Up to May 20
My back growing worse today than it was yesterday, starting the morning with the illusion of progress & finding it now evening utterly & irreparably fucked. Every time it slips, it worsens, lays me out, intensifies in pain & tightness to the point where I literally dread putting on shoes or walking Willa for the tugging at the leash. Too, it makes for a deeply absurd kind of day, half-spent grimacing, half-spent supine & immobile, artifacts of industry gathered around me as if they might magically spring into use of their own accord—a phone that will not ring, a chapter that will not write itself, a book that just annoys me the further it unfolds, a guitar that I can’t sit straight to strum. & if I’m on time-out anyway, I’d prefer a painkiller that works, a muscle relaxant, anything to alleviate this to some small degree. I am taking this personally, taking offense to my spine. Goddamnit. As if my hours weren’t fraught enough. As if I didn’t quarter myself enough already.
***
I am thinking about movies with alarming frequency lately, on an aesthetic level, in terms of what potential they carry, what wonder they can articulate. My Life as a Dog, or Small Change. Where poems conjure image they seem to only usher it into insinuation; the clarity they possess is the onus of the line itself, the particular word. Time exists differently in a poem than it does in life, even if Pound would have it differently (image, for him, being “the emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time”). A poem is a kind of intimation towards something imagined simultaneously by heart & head alike, true, an opening, an illuminated rupture, an invitation. Then I think of movies as this sort of heavy artillery of tools: language, visual language, empathic humanity, music, presence, time outside of its imagining. A film is capable of so much, of so much beauty & tenderness & care for the actual as it actually is. If I write a poem about standing in a field, it could well be striking—it could describe the sallow bend of a dried stalk of wheat, or the swaying grain-tops rippled with wave like a sea, or the sussuration of it, the wind sung through brittle stalk while cicadas muted & soft bleat under sounding gales. I could write about the cerulean sky, its dimpled cloud, its pale sliver of early moon arced against that vastness. The soft give of the soil underfoot. Or the simplicity of it, the field & the sky, the horizon line right there, cut swath between that yawning shock of blue & the sepia grain-tops, almost graspable, almost at hand. But then I could also show it to you while I described it in whatever voice I could fathom, play an etude of Satie, let the camera linger over a hand running slow over the wheat-berries, & let it all unfold in a demarcated time—shackle it to the ordinary, to the actual. I know nothing about movies in any practical sense, though I’ve watched more of them than I can remember. Lately, though, I wonder if I might want to learn.
***
& isn’t it odd how the simplest lessons seem to take the longest in learning? How, for example, we know the fiction of tomorrow, how we are well-rehearsed in its delusions, & how we find self-satisfaction when it comes, bearing a semblance to our imaginings. Or how we cull the patterns of our pasts for transposition, bring them to bear on a contextual puzzle entirely other. We make clichés of extraordinarily profound insights so that we don’t have to heed them head-on. Say, there is only the data of the present, only the promise of your immediate life. Say, you cannot wait for what you want to come knocking on your door. Say whatever you like, & then let it linger, & settle, & come to flesh & mean. & right now it is forty-five degrees in my cabin & my breath is spiring before me. My fingers waving over the keyboard. Willa’s fine hairs adhering to everything. The condensation on the windows. The radiant pain from the middle of my back. But here it all is, fully realized, the world’s articulations in this briefest of dramas. & here I’ve been goading myself, wracking & wringing, when really it is sufficient merely to be. It is enough living, I wrote once, it is enough life. No more happiness than pain, no more pain than ambivalence, no more ambivalence than ecstasy, no more ecstasy than dullness, & so on. How we must make room for them all, listen to them all, heed them all even when they splay us sickle-backed on the floor. Something is always being communicated, most often from ourselves to ourselves, & I rarely grasp after my body’s vocabularies, but I begin to over time. A self-optics. A pre-original empathy. Then speak to lull, disc & vertebrae, & spoken, hush down.
Two bits of Oppen: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful / thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity // I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity,” & then prior to that but more illuminating: “Clarity // In the sense of transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained. // Clarity in the sense of silence.”
That one can clarify without conclusion, hew without complicating. It is complicated enough, after all.
