Specimens, Days

Waking up with my back out, that sharp nerve of taut pain creeping up my neck. I can’t bend my head forward. Usually it stays local to the geography of vertebrae, emanating in a quick web that quiets in inches, but today, it runs the length of me, head through neck through one side of the back before dissolving in my sits-bone. Opportune timing for one feeling already vaguely confined. Cabin fever closes in to couch fever, or bed fever, unable to so much as drive away. The day entire between paragraphs, & little of account, my back in its apex, tight & clenched, radiating pain. Just now, though, I find myself cast beyond comfort, missing simple fun, or plain joy, or rhapsody, however brief. I’ve not laughed out loud in so long, not found mirrored gayety in another’s countenance, not felt heart sing but this one protracted dirge, monotone & ache. My feet itch now to carry me to a familiar place, to cast me from here, retract my solitude, trade it for even the quickest of bri

An interesting day. *** The morning after the conversation. Still, a kind of heightened processing, a thrumming back-&-forth, mind to heart, heart to mind. Good to hear her voice, & my reeling from it more subdued than I’d imagined. & so. Today finally the sun & a sustained sky of blue. A snipe overhead last night, & a first mosquito lighting on my skin. So spring seems to have arrived, tardy, maybe, but charged with what it bears. The light lingering well-past eleven already. Impossible passages of sleep. Sixteen pages into Hopkins & charging ahead. Writing, writing, writing a dissertation, writing poems, writing quick sketches for stories, notes for a book review. & caulking time stable with reading, walking long & regarding the brittle tall grass swaying just so in the softening firn wind. A sense not of pursuit or urgency but of receptivity, vulnerability. Open-selved. Saying—rush through me, gale & gust—there is nothing will pierce the heart. I

All of this, a clamor after being heard when I’ve extricated myself from the clamor. This manner of living will serve but briefly, I think. I’ve harbored some sense of this lifestyle for as long as I can recall—now, its living seems an overture to an old dream, a proof. Alaska, by myself, & yet I breathe. It would be an easy time to get cynical, to see errancy in this move, to ask for a medal already. But I regard it with pride, I think, & with careful wonder at what it wreaks in me daily. It is the most ordinary of things to sustain oneself, & yet, for me, it presents unspeakable challenges. For everyone, I imagine—they are just new to me. & so I look upon the bay & the mountains & the quieting sun to one hand & the waning moon to the other, & I recognize a vast beauty, but a beauty that alone will not buoy me here. Already I know the limits of a life carved here, already the longing I would carry forward. I could find half of a happiness here, & th

I wonder at the past, how it underwrites us, some invisible thread to call us back, calm & tender, to remembrance, even if what unfolds before us here wears the mark of beauty. I think of place, of geographies that tie themselves inextricably to our dreaming. That a friend writing me would note a river in California she wanted so badly to swim in again. Or another describing the old growth firs. These places, even in simple imagining, pull & enchant, cast webs of star & slivered moon. Memory finds it texture this way. The smell of blackberry cobbler, or the dust lining the Mason jars in the mud room. The taste of red-hots. The look of the swirling Missouri sky from the rear window of the van. Sound of the Pecos River, hushed in babble, songbirds branch-flittered, the sun-baked pine-needles soft underfoot, pinon & pitch. Or the wet leaves & slick bark, the vines rotting from Pennsylvania elms when we, full family, walked each in a green poncho. That persistent tap of

Of a sudden, evening well past, a tempest in me, a frenzied thing blowing through & rattling rafter & ribcage, calling & pulling. To cull from me my torpor, cast it to the flame. I rut in pity, bog & well in tiresome woe, whittle time to no shape at all, blade over wood that it become wood alone, no shape discernible, no half-form erupting, no Daphne’s arms flailing from the riven bark. Evening calls & I offer it nothing, some pages of overwrought writing, some hot tears, some aimless vespers to forget in sleep. A part of me would upturn the whole charade, but it would not know where next to turn, that part that would shake my whispering from me, rack & vanquish self from self, slap away my muttering & call me to me entire in faith. Safe to say I sicken of myself, spit on my sounding to hear it thus expressed. A restlessness crawling in my skin, these sudden outbursts, head hung in hands, how I can do nothing the day through & fall to sobbing a briefest

