believe that the state of Massachusetts only pretends to elect their governors: they must really select them by written exam. How else to explain the extraordinary political incompetence of Mitt Romney and Mike Dukakis? You could swear that neither of these men had ever dealt with the public in their lives. Their instinct for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way amounts to perverse genius. Two more nationally unelectable men I've never seen. Maybe the people of Massachusetts are freakishly attentive to policy, and vote on issues, rather than on personality? That hardly seems likely. It's a puzzle.

---

Light wells up behind the trees and the houses, washes over the fret-bars of the power wires, pools in the deep places of the rumpled sky: white cloudlight, surging in like the tide. The asphalt and cement glow with it. Today, the 3rd of March, is the beginning of Spring in Portland.

Good Morning

Now this is Spring: the deep dark and the long steady rain.

No hint of morning yet: somewhere above the clouds the sky must be changing color, but no sign of it here below. The rain is soft but persistent; the parking lot of Tosi's glimmers, shimmies. Each raindrop, as it strikes, is a vanishing pixel, catching streetlight or traffic light or headlight: the whole surface wavers like an old tv screen. Beyond, the cars kick up wakes of spray behind, and cast beams of lighted droplets forward.

In the cafe, people talk quietly. It's slow: Jimmy comes out from the kitchen and perches at the booth of the old-timers by the window. The radio plays softly, some old song about longing to go out dancing.

As I've been writing, the sky has imperceptibly lightened. At least I suppose so: the doug firs have darkened -- their black sillouettes are clear now against the sky.

And now a tide of blue-gray light is slowly washing in, from everywhere and nowhere. Morning. The rain patters on, the parking lot gleams as before, but you can sense that somewhere the gods are waking, that restless intelligences are abroad now. Intention is washing into the world with the light. People have plans, ambitions, agendas. All over the city they're jolting awake with alarm clocks, launching themselves out of bed, shaving, applying makeup, running over their daily list of fears and hopes for the day, reminding themselves of appointments, tasks undone, disputes unsettled.

I say I'm a morning person, but it's not this moment of the morning that I belong to. It's the moment before this one, when the doug firs first pick themselves out against the paling sky. I have nothing to do with the frantic preparation of faces, and I want nothing to do with it. Let them go and fight their battles. There's nothing I want out there. I want the touch of your hand, the slow sleepy bright smile, the pools of lamplight, the gradual wash of cloudlight.

Good morning. Good morning, dear.

Spring

My blood drips like burning gold;
my teeth are sharp; my politesse
can't conceal my ferocity. I'll eat you all,
hook, barb, line: I'll grind your ribs
between my molars.

The strength is coming
back into my hands, and the warmth is coming
back into the soil. Strange rooted things exult
and push into the air; tendrils
cinch on bricks and tear the mortar.

Your houses are falling. Your cars
are sliding sideways down the drives;
Your marriages split like melons
dropped from a grocery bag.
I'm back. As if I'd never gone.