13 Ways of Looking at Love

Is this what love feels like?  The final, fatal cataclysm of the heart?
 

I.

I am at the bottom of a waterfall. It is sixty-six feet; I measure the collapse of hydrogen and oxygen molecules with my shutter-speed eyes and in one sixty-sixth of a second the whole grand spectacle, the flying leap of life crashes with infinitesimal sound. I don’t believe I can move that fast, but I know that's how quick the current kicks and who am I to fight it? I trace it with my senses; soak in the text of the world. I am talking of course about a waterfall and I am at its base.  I am the deep pool and the swirling eddies of blue sky and my white foam are aquatic clouds. I watch the stupendously swift spitting and spewing life-saturated force stampeding in perfect speed over an edge then falling off, gracefully, violently, passionately in sacred prisms of liquid light that can only be described as miraculous. Continuous fall, forever. I watch the sky grow foul and grey. A large bird struggles against the wind putting up just enough resistance to remain still. Leaves pour down from the sky like ash from burning buildings. I watch them pirouette with a carelessness and glee given to those who are departing in their proper time. In a sixty-sixth of a second I know a storm is coming. I let the movement of water drum in my body, the vibrations chilling my skin. The smell of change is so strong I can scarcely focus. I keep my eyes locked on the bird. He glides left and it begins to rain.

I get the notion that everything is a waterfall to some degree. All is given a moment of miraculous flight that is, at the same time, the descent as well as the re-collection of parts. From whole to part to whole. I think about people, naturally, and I think about you and me. Are we waterfalls? Are we falling water? Little hydrogen's clinging to our oxygen, trying desperately to keep it together, moving fast, so fast, so very fast. And you are one sixty-sixth of a second and I am one sixty-sixth of a second and together we are one sixty-sixth of the same second, flowing continuously in and out of one another. I am a deep pool at the end of a waterfall, you are a bird in an ominous sky. You veer right and I cry. How quickly everything changes, how very far the distance of one sixty-sixth of a second.

II.

There is pressure here and it’s difficult to calibrate myself to this alien atmosphere. I try to calm my chest but it aches all the time. You think I wouldn’t even notice anymore. But there are very real, very persistent thumb prints pushing into my collar bone, kneading doubt into my structure, blending fiction with non-fiction until finally, I can’t remember what anything felt like before us and this anxiety and you. I’m being tenderized for something, I just know it, and it will only be a matter of time before I’m submerged in the spices of your wanton expectations. But I asked for all of this didn’t I? I wanted you to mold me if only to establish a constant and crazed hold. I wanted you to own me.  It’s funny how constriction and security sometimes feel like the same thing.

I’m getting my metaphors mixed up. I’m relying on my body to tell the story, but it knows only as much as a somatic simpleton knows. This body is all sweet and sour or dull and sharp or hot and cold. It doesn’t tell me why.  So I ask my ribs, still polished by the pulsating pads of your fingers, “where did I go?” I interrogate my jaw; try to force a confession, “what have you said? What deals have you made? How many times did you duck away to avoid the hit?” My eyes skirt their own glare, “and you, when did you stop looking out? When did you turn into the smudge covered planes of a museum exhibit?”

I oscillate between wanting nothing and everything to do with you. I thrust myself out, knobby kneed and watery eyed, skin as thin as air. I held nothing back, save for all the darkness. I let you feed on the best parts of me, offered up all my light.  I loved you entirely, loved every crazy consonant of your being, every slight inflection, every innumerable pattern and sequence and pairing that could ever make up here to eternity. How can it not be enough when it is all I have?

III.

There is a place I go when everything on the outside seems dismal and dark. There is a quiet warm spot I find. I come with so much of what I don’t want, but I cannot shake it until I get here. I carry it because I don’t know how to let it go. This pain, it knows me and it holds me. I come soaked to the bone with sadness; I come with hands full with grief. I come to you, beaten and alone, I come to you, tired and short, and I come to you because you know. I let it all out, the shouts, the tears, the insecurities, all of it, I shed it. You sit there and take each bit, pull each sorrow from my body and smile. You’re not afraid. You pull the dark from me because you love me. When everything else in the world seems uncertain, I always know that you love me.