Falling into redundancies now, a cord whipped back. A long run up to Diamond Ridge along the beach, plus tide, alluvion alone, no packed sand, no firm footing, but sun & a brief window of blue shot through the haloes of cloud. Talked to Willa the whole way, or the air, or the cliffs layered in ochre & burnt sienna, shale & sand, to the stone & pebble shifting underfoot, the runnels of breakup streams spilling dun over the cliff-tops in cut ravine & culvert. The finer points of a self-examination in which no self would stand in steadfast at the close, in which answer’s liquefaction is nearly immediate, a foothold cleft from sand. I would have no answer, bride no certainty, grapple not after wrested fact. I would wrestle instead a shadow & know the bout endless until its end. Toss anchor to tug at tow & undertow, tide & riven wave. no sea-bed, no ample weight to hold. What self would come of self’s ceaseless battery? Self-inquisitor, playing at self’s endg

Bought ample wood at the lumber yard to fashion a desk & chair today. Would you believe that it took all of my will, all of my careful composure merely to ask after two by fours? Tensed, my voice a sliver, shoulders doubled over, wisp-of-self. & a wind blows a reed. The usual perambulations on the beach, trying to work recalls with Willa in the snow, her attentions focused on the lazy circles of blackbirds. Retreated to the cabin, a soft rain, my dear quiet. Notched & sawed & pounded a handful of nails, & for eleven dollars of hickory & metal, I now have desk & chair. Now, the gloaming. The four-hour evenings that haunt & linger. The lights on the spit distance-muted & glowing orange, small fires upon the sea. My heart skittish in its hold, a crumb pecked along, a sparrow’s beak, eggshell-thin. There is no revelation here. Only hour tacked on to hour, an interminable addition of days upon days, layer-thick & holding. I sidle, a tired ring around

& no sooner do I call in relief on my self than my heart infiltrates my nightly dreams. All week, each night, some new heartbreak, some rejoinder of loneliness, ghost of her, active landscape of the peopled past of which I was once centrally a part. & I awaken burning with longing, enflamed by the desire to feel that subtle tempest of connectivity, to share in life’s vicissitudes, fall back upon or hold up. All of my contingencies vanquished. Self-exiled. How oil-slick & slipshod our brief roles in life can be. Regard an old album of photographs with an eye for the periphery in each shot. These people whose names well up from some forgotten cave, flushed & fleshed to, glimmer-eyed & smiling. Say here, my arm around a friend now dead & years buried. There, an anonymous hand border-severed upon my back, a sidelong glance. What have I been to others, to myself, & how, I wonder, do I haunt them? Some stranger’s awkward grinning in the corner. Oh, that one. I rem

A run with Willa this morning from Bishop’s Beach towards Diamond Ridge & back, along the waterfront at low tide, the sloping slate-grey rocks & seastacks like the barnacled backs of beached walrus. Closer to the shoreline, how the sand lays itself out in ripples that firm up, inches apart, & stretch in semicircles along the receded arm of the waves, themselves multiform, scalloped in their entries across the sand so they might appear from overhead a frothing gossamer doily, a fringe-end, no semblance of straight line. The bay cut half from view by thick & malingering fog, save for a window of sunlight miles along towards the Cook Inlet proper, sparking those distant peaks with sunlit snow. It was good to run, to feel a coursing in me. & spent time before in the library, searching half-assed after anything—a job, a rocking chair for sale in the paper, something upon which to hang my energies. Took out the Skeet Monastery dog-training book, to Willa’s imminent deligh

Crushing, these afternoons. Today it’s like a dirge in my blood, the echo of some sad song reverberating in my chambered heart. Sick with it. I am of no use today & hereby check out. Took Willa for a hike, ate a cup of soup, walked along the beach in the coming rain, the little waves lapping after each other. Came upon a dead dog hefted parallel the wave-arm in the sand, ten yards from the water. Or coyote, one of the two, its teeth bared in a frozen grimace, no bodily wound upon its coat. From a distance I thought it burled driftwood, but closing in, saw its black pads flecked in sand. It looked a painful death, its muscles all contorted, its countenance braced against sudden trauma. & then more rain, & more sad songs about love on the radio. Here in the cabin, I talk to myself, ask myself what I am supposed to do in this situation, how to greet it, how to breathe into it, bowled over by it as I am. You can be conscious of a longing in you, a filament, a fine kind of thrum

