middleagedmiddlechild.

This is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I do that annoy my wife:

When I am nervous, I laugh

Very often when I am certain that I am right about a thing, I am quite wrong about that thing

When I am full, I give her hugs & snuggles, no matter how busy she is

Decades ago, I told her that she was holding an umbrella wrong – she still brings it up

I rearrange dishes that she has already loaded into the dishwasher

Right before I fall asleep, I tuck my socks behind my head on my pillow just in case I need them during the evening

I regularly forget things about our life together

Sometimes if I’m telling a story that she knows happened on, say, a Tuesday, but I say that the thing happened on, say, a Wednesday, she will correct me, and (but?) I will continue talking as if it could have very well happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, all, Anyway as I was saying …

I ask for her help loading the washing machine we’ve had for 18 years

I once had a soul patch

I met her great-uncle Henry once at a wedding. After, like, ten minutes of me talking to him, Henry told her, “You’re lucky to have him” — she asked me if her uncle had also said that I was lucky to have her. Reader, he had said no such thing

[redacted ancient history thing]

I add that ’93 Snoop Dogg ‘izz to lots of what I say, to the extent that my own children say Harry Pizznotter rather than Harry Potter

Sometimes I put her used tea mug (which she leaves by the sink with other dirty dishes) in the dishwasher, when I should know by now that she is going to reuse that mug later

I follow behind her turning off lights that she’s just turned on

Just as I’m happily about to drift off to sleep, I pat her shoulder to let her know that I love her, which interrupts her drifting off

I can fall asleep on demand—like, if falling asleep were an Olympic event, I would be a gold medalist

I once broke up with her for a really dumb short-sighted reason

I exercise regularly

I sing along with songs but paraphrase the lyrics so that the song no longer rhymes

[redacted bathroom thing]

I am very happy when I wake up, like whistling happy

I whistle upbeat versions of sad songs—for example, a swingin’ peppy version of Les Miserables’ “On My Own”

My default song to whistle is “As Time Goes By”, which I have been whistling in her presence for nigh-on thirty years

Whenever she drives us home from a nice evening with adults where I’ve been drinking, I curse a whole lot on the drive, like, way more than is necessary, and I usually wind up saying “I was funny tonight” over and over

I am very particular about my coffee. I’m getting worse

Sometimes when I see her around the house and remember that I love her, I’ll just moan, “Oh mama” like she’s leaving on a long trip or something. She’ll interrupt what she’s doing to ask, ”What?”, and I’ll just moan, “Oh mama” again

I once had a beard

[redacted pretentious thing]

When she texts me, chances are greater than 75% that my response will be “Lordy Lou” or “Whatreyagonnado [insert shrug emoji]”

I am listed as a co-volunteer on loads of school stuff, but she does all the work

I yawn loudly

I claimed as my own a soft silk eye pillow that a friend gave her for a gift

[To be updated]

By the time Erica & I decided that a long-distance relationship wouldn’t work, I had already taken possession of her John Lennon poster. I first saw it while stretched out on her futon in the West Campus house she shared with three other guys. John was mounted on foam board and resting on top of her low bookshelf. You’d be right to judge this Richard Avedon poster as just the kind of black & white poster that gets sold a lot in student union buildings every fall.

John’s body is a hulking black mass. Half of his face is shadowed. He’s looking right into the camera eye, blank, not challenging or accusing. The openness that, upon reflection, shows more about his comfort in the frame than his comfort with himself. He’s got a kind of long bowl cut, which at the time was either fashionable or shockingly long, depending on how old you were in 1965. I thought he was 28. (Turns out he was only 25.) I thought—and probably said—“That’s the image of a man just at the point of becoming a man. That’s an image of a time when you’re no longer a young man. You’re a man. If you’re not wise then, you might never rise to it.” I was nineteen. I thought I’d be like that myself at 28. And David Berman proved me right.