***
Interviewing tomorrow for a dispatch position at Denali. Worked thirty more hours in three days, my back slowly struggling out of its torsions, sending still radiant pulses of pain like shivers from time to time to remind me I’ve no unguent for what ails it. Been hovering around my approach to the chapter on Eliot, volleying, retreating, batting about its access like a horse hooving a starting line. Found & escorted well beyond the threshold of my door a brown recluse, that milkwhite cross blazing upon its back. & then all the regulars, loosing & wefting, tying & untying, tallying days, weighing their carriage, wondering at this version of my life even still, finding it sort of removed & quaint & alternately marvelous or frustrating in its simplicities. I spill out, a single syllable. But then there are no webs to tend cornered in flushed dark, no lines taut with pull & bid, no tassel, no tether. I greet myself in my selfsame recognitions—if it is anger welling, I bid it welcome, or sorrow all the same, or a brief eruption of joy. To tell it true, if it isn’t joy it isn’t sorrow either that mainlines & directs me, compass to my wandering. There is a steady hum & it comes unadorned & what the day assumes, it too assumes with neither judgment nor hesitation. My mood knows no palimpsest, no encomium, no stern disavowal. I am breezed, galed, gusted, & find myself almost uttering my name without an enclitic shadow from which it must struggle to emerge. It is given just so, how hands can cup together & hold some miniscule thing to the heavens—a leaf, or a grasshopper, or a blade of grass—& how that obeisance is somehow invariably & heart-rendingly humbling. Say your name & the air parts to receive it, & it is taken from you, & you are there still, asking the air who am I—
***
& so I will be packing again & moving up to Denali, where I was moments ago hired on as a seasonal dispatcher in the communications office. Must have been the clear cutting baritone of my voice that convinced them. I’ll need to do a urine test & clear a criminal background check first, which means maybe two weeks before I head up. A part of me is loathe to leave Homer, because of its familiarity at this point, its inchoate connections—but then I remember where I am to go & my jaw begins to drop anew. Denali. I’ll be living literally at the base of the highest peak in North America, during months in which the sun rarely absents the sky, at a latitude amenable to the auroras when it does. That peak is a kind of Mecca, jutting well past twenty thousand feet & cutting out of the Alaska Range’s sprawling, jagged skyline. I imagine now the energetics of the place & find myself reeling in that imagining. All of this, though there is a sore spot in it too—Willa cannot live in the government housing. Either we live outside the park or she goes to live with Stef in Oregon. Heartbreaking to think of it, time away from her, but she is Stef’s dog too, & I wouldn’t want to compromise a decision directly informing my felicity in this life because I wasn’t willing to entertain what would be best for both myself & my dog. She would be thrilled, I’m sure, to spend time with her ma. Clearly, I have grown ludicrously close with old Wils. That part & that part alone gives me pause. I came here, among other reasons, to see Alaska. Working at Denali seems a fairly decent way to continue along that particular road.
***
I am thinking about movies with alarming frequency lately, on an aesthetic level, in terms of what potential they carry, what wonder they can articulate. My Life as a Dog, or Small Change. Where poems conjure image they seem to only usher it into insinuation; the clarity they possess is the onus of the line itself, the particular word. Time exists differently in a poem than it does in life, even if Pound would have it differently (image, for him, being “the emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time”). A poem is a kind of intimation towards something imagined simultaneously by heart & head alike, true, an opening, an illuminated rupture, an invitation. Then I think of movies as this sort of heavy artillery of tools: language, visual language, empathic humanity, music, presence, time outside of its imagining. A film is capable of so much, of so much beauty & tenderness & care for the actual as it actually is. If I write a poem about standing in a field, it could well be striking—it could describe the sallow bend of a dried stalk of wheat, or the swaying grain-tops rippled with wave like a sea, or the sussuration of it, the wind sung through brittle stalk while cicadas muted & soft bleat under sounding gales. I could write about the cerulean sky, its dimpled cloud, its pale sliver of early moon arced against that vastness. The soft give of the soil underfoot. Or the simplicity of it, the field & the sky, the horizon line right there, cut swath between that yawning shock of blue & the sepia grain-tops, almost graspable, almost at hand. But then I could also show it to you while I described it in whatever voice I could fathom, play an etude of Satie, let the camera linger over a hand running slow over the wheat-berries, & let it all unfold in a demarcated time—shackle it to the ordinary, to the actual. I know nothing about movies in any practical sense, though I’ve watched more of them than I can remember. Lately, though, I wonder if I might want to learn.
