Specimens, Days

Back at Morning Star to house sit, where, in spite of an almost catastrophic near-miss with the water system, we feel immeasurably better than we have since beginning our tenure out at Deer Point. Our duties, vaguely extolled from the beginning, boil down to a kind of servitude. We are butlers, under slippery management, hired to fill 40 hours between the two of us & finding ourselves hand & foot servants patching together long weeks both for a couple so distant from us in so many ways. Both working, we can get up to 80 hours, though they have decided that they will give us a flat salary for 40—a conversation we will need to revisit very shortly. Worked their anniversary party last night, on our day off, & three couples attended. Without warning or prior word, we found ourselves tableside after our employer snapped his finger. I mixed drinks for thankless septuagenarians drowning in cologne, all neatly groomed, all with the same practiced smiles smothered across their faces

These entries begin on the 9th & wend towards the present, undated. *** Our last night at the barn, & a strange kind of feeling attending us both. For all of its idiosyncrasies, welcome & unwelcome alike, it has been a simply magical place for us. Usher to deep strife, sheer wonder, joy & a nearly rending sorrow, this place has housed our transformation into whatever it is we have become, however changed (beyond measure, I think, for the better). We talked about our first nights here a moment ago—the whipping wind, the cleft & knotted sideboards in the loft, the soot-black stove that tries & wheezes & tries, its emblazoned Vermont maple sprawled across its front like some argent bird across the grate of a passing locomotive. But beyond its physical presence, a rich & rare profundity deep in its foundation. It has been a place of honest reckoning. We have asked ourselves every conceivable kind of question since we arrived, no single one of them easy to an

A light, at last. We are hired to care for a six acre garden, flush with rhododendron & rosebush & god knows what, to weed the beds, to amend the rocky soil, to propagate & split stems, to till the compost. I will have a tractor, a chipper, a machine that will split the wood for me. We will live in the basement apartment of a mansion poised above Rosario Strait, 1800 feet of our own private beach beneath, the water swelling & cutting hard half a mile off the shoreline. We move on Wednesday. We almost tremble at it, the way I imagine a pauper trembles at a crust of bread after its long absence, a kind of framing in which to ask, simply, is this real? What telling of my life involves this chapter? It will, for all of its fundamental surreality, again, prove a wonder, without doubt. That we have been absurdly fortunate along the way is without question. That we have faced enormous difficulty along the way, too, is just as certain. & here, on the other side of the isla

Hard not to see each passing thing as a lesson these days. The yellow leaves. The sunset shot with violet & whale grey. The way a soft gust through the pond-side reeds can articulate itself in such a plain, sad song. Against this backdrop everything comes rendered already, tailored to a kind of abstract thinking that at this point seems as much a justification as a reality. I teach myself these lessons to fill my time, maybe, while around me, nothing changes. Evening. Morning. Evening. Today, Willa attacked a russet hen, carrying the struggling dun body across an acre before I could convince her to drop it. I washed the blood off of her legs & snout under the pump, perfunctorily tossed her into the barn & returned to the chicken, its right wing almost severed, blood upon its breast & coming in a trickle from within its beak, strange & slow. Its eye was wide & tremulous, a deep amber. It breathed & breathed, these slow, ponderous breaths that seemed a very re

Here at La Quinta for a week now, the same beige walls of the hotel room, the same drab carpet, the same continental breakfast each morning. Supposed to hear word on the car this afternoon, & with any luck we may be able to leave tomorrow. Walla Walla yawns all around us, the strange & desolate beauty of the Palouse with their rolling wheat fields, otherworldly, cloaked under a thick mist in the figured distance. We’ve seen blue sky twice, maybe. Cloud & freezing fog appertain, a garb we wear constantly here. & outside the window, the rusting silos of a granary, train tracks that random people walk from time to time, their heads bowed down, looks of strain on their faces apparent even from here. The freeway bridge humming all hours. A birdless sky. We have our routines here, the long-term hotel residents that watch people come & go each day. They serve warm cookies at 7:00 sharp in the lobby. We are on a first-name basis with everyone at the front desk. We have done

Yesterday Thanksgiving, & then & now, yawning out for a week ahead, we are in a hotel room two miles from our friend’s home, where we were not welcome. Turkey dinner was replaced with a trip to Safeway for greens & some deli chicken salad. We toasted, Stef her cabernet in a Styrofoam cup, me my winter ale, & we ate our dinner in our king bed here at La Quinta. I jawed the ears off my family prior, & took the weight of the situation, & balanced its circumstances with its calendar day. In the end, gratitude stands out in stark relief against the unfortunate backdrop we’ve been given here. But we’ve this roof & this bed & each other, & we neither enduringly suffer the abuses of the other, we neither acquiesce, we neither will resign ourselves to the venom we’ve seen here, or the sheer thoughtlessness, or the disregard for the fragile carriage of a friendship. Our values, these days, are shaken to their core, & we continue to mine & furrow into d