IV.

I was going to make something for you, my darling, from the strings I have dangling at my heart but I pulled at one and the whole thing unraveled. Sorry, but you will have to wait until next week, or next year, or next forever. I just want you to know my intentions were my fully convinced dreams and when I promised to be good, when I swore to deliver on every promise, to believe in everything I said, I really meant it. How was I supposed to know that these dreams were not fully developed? We discovered them simultaneously, gasping for breath with lungs inferior. No one can tell if the soft, dripping soul that you present to another, will, in fact, thrive and live a happy, invigorating, soul satisfying life. I find that I cannot exist in this environment; I have come from another place altogether.  My body balks. I must leave. This does not mean I do not love you. I never meant to cheat. It is something clawing inside, something afraid of what permanence looks like, and something certain I cannot survive synchronized living. You said I am incapable of loving and for a while I believed your anger, believed my guilt. Although I left you, I could and cannot stop loving you. There’s a difference.  I left you because I loved you. And when I scoop my soul into my arms and rock it’s sobbing, precious frame back into myself, I promise to always love you.

V.

Love is a slideshow of images framing how you see. My love is a series of microscope slides, an atom thick, universes wide and infinitely deep. My love stretches out all around me in transparent sheets of meaning and I live in a cell of unintelligible animal beauty; my love, consumes me and I circulate in and out of her in animal intensity. She gives me images that I store in the library of my animal heart, corridors boasting synchronous metaphor and promising eternal metempsychosis. My love is fluid and fixed at the same time and I pull up slides between forefinger and thumb of mind.

Image one, the moon is a marrow filled fissure in the sky curving like a snake running backwards. There is an apex star holding up this low sickle arch that grounds our floating existence like metal grounds lighting. I look through this slip of a porthole; “someone has forgotten to close it”, you say and smile. We make up the rest of the image so that the moon is whole even when it’s not. And it occurs to me that perhaps we only really see ten percent of things and the other ninety percent is imagined. This would indicate that we live in an altogether fabricated world sewn together by the imaginations of our loves and our lovers.

Image two; I am on my back looking out at the world, wondering why stars have names. Can we know them truly enough to mark them static, forever, until their dying day? My chest is free out here as open as the night sky.  And I ask you, can you see black, ever, wholly black? Even when I close my eyes I see a shade of light. What does absolute darkness look like? You say you don’t know and I am happy enough with the uncertainty. We make up our own constellations and imagine ourselves light-sensitive aquatic dinosaurs at the bottom of the deepest ocean.

Image three, we like the sea. Always lingering on the edge, watching the tides flicker like rascally ribbons. We stare at a fish that swims towards us and disappears, slipping into another slide. We giggle and muse on metaphysics while wild dogs race around us. I like framing my world in consideration of you. The images are hypersensitive, a glow of the abstract with colors and texture that is other worldly. It’s no wonder I haven’t a clue as how to deal with my present world. How does a solar system keep revolving when there is no central force holding it together?

VI.

I awoke with dreams of roots and you.  Root roots, the bifurcating and mysterious expansion of a pale to translucent assembly of plant feet. Root roots, the kind that finger through soil and grip, with all their life, to a specific spot, and, in fact, become so connected to their particular plot that upheaval could result in death.  These roots were bright white, almost fluorescent, and completely isolated, hanging in picture frames as normal and one would photograph a single flower and call it entire. But the roots belonged to something, someone, and yet the owner had been cut off and the soil removed, roots laid threadbare and washed like a heart someone left behind.

