Specimens, Days

Quickly, I am compelled to note a new discovery: they have oil paintings of themselves hung upon the hallway wall. In his portrait, all business, he brandishes three silver rings, fists closed & rested upon his legs in a half-lean, that familiar smirk smeared across his face. In hers, rendered in a wash, she gazes, because of how the paintings are positioned, up at him, her eyes full of adoration & life. Oil portraits of themselves on the wall five feet from their bedroom. My disgust is complete.

A heavy day in which I seemed to plummet discernibly as the hours passed. The sun & a relatively calm sky to start the morning, lasting through my work at water-sealing the shed’s new tongue & groove pine planking. Three coats, a shower, a drive into town to deposit my check. Somewhere along the drive, in Moran State Park, Cascade Lake placid, the wakes of gliding mergansers tearing quiet behind them, the rings of thick fog appertaining about the distant hills, the precipitation mounting more an incidentally wet mist than a rain. & Eastsound, all of its insular quaintness, its chalkboard signs, its jalopied Fords, the waves audible through the windows of Darvill’s, the hushed banter of employees muttering vitriol under their breath—all of it seemed to coalesce in the worst of ways. Double-charged for an avocado. Run into twice in one aisle by a drunk with a twelve-pack of Sierra Nevada. Cut off in the check-out lane. These things crescendo. Since I took this position &

Started a short story a bit ago in which letters from a battlefield are warp to a family history's weft. Also, drank some gin since my employers are again in Seattle & I am again at liberty to do so. The latter leads to posting the former in order to get at a simple question right when I wonder it most-- should it continue? The first part, a letter, would be italicized I think. The second part is where I got up to get a gin & tonic, & it is quite short as a result. So. Don’t have much time to write, so please forgive in advance any omissions obvious to you. Besides which, to shift my focus & thinking from this place to that is an endeavor I’m never likely to master. I close my eyes, though, to sleep at night, & in that swelling darkness I am flooded with the old ghosts, with that life I left behind me, all of its currents, all of its loose ends buzzing like a dying filament inside my heart. Or I’ll be kicking a shovel into the dirt & suddenly rem

Spent the majority of the day in bed, supine, unable to stand for any length of time without my back getting the best of me. It comes around, time to time, & usually the disc slips out & the pain is relatively intense for only a matter of minutes before being a caution for the rest of the day, a kind of ghosting discomfort. This morning when it went out it stayed out, to the point that I almost felt compelled to seek medical attention while I was, of all places, at the dump, my spine locked up, leaning against a concrete abutment scattered with the shit of gulls flapping about the rafters. Spasms for roughly four hours straight. That highly localized pinch of the vertebrae, & my body’s unwillingness in lieu of it to allow me to take a full breath. So. Not much in the way of productivity. It was noted, of course, that I ought to make up the hours I missed. Of course I will. Top of my action list. To their credit, I was given three muscle relaxants that she keeps around—her o

Put in my notice this morning, amicably, hemming & hawing where necessary but by no means making myself smaller for the process. It is a palpable shift, a weight unmoored—I can’t say entirely lifted, but in seachange, a buoy severed of its anchor. A quick work, possibility, how it rushes in to flood my thinking, to color it new. Where I wore this decision as heft & hindrance yesterday today I see it open unto that nameless world I knew upon arriving here. A place entirely other. A place for which I had no vocabulary, simply because I had no expectation. The good news here is that Orcas & this particular situation have managed to retain their respective identities. This has ruined nothing larger for me, only caused me to bend & bow. But we bend back, don’t we. & so. The novelty in this I can greet either by biting my nails or by jutting my hands in my pockets & whistling, so to speak. Stress or let it unfold. I wonder how heavy my hand is in the making of this pa

Sitting at the kitchen table upstairs, no lights on to impede the coming dark, stammering through edits to my inchoate dissertation when of a sudden they arrived home in a cloud of cologne & sickly perfume. These scents always conjure nausea in me, an allergy since I can remember. No phone call. They wanted to visit with me (intermittently, while I unpacked their car), to expound on the details of their marvelous celebration, but I deferred, claiming to be in the middle of important writing, the momentum of which was in motion & my attention to which was critical. She kept trying to give me things from their trip to Costco: a loaf of bread, a five pound bag of coffee, a papaya the size of a small child. I will give them back, each & all, in the morning. She kept wanting to tell me that her granddaughter played piano, that she saw her dearest friend from junior high, that her daughter fought through the pain of a torn ligament in her knee obtained the day prior at Whistler.

Put my application in adjunct pools today. Ran in the waning cold, Willa stubborn against her leash. Spent the better part of the afternoon simply deliberating, weighing pros & cons, digging for perspective. & here I am, this new custom, packing before I’ve fully unpacked. Checked on submissions for creative works & found no updates, in some cases after four months of waiting, which I suppose is better than hearing nay within four weeks. Wrote Morning Star to prospect the option of staying in the goat shed or any other outlying building, if only for a brief time. This will all seem very little, I’m sure, once it is behind me, but for the time being every silence is pregnant with the clamor I ought to be making, every still moment an admonition against working towards change. The work of finding work, again, & so it goes. In the end, I’ve much yet to celebrate, much to look upon proudly. Silence & stillness the hardest precepts to put to course right now, though the