About twelve years later, when I was in my early thirties, I discovered DB’s poem “Self Portrait at 28”. I read it in such a way that he proved me right about manhood. At 28, you sometimes have to squeeze your life for good material. You find yourself in a room alone, reading and trying to make meaning. Even when alone, you imagine yourself in some difficult conversation with a woman, wanting to talk very plainly to her. There are things you would have given up on by then. You’ve got a sense that your vision, your experience, your voice might be everything.

I saw it in John Lennon’s face, I recognized it in the poem. Because I am an English teacher, I forced students to read this poem that I figured was right about something that I cared deeply about.

English teachers do that a lot—find a poem, and excitedly remove it from its context. Find a poem that makes sense to you, and compel young folk to prove you right about it. Students loved the discussions even when they didn’t really get the poem. So I decided to teach the poem in context, as a huge part of his collection Actual Air.

I hadn’t taught a collection before, just isolated poems, great poems. I was kinda beating myself up about it, teaching singles without teaching the album. The year was a mixtape, even if it was a good one. It was getting better now that I was trying to teach from the inside out of a work, to get deep into a writer’s choices and decisions and challenges. I lined up several writers to skype with my kids. Vanessa Grigoriadis told us all about gaining temporary trust of a famous person you were profiling. Mark Doty told us that he had a theory about the power of tercets and about how he thought the word “faggot” was on its last legs. So I figured if I was going to teach Actual Air, if I was going to get students thinking about their near futures, that I should set up something with David Berman.

July of 2009 I called Nashville information for his number, which shockingly was listed. I said “Yes” loudly to be connected automatically. Before I had planned what I was going to say, DB’s answering machine picked up. I left a terse non-fan-boy message. He called back a few minutes later.

“Yeah, so students really love Self Portrait, so I figured I’d teach the whole collection. Would you be up for talking to my students, skype or email or whatever—sometime in the spring?”

DB said yes, in 2009 and again in 2013. He’d answer anything. Provided that the questions came from the students. He wanted to connect with them, seeing as I teach at Greenhill, DB’s alma mater, the campus where he became a poet.

“I wrote my first poem just sitting on the carpet in the common area of the upper school. I started to write down these images in the back of my notebooks. Mrs. Eastus [who is thanked by name in Actual Air acknowledgements] actually took a lot of this writing and assembled it into a long poem for me and then entered it into a writing competition. That meant a lot to me. I never would have put that together on my own.”  

So how did he become a good poet? my juniors asked.

“Well first you have to read a lot of great poetry. Then you have to read a lot of average poetry. Once you figure out what average is, you shoot higher than that. You have to be critical of your own stuff. The first couple years of writing isn’t going to be something you’re proud of later on. But you have to have those years and it’s alright to not realize how bad it is but you can never be easy on yourself. If you don’t revise, and cut, and do over, and improve on your original you’ll probably never be a poet.”

I’m so proud of them, looking back, at the what-did-you-mean-by-X questions.

Was there a Kitty? Yes, but DB gave her a different name in “Classic Water”—“She wasn’t my girlfriend but I was drawn to her. We went to see the Cure together in 1984.” Do you really have a little brother named Seth? “Yes. He’s actually my step-brother. He lives in Washington and designs bombs.”

And when they get to craft-specific questions that they probably asked because they thought I’d want to know, DB was as candid as you’d expect—“I’m always pretty much unaware of the sound of my poems. Those things [like alliteration and caesura] either happen or they don’t.” He made the students feel like just the kind of readers that he deserved—“I never had to explain that image before so I’d never explicitly made those connections until right now. I’d felt them when I came up with the image, but I hadn’t quite parsed it out, until you asked.”

And he’d sometimes write something so disarming, so lyrical that you half-expected to hear it sung on his next cd.

“I didn’t know how bad men were, until I became a (sort of) a bad man (for a little while). I didn’t know how good and kind women were in comparison.”