In the morning the flakes elephantine, great floating orbs ushered feather-soft to the grass. The sky here never fully committed, grey with streaks of blue rayed through with sun scrawled out over the bay. A cold morning, bitter to the skin. Along the beach, Willa in her sprints, the winds pierced my layers, bone-chill, wet-bone. A different cold along a shoreline. & now, late afternoon, thinnest snow, an afterthought of snow, miniscule punctured dots that strain the eye in their regard. A quiet day, unsurprisingly. Touched up resumes. Spent some time at the library, had an odd letter from the chair of the English Dept. up in Fairbanks about my application in the adjunct pool, warning me off its doldrums, telling me I’d be better suited seeking a full-time position. I told him to give me one, then, or else trust that I was aware of what being an adjunct entailed. Good will can appear confounded, & living here how & why I do has lent me perhaps a touch more gumption vis-à-vi

Coming now to a close, this shaky, awkward & illuminating day. From sunrise to the sunset that only now feathers its last lights, a roll call of friends & family calling to wish me well, taking the shine off the loneliness. Such deep & enduring gratitude for these continued gestures from those I love, those whose steps rhyme with mine even over countless miles. & so. I survived it intact. One episode of inconsolable weeping, but that is to be expected. After all, I spent my thirteenth birthday in shambles, accosted by the malingering idea inherited from my Jewish friends in Ohio that my childhood was forfeit & that I was, from that point forward, a man. This, somehow, easier to bear. Another bit of data on a laundry list of exhausting items of greater urgency, I’d say. Had the pleasure of speaking however briefly with my grandparents, Grandma suggested knowingly that it was the Cherokee in me that caused me to roam like I do. I like that. The notion that there is en

My thirtieth birthday. Snow driving down all morning, an Alaskan idyll. A pair of pheasants crossing the meadow, a fresh track of moose prints across the frozen gravel. Awakened in earnest at seven sharp, alarms of messages & well-wishes already flooding in, making it damn near impossible for me to feel somehow sorry for myself today. I hauled myself here in the first, & now I look about my environs, & with each renewed glance they strike me ever more capaciously beautiful. Here, then, a choice, a walk along a razor’s edge, between letting some figured loneliness call out a pattern for the day or assuming full & complete accountability for my time. I will choose a celebration. I will choose the snow-heavy boughs of spruce, the icy wave-arms along the bay, the sleepy drone of the pickups along the Sterling Highway, the air—even in the interstices of falling flakes—redolent of spring. That I am alive to see it, resolved to be here, buoyed by such rich supports. Let me cel

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” Writing again, finally, in my chapter on Keats. A few weeks ago, half-asleep & irritable in the barn on Orcas, I came of a sudden to an understanding in regards to his poems & poetics, & though I’ll ush

Almost ten & finally the light is fading, though the luminescence of the white peaks glows still under what appears to be a full moon. Tonight, thinking about the abstractions that govern me, how I am constellated by vagaries, intimations of conjured dreams. Solitude, or love, or prudence, or investigation of self, or truth & beauty. These auratic, nebulous things that I seek out, as if some overturned rock would reveal them, some cloud part or bough bend low enough. Forge into this furrow to find a longing that aches in me for none of these things, or rather for how these things adumbrate & finger out. Not the recollection of a smile, but the smile itself, fleeting, waning & wilting both at once. Not the joke but the sound of the laughter, the head tilted back, the nape, the jawline. & not the sadness but the tear hesitating upon the eyelash, pregnant globe. How many small dreams were captive in these minutiae, how many versions of my life have I hushed & foreg

Strange to come upon such vacant hours, such yawning, chasm-wide days that wait at my beck & call, or else stagnate & silence & wonder after my will. How quiet can menace me, make a reflex of guilt just as easily as appear the arena of productivity. Here I am in Alaska, where I chose to be, surrounded by a titillating landscape, literally thousands of miles from anything or anyone I know, & here, within the four walls of this cabin, that carriage I drew out from place to place, that same heft & weight, lies in wait for me. I have limned it so long, walked its periphery, glanced to its center time to time, maybe even rushed in headlong for a protracted moment here & there. Come to find my hours my own. Whittle into accountability. How easily I could weave my days of tentative deferrals, dissembled promises. Now the hours ask after my writing, after my emotional integrity, after my distractions, my fundamental reality. Are you pleased with how you’ve spent your da