***
& isn’t it odd how the simplest lessons seem to take the longest in learning? How, for example, we know the fiction of tomorrow, how we are well-rehearsed in its delusions, & how we find self-satisfaction when it comes, bearing a semblance to our imaginings. Or how we cull the patterns of our pasts for transposition, bring them to bear on a contextual puzzle entirely other. We make clichés of extraordinarily profound insights so that we don’t have to heed them head-on. Say, there is only the data of the present, only the promise of your immediate life. Say, you cannot wait for what you want to come knocking on your door. Say whatever you like, & then let it linger, & settle, & come to flesh & mean. & right now it is forty-five degrees in my cabin & my breath is spiring before me. My fingers waving over the keyboard. Willa’s fine hairs adhering to everything. The condensation on the windows. The radiant pain from the middle of my back. But here it all is, fully realized, the world’s articulations in this briefest of dramas. & here I’ve been goading myself, wracking & wringing, when really it is sufficient merely to be. It is enough living, I wrote once, it is enough life. No more happiness than pain, no more pain than ambivalence, no more ambivalence than ecstasy, no more ecstasy than dullness, & so on. How we must make room for them all, listen to them all, heed them all even when they splay us sickle-backed on the floor. Something is always being communicated, most often from ourselves to ourselves, & I rarely grasp after my body’s vocabularies, but I begin to over time. A self-optics. A pre-original empathy. Then speak to lull, disc & vertebrae, & spoken, hush down.
Two bits of Oppen: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful / thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity // I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity,” & then prior to that but more illuminating: “Clarity // In the sense of transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained. // Clarity in the sense of silence.”
That one can clarify without conclusion, hew without complicating. It is complicated enough, after all.
***
Interviewing tomorrow for a dispatch position at Denali. Worked thirty more hours in three days, my back slowly struggling out of its torsions, sending still radiant pulses of pain like shivers from time to time to remind me I’ve no unguent for what ails it. Been hovering around my approach to the chapter on Eliot, volleying, retreating, batting about its access like a horse hooving a starting line. Found & escorted well beyond the threshold of my door a brown recluse, that milkwhite cross blazing upon its back. & then all the regulars, loosing & wefting, tying & untying, tallying days, weighing their carriage, wondering at this version of my life even still, finding it sort of removed & quaint & alternately marvelous or frustrating in its simplicities. I spill out, a single syllable. But then there are no webs to tend cornered in flushed dark, no lines taut with pull & bid, no tassel, no tether. I greet myself in my selfsame recognitions—if it is anger welling, I bid it welcome, or sorrow all the same, or a brief eruption of joy. To tell it true, if it isn’t joy it isn’t sorrow either that mainlines & directs me, compass to my wandering. There is a steady hum & it comes unadorned & what the day assumes, it too assumes with neither judgment nor hesitation. My mood knows no palimpsest, no encomium, no stern disavowal. I am breezed, galed, gusted, & find myself almost uttering my name without an enclitic shadow from which it must struggle to emerge. It is given just so, how hands can cup together & hold some miniscule thing to the heavens—a leaf, or a grasshopper, or a blade of grass—& how that obeisance is somehow invariably & heart-rendingly humbling. Say your name & the air parts to receive it, & it is taken from you, & you are there still, asking the air who am I—
***
& so I will be packing again & moving up to Denali, where I was moments ago hired on as a seasonal dispatcher in the communications office. Must have been the clear cutting baritone of my voice that convinced them. I’ll need to do a urine test & clear a criminal background check first, which means maybe two weeks before I head up. A part of me is loathe to leave Homer, because of its familiarity at this point, its inchoate connections—but then I remember where I am to go & my jaw begins to drop anew. Denali. I’ll be living literally at the base of the highest peak in North America, during months in which the sun rarely absents the sky, at a latitude amenable to the auroras when it does. That peak is a kind of Mecca, jutting well past twenty thousand feet & cutting out of the Alaska Range’s sprawling, jagged skyline. I imagine now the energetics of the place & find myself reeling in that imagining. All of this, though there is a sore spot in it too—Willa cannot live in the government housing. Either we live outside the park or she goes to live with Stef in Oregon. Heartbreaking to think of it, time away from her, but she is Stef’s dog too, & I wouldn’t want to compromise a decision directly informing my felicity in this life because I wasn’t willing to entertain what would be best for both myself & my dog. She would be thrilled, I’m sure, to spend time with her ma. Clearly, I have grown ludicrously close with old Wils. That part & that part alone gives me pause. I came here, among other reasons, to see Alaska. Working at Denali seems a fairly decent way to continue along that particular road.
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