Like you, I kept an eye out for DB. Skimmed through his blog one week. Happened upon cartoons one day. Kept American Water and “Rebel Jew” nearby at all times. And then like you, I got excited with the new material. DB seemed to have moved beyond being bad and good. He was, for the moment, just sad. And he had let us into his room, stretched out and singing on his bed. Showing off the kind of loopy tchotchkes you’d find in your favorite TA’s house.

And Wednesday evening, ten years after I first booked him for an email Q&A, the summer I turned fifty, before I had time to check on Purple Mountains’ tour, I get a text from Sophia, a Greenhill alumna. My wife Michelle—“sometimes I dream of Michelle / she’s the biggest part of me”—holds up her phone with another RIP text. Leaning against the safety gate at my brother-in-law’s pool, I fumble through my gmail archive, searching for answers, searching for his voice. I refill my red solo cup and tweet out “Rebel Jew” and our soccer coach reading Classic Water, Snow, The Double Bell of Heat. I copy the DB thread and send it to Hannah, a current student: “wish you could’ve met this guy.”

Michelle drives us home. I tuck my son in, the John Lennon poster above his bed. I cue up Purple Mountains and scroll through the emails again. One question from my 2013 class pops out. A kind of inevitable question from a student to an alum—what if you had it all to do over again. I knew about DB and the Al Gore suite in 2003 [where Berman first attempted suicide]. He had had it to do over again. If you had it to do over again, what would you change about high school?

“If I could do it again I’d make more friends more quickly. It took me half a year to overcome distrust and relax.”

And right at that moment, I heard him on my earbuds go high lonesome in “Darkness and Cold”, and I wished he had taken another half year to overcome whatever it was that drew him down. These days he had seemed completely himself—depressed but creating, on podcasts, in interviews. Seemed as grateful these days to be asked about his work as he did in 2013.

“[…] I get email through this address a couple times a week. If you have anything else you’d like to ask, please feel free to write anytime.
Yasher Koach,
David Berman”

I looked it up, of course—Yasher Koach. I wondered if it meant something about blessings, about art, about poetry, about youth. It did. It meant something about all of that. Yasher Koach— “May your strength be enriched”

On behalf of all of us who have learned from you, DB, thank you for coming back and for enriching our strength.

_{[If you or someone you know is thinking about hurting themselves, please reach out for help to a hotline like this one.]}

---

Now I've come to look at love
in a new way. It's a deep resource,
one that's renewable in surprises
& cycles. Dig fifty one-foot wells, 
you're not likely to find water.
So you dig one fifty-foot well.

Now I dig deep, I know
what nourishes & refreshes,
what cleanses & glistens.

Go back to the well. Let loose
the bucket. Feel the rope go 
slack in your hands. A long silence
as you wait & trust. The empty
vessel falling into the darkness.
A blessing you hear before you
taste it. A distant slap & splash.
You tug & jerk, cajoling it 
to just the right angle 
for a fullness of relief, 
for a chance to drink
deep.

But take your time.
Hand over hand.
Too hasty a pull will upset
what you hoped for. 


Inspired by, among other things, the gospels, Frost's Directive, and the opening of Sharon Olds' Unspeakable

_{“From January 12, 1992 to June 4, 1996, I traveled in India, England, and the United States, interviewing Indian women of diverse ages and backgrounds. […] I asked these women — strangers I met in theaters, forests, laundromats, temples and diners — to respond to […] twelve questions” Bhanu Kapil, from “Introduction” to The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers}