For the most part, unpacked in the new cabin, the agreement signed, meters tallied, & out my window I see the sun crisp over the peaks across the bay. The moment I closed the door behind me, as has been the case in moves past, I was overwhelmed, unable to find any defense against the inertia I’ve built up & deferred. Now, hours later, a trip to the grocery store under my belt, I stretch out into my new home. It is the second cabin, up East End Road, which boasts electricity, heat & a functional range in the kitchen, even if it does lack water. Always a honeybucket if I need it, though I have constant access to shower & toilet up at the main house. One room, a kind of rectangle with a sloping roof, stucco in semicircles. A relatively clean beige carpet covers the majority of the floor. Rough-hewn & unfinished two-by-fours frame each window, nails & coat-hangers sticking out at random intervals. There is a twin bed to wrap my queen sheets around, two camel-brown c

The heavy pallor of early morning seemed to hover long through the window, gungrey-light, muted. & come to find everything covered in a fine film of ash, Redoubt blowing at 6:00 for a solid half hour, pluming 50,000 feet in the air, a southeasterly current ushering ashfall along the Kenai & depositing it in a thick shroud here & in Seldovia. We are under an ash advisory. Stepping from the door was a strange shock, akin to wondering into some post-apocalyptic landscape. I half expect a father & a boy wielding a fire-stick & a shopping cart to come trundling past on the Seward Highway. & so today unfolds under a tight constraint. Manacled to waiting, the air unsafe to breathe, an anxious & cabin-fevered dog restless on the bed, I can only shrug, only resign, let a day quietly stream past. In a way, it will be a relief to extricate myself if only momentarily from that storm & stress of finding anchor & settling place. That unclear panic, that galaxy of

Quarter to five on Friday afternoon, in the library, wondering where I ought to lay my head tonight. Looked at three cabins of various levels of modernity today before hitting every real estate office in town for leads on alternatives. The first cabin was twenty-five miles outside of town up a barely passable road, a kind of makeshift shack nailed feebly together of particle board & woodscrap, a corrugated tin roof, like a picture of a cabin comprised of different puzzle pieces of cabins cut roughly & taped together. The outhouse did not have a door, snow drifting three feet against its inner walls. The second cabin, perhaps where I will stay here at first, is caboose-shaped, clean, two yellow walls, the others cedar-planked. A cut carpet covers it, an oil heater sits against one wall. It has electricity, which is to its credit, & seems clean & orderly enough. Drawback here being no water, but access to the landlord’s basement bathroom, where I could shower or use a flu

A light snow beginning to fall on today’s thaw. Up to the mid-thirties earlier, the drives & culverts & watercourses all puddle over in layers of water, then slush, then winterlong ice. The black soil gives underfoot like a sponge. A good day to have neoprene boots. & as is my two-day habit, back in the cabin for an afternoon intermission marked by a sunken heart. Each morning when I begin the day’s endeavors I do so with zeal, with breath, & over the brief hours it fades & flees from me, & there rises that quieted ghost in me, a swelling pith. A moment ago I felt a guilt at its feeling, but recognize the lunacy in that. It will reside in me for some time. Grief, or sadness, or whichever it is, has a palpability that other emotions cannot stir, a kind of tintinnabulation, a thrumming that, when it opts for clear & cutting tolls, cannot be denied nor skirted nor left for later. Taken by grief, they say. Possessed of it. & so. Took Willa to Bishop’s Beach

Late afternoon on my first full day in Homer, the sun still blazing through a diffuse air, the gargantuan white-capped mountains sprawling across Kachemak Bay, an ashen haze obscuring the view. Earlier, took Willa down to the Spit, where she chased gulls along the shoreline, sprinting headlong into the frigid water over & again while the wind whipped the waves in over the packed sand & rounded stone. What can I tell you about Homer? The view in every direction is absolutely breathtaking. Muir, who spent a good deal of time along the Inside Passage, cautioned people against coming to Alaska. Once they’d seen it, he wrote, everything else would seem an ordinary disappointment. In one of his essays on Alaska he began by writing about how everything here strains beyond our regular notions of scale; writing about a place up here is like capitulating a universe in a sentence. I have found something interesting, too, in viewing it all alone. Somehow, its geologies seem clearer, more k

Reached Homer last night after a fifteen hour drive. More to come once I breathe a while.