Then there was you, interspersed with these visions, like fall leaves caught in the boughs of young and inexperienced maple trees. You felt so very far away and I questioned whether not or we had actually met before. My fingers get tongue tied trying to explain just how I felt watching you move away from me. We floated through my melancholy mind, surreal as sea nymphs, equally detached from one another as the roots from their homes. Somehow I felt I lost you as sure as I lost any sort of grounding, as sure as I’m floating, as sure as I’m not sure.

I see you next to me, your brown hair washed over the white pillow, your face set in a peaceful sleep.  I want to touch you to make sure you are real, to push back the convincing narrative of my dream.  But what if you aren’t?  What if I’m not?  I can hear my heart beat in my ears.  The drum is familiar, “run” it says.  “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run”.  I love you so much, it scares me.  Before I know it I’m at your bedroom door.  It’s three in the morning.  I won’t be returning.    I take one last image of you, your small body curled up under the white, white sheets, love laid threadbare and washed, a beautiful heart I left behind.     

VII.

There is a famous painting by the enigmatic artist Frida Kahlo where her two selves sit side by side and face frontward. The women look ordinary except for their anatomically correct, vibrantly live, lucidly raw hearts which soak through their very proper postures. The hearts are complete in human form having two ventricles and two atriums each, the aortas are intact.  The veins and arteries of one run into the veins and arteries of the other. There is no more literal connection than the one Frida has drawn and no more poignant an articulation of the heart to heart fusion. I sit next to you and feel the strum of your love in my veins and feel your colors coursing through me and feel the soft call of your soul in the highest aspects of my atrium. Together we are a closed loop, a sea of symbiotic revelry.

 What do you want? I ask you. You hesitate, not because you don’t know the answer, but because you aren’t sure you dare set it out before this open sky and inquisitive mind. We see the painting at the same moment. We’ve been drawn before, every century in a different hue but the lines are ancient. My heart overflows with you. What do you want? You say, Love. Love. Love. I smile. Me too.

VIII.

You are another self, clean and healthy. You are another self bathed in light and a pure halo like the divine. You are another self in another time and you are timeless. Everything else is inconsequential.

IX.

I met a man who knows you, his name is Patrick.  His knowing made you feel real.  Again.  I told myself I wouldn't look, wouldn't look at the wound because once I did, I'd want to pick at it, I'd want to open it up. I said I wouldn't, promised myself I wouldn't. But he pulled off the bandage and low and behold there you were staring out from my chest.  I spent so long trying to discount your existence you see? It's not healthy to love. you. Not healthy, so I just cut you out. Or I thought I did. But here's Patrick, fingering my heart telling me to give it up, to open the flood gates, to free myself. Free myself. Free myself. "Give it up, it's a sham, we both know you loved" he seems to say. "She's a good friend of mine" was all I could muster. But that's not it, is it? There's more, much more. Bittersweet Patrick, tricky Patrick. I hold my chest afraid my heart will drop out, right here, in the open, in public.  

X.

Taciturn clouds close their lids batting strained rays of light like eye lashes onto a heavy and pensive sea. I am holding you on sand so grey we look electric against it as the wind comes in from the west. Rain gives movement and texture in the northwest corner of this scene and pulls slowly toward us, manifested magnetism carried over miles. I clutch you tighter, wanting to shield you from the rain. You feel so cold. Every day we sit here and watch the sea, it's a strange thing lovers like to do. Perhaps it's because the sea is love embodied, infinite, deep, shifting, mysterious, rhythmic, revealing, life giving, drowning, translucent and mirroring. (The sea is us and we are love.) Perhaps love is the water that comprises our bodies and our bodies are the essence of the sea. (The sea is us and we are love.) I hold your image tightly in my right hand. I miss your body. The taciturn clouds open and a bright-eyed sun looks knowingly into me. (Today.) I take you in again, stare at the glossy photograph I hold in my hands, you were so young but you knew me perfectly. Waist deep in water I lay you on the surface of the sea. You said, "The Sea is us and we are love". I let you go, your image forever held in my loving embrace.

XI.