1. Who are you and whom do you love? I am a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a teacher. I move through each day from love to love. Once I voiced my love(s) sparingly. Now everyone must deal with this love in some way. I say it often–you are loved, I love you. I’m no longer afraid of saying it. I’m only afraid that if I say it too often, people will stop believing me.
2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive? My compass points south to Starr County, TX. I’ve never lived there, and we arrived so long ago that it makes no sense to think of any part of my story as immigrant story. 1540something made us New World people; 1848 made us Americans; 1973 made me a Dallasite, apparently, for good. My children know nothing (yet) of these beginnings.
3. How will you begin? I will begin with a glass of water, then a shower, then coffee. I will go to bed to bed, kissing my children awake. They will be angry. I will shave & shower. Most days I match my belt to my shoes, my watch to … something. I will be in a hurry. I will begin as I am, slowly. I will miss a patch of stubble under my jaw. I will rub the corners of my eyes for a couple of hours — keeping my hands off my face & eyes is the hardest part of covid.
4. How will you live now? I will not drink alcohol on a school night (unless there’s a really good movie). I will ask my wife frequently how she is. (She is working. She is busy.) I will tell my kids how proud of them I am, and I’ll remember a post saying that I should instead say how proud they should be of themselves. I will reconcile myself to not understanding them sometimes. I will be frugal long term but reward myself often in the short term. I will be clear & fair, patient & kind with my students. I will earn while I can, while I’m seen as innovative or progressive or smart or available.
5. What is the shape of your body? It is as strong as it’s been. It only hurts when I sleep somewhere else. It shows some signs of decay & aging but not many. I can still go most of the day without thinking about my body, trusting that it will be of use. No pills, no canes, no machines, no fuss. For now.
6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? There was a war, a long war, before I was born & right through the first years of my life. It was on the other side of the world. My dad made it there & back. Twice. At least physically. It caused untold suffering for loads of mothers & wives, including my mother. That suffering seemed over by the time I was born. War’s wounds linger; even those healed, even those who survived, bear its scars.
7. What do you remember about the earth? It warms you if you wait long enough. There are birds there. It’s teeming with birds, most of them very small, surviving on the smallest of things, sheltered by the smallest most delicate of homes they make themselves twig by twig, string by string, leaf by leaf. Such small beauty. I should have noticed them more.
8. What are the consequences of silence? A lonely person stays lonely. A beautiful person might not see or know they are seen. A child might wither & suffer. A harried person might become a contemplative one. The questions & doubts have nowhere to hide.
9. Tell me about dismemberment. [a solid twenty seconds of thinking] There’s a rotisserie chicken in my fridge. Warm from the oven not from life. The seasoning gets under your nails, and the dog is at your feet. A layer of fat(e?) & flavor. From one bag to another. Now it’s meat, the last vestiges of creature-ness gone. [wild non-sequitors] Mind from body. Child from family. Leaving home. Leaving husband. Leaving job.
10. Describe a morning you woke without fear. The boy had snuck in our bed again. His open mouth breathing into my open mouth on the same crowded pillow. Must’ve been an hour like that — sharing / trading breath. This one [I have three kids] not afraid to touch or embrace, not one to shrink from my hands. Unabashed in his need to be comforted. I get up to begin the day, beginning with a confidence that is practically pre-thinking. I know so deeply that I don’t even have to think — that there is gas in the tank, that there is money in the account, that there is a school where my children are valued for who they are, that there is food in the fridge (so much food that [forgive me] we often throw some away), that there is hot water in the pipes, that there is a long list of numbers to call if I needed the smallest or biggest of favors.
11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? We should have done it sooner — the discussions & documents, that is. We had a mortgage & three (!) kids before we had a will. We had, however, some basic understandings: She knows I want to be cremated; I have no desire for a monument or plaque or stone anywhere; I know she’d want Rabbi P if he’s still alive by then. We relented and prepared to spend a shocking amount (“It’s … it’s a f7cking mortgage payment!”) on setting our affairs in order. A professional, not some online thing. One afternoon session in his office and one evening session at our dining room table (used only for special occasions). Scenarios both grave (brain death) and ludicrous — “If she runs off with the pool boy after you die … ” — meant to prepare the kids for her death, my death — “If he runs off with the pool boy after you die”. We all grinned, the post-its peeking out from the stack of papers indicating the tiny permanence of it all, a notary seal in a little bag, a surprisingly direct legal process–who, what, where, when (we know why). Person X will raise the kids, persons A, B, and C will get the money. Persons A, B, and C will be okay because of Person X.
12. And what would you say if you could? The day will usually be beautiful in some way. Looking someone in the eye gets easier. Salted butter & olive oil will yield even better tastes than even the sharpest flavors if you train yourself to these elemental, ancient gifts from the earth. So will silence. And wonder. And prayer. The day will usually be beautiful in some way. Or you can make it beautiful in some way. If for no one but yourself.

