April 24, 25, 26
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, & that other half would grow into a thin specter & expire. I need to participate in the passions that I hold dear, cultivate them, engage them in dialogue, unabashed & without reticence. We are nothing for so long, & then suddenly alive, & then nothing again, bookended by oblivion. I wait & wait & what I drag in tow, what I would call gravitas is nothing more than ballast, prop, unwitting plaything. I am no victim. I am not extraordinary. No one is looking. Every heart comes to ache, every life to obstacle. It is a small dream. But I hold it in my own hands, fledgling, winging to flutter, eye attuned.
***
The rain we’ve waited for all this time, to runnel, to wash the grey ash from every sheen. Alaska well-suited for rain, its patient sussurations, taps on copper-green roofs. Rain on pine-needle & pine-needle on wet soil. A circuit. Writing the better part of the day, through with Grecian Urn & halfway through Nightingale. Autumn will close Keats, my clean aim by Sunday. & on then to Hopkins. & meantime, myself here. Long run before the rain at low tide, a whipping wind but the beach to ourselves. Then a long discussion of halibut fishery politics with my landlord after reading over Federal Register posting about the same. He proposed as treasurer of the charter association that I make follow-up calls to recreational skippers, paid in allocated funds. Of a sudden I am embroiled in a war between commercial & charter fishermen the viciousness & deep-ranging antipathies of which are shocking on a cursory level, & sensible on another. & reading afterwards Oppen for a review. Walking Willa in the rain, my hands blue with cold. Breath cut through with falling rain. Same old.
***
Saturday morning. The sun & small pitch of blue taut over the bay at seven is occluded now in an unbroken swath of grey stretching the eye’s wide scope entire. Dendritic boughs seem to shiver, light-blown in the small gusts. & the water, the water can dissemble so day to day, a blank, ice-white sheen, & none of the patched emerald or gunblue that usually delineate depth, or kelp, or tide. When do we stop feeling like strangers in our peregrinations? What steps to rhyme a familiar syllable, call us to ourselves? Not a wanting of other, but a longing for my own sole self. Maybe the “shipwreck of the singular.” Maybe the slow education of circumstance. & then, maybe a step towards order, towards even briefest fecundity, a soil to till until yield can come. I am thinking of staying in the lower 48 when I go to the wedding in June. Closing the formidable distance between myself & likely opportunities. I fear I cannot find fully formed here what it is I think now I need: a rarified company, artistic communion. I could half-content myself with the eccentricities of community here, retreating to my solitude to render them anew in writing, but it’s a lonely prospect in the end. I’ve cultivated a fairly particular eye for a fairly particular line of study, & in staying I fear that cultivation will decay into a protracted, unchecked monologue, eroded in sense, cloistered & silence-blasted in hermitage. I could not work without quiet. But I could not hear myself speak in it either. I intend to apply for academic positions, one or three year appointments. Get some footing, a firm ground. Cover a base or two, pay a bill, & settle into dreaming from I know not where.
***
How do I build from this? Seven years. I am splayed tonight, rended, a heap on the floor. I sobbed for an hour without cease, carry a soreness from it, rib-ache, throat tight from no sound. This is a pain I could never have fathomed. I am at a loss. I am at a loss.
***
The rain incessant, between the lightness of drizzle & the steadiness of storm, just enough to keep us guessing. Finished my chapter on Keats this morning, a good feeling, brief, lumbering up & swiftly receding, an otter’s back in a black water. I can hold no steadfast joy these last few days. I focus on my work & it progresses, & in the meantime darkness gathers on the peripheries, clusters firm in wait, the more a presence for my quick escapes into writing. I turn from the page & find it there, ghost over my shoulder, whispering thing. It walks with me to put on water for coffee. It follows me to the meadow. It curls beside me in my sleeping.
I find comfort in the fact of my writing now, that I thought long ago I could accomplish it if I cut myself from myself & forced hand to key. And here it comes along. In the meantime, I cannot fathom what to do with myself. I look at June like a paralytic, slack-jawed, thinking all the while but coming to no thought, resting on no solution, figuring with imaginary geometries. My decisions anymore waves that yearn across seas entire to arrive, & then convoluted, carriage of detritus, alluvial. They hit me from behind, when I take already a wayward & hesitant step. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I am trying to figure a future from a present unfigured. A projection of some enacted self, one that fills chest full of breath, a caricature, an entasis to counter my slight days now. I think I half-live in adumbration anyway, welcome it, blame it, make instrument of it when I might forge instead with a precise vigor. When I might. I do not want to hide in shadow, cower behind a sadness, galled thing, corner-bound. I would have voice, a clarion boon. But it seems a fragile thing, wishbone-thin. It seems at times a whimper, & me half-abashed by it & half-angry. But isn’t always this way? How we can all tremble at our own soundings, fear our own admonitions? & I nailed hardwood crosswise & thick against all of my retreats. I glimpse them in slivered miracle, but my hand can’t thread through to clutch. What could we envision, after all? Our hands sidle down slow & hang at our sides. We don’t think about them. We turn.