House-sitting, while they weekend in Seattle in tuxedo & gown. Even alone in this house, I feel ghosted, tarnished, the way a coating film malingers in your mouth, a stain upon your fingertips stains still after each wash. I expected their absence would prove some compensation for enduring their presence, but instead, access to their liquor cabinet aside, there is no reward here. & so. Where to go. Perhaps I’ve let my gaze dote upon detail, settle too long upon those small outcroppings of wonder I have found here, & in so doing, somehow I find myself in this odd position, wondering very simply where we ought to go. Orcas. Austin. Maine. Canada. Alaska. Priorities demand some cultivation, some constant care. & here I aim to write the dissertation, though suffocated in the gaping space of this house, it becomes more difficult, their thumps above, the woofer of their ceaseless television just above my room, seeping Fox news down, some horrid toxin. I am up against myself,

This morning I sat through the inauguration upstairs, the bosses smug in their pajamas, barking at the television, slurring ejaculates firing out of their fat lips. What a thing to witness. I live among Palin supporters, old guard Republicans who extol Christian virtue out one side of their mouth while spitting vitriol always out the other. Obama a terrorist, Obama not even a citizen, the “negro situation,” the elegance of Laura Bush, the accolades due her husband. I left the room after a comment about how blacks might finally get their acts together, went to pull weeds from the superfluous garden of these superfluous people, to tend to shoots & weeds & improve their lives even as they go about the deleterious business of condemning everyone else’s. At 11:30, I rose from weeding, nauseous with the morning, with what I was doing. I came in & packed for an hour, ate & went back to work. The neighbor stopped over in the afternoon to join the chorus & pitch polemics at

Living out this version of life has been a constant preoccupation of late—examining which parts of it I would tail along behind me in leaving, a drawn wake, & which parts I would sever sooner than later. Living & working in this same secluded place for this same particular breed of secluded people has already run its course. One minute I dodge xenophobic tirades, the next I am utterly ignored if I happen into the same room when the neighbor comes round for coffee. Thursday afternoon Judy had a blood pressure spike, I learned later, & an ambulance came & they followed it a half an hour later to the hospital in town without a word of parting, walking by me as I stood aside without any explanation. I got a call later presuming that I would be present to care for house & dog for dinner, after which I didn’t hear a word. Until ten the next morning, when they nonchalantly arrived home & set me to pruning salal. One silence might be accounted for by the absence of the

Received my copy of the Denver Quarterly in the mail today, with my review of DBQ’s book from two years ago. Always prompt. Looking it over, it’s difficult to refrain from wincing. I wonder if I will always judge my own work so harshly, find it needlessly verbose at times, transparently fixated at others. The one thing I would surely not change would be the note of praise for a spellbinding work. I have decided, sitting here, recollecting a few Wyath sketches, piecing together my own day spent again in the salal pruning, Willa on constant vigil about me, that there is perhaps no greater peace than watching a dog sleep. The stretches, the flexing paws, the sighs. When any tempest abides, there is quick salve here, in simple witness.

I seem a bit inclined to render these little entries in a distinctly didactic tone, & were I surer of an audience I would feel almost compelled to make formal apology, but as it stands, that tone serves a very distinct purpose. For as little as I know, for as much as I tremble before the world, or in contradistinction for how capable I feel myself becoming of gripping it & clawing it to me, I am the better for composting my experiences into a kind of schoolbook for my own future. I am learning this new language, its tongue some foreign thing I puzzle together as I go, its syllabary a scatter-shot of raw material. I wend & weft, I yoke together, & I render this specious account in order to make sense of it as it comes & fades again, in order that I might gain from it something beyond an ineffable hum within or an occasional memory that I can conjure at my leisure down the line. A record, then, for my senses, for my mind, a thing with which to wrestle. How the salal s

I have felt a breed of indolence creeping about within me, my quiet fire subdued the last few weeks. Weathering the holidays was no simple chore; the island saw record snowfall & an enduring cold snap. Back & forth between two homes, tending to the farm & the garden, trying to hold our feet firm on the floor. & now it is rain that falls, relentless, wind-thrashed across the point. The swells come from all sides, tide-low, cresting ever in swales, a kind of energy to the water that sends a formidable warning. There are times I look across at Blakely or Guermes & think of the crossing enthusiastically, the dip of the oars in the water, the supple play of current. Then there are times when I see the buoy stationed at ten feet deep off the pebbled beach, whipping & yanking violently in a series of contortions that gives a shudder, a sort of exaggerated pantomime of struggle. Patient moments, moments of sudden panic, toil & wonder, abiding joy & a slow pensiv

Some time since I've made a point of pausing. After the snow, a relentless rain from which we are only now beginning to break, the muted intimation of sun slung low past all seeing, something felt. I feel brow beaten, some dark hand tamping us down that finally is giving. Had I been productive with my time, I'd feel better about it, but as it stands, I slip into an easy sloth each evening, a habit I'll need to break. & Orcas, this peculiar place. This peculiar version of my life. This peculiar job I have. I am interested, daily, to watch the motions of my living, to see which implements I employ & in what regard, what small dreams flood my mind when idle or what excitations spur it into activity. Odd to blend this quiet hushed existence with its capacity for wonder, but here I am, & there the ocean, & there the islands tossed across it, turtlebacks obsidian-black in a distance.