Wires & coils surround the neighborhood cardinal. He sings, untroubled, a blessing--color & song-- drowning out the leaf blowers.
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My backyard, October 2023 -
Tell me a story of dirt & sun & rain. Tell me a quickening & a flourishing, of hair-thin intent reaching deeper & darker higher & brighter. Tell me of your frailty, how to be alive is to be a miracle, to look in a daze at the surrounding ghosts of plants past, at the carnage common enough to go unnoticed. Teach me to pronounce the gentle pushing aside of individual grains, teach me the verb for October, teach me the tense of your proud posture. It's been so long since we've spoken.
The opening line is from José Olivarez’s “Escargot” in his 2023 collection Promises of Gold. The image came from here.
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If I look carefully enough, I can see all my siblings in me. This one's eyes, that one's hair, this one's cheeks, that one's grin. Distance deepens what's on the surface. Somewhere in Austin, somewhere in LA, somewhere up the road, hands like mine do work I'll never understand. And as the next generation bears fruit of different seeds, if I look carefully enough, I can see the roots that ground us all. To grow old is to grow deeper, to grow stronger, to be rooted in one another. Photos by François Brunelle for an article on non-related doppelgangers. In Spanish, "raíces" means "roots".
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The world is not a pleasant place to be without the hard assurances of true friends who speak up before they're asked with stark truths that elude you. Silences stretch pregnant with loving thought, their two cents on the tip of nimble loving tongues. It's difficult enough to walk the wide world alone. You need not. Inspired by photos of Vivian Maier (not just that one).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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 yet another cherita.
middleagedmiddlechild. 