***
The rain we’ve waited for all this time, to runnel, to wash the grey ash from every sheen. Alaska well-suited for rain, its patient sussurations, taps on copper-green roofs. Rain on pine-needle & pine-needle on wet soil. A circuit. Writing the better part of the day, through with Grecian Urn & halfway through Nightingale. Autumn will close Keats, my clean aim by Sunday. & on then to Hopkins. & meantime, myself here. Long run before the rain at low tide, a whipping wind but the beach to ourselves. Then a long discussion of halibut fishery politics with my landlord after reading over Federal Register posting about the same. He proposed as treasurer of the charter association that I make follow-up calls to recreational skippers, paid in allocated funds. Of a sudden I am embroiled in a war between commercial & charter fishermen the viciousness & deep-ranging antipathies of which are shocking on a cursory level, & sensible on another. & reading afterwards Oppen for a review. Walking Willa in the rain, my hands blue with cold. Breath cut through with falling rain. Same old.
***
Saturday morning. The sun & small pitch of blue taut over the bay at seven is occluded now in an unbroken swath of grey stretching the eye’s wide scope entire. Dendritic boughs seem to shiver, light-blown in the small gusts. & the water, the water can dissemble so day to day, a blank, ice-white sheen, & none of the patched emerald or gunblue that usually delineate depth, or kelp, or tide. When do we stop feeling like strangers in our peregrinations? What steps to rhyme a familiar syllable, call us to ourselves? Not a wanting of other, but a longing for my own sole self. Maybe the “shipwreck of the singular.” Maybe the slow education of circumstance. & then, maybe a step towards order, towards even briefest fecundity, a soil to till until yield can come. I am thinking of staying in the lower 48 when I go to the wedding in June. Closing the formidable distance between myself & likely opportunities. I fear I cannot find fully formed here what it is I think now I need: a rarified company, artistic communion. I could half-content myself with the eccentricities of community here, retreating to my solitude to render them anew in writing, but it’s a lonely prospect in the end. I’ve cultivated a fairly particular eye for a fairly particular line of study, & in staying I fear that cultivation will decay into a protracted, unchecked monologue, eroded in sense, cloistered & silence-blasted in hermitage. I could not work without quiet. But I could not hear myself speak in it either. I intend to apply for academic positions, one or three year appointments. Get some footing, a firm ground. Cover a base or two, pay a bill, & settle into dreaming from I know not where.
***
How do I build from this? Seven years. I am splayed tonight, rended, a heap on the floor. I sobbed for an hour without cease, carry a soreness from it, rib-ache, throat tight from no sound. This is a pain I could never have fathomed. I am at a loss. I am at a loss.
***
The rain incessant, between the lightness of drizzle & the steadiness of storm, just enough to keep us guessing. Finished my chapter on Keats this morning, a good feeling, brief, lumbering up & swiftly receding, an otter’s back in a black water. I can hold no steadfast joy these last few days. I focus on my work & it progresses, & in the meantime darkness gathers on the peripheries, clusters firm in wait, the more a presence for my quick escapes into writing. I turn from the page & find it there, ghost over my shoulder, whispering thing. It walks with me to put on water for coffee. It follows me to the meadow. It curls beside me in my sleeping.
I find comfort in the fact of my writing now, that I thought long ago I could accomplish it if I cut myself from myself & forced hand to key. And here it comes along. In the meantime, I cannot fathom what to do with myself. I look at June like a paralytic, slack-jawed, thinking all the while but coming to no thought, resting on no solution, figuring with imaginary geometries. My decisions anymore waves that yearn across seas entire to arrive, & then convoluted, carriage of detritus, alluvial. They hit me from behind, when I take already a wayward & hesitant step. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I am trying to figure a future from a present unfigured. A projection of some enacted self, one that fills chest full of breath, a caricature, an entasis to counter my slight days now. I think I half-live in adumbration anyway, welcome it, blame it, make instrument of it when I might forge instead with a precise vigor. When I might. I do not want to hide in shadow, cower behind a sadness, galled thing, corner-bound. I would have voice, a clarion boon. But it seems a fragile thing, wishbone-thin. It seems at times a whimper, & me half-abashed by it & half-angry. But isn’t always this way? How we can all tremble at our own soundings, fear our own admonitions? & I nailed hardwood crosswise & thick against all of my retreats. I glimpse them in slivered miracle, but my hand can’t thread through to clutch. What could we envision, after all? Our hands sidle down slow & hang at our sides. We don’t think about them. We turn.
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