August 14, 15
Back in C-Camp, conjuring unwitting the sense memory of the breeze blown over the willows & onto the porch at Thorofare, that broad expanse stretching endless before me. The smell of the air, sweet with rosehip & blueberry, streaked with current-cold gusts off the watercourse below. The rough-hewn logs in tidy array. This was the dream I dreamt, when a child yet. That cabin clawed & shaded in aspen tucked against a rolling hill under white peaks roseate in their alpenglow. A dream I cannot forfeit; I feel something inextricable grown between Alaska & myself, some promise we’ve silently vowed, calling return if we are to one day part. It is not all of me, but it is a substantial part of me that yearns for this place. & so. A wild covenant. A sometime home, more than any geography I’ve known.
***
Rain or hint of rain, swirling eddies of cloud, patterning the last few days. Thin & scattered snowflakes on my walk home at two this morning, autumn closing in & swiftly. This morning, after talking about handguns for some time with Roy over coffee (me) & beer (him), the dripping rain tilting off the corrugate roof with its massive grey patches, I retreat to my closet of a room to chart the hours ahead. I grow claustrophobic at work, that dark cave & silence to sustain me those long hours, the shifting glow of the computer screen. I feel my body build anxiety, feel it compelled to thrash about in off hours, that it can abide the idleness of work. A run, then, in the rain & cold, to recall my blood to vein. & otherwise what is it in me? Some bite of anxiety taken out, some calm settled in, a softer music, & not so lugubrious in its soundings, not so self-satisfied. I am thinking about life as a life, a finite landscape coupling its own choosing & its warp & weft of fate bestowed (& fate besides perhaps only the willingness to accept the consequences of one’s choices). Where abstraction hovered, some halo to enwreath the thought in its thinking, of late there is just that same blank backwater stillness. How a hand cleaves water & its wake so quickly subsides. The thing was not the wake nor the water, but the sensate hand coupling to cold, the hum of life in it. & as soon forgotten. I dream small dreams that do not collide with the world. It is enough—it is more than enough—to merely be, after all. To plumb the stream for scale against the ocean. Find some rosary of small syllables to roll finger to finger, to mutter & repeat. Lay in some small patch of grass. Outstretch even once a small hand to receive another in yours. Small things, yes, but a world sung through them, a life entire.
***
Rain or hint of rain, swirling eddies of cloud, patterning the last few days. Thin & scattered snowflakes on my walk home at two this morning, autumn closing in & swiftly. This morning, after talking about handguns for some time with Roy over coffee (me) & beer (him), the dripping rain tilting off the corrugate roof with its massive grey patches, I retreat to my closet of a room to chart the hours ahead. I grow claustrophobic at work, that dark cave & silence to sustain me those long hours, the shifting glow of the computer screen. I feel my body build anxiety, feel it compelled to thrash about in off hours, that it can abide the idleness of work. A run, then, in the rain & cold, to recall my blood to vein. & otherwise what is it in me? Some bite of anxiety taken out, some calm settled in, a softer music, & not so lugubrious in its soundings, not so self-satisfied. I am thinking about life as a life, a finite landscape coupling its own choosing & its warp & weft of fate bestowed (& fate besides perhaps only the willingness to accept the consequences of one’s choices). Where abstraction hovered, some halo to enwreath the thought in its thinking, of late there is just that same blank backwater stillness. How a hand cleaves water & its wake so quickly subsides. The thing was not the wake nor the water, but the sensate hand coupling to cold, the hum of life in it. & as soon forgotten. I dream small dreams that do not collide with the world. It is enough—it is more than enough—to merely be, after all. To plumb the stream for scale against the ocean. Find some rosary of small syllables to roll finger to finger, to mutter & repeat. Lay in some small patch of grass. Outstretch even once a small hand to receive another in yours. Small things, yes, but a world sung through them, a life entire.
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