July 8

A beesnest at work, humming & cackling, strand & cross-strand of livewire & static. & afterwards took a long run while hulking black thunderclouds gathered roiling behind Mt. Healy. Felt good to find the purchase of shade along the path, the black spruce & the bending aspens, top-heavy & curling leeward. Every pedestrian I come upon jumps as if I am a bear. Every squirrel that moves in the underbrush makes me jump as if it were a bear. & then just as quickly as I’d finished running fell the rain, thick & rapid, littered with fine hail. & then came the sun again, light suffusing an air now ten degrees cooler. It feels indescribably good after a night spent tossing in a sickly humid bed, with cigar smoke singing the air. Too, finally recovering today more fully from Monday night’s hourslong bout of drinking whiskey & eating Copper River salmon dip-netted the day before (holy living shit) with two of the rodeo-type law enforcement rangers, followed by yesterday’s protracted but relatively quiet emotional melt-down. Peeling myself from underfoot, scraping splinter from skin. There is more lightness in me today, at least, & I must cling to that. Or permit it, maybe, at the very least. How stubbornly I can clutch hold of a sadness & bury it to grow in me, find it root-room in some furrowed plot dark in a corner. & so flows the blood, & washes that soil, & carries it along to command. I do not intend, hardly ever, to so overtly wallow in it, contrary to the conveyance of every word herein. I intend always though to recognize & explore faithfully what rises in me, or what falls, what whimpers or would sing. & so in me as in everyone. I am in a position to pay ludicrously close attention, ear to my own chest, & so I indulge myself, luxuriate in the sweetness of crushing sadness when I can, or submit to it with no earnest pleasure when its tenor is more fierce, more frightfully articulate. & so with joy, with brief & fugitive wonder, with my hand trembling under the hail, my jaw slackened before the mountain, those moments more frequent of natural sympathy. “I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased to the other” reads a clip of Whitman. But as long as I plumbing lines, I will force a poem entire on you, this one Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” which for its few flaws (inclusion of the word “silly” chief among them) feels still exactly how literature should feel:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

& maybe what I like about it is how it exposes both the hollowness & the violent power of the word & world both. How there is dissolution in it & then recovery, how beneath the faculties of rhetoric (i.e. a saturnine diary of one’s days in Alaska, say) there is yet something vital, however simple, however irretrievable. How it is an annunciation that sounds always something past, sacrificial ever of its origin. But how it weighs so much—not the word, not the line, not even the mineral world, but that ineluctable draw in it, that ghost’s blurred movement, the quick rapture of time passing & passed that sings through every syllable, however ordinary, however plainspoken. That we are. & that there is a wordless music always sounding under our breath, whether we stumble upon its frequency or not. & that its notes find their rhapsody not in the making monument of time, but in the affirmed celebration of its ceaseless & ceasing gift. Our simple carriage. Our burden. Our cherished thing. That which lends us, perhaps or after all, all that we can know of beauty.