An empty chair gathers dust in the garage, pale & stained
with dried out apple juice & cheerio crumbs.
There's a plastic booster strapped atop it, tightened fast
to keep safe what's precious, babies wild in their
hunger & joy. They learned to share in this chair,
to say please, and to thank their mom.
Sometimes these days we're in our digital corners,
eating while on screens. Timelines & due dates
interrupt & splinter & threaten what holds us together.
The refrigerator opens & closes before I can remind
them we're eating soon. They're hungry now. "Okay,
not too much." The table sits empty in a full busy house.
Image from Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me.
Open wide the eye
that remembers. Capture
& share your now now
since your horizons have grown
predictable, repetitive.
Stand in this blessed
time, divided & animated
by the young, by your young.
Minutes & years sing a worth
for your ears only.
Listen, reset yourself,
and be whole again.
A classroom prompt, where we riffed on four of our phone apps for one stanza each, moving from the left column of apps to the right.
The last row of a plane is the one that makes you feel each bump, each jostle worse than anywhere else on the plane. If you’ve got a week stomach or an overactive imagination, the last row reveals it.
I can sit still, but even in the backrow I can’t think still. I’m a serial mental fidgeter. I find it difficult to do breathing exercises even on the ground. These chaotic & capricious eddies of air come patternless and unannounced, and they frighten me. I’m short, so I can’t distract myself easily by looking over the seats. So I look out the window.
We are above the clouds now, a cruising altitude. Clouds as far as I can see framed by the pillshaped window and bisected by a glossy grey wing. The wing gives me a sense of scale, but a false one. “It’s a seventy-foot wing,” I guessed, “so each cauliflower cloud is about …” and I have no formula in my mind that would place me on one corner of a triangle, the edges of the wingspan along legs of two sides of that triangle such that the clouds might be the base of the triangle opposite my vantage / point. It isn’t a mar de nubes, though I want to write down (I do write down) that it is. It is bumps & bumps, hillocks & eruptions of powderwhite, of charcoal grey, of flat muted blue. All in one long vista.
I imagine them all gathering in some wind event, a rainstorm-to-be right outside my window, all that potential to feed the earth, to cleanse, to bring spring. My stomach & my anxiety ease.
The engine hums, and I feel my left shoulder get colder & colder. Row 28 Seat E watching The Departed on a laptop has leaned forward, a trickle of air from the spigot above bouncing off his broad fleece back & ricocheting onto me. I turn to the window again, looking back behind the crew’s galley, back toward the sun.
We’re flying pretty much due northeast now, late afternoon the last day of the first week of spring. (I’m heading to a committee meeting, the last such meeting, unbeknownst to me, the other members, or the administrators. We had our last meal in the hotel that last night, numbed by the rich meals we’d paid for out in the city. “Isn’t it a luxury to just sit here,” one member mused, vulnerable through our years of working together, “sipping wine, and talking books? This was all I ever wanted.” “Same”, we each said, “same.” I’m on the way to that weekend meeting; she’ll say that on Sunday night. two nights from now. This flight is AA2019 Friday March 28, 2019, DFW to PIT. Covid is a year away.) You can’t see the sun, just a plexiglass refracted setting of rays disappearing into the cloudscape, now a long sheet, a kind of celestial milky opaque bubble wrap.
It is still at 550MPH–it is the kind of stillness you feel only at 550 MPH. The clouds varied & linked thick, revealing no glimpse of shaded land below. I don’t know where we are. We’re high enough in the air that we could be anywhere.
I’m almost there.
I wrote this a while ago, while nervous on a flight. The title is from one of my favorite Laurie Anderson songs. I didn’t take a photo that day. The photo above is from July 14, 2022 on the AA1331 LAX to DFW.
Some of my ancestors lived at a time when you might have a single photo of yourself. Those photos are about what you'd expect--the kind of images that flatten & deaden who they were. White starched shirts, dark wool coats, patternless black ties, sun roughened skin, a mustache & a direct gaze. Interchangeable in a way I hope never to be. With one exception.
Papa Pedro was a blacksmith in what looks like a busy shop. In this photo, he's got three coworkers & three boys who must have been playing in or near the shop. The photographer on the far right looks at his subjects. The forge must be toward the back, buckets nearby, the hiss of white hot metal hitting the water. The men stand in a line. Papa Pedro is left of center, most in focus. It's Starr County TX in 1924, and it must be hotter than I can imagine.
His forearms are defined & slick, his collarless shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbow, a massive mallet at his side, angled like a broadsword ready to be drawn. A leather apron covers his lean body. He's young, and he's capable, and he's strong.
What a blessing. To be remembered, to be captured exactly as you lived.
PS. As far as we can tell, the blacksmith shop was here:
after i became a father,
the mundane took on meaning.
Me, in a chair at 2AM.
Feeding, rocking in an embrace,
silent, watchful, sober.
A far cry from the 2AM
I had known
before.
Cigarettes & laughter,
a posse trying to stretch
the night out. A diner, a booth,
grilled cheese & French fries,
ears ringing, hand stamps blurred,
and the drive home alone.
The river at that point was a foot deep.
The surface glistened & shimmered, the stones below
soft & brackish with long settled moss & silt.
We rowed, & we laughed. The kids all on their own.
The current (gentle, persistent) could carry you
through miles of sunshine & color if you let it.
This one is yetanothercherita.
The man on TV digs another hole in an unkempt yard.
The teens approaching avert their eyes
from the owl on the eaves of the porch.
It's a clear day, and they're here for help.
Teach us how to fight, they say.
He puts down the shovel.
He'll do it, he says,
for a ride into town & $30.
I'm watching, stretched out again, exhausted from
reading & thinking. The kids are happy & on their own,
doing homework, gaming, playing with the dog. They'll learn
enough to leave me alone for good one day, making their own ways.
May they be safe, & smart. May they know when to return.
And may I have the strength & wisdom they need.
Sonnet inspired by Reservation Dogs S1:E3.
Remembering is an act of will & an act of
hope. You choose a beginning & call it
the beginning, as if that was how it should've
been. You edit, choosing the highlight,
ignoring the tedious realistic details,
pulling into high relief the what of
way back when. What excites or appalls,
a movie always on cue, quickly on or off.
So don't forget the routes he ran in the street,
don't forget the smell of his baby sweat,
don't forget when she learned to act.
And let them grow away from the path
they struggled with once, help them with
the terror & the freedom of their own growth.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
The two of them in someone else's nice neighborhood,
walking down the steps to the water. The young man kneels.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
The young woman smiles & cries. She says yes.
They hug & kiss. They make each other a pledge.
This is the place it happened. It was here.
Soon everyone will know they're in it for good, for life.
This draft has two inspirations. The first is Joshua Mehigan's "The Crossroads", a perfect triolet from which I borrowed the first line. The other is Yi-Fu Tuan, who reshaped the way I think of space & place. My then-girlfriend & I had designed just the right engagement ring for her, for this moment. The jeweler finished it a week early, and we both rushed to the store to make sure it was just right. Then I drove to this spot, a nice neighborhood where we used to walk, in Dallas. We both woke up that morning not knowing that today would be the day we got engaged.
When I learned about love,
I was on my knees,
praying for mercy & wisdom.
I believed what they said:
G-d listened, and G-d cared.
I grew to love myself,
to open my heart (late).
The right girl found me
and waited, and led me
to believe again, believe anew.
The challenge for this one, I think, was to stick to five-line stanzas or five words in each line. Every time I write about my wife, I’m tempted to use that image above..
middleagedmiddlechild. 