_{[This is a project my juniors & I do each year. These twelve questions, two minutes each. Students may skip a question if they wish. Although Kapil’s questions weren’t written for me in mind, responding to them has meant a lot to me & my students.]}

A grown child, daydreaming still,
   buckles his children into the backseat.
 
He always wanted children, but
   he could only imagine
   generic children, 
   embodied joy for his wife, 
   a practical, loving, patient, 
   future-focused soul. 

The car is loaded, children & backpacks,
   driver & briefcase. They sing & poke,
   squeal & complain, erupt in a 
   laughter, an intimacy with 
   an expiration date. A timeline
   that he alone knows.

He's nostalgic for now even now.

The grown child, new to selflessness,
   (signal on, hands at ten & two)
   imagines a future where they're grown,
   where they are burdened like him with
       all they are,
       all they've chosen,
       all they dream.
And he, the future-he, now old, is 
   elsewhere, a phone call 
   forgotten another day. Maybe 
   tomorrow, the future-they think. 

For now, he parks the car, 
   he unfastens the belts,
   he kisses their fragrant heads
   good morning
   as they leave.

The day is long & bright
   and calls them to now,
   to learn, to play. 





[After Ruth Moose's The Crossing] 
     
    

Borges walked the aisles of library upon library,
his hand on the arm of a lovely assistant. 
Mothered & honored, a reader,
a writer, poet & lecturer. A blind seer
speaking into auditoriums, from memory,
from centuries.

Borges, I too am moved by a love
of story & the sound of voices. A proud
citizen of one place & every place I read. 
What do you see when you look within? 
Do you remember a terrain before
the darkness? 

[Modeled after Clint Smith's "How Malcolm Learned to Read". Inspired by Borges's 1967-1968 Norton Lectures at Harvard and of course, by this]

_{“When she was there, she had not loved it enough” (Pachinko 239)}

My mother says that I cried when we left “my little red house,” the first place I lay my head after the hospital. That’s it up there. It’s not far from where I’m writing this. In the late 90s, I even lived a few blocks from it. Still, I haven’t driven by it in at least thirty years.

It’s just north of the highway, but then again most of everything in the town is now. It had a low chain link fence, probably, and humble dimensions. One rectangle. No nooks or wings. When I looked it up on Google maps, I saw that simplest humblest of destinations — one of innumerable grey blocks. Like a little Lego that cannot be anything at all on its own. You can walk from the front to the back door in seven or eight steps. I imagine. I don’t remember much, and there’s little in the boxes of family photos that could jar any memory.

The family camera broke when I was born. They didn’t realize it until they developed the film, returning from the one-man booth in the parking lot of the mall to the little red house with an envelope of muddied prints, multiple images purpling one another on each glossy page, a date clear in the frame of each deep dark unreadable mass. The coffee-brown cellophane strips in the subpocket as always.

Surprisingly, mercifully, we have a few photos from back then, from there. They’re all black & white.

In my favorite of those photos, I’m in the backyard, almost two years old. My brothers, I know from other pictures taken that day, are on the swing set. I’m looking directly into the camera, my cheeks filling the hand-me-down hoodie on this cold spring morning. My lips are parted (in speech, in wonder, in exhaustion?).