How do you love? Tell me! Tell me! How do you love? The question raises its fist inside my brain like a combusting techno fever dream. The morning is new and swaddled in the mist of an already exhausted dawn. Everything feels crisp and sharp and the brightness stings my eyes. I traveled this road many times just never in this direction at this hour. my skin seems to burn in this cool air; I am a turtle without it's shell, the earth without it's moon and every other metaphor you can think of to describe the severing of one essential from another. That is to say, I am leaving you, though it feels more like dying. All the things I need or at least had the nerve to remove are weighing heavy on my back. Despite the weight on my shoulders I cannot seem to balance the overwhelming gravity of my heart which is perpetually plummeting in sadness' vicious velocity. How do you love? Tell me! Tell me! But you can't reply, or rather there is nothing to say. And when we both say nothing, I ask, why don't you love me? Tell me! Tell me! Why don't you love me? And you reply, because I can't, love you, love you, because I can't.  I lock your gate quietly; I don't want to cause a scene. I don’t want to think, I can only hear my pulse frantic and mad, it goes, where are you love? Tell me! Tell me! Where are you love? Long gone! Long gone! I fight to keep my body moving, one small, painful step at a time. The road is vast and it feels so empty. That is to say, I am leaving you though it feels more like dying. Mother always told me it would. Women will break your heart. Simple fact. I’d rather she took a rib instead and let me back into her lighted garden but our story was not fated to be thus. The sun is pushing itself up and over the Pacific Ocean. I feel the light running through me in fiery rods; I could dissolve any moment.  My body seems to disappear; I focus only on the light. Where are you love? Tell me! Tell me! Where are you love?

XII. 

Aren’t we special? Please tell me we are special. I don't want to die alone. I want to die in arms clasped tightly. I want to die under hot breath. I want to die being held together and never being let go. I want it to end softly and with great love. Aren’t we special? I think we must be. You are the bits of me that escaped, that flew out in the corners of the world and sang to the most charming worldly clouds, who lived and loved and longed to come back me. And I am the bits of you that escaped, that swam to the deepest trenches and serenaded the ancient creatures, who lived and loved and longed to come back to you.

I love you. It’s a strange thing. Love. Not what I expected. Not gushy. Not full of low lights and soft music. No brilliant one liners. No long pans across exposed torsos and close ups of dilated pupils and the sounds of bated breath. No. It is maple leaf covered roads in northern New Hampshire and the sound of your guitar and the way my soul sways whenever I hear you sing. I remember your lungs; I remember your hugs. I remember being held tightly, transported to someplace where there is coalescence, where I felt altogether content and present.

 I miss you. Part of me run out and searching. Part of you run out and searching. I put your letter close to my chest. Let your words hug me, clasp tightly around my body. Make me feel special. Make me ready to sleep a while. Sleep a while. Aren’t we special? How very beautiful we are. Beautiful you, beautiful me.

XIII.

I wrap you in metaphors to try and understand you. Perhaps this is silly, or childish. Perhaps I am weakly forgetting the hurt you've caused me and the monster you harbor inside yourself. But I wrap you in metaphors to keep my angry mind from consuming you, gnawing ten thousand teeth and foaming at the mouth with pain and distrust. I could quickly banish you there; chew you until all I have left is a hard stone of hate to carry as my token of you. Still the lover in me and the soft memory in me tries to save you.  Can I love you after all the hurt? Yes, I will love you, even when I think there's no possible way I could. I don't know what's happening to us and I haven’t completely forgiven you, but I do love you because in you I can still see light and goodness.

praying mantis

This was supposed to be a story of infinite loneliness, of absolute disconnection and total isolation.  I was quite thoroughly heartbroken sitting in that faded lawn chair facing the immaculate hedge of wild olive.  You left ten minutes ago, your things in brand new cardboard boxes, our dog Zen in the front seat.  I couldn’t take my mind off of us, the ‘us’ you said would make it through this, the ‘us’ that was not an ‘us’ anymore but a ‘you’ and a ‘me’.  What was left?  Only images of the dissolution like ripples in the water before it descends down the drain and dissipates back into the belly of the earth.  Only the paradox of wild olive, trimmed and tamed at four feet. 