A difficult day of quiet strife, unfolding slow, almost inarticulate. Outside the sky remains inexplicably blue, the clouds few & hanging light & spare. The aureate glow of sundown hums about the farm & lends its odd illumination, the empty boughs of the deciduous trees black skeletons against the brilliant backdrop. & inside, inside the weight of our travels lands hard. In simplest possible terms, we have no jobs, the majority of our time is occupied by searching for work, the relentless cold of the barn has started to affect us & we are wondering how exactly we are going to get by. Every rock we overturn is slate-bare. There are for the time being two jobs that seem remotely possible for me here at present, though every day we extend our search. There is no room for timorous query here—if I meet someone, I have asked them within minutes if they have leads. & so it goes, with each day proving an addition to the last in some now mundane sequence of empty hope. I

How quickly accustomed we grow to our surroundings, in spite of their essential surreality. The windowed walls of this barn & the views they open upon already a kind of ingrained familiarity. After our trip we didn’t hesitate to unpack, to scour the place, to make a home of it. With winter coming on I wonder at it. The water will need to be shut off in anticipation of enduring cold so the exposed pipes leading to and from the outdoor shower don’t freeze & burst. The wood stove, bless its heart, cannot fill this space with heat, though it blazes tigerbright under its sooted lip & though I’ve come to find comfort in its spit & crackle. Perhaps it is having moved so many times already in my life, or perhaps I am still gradually unburdening myself of the exhaustion that attends to a slow & indeliberate move across the country. In either case thinking beyond this barn is almost an impossibility, if a necessity. & snow will come, soon, & send its flakes dissolving

A blur of a day, a slow blur. Awakened a bit hung-over from a dinner party & our inaugural trip to the Lower, where a band played & people closer to our age danced about the small stage in various states of inebriation, some drunk, some clearly tripping, some merely enjoying themselves. & today the sun has been constant. Took Willa for a run through a private trail, the sun dappling the fine needles underfoot, the forest alive with a vibrance it hides in the rain. Stopped to help Steve with the worm compost on the way down to the barn, raking fresh scrap aside to get the soil thick like wet black cement piled aside for sifting. An awful stench, but a valuable lesson & an opportunity to help around the farm, which I welcome. A shower outside, the mist fine & articulated by the golden sunlight. & here, now, a sudden sleep upon me. We sink slowly into the island’s black soil, I think, as if it spreads its arms. Landing. *** Something about being resourceful becomes

Just brought fresh madrona logs in for the woodstove, the rain quieting a bit in the loaming dark, the horizon cloud-bright in the figured distance that articulates in silhouetted relief the swaying tops of the Douglas firs down by the landing. Here, here, finally, here, a home. We have traveled 5000 miles, for a month & a half, sleeping on something like fifteen different beds, in four different states. Since we exited the ferry landing a week ago, we have slept in five homes, met countless people, winnowed our way into a community as fulgent & full of promise & enacted ideals as I could hope to find. & here, here, a home. The barn is modest & beautiful & rustic & easy all at once. Great vigas cross its low roof under white plaster & windows spread across the entirety of three of its sides, opening unto panoramic views of the farm & the forest & the sound off in the distance. Thick wooden posts line the room, rising of the red-brown floor. Mason

Leaving San Francisco today after an my carriage of exhaustion caught up with me. We've put 3600 miles behind us, crossed between broad & golden plains, undulating dunes, vast & desolate salt flats, the jagged & sloping rocks of the tahoe wilderness, the sand & low ripple of the lake itself, the valley cloaked in a sunset haze, & finally, here in this city, where the buildings loom unending overhead & tower down avenues on & on until the ocean yawns its response. Glad to be moving along, but I must note the sense of gratitude I have for everyone along the way. My brother & Dawn, the Brosches, my parents, Stef's parents; we seem to be on precisely the right path. Now to turn northwards & glide up the coast into that verdure that awaits. My life, my life, it looks a bit strange right now, but I feel a dormant vibrance awakening. I feel, simply, wonder.