Below the frame my left arm is in a cast, broken in a fall two weeks earlier while we were jumping on the bed. They took me to the doctor’s because I kept fainting — they took X-rays just in case I had swallowed something. My mother, out of the X-ray frame, no weighted apron to protect her, had to hold my shoulders flush against the cold clean metal, propping me up in case I fainted again. By chance, my left arm fell into the X-ray eye for one shot, the one showing the clean compound break.

You can’t see my broken arm in the photo, and I can’t see the backyard in Google. I could probably navigate the Google Earth eye into the backyard if I wanted to, could pivot and zoom in for a glimpse of something to jar my memory.

What I have instead — dimming greys, this black & white photo, of me alone (rare for a middle child of five). A record of my mother’s love. Her hands on the camera, ignoring her other boys for a split second, a morning at play behind my little red house.

I shared a room until I was thirteen and a bed until I was nine. The television was in our room. We got used to sharing it — cartoons Saturday mornings, Carol Burnett Saturday evenings, Cowboys games on Sundays. During the week, we’d call through the house any time HBO’s Video Jukebox came on, crowding into our room for that rare glimpse of a song from the radio on TV.

Our room didn’t have a stereo. We had to go upstairs to listen to my brothers’ records — Van Halen Fair Warning, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes — and sometimes dad’s Beatles greatest hits album, the one with the before & after LSD photos on the front & back covers.

I loved my family. I cherished alone time.

Long bike rides past the school, down by the 7-11 and back again, the dust kicking behind me as I pedaled hard then stood up to coast home, the gentle tread rumbling beneath me. And hours kneeling by the bed, Legos spread across the sheets, the gentle creative snapping of pieces that I can feel on my fingers even now. And especially those moments late at night, the house dead quiet, the chinaberry dappling its shadows onto my window, and the Rock Island Express whistling a mile & a half away, rolling through my hometown at a gentle clip, never stopping, carrying men & things somewhere I’d never know.

Music was not me time. Until October 1983.

Nickelodeon wasn’t known for its teen market. I couldn’t tell you why I was watching it that day, but I can hardly imagine happening upon Livewire by accident. It was a talk show for teens. The host was not cool, but he wasn’t condescending or cheesy either. He had a thick shock of white hair parted to the side — white, not blonde, white. He wore button down shirts and neutral slacks. We didn’t have the term yet, but he was business casual. More weatherman that veejay, earnestly introducing a band and then joining the studio audience on the dance floor.

The drummer had an authoritative snap, no big fills or flash, and he was constantly pushing the band forward. Nobody was on the back end of the beat — this thing moved with a kind of urgency that wasn’t menace or anger, with a purpose that wasn’t political, with a longing that wasn’t nostalgia. They rocked in a way I couldn’t figure out, the guitar & bass mixed in a way I hadn’t heard, their Rickenbackers slung low.

Rickenbackers were broader bodied than anything my brother & I pulled off the racks at Murphy’s Music on the weekends. In an era of Van Halen striped primary colors on Fenders & heavy black Les Pauls, these guys had wood-grain gear with f-shaped sound holes, a look of another era. The bass had a melody all his own, not just following the guitar. The guitarist was all jangle and quick picking, throwing his elbow way up to strum before resting his palm right back on the pickguard just in time, right on time. They were constantly in motion, an edgy pacing up to the edge of the stage & back, that wasn’t quite dancing but instead a constant bridging of the space between the band & the audience, an angular unplanned tight motion & energy framing the singer, who barely moved at all.

The singer’s curly hair was in his face, covering part of his glasses (not sunglasses) and he held the mic stand with both hands, his feet crossed at its base. The pose & hair reminded me of Jim Morrison but without the ecstatic me-me-me preening & leaping. This singer was not trying to rock us or woo us. He was tense, assured, contained, unintelligible.

I couldn’t understand what he was singing until the chorus, which was about boxcars pulling out of town, and I thought of the Rock Island Express the night before.

I fought back tears that I didn’t understand, praying that nobody would come in to break the spell or change the channel.

