May 30

Note to self: sleep more.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

For Abdul Rahim Ahmed Abdul Rahim Awad, Age 0

  Often there is bone-trill in me When birds of prey near. Their wings Displacing air, the sound dopplered & trailing. Yesterday an eagle eight feet Over trail, apparition in heavy Cloud appertaining to pinnacle & peak. Briefly, a bolt of fear, shock Of my smallness. A landscape redolent With varied lives reduces yours Unto pinpoint, unto what I’d thought Of as almost disappearance. But That is the province of man. What is cyclical, Spurred by fecundity & churn, what Bears out the elemental, is beyond us.  Our deaths at each other’s hands A mockery of the world’s need & hunger.  We craft lives in which your name Erases with your small body. In which The elemental cedes to flimsy  Inventories of meaning. Maybe yours Is a name iterative of its import, Abdul. Maybe repeated in its repeating The intransigence of life coupled  With world, with world-awe, meaning Preceding all naming. May it, wordless,  Sing your name this morning. 
Read more

Dogs First

On the trail to our cabin, the wind shifts & sculpts the landscape at whim, hurling blankets of sustained 30 mph gusts across the tundra & depositing snow in undulating moguls that cover over our precious tracks. We see gales of up to 75 mph fairly routinely. I have skied home ten feet behind my wife on many occasions & been unable to discern her tracks. Say a word & the wind will carry it aloft & away. Drop a liner glove or a hat & you wait until spring to retrieve it. In the places I’ve lived prior to Alaska, I’ve known snow to behave in any number of ways. Here, for whatever diaphanous splendor it may reveal in the structure of the flake, it is always, always dry. When it drifts, the sugary weight of it transforms into the consistency of concrete. People use chainsaws to dig out trail. & when the wind & the snow conspire, people here know precisely what to expect & what to do. No matter the temperature, our community knows to check routinely o...
Read more

January 25

Sitting at the kitchen table upstairs, no lights on to impede the coming dark, stammering through edits to my inchoate dissertation when of