This was supposed to be a story of infinite loneliness, that’s what I had my heart set upon.  My pocket sized Moleskine was heavy as an anvil on my thigh when I set to scrawling out some tragic metaphor involving sidewalks and the red seed heads of Yorkshire fog.  It wasn’t until I extended the tail of a wailing ‘y’ on my sixth sappily sorrowful sentence that I noticed someone was watching me.  A taught, geometric little leg carefully placed its foot upon the left page of my notebook.  Following the leg to its owner, I found a baby praying mantis holding my gaze with his little buggy eyes. I could not help but smile at this strange creature reaching out to me.  Perhaps my teeth made him nervous because he raised his little dukes like an insect version of Micki Rooney ready to scrap with this giant.   “I am a benevolent giant” I said.  His light body swayed in the wind a filament of the finest web, but make no mistake, he was not fragile and he made this clear by cocking his head and sizing me up. I turned to grab a separate piece of paper on which I could, without disturbing him, record my new acquaintance.  When I looked back, however, he’d moved to the top of the chair. I never knew praying mantises could move so quickly, perhaps because I had only watched the large adults whose calm, collected appearance provided a perfect veil for their deadly and stealthy ambitions. But he was, as I’ve said, a baby, and I watched him rock on his little insect feet, bob and weave, bob and weave. He stared at me for felt like several minutes.  I must admit part of me feared the capabilities of that flashing, agile, wee body. We examined one another and I could not help but feel a great deal of love and respect and mostly gratitude that he would allow me to admire him for so long. I noted his head; it looked alien (as did mine I’m sure). He had a broad forehead whose heavy crown grew up from the tightest of mouths, pursed like a Puritan. His long antennae were two strands of unruly, wiry hair. His arms were mini guillotines. He was straight backed as a monk with an acute curvature of his bottom like a sassy suped up Mustang while his four rhythmic legs forever rode the latest vibe. He swayed, feeling the wind like a medicine man.  Thinking back on it, he was probably communing with the universal spirit and was quite annoyed at my gawking eyes.  What a beautiful and fine tuned creature, his whole body a lightning rod of divine inspiration. To have had all this grace and elegance at such a young age was enough to make anyone a little envious. But such is the way of the natural with its ethereal glow of certainty in one’s existence.

This was supposed to be a story of infinite loneliness, of absolute loss.  But I was interrupted by a praying mantis. He stood upon the chair cushion and let me admire him.  We both came to an understanding that neither one of us wanted to hurt the other.  It took such a small and strange companion, someone to look me in the eye and see me plainly as I am to remind me that no matter how far out I feel I’ve been cast, there’s always a connection to be found, that one is never, truly, ultimately alone. 

writer's block

A yawning owl and a layer of dust separate me from something great. I am a little field mouse wondering through a maze. This is unnatural. The owl picks me up by the scruff of my neck, his wing feathers pointed and closeted like a mole. This is unnatural. His eyes are so large they don’t even seem like eyes, more like great expanses of space, like the everything that exists between the “she loves me” petal from the “she loves me not” petal. In fact, that is exactly what those dark spheres look like, absolutes. On one edge there is ‘yes’ and on the other ‘no’ but I cannot look into his eyes and see both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. There is too much space; I cannot comprehend it all. In fact, these eyes are so dense it registers as nothing. Nothing can come close to encompassing the everything that he reveals to me. He knows this too. I’m just a field mouse. This is unnatural, yes? I should be eating and procreating. Instead I’m here, wondering what it is the owl sees. He dangles me in front of his strange eyes. “now, try, try to see the whole picture”. I sneeze. I’m nervous. Is he going to eat me? He puts me back into the maze. “or are you destined to run this rat race for the rest of your life?”