Here in Denver again after a prolonged while away. In Minnesota I thought after trying to lend substance to some fugitive memories, trying to hunt for branches with my initials carved boldy in youth, for my name falling out in casual conversations among friends I once held dear. I sat in the car & looked over the Commons, where I spent so many hours as a teenager, where the passage of time seemed an abstraction, then, hardly worth contemplating. In remembrance, I feel still the kiss of the breeze, the smell of tobacco mingled with fresh-cut grass, the chthonic heft of wet lichen on the rocks at the shore. The bark's thick sinews on the bough overhanging the water. The fine sand cold under my feet in the autumn. & that attending spirit of youth, laid bare in its gaping, honest simplicity. I looked for myself in these places, auguring, divining, as if they would speak, lend me substance, reify these strange & changeling songs in my heart. I found nothing. I found places w

This morning, the steady beat of the rain upon the window panes, the homogenously grey sky hung overhead, the variously hued leaves slick on the ground in their coats of red & yellow & brown. A morning like this calls the sensate to mind, or the phenomena of sense memory. That a sensory acquisition can come already endowed with a kind of emotional heft. That the thought of dew gathering on your leather shoe can conjure something else entire. Or that you can imagine the cold leaves, how they feel in your hands, their crispness gone, their spines supple & malleable, that cold water dripping off quiet & collected. Rain subsumes every sound, in the most wonderful possible way. Twigs break, cars drive past, but everywhere, everywhere that sleepy consistent hum. I have missed rain more than I ever thought possible; Colorado rains fell for minutes & dissipated. New Mexico had its half-hour monsoons in the late summer. Something about the enduring rainstorm, though, I absol

Revising the wedding I am to perform next week, the sheer simplicity of certain elements of life strikes me. That unfettered awe of our youth that dropped our jaws & stood us up before our futures as if before the gaping cusp of some endless landscape of unimaginable contour, that slow struggle in which our faithful naiveté collides against our impregnable sense of maturation, our endless longings, the thrum & thrill of love & love enduring. It seems suddenly the same thing, drawn out from cradle to coffin, a kind of furious desire that knows not where to lay its head. That we learn along the way is hardly disputable, but that we come to know is something else entire. Love offers us the same wonder that youth did—a comparably powerful ally that we can no more readily define for its enduring presence than we could any of the fleeting moments of our pasts. It is wonder invested, I think; a kind of lineated awe, but awe nonetheless. Right now, I wait for my fiancée to return h

Hopkins with his fine eye & excruciated tone would stare a thing down until its thing-ness dissolved into a kind of essentiality; not precisely its own essence, but a marriage of both its individuated & its general modes of being. A kind of auratic wavering that ghosts a thing. He'd spy a knotted chestnut tree, or a gust roiling over grain-tops, & in each subtle motion & after exacting witness there would come to the forefront of consciousness the apophantic moment, the rising at the same time of the thing & the self. Coupled thus with the world, Hopkins felt the embrace of his god, in the dissolution of a border between self & self's alterity. What seems critical of a sudden is that never for one moment did his inscaping demand an absented sense of self, never did it hush the quiet storm within his own rising chest. He was an essential part of the world's universality, as much as the kingfisher or the carrion or the Deutschland splintered against th

A brief run up Saxon Mountain today, my person lodged between two intermittent stormclouds which cast great grey shadows over the broad mountainsides. From the third switchback one looks down upon the lake in Georgetown, green-blue & stunning-cold. No sense of wonder attended my run. Willa stayed home, her tail flat, as it gets from time to time. A simple day & one barely worth a mention but for the heart beating in my chest, the air fanning my lungs, the dappled sunlight & the susurration of breeze & gale outside, the light & hurried shower of rain playing upon the red planks of the patio. Some days it is enough merely to look upon the grain of the oak of the fence-post, or the paint where it shows wear upon the table-top. These, our quotidian comings & goings, the unrecalled exigencies of the mundane. In running, I felt a finitude today, itself only remarkable in hindsight. At a good clip up the dirt road that zig-zags Saxon, I felt that rare almost mechanical

Atop the western ridge over Watrous Gulch again, I had a simple, quiet day of it. The ascent was without trail, & my steps gingerly carried me over budded black-eye susans & columbine, scrub & sage. Nurse logs from decades ago, or rather their imprint upon the soil, could be seen here & there like shadows, phantoms of having-been. A fine mulch attended their angles of repose, soft underfoot, fecund. & perched atop the ridge, Willa in the distance chasing after a chipmunk in a patch of thick & twisted pine, I looked over the gulch below, the stream & its densely foliaged banks, the bark & plank laid over as a bridge, the winding trail small & peculiar from afar, a pencil-line drawn over an acquiescent landscape. Two hawks were gliding about a copse where late a camp was made, scavenging or investigating. I could plainly see them from above, some two hundred feet below me, their gliding so controlled that it seemed to announce a plane like an invisible