Later that week, I took my paper route money and went with my big brother’s friend Carmen to Bill’s Records, an amazing (ergo, now closed) record store way north in Dallas, where Bill himself (I heard, and later saw) smoked weed at the counter, and nothing had any prices on it. Anything you wanted to buy you brought directly to Bill, in this case the band’s debut EP with only their first names on the back. Bill would look at the thing briefly. Then, he studied you, really studied you. Then he’d tell you what the thing would cost you, in this case, eight dollars.

In the car on the way home that fall afternoon in 1983, I prayed that what was in my hands would match what I saw & heard earlier that week. It did. It does.

_{PS: This performance that changed my life in 1983 was filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater — the site of life-changing, pop-culture defining performances by Elvis Presley in 1956 & The Beatles in 1964.}

Years ago, he got a tic in his eye that he couldn’t control. He was at a party, drinking. Figured maybe he’d had too much. (He probably had.)

Hours later, he woke up to find it worse. Figures swam before him, not blurred, not moving, but liquid in this re-vision. He made it to the bathroom, figuring he’d had too much last night. (He probably had.) He saw in the glass darkly a fright — the face in the glass was often a fright after such nights.

For a quietly panicked minute, he blinked, rubbed, even prayed. But he couldn’t right his crossed eye, nestled now like a thick bead heavy against the bridge of his nose. A round persistent sightless weight dead center of his disbelief.

That day & the next, he made do with a patch from the drug store. Shrugged it off to anyone that asked. (Everyone asked.) He kept it on until the doctor removed it, gripping the paper sheet rolled across the examining table, hoping the bead would roll right.

In a swift ten minutes, the doctor moved with the kind of sanguine approach and gently urgent pace that you’d expect from a young professional practiced in hour after hour of these fifteen-minute appointments, one after the other, from one not well person to the next not dying person, from one end of the hall to the other and back. She moved a light around. She asked him about his drinking, about his weight, about his eyes, and those of his family. He answered everything.

For days & weeks, he answered even more, in other offices, crinkling paper on table after table, test after test. Each time, a penlight moving laterally, searching out the pupil of his eye now fixedly lightless. His wife right there with him now, noting everything, repeating the questions and responses and hopes to every person who called. (Everyone called.)

One day, they found something.

A walnut-sized tumor deep in his skull. It had probably been there his whole life, they told him. What a relief, he joked, for a minute, I was worried someone had left it there by accident. His wife slapped his shoulder, not softly. They repeated, Probably growing his whole life, micromillimeter by micromillimeter, now just large enough to just push just enough on his optic nerve just in time to ruin that party that night.

In a couple of weeks, they said, they’d saw part of his skull open to enter his brain through the ear canal and arrive, dead center, where the tumor was. You’ll lose your hearing in that ear, but you’ll also lose the tumor. There was no other way.

The afternoon before the saw and the scar, before the great cleaning (as he called it), he moved the living room speakers to either side of his easy chair, the cords stretched taut above the frayed rug. On the side table, three fingers of mescal and a stack of LPs. He sat down and listened, the stereo turned up like it was the last time. (Which in some ways, it was.) Tupelo Honey. Eydie Gorme y Los Panchos. Taj Mahal live at the Fillmore East. Tom Waits On the Nickel. His wife & the kids could hear the Julio Jaramillo album as the car pulled into the driveway. He welcomed them home, smiling, tears darkening his eyepatch.

After it was all over, after it was all out, they stapled shut a long pink rainbow of a scar over his ear.

It’s been years. He’s okay. Sometimes, he even forgets which is his good side.

it's black on black
hanging
swirling slowly

balanced delicately
a mathematical
suspension

of wire & metal
hand made world
twisted & curled

it's a reminder
maybe to know
that we spin

& live
surrounded by
nothing

that movement
is slight & shape
is subtle

to seek out 
light & motion
to look up