I’ve been unable to write recently and the thought of not writing frightens me. I hate to accept that the fact is sometimes things don’t flow the way you want them to. Perhaps there isn’t enough adversity in my life…a tsunami plays over my mind and I regret instantly my silly suggestion. But I don’t believe such fantasy can actually come to fruition. I have not, however, decided if one can truly bend a spoon with her mind. I’ve tried and the only result I’ve noticed is a splitting headache. What does that say about my mind, when a spoon can scoop around its edges and whip it into submission?

How many books are devoted to learning to write? There must be thousands of self-help and instructional texts that attempt to unlock a writer’s mind. But how can one expect these foreign bodies to know how to decode your own intellect? Aren’t you the one who locked it in the first place? Isn’t the lock on the inside? Don’t you have the key? Or is it a combination lock and you have, in your human way, forgotten the code?

Shhh... I silence the grin creeping onto my face. “you’re writing” it says. “shut up!” my mind cries, “you’ll scare it away”. What is it? The little field mouse has bumped up against a wall. I rub my head. I was writing about not being able to write. I think I’ll make a book devoted to this subject. It shall be my longest and saddest book yet, save for, perhaps, the book I plan to dedicate to bad love poetry. I wonder if anyone will read it? The book on writer’s block that is? I guess it doesn’t matter. Something is on the page. Isn’t that victory enough? The little field mouse fans herself in one of the corners. The owl looks down at her. She looks up and in a heavy sigh says, “yes, yes, but haven’t I tried?”

Illumination I and II

meditation on doors

doors are like chambers in the heart; they open and close, open and close in unending chasms of light.

***

it's been days, maybe several days or weeks. it could have been months or years even. ten, twenty, time seems retracted and slow. i am staring down the barrel of the past, waiting for the hammer to hit. but it never does. perhaps this is my prison, forced to remember the things i can't seem to forget.

i wrote myself a note yesterday morning reminding myself to forget but i forgot the note and ended up remembering anyway. it feels like yesterday, when that whole thing happened, like a drunken sleep where you wake up more shaky than when you first entered the unconscious. it causes you to wonder if you slept at all.

i don't sleep anymore. i remember. i dream and replay the same story and each time i try to change things, my eyes snap open and i've wet the bed again.

it started with a door, an unassuming door with a light gloss to it and green trim. the daylight was sweltering and my uniform stuck to my back. i was somewhat ambivalent about being there. something didn't feel real or something didn't feel right.

i didn't knock. i didn't have to, this was war after all and all pleasantries are thrown out the proverbial and literal window. i turned the knob as simple as i would flip a pancake.

he was fat and sloppy looking and the fact that he was in his underwear made me feel a little embarrassed for him. i watched him drop to his knees and he started to speak. i didn't hear a word and even if i could have heard him i wouldn't understand what he was saying. i had long lost the ability to understand human pleas. he held his hands up in the air. he was unarmed. in fact, he was having breakfast, a light meal of fruit and tea. i let him move his jaw around a bit i felt like i was doing him a service by giving him hope. after all, what is there for the human race if not hope? but this was a farce. i intended and in fact was required by the government to end his life. i pointed my rifle at him as simple as a lover leveling a dozen roses before his valentine. i saw his head blooming with red rose pedals as he slumped to the floor. it was quick, i made sure of it. i may be a killer but i'm not cruel.

then i saw her, or rather i heard her. a scream. i turned. she stood barely three and a half feet tall. she was wailing and pointing a virtuous index finger at me. whatever feeling i thought i had lost came racing back into me and i felt remorse. remorse unparalleled to any i had know and have ever known since. she looked like a little girl i would call my own. she looked like everything beautiful and bright and i had put a black smudge on her innocent little life. i had poisoned the garden, had slit the throat of the pure.

i set my gun down next to her and walked slowly toward the front door as calm and quiet as i entered. i hoped she would kill me, i hoped that i would be paralyzed at least. i gave her the chance for vengeance and she spared me. i closed the door lightly, sealing inside that humble home, my heart, my conscious, my every waking moment.