A crisp sixty degree day feels a great deal warmer under mountain sun, especially heading up a bare, exposed scrub-hill towards a distant rock outcropping. Remarkable weather for a hike this time of year, the aspens in the infancy of their turning, the conastoga pines already half-russet from late bark-beetle attacks. The way in marked by a lashing out against oblivion. Near a dilapidated section of wooden fence that stands alone, two horse ties in the distance falling over slowly like the wounded in a gunfight. & the white bark of the aspens gouged in shoddy script with names scrawling vertically down that have already come to mean nothing. A quarter mile past & it is forgotten, the interlopers on prosperity cordoning themselves off to the first feeble climb. & after, pitch after pitch of aspen grove, expanding vistas of the Dillon Reservoir &its unfortunate environs (condos, etc.) that one can glance over in focusing on the jutting peaks that delineate the horizon. Wi

& a missive this morning from India ending love love love. to Varkala, up to Rahjastan, to Bombay, & back to Delhi before her plane comes home. & this morning Willa & I will head up Guenella Pass to find a suitable trail (suitably empty of people), & we will linger upon the soapstone banks of the creek, the morning sun falling in glaring sheets over the small ripples of the clear-brown water, the cooling underbreeze in eddies off its roiling surface. I will put my head under, & she will wade & take gaping bites at the current, & she will again lean her heft against me when I am prone on the ancient bridge of two by fours. I will hear snapping twigs & falling pinecones, I will search the far reach of tangled wood & dappled dawn for shapes familiar, remembering the contours of the cougar I spied last week, its velvet body a thing of sprung grace, illuminated by headlights in the otherwise black of passing twilight. fear attends to every run, to eve

What is it that renders me paralyzed before the not the notion, but the evidence of freedom? Such long hours I've spent in no place particular, thoughts hovering upon substantiation, ideas in their slow revolutions while my hands lay idle. It was thrust upon me in thinking, that the effect of moving so regularly as a child was to modify that old addage, that it reads for my psyche "nothing ventured, nothing lost." A wonder that I may find anything meaningfully efficacious, that love can prove intrepid, enduring through tedium & turmoil. Reft & reft again, asunder from so many fanned flames, you begin to wonder less & less at the trail of smoldering ash in your wake, & instead facilitate clean breaks. Your mind tells you it is so, & your heart's rebuttals, those undying profusions, come to nothing unless you've properly anchored that to which they attend. I used to expect to come to death this way, trembling, cold, my hands grasping nothing wher

A run today up Watrous Gulch, bifurcate trail that veers right where Herman's Lake is left. Passed an old woman in a blazing pink windbreaker, &, yards ahead, her husband, who asked after her progress. A tenderness, that. & ahead, at Bard Creek, was a structure loosely banded together of lightning-struck bark, fallen branches, planks of ancient oak shaped dountless by the blades of miners in forgotten years. Two benches, a fire-pit, an overhang strung shoddily together with twine pushed to its limit. The valley affords a thick & tangled scrub-grass, briared & dense around the flowing rivulet, itself a copper-brown. & on either side, grass gives quick way to looming granite, tree-line falters & the great bald caps of the mountains jut formidably into the now-greying sky, black clouds beginning to creep over their barren domes. We are hit with hail on our run out & get to the lot in good time for it. An amicable wood, no dint of foreboding as one finds els

Here at Herman Lake, the azure sky pure & unbreached by cloud, the high tundra grass a copperwire, porcelain-fragile in what is no ireffutably mid-autumn. The ater of the lake is frigid, but Willa insists on a swim, out of character for her. Afterwards, she leans the weight of her wet body against me as I sit, lapping at me with her pink tongue. She is content. Around me yawn the capacious mountains, their stone teeth of granite, soapstone, Oklahoma buff turfed in yellowing lichen & moss. It is the sense of being here unnoticed, or of being permitted such rich passage, that thrills & enervates one's gratitude & simple faculty to marvel. I address you, my love, from this place, where late we waded or dove to the depths of the blue lake before the storm fell in behind. Your footsteps dot Kerala in paths the contours of which I cannot conceive-- but it is your face I conjure now, how I might hang upon its shifting countenance. Come to me safely. Here, here, the autumna

This, an attempt at unreservedly exploring a kind of pursuit that seems quite appealing to me. Travel a bit, document. Move, document. Run, document. & permit the transgressions of a regularly inflated prose. Stands to reason that, posited in such wild environs, the care for the consequence of being too effusive can be diminished considerably. Besides which, we can uncover the ponderous in the elementary just as easily as we can translate the extraordinary into the mundane. So.