February 17
A fine frost turns to vapor in the morning sun, the dulled, white sheens enveloping the blades of grass giving way to green. & the farm in the morning is a familiar thing indeed. The barn, again, that we intermittently call home. We are out of Olga, out of the situation that weighed upon me so heavily, that filled me with vituperation & insidious anger, & here we waylay again at Morning Star, & here we wonder anew at our paths, recall our progress, retrace our route. We are opening our hearts, peering into their recesses, letting speak their shadows & fault-lines. It is a difficult work, an almost unbearable, ongoing toil at which we labor, morning to night, each of us, alone or together. To love one another & to turn & walk away. Our happiness thusfar fraught with an unspoken carriage that we lay out in the light & elucidate. I will likely head to Alaska, alone, & wonder from afar what it is we’re doing. I feel myself in myself & it struggles, it kicks. I feel my heart in my heart & it loves & it questions yet. Bound & unbound. We give each other, gifts that fit but barely. & every moment gapes open.
***
Maps of Alaska, ferry routes & schedules, notes jotted in margins about jobs or lodging, my bags yet unpacked from this last move back to the barn. This kind of prefatory work that neither reifies what is to come nor elucidates what is presently becoming makes a strange kind of ghost of me, again. Hovering next to myself, willing a progress. & my body’s torpor at it, the here of it, echoes off its own small thrill at the prospect of that distant place I’ve conjured so often in my imagining. Were I forced into retreat, into duck & cover, into some lachrymose drama played out among a familiar cast of characters, I think I’d break. The recollection of myself years ago in Iowa City spurs quick bile—that I sought refuge in some other life, some tired remembrance of my passed youth, inebriate, grasping haphazard, a child in a fit. If this is to be a generative time, it will spring of my own solitary courage, of an unfiltered quiet, of an earnest, sober commitment. If I am to pay faithful attention to my selfsame breath, I cannot count on, cannot seek out, distraction. Let me be resourceful, then, & let me be the resource. All bearings slip & tremble, & we shudder our fear. What we do next with it is precisely the question—quelch its fine filament, pluck the flame between the fingers to let it fly. Put the fire to the web, & let it light to adumbrate & scorch both. To self-illumine the flux. I will carry fear with me always, yes. But to carry its antidote in greater dose & persist & emerge from my own deeps the better for it. & so, days away, weeks away, howsoever & so on, I head north, to Alaska, myself in tow.
***
How I cannot let it rest until it is done, going over the minutiae of the decision in precise detail, glossing for flaw, for opening. Here is the truth: we have committed ourselves to tending & bettering & repairing our relationship for years, in counseling, in open dialogue, in hope, in storm & stress. We have tried nearly everything that two people together can try, & have found our efforts lacking. So here, this new angle, this sabbatical. When I go, we both understand the possibilities before us. Honest to experience, present in whatever slow revelation, we may drift & our bearings may not ultimately coincide. This goodbye could well pronounce itself finally, just as it could sound a necessary but finite period of self-reconciliations, of quiet & earnest illuminations. There is a severity in it, a kind of ghosting implication I suppose, but one that ghosts every moment in any case. At no point are we assured, at no point do we hold the control we think we yield. Goodnight or goodbye always hung propositions. Our hands, in the end, reach towards but cannot grasp—what it is we all cherish & nourish & hold dear, what it is we love & in which we find enduring meaning, is not our own, is a gift, is entirely wild & other. Proximity breeds illusion, & we invest our infinite faith in the transient. But we are servants to forces beyond our wills, subject to erosions, windfalls, turns, gaping cliffs. & so we part, for now, true to our sense of the present, unwilling either to submit to settling. & we part lovingly & with our sincere best wishes. we take a part of each other’s heart & we carry it forward, into our individuated progress. We must become again the people that we are capable of becoming—this not an act of recovery but of discovery. Our past lays out behind us, a trace, a wake cleaving our memory, a familiar song we hum in or out of tune. For now, though, to fall back is to regress, to reanimate a past is to obfuscate a future. & so as I prepare to set out, I prepare myself for the new, I unfetter, I loosen a grasp, I surrender, & I look for my present hunger. I quiet the tune in its singing, let silence stop my throat. What to speak I hardly yet know.
***
Maps of Alaska, ferry routes & schedules, notes jotted in margins about jobs or lodging, my bags yet unpacked from this last move back to the barn. This kind of prefatory work that neither reifies what is to come nor elucidates what is presently becoming makes a strange kind of ghost of me, again. Hovering next to myself, willing a progress. & my body’s torpor at it, the here of it, echoes off its own small thrill at the prospect of that distant place I’ve conjured so often in my imagining. Were I forced into retreat, into duck & cover, into some lachrymose drama played out among a familiar cast of characters, I think I’d break. The recollection of myself years ago in Iowa City spurs quick bile—that I sought refuge in some other life, some tired remembrance of my passed youth, inebriate, grasping haphazard, a child in a fit. If this is to be a generative time, it will spring of my own solitary courage, of an unfiltered quiet, of an earnest, sober commitment. If I am to pay faithful attention to my selfsame breath, I cannot count on, cannot seek out, distraction. Let me be resourceful, then, & let me be the resource. All bearings slip & tremble, & we shudder our fear. What we do next with it is precisely the question—quelch its fine filament, pluck the flame between the fingers to let it fly. Put the fire to the web, & let it light to adumbrate & scorch both. To self-illumine the flux. I will carry fear with me always, yes. But to carry its antidote in greater dose & persist & emerge from my own deeps the better for it. & so, days away, weeks away, howsoever & so on, I head north, to Alaska, myself in tow.
***
How I cannot let it rest until it is done, going over the minutiae of the decision in precise detail, glossing for flaw, for opening. Here is the truth: we have committed ourselves to tending & bettering & repairing our relationship for years, in counseling, in open dialogue, in hope, in storm & stress. We have tried nearly everything that two people together can try, & have found our efforts lacking. So here, this new angle, this sabbatical. When I go, we both understand the possibilities before us. Honest to experience, present in whatever slow revelation, we may drift & our bearings may not ultimately coincide. This goodbye could well pronounce itself finally, just as it could sound a necessary but finite period of self-reconciliations, of quiet & earnest illuminations. There is a severity in it, a kind of ghosting implication I suppose, but one that ghosts every moment in any case. At no point are we assured, at no point do we hold the control we think we yield. Goodnight or goodbye always hung propositions. Our hands, in the end, reach towards but cannot grasp—what it is we all cherish & nourish & hold dear, what it is we love & in which we find enduring meaning, is not our own, is a gift, is entirely wild & other. Proximity breeds illusion, & we invest our infinite faith in the transient. But we are servants to forces beyond our wills, subject to erosions, windfalls, turns, gaping cliffs. & so we part, for now, true to our sense of the present, unwilling either to submit to settling. & we part lovingly & with our sincere best wishes. we take a part of each other’s heart & we carry it forward, into our individuated progress. We must become again the people that we are capable of becoming—this not an act of recovery but of discovery. Our past lays out behind us, a trace, a wake cleaving our memory, a familiar song we hum in or out of tune. For now, though, to fall back is to regress, to reanimate a past is to obfuscate a future. & so as I prepare to set out, I prepare myself for the new, I unfetter, I loosen a grasp, I surrender, & I look for my present hunger. I quiet the tune in its singing, let silence stop my throat. What to speak I hardly yet know.
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