***

the sun is etching ghost-like patterns on the ground and i am thinking of you. i am remembering how you used to trace your shadow on the wall and would be aghast when you couldn't pinpoint your hand. things were always moving and even in trying to fix yourself, you discovered that few things in life are as easy as the turkey hand drawing you did in the second grade. i loved you, you know? i really loved you to the point that when i said it, it felt like the first words i had ever spoken, that all other language was babble. i meant it, you know? i meant it from some place in my chest, someplace where such inexplicable pangs live, where matter begins and where it will end, in that place i loved you. but you love shadows and playing on light shifting between trees on that near invisible edge where things constantly are born and die in less than a second. i thought that perhaps you could find me a constant, a port to come home to, a house, a door to step through as you laid your tired cries into my chest.

when you left it felt sudden like the jolt of a massive wake on a placid lake, or the curtain drawing down hard on an awestruck audience, or perhaps, more accurately, the slam of a door. i loved you, you know that? i loved you and i learned from you. i learned that if there's one thing i must never be, it's a door. doors are walked through, they bring you to something else, they let you in or shut you out. but doors do not exist as a place unto themselves. doors cannot be lived in. you cannot breathe your dreams into a door. you cannot hold a door or carry on a conversation with one. doors are short lived experiences. they are portals, instruments of movement. i was a door in your life, a second, a flicker of semi-fanciful light that caught your eye when you were dancing on the edge. i was something you passed through to get somewhere else. i was opened and closed in a blink of a light.

write about...sheep?

i'm standing at the edge of a cliff and i'm going to jump. there's no one here to stop me and even if there were, they wouldn't see this cliff, they wouldn't see the chasm, smiling open mouthed and licking it's chops. in fact, it's a good thing no one is here. they would find me ridiculous, doing arm circles to stretch out my shoulders and pulling my head from side to side. they look out in the direction of my intense gaze but all they see is a flat tract of land, wholesome and mannered as a garden party. but this place is wild and hungry and i am wild and hungry. i stare past the cliff and mark a small cloud. there, that's where i want to go. i've barreled through a pot of coffee and am working on my second. i'm hoping the caffeine will send me into tremors strong enough to vibrate me airborne. i pump myself up, crack my knuckles. i have to do this, i have to do this. i take a few steps back and inhale deeply. perhaps this is how evel knievel felt before his death defying jumps, or saint-exupery before his epic journeys across foreign and hostile lands, or the big bang before it became a "big" deal. it's all the same isn't it? me and evel and saint-exupery and the big bang, just clusters of energy having a course but unaware of what's going to happen, everything speeding up, whizzing about, growing in intensity and light, exploding, and blooming at it's highest over the great nothingness of not trying. and so i run with all the power in me, lock onto a puffy white cloud and leap. is it faith? of course it is. each sentence feels like this: a leap into a land i know little about but intrigues me more than anything. it's true, writers are adrenaline junkies, from their coffee to their free falling prose.

someone once posed a question about sheep. she said, i often see sheep intently staring out into the void, and when i look to see what it is they are spying, i find nothing there. what could they be thinking? i laughed and wondered if perhaps they were just "watching the grass grow". but as i stare into my empty coffee cup, i think, huh, maybe they're all writers, metaphysically leaping over the fence of our simplified earth-bound perceptions. now who's dreaming? or perhaps we're all sheep simply watching the grass grow and maybe some of us will write about it, i mean, walt whitman did! oops, i floated...

