Aug. 18, 19, 20
What but the rain to fall, the rain to fall. What but lulling words, & all the tide to stem. Thinking today of this unwitting sentinel role, guardian of a maelstrom, the way I’ve remained exposed all this while to the literal toxicity around me. How stunningly clear its basic counterproductivity is presenting itself to me. Fled to all the quiet in the world, six million acres of wild alterity, & here caved up with a reeking lipoid viper in a closet-sized cabin. Where now that calm I craved? How I sought in Alaska self-refuge, time in a dear space, a chance at discovering beneath the exigencies of dailiness that rudimentary architecture of desire & necessity that would skeleton me, underwrite me, if even in some strange syllabary. & here I cast it forfeit into another’s jaws. I will need, moving forward, my own space clean & clear, absent of other, absent of what I find by the ticking second more & more viscerally repugnant, less & less tolerable, until it finally comes to resemble an offense I perpetrate against myself in staying, a disease I will not eradicate though I hold its antidote in my own hand. What I am & what I am deserving. That no door will open of another’s hand. It becomes a matter of that simplest grace: I must care for myself. Cherish my progress. & all of my gathered darkness, I know, not even my own, some borrowed thing I’ve corralled in turning from the contrary. How I have daily surrendered to it. This slow cough in me where a word should have raged long ago. The me I’ve swallowed down in a treacle of feigned kindness, dutiful, dutiful, soldiering along with no medal to show. This, the thetic turn. I am my own.
***
Here, always the risk of exposure. A few beers at a bar to avoid my home, a few more since arriving in order to soften the blow of palaver. Tonight’s unlikely subject of roomie repertoire: karaoke in Burma & Thailand. That & that quirky way that the Europeans & the Americans seem to differ on the definition of football; have you ever noticed? He is like an autistic Andy Rooney half the time. Sample of the monologue: “There was this Swede I knew, Ing or Eng or something or other. Anyways, this Swede & I, hell, he’s a stubborn guy, I can be pretty stubborn. We start talkin’ ‘bout football & he says soccer is football, & I say hell no, the NFL is football. He says that’s ‘merican football, I says the hell it is, I played it in ‘merica & we plumb called it football. Ing, he says soccer is football, me, I say nope, no deal, football is football. Hell, we go back & forth. Ing he keeps saying soccer is football over & over again, & me, I say Ing, the fucking NFL, Ing!” Repeat this four times & you have some basic understanding of how every single story that he tells is passed along, in endless, unfruitful repetition. & to top it off, right now he is blasting a reggae version of the Gilligan’s Isle theme song apparently recorded on a Casio by some dead guy from Hawaii. But now it fades to some recitation of famous Japanese people. He is singing along, husky-voiced, literally punctuating the lines with flatulence. My life, my life, Oh dear God, my life. This viper’s nest. What was it I wrote? I am my own. This is precisely why I must honor those fundaments that I need manifest. This, precisely.
***
Thinking through winter. Through wintering. How to tailor the coming months that they serve to allow me not only to abide, but to thrive, to hit upon purpose & drive it through to the me in it. Enfolded in this snow, long milk-white arm shivering around, a wing’s eider-down, a gesture towards a flame. & already, the mountaintops capped in white, black veins of thick foliage cracking through, valleys unblasted yet by drive-of-wind. They are there, looming, a confident preface my eyes spy in running, & that snow under footfall running a ridge already, that sharpness in the lungs, a burning blade calling winter, winter, winter. It is this state’s ineluctable axis, & the days spin swiftly toward their center, & I, doe-eyed, seem in them to spin as well.
***
Here, always the risk of exposure. A few beers at a bar to avoid my home, a few more since arriving in order to soften the blow of palaver. Tonight’s unlikely subject of roomie repertoire: karaoke in Burma & Thailand. That & that quirky way that the Europeans & the Americans seem to differ on the definition of football; have you ever noticed? He is like an autistic Andy Rooney half the time. Sample of the monologue: “There was this Swede I knew, Ing or Eng or something or other. Anyways, this Swede & I, hell, he’s a stubborn guy, I can be pretty stubborn. We start talkin’ ‘bout football & he says soccer is football, & I say hell no, the NFL is football. He says that’s ‘merican football, I says the hell it is, I played it in ‘merica & we plumb called it football. Ing, he says soccer is football, me, I say nope, no deal, football is football. Hell, we go back & forth. Ing he keeps saying soccer is football over & over again, & me, I say Ing, the fucking NFL, Ing!” Repeat this four times & you have some basic understanding of how every single story that he tells is passed along, in endless, unfruitful repetition. & to top it off, right now he is blasting a reggae version of the Gilligan’s Isle theme song apparently recorded on a Casio by some dead guy from Hawaii. But now it fades to some recitation of famous Japanese people. He is singing along, husky-voiced, literally punctuating the lines with flatulence. My life, my life, Oh dear God, my life. This viper’s nest. What was it I wrote? I am my own. This is precisely why I must honor those fundaments that I need manifest. This, precisely.
***
Thinking through winter. Through wintering. How to tailor the coming months that they serve to allow me not only to abide, but to thrive, to hit upon purpose & drive it through to the me in it. Enfolded in this snow, long milk-white arm shivering around, a wing’s eider-down, a gesture towards a flame. & already, the mountaintops capped in white, black veins of thick foliage cracking through, valleys unblasted yet by drive-of-wind. They are there, looming, a confident preface my eyes spy in running, & that snow under footfall running a ridge already, that sharpness in the lungs, a burning blade calling winter, winter, winter. It is this state’s ineluctable axis, & the days spin swiftly toward their center, & I, doe-eyed, seem in them to spin as well.
Comments