Specimens, Days

Wordsworth noted how recollection is always a form of reanimation—a breathing-into that conjures into dance the ghosts of the past. The idea was to direct one’s contemplative focus in an effort to recreate whatever circumstances seemed redolent with meaning, & to conjoin the present mind with the newly animate whilom feeling in a coeval creative effort. & so a childhood excursion across a meadow of tall grass, a leaf’s spine stuck in the sedge of the Thames, or a visit to France, or the death of a friend years ago, or the faintly lingering acrid sweetness of a flower pedal long since turned under in the loam & soil. & it would seem that he earnestly believed that the two could come together without compromise, or without enough distortion to merit fundamental suspicion. & maybe as a matter of forging a poem, forging his poems, that can make sense—if that particular faith in the sameness of what is past was what lent his better work its spark, it’s a trifle to dissec

It’s a fine point, the prior comment. There was roughly a year of my childhood during which time I was so thoroughly convinced that I was in fact a dog that I abstained from speaking the king’s English & opted instead for barks, grunts & whines. & my food in a bowl. & as I understand it, much to my parents’ credit, they did little to discourage the delusion. Certainly, my brothers would have done everything in their power to foster my canine sensibilities. What spurred my transfiguration back into the human fold I do not know—only that I sort of resent it. Dogs achieve a kind of perfection, utterly given to phenomena, utterly incapable of dissemblance. A dog’s joy dwarves the moderated human’s. Maybe in childhood or in moments of unparalleled exultation in which the will folds in upon itself & ipseity gives out completely. Otherwise, we are bridled, reined in, filtered even when we perhaps ought to let an emotion unfurl in us to its fullest conceivable degree. The r

There is something to it. Even raindense, or wrested behind some window or heavy door, that light filtering through the marled cloud. The seagreen tufts of wet needle clustered under the boughs of spruce, or the windblown white of the one we named dogflower , or just the sound of the rain over the corrugated roof, the felt curtain blown just so. Or in the sun, dappled willow, the sibilance of the aspens. & I can do nothing & find its grace—ask nothing of it, expect nothing, & still, its gift. You grow up thinking on other lives like books unread on a shelf. & suddenly you are living some old tale, some familiar trope that has been your steady carriage the years through. & your imaginings are such brittle things, & the wind is very real. The x-ray & the light. What you regarded once in some other’s telling & colored in hues presently unavailable. Which is to say, I think, inhabiting a dream from childhood clothes you again in childhood’s robes. Or that ch

After the family leaves, the sudden cognizance of distances, of miles untended. & the house’s new quiet, tempered by the having-been. The floorboards I didn’t hear in their creaking, the wind in its rustling, Willa sighing & looking towards the door. My remoteness less a conceptual thing now, more tangible in me. The lines on the map sinews stretched taut, arteries ushering blood from me & sending it away, away, some gift unbidden. & with that, the textured memory of how I came to be where I am. Something about seeing my family conjures my life entire & seems to flush my heart with some longing after irrecuperable years. I think on childhood in no particular way, am ghosted by remembering & feel that fell, that odd confluence of loss & warmth & sentiment that demarcates for me the passage of time, causes a swelling in my breast, underquiets each word. As if some rend in the familiar continuum through which that wake must run, from which the mind & he