telrod cove

A clear and crisp morning. My bed has a deep in-slope, a hopeless depression in one corner. My body gravitates toward the low point and in my sleep I wade into this pit and curl up like a fawn. I dream of being reabsorbed by the earth, eyes closed and floating in the womb of this place. That’s why people don’t fly, we’ve already been cast out, already feel the chill of our supposed disconnectedness, what use do we have for more elevation and more wind? No we’re not ready for wings just yet, we’re still working on roots.
I put some boxes underneath the broken frame hoping to firm up my resting place, but this bed is shoddy and frumpy and completely uncaring of what the world thinks. I disrobe, shedding my sleeping bag like a winter coat. The chill of the morning snaps me awake better than any cup of coffee ever could. My co-worker is deep in sleep, per usual. I prepare myself for the day, starting with slipping my feet into my extratuffs (or Alaskan tennis shoes as the locals call them). I boil water and put an obscene amount of coffee grinds into a paper filter. Licking my finger, I clean out the cup’s residue from previous day’s use.
“Another day” I say looking out at the serene midnight blue of a half sleeping cove. The fishermen are up no doubt, brewing the sort of tough coffee that makes my wimpy cup look like watered down ovaltine. The tide is extremely low, exponentially increasing the amount of walking space I will have this morning. In fact, if I wanted to I could almost walk right out to the seiners and if you shot me from the ankle up, you’d think I was Jesus walking on water. Alaska has a way of tricking your eyes, making you see all sorts of fantastical things. And yet, the longer you spend in this place the more you come to realize that there is no trick here. Alaska has a way of opening up your eyes and revealing the brilliance we’ve been gifted to be born into. The world comes into view, hazy, distorted and blue and every morning I clutch my heart, “my god, it’s beautiful!”.
One of the nice things about living so close to the water’s edge is that it makes you humble. Sure, you can track the tides, know when they’ll be at their highest or lowest, but you can’t change them. You learn to be thankful for what you get, when you get it because you know within fifteen minutes or less, it can be taken away. I drizzle hot water over my mound of grinds, letting it percolate slowly, saturating each grind and pulling at its essence. I set myself down roughly upon the trunk of a large beached cedar. I pull out a cigarette and position it ever so gently between my lips, I pretend not to care if it falls, I hold it loosely, no one wants to look desperate. I watch one of the boats start its set, the seiner charging East through the water like an elephant and the skiff buzzing along West smooth as a dragonfly. A net falls from the backside of the seiner, the white floats poised on the water’s surface sophisticated as pearls, as jolly and aloof as the elite while lead weights race for the bottom anchoring a man-made mesh wall . I light my cigarette and inhale deeply. Coffee and cigarettes, since when did I decide to become a lyric in another sad country song? And yet, there was no denying that the couple worked well together.
The seiner hugs one edge of the cove, the skiff bobs like an innocent rubber ducky at the other end and the floats bask in the sun like joyous vacationers. All is calm. I dig my toe into the sand and stare down a sea bird. I smile to myself, “what if this with Jonathan Livingston?”. Then aloud, “hey Jonathan, can you teach me how to teleport?” The bird flaps its wings trying to shoo me away, guess that’s a no. The skiff begins to tow his end of the net, pulling it into a circle, grab your partner, round and round, dosey-doe! The seiner moves toward the skiff and if I were poetic, I’d tell you that the two crafts looked like eager hands, racing toward one another preparing to embrace the sea. and perhaps it looks like that from space, but not down here, down here you get an entirely different picture.
The skiff man, decked out in bright orange bibs and armed with a plunger pole about six to seven feet long, busies his hands. First, two big puffs on his Marlboro red, then a flick of the wrist on the wheel and finally four or so strikes with the plunger into the water. The pattern is more or less the same, perhaps save the plunger, some skiff men swear that the “clap” made by the phallic object actually does scare the wayward salmon back into the net, while others find it a waste of their precious time. Either way, he better look like he’s doing something or he could very well lose his prized position. And it is a prized position. While the other deckhands are busy untangling the net as getting things prepared, the skiff man is out on the wings where it’s quiet and he can smoke in peace. However, he does have the added pressure of making sure he doesn’t screw up the line of the net. But, in general, the skiff man has it best, except of course, for the skipper.
I watch them struggle to get the net in. That’s usually a good sign though it sounds like a contradiction. They’ve either scored big time or they caught a whale. Either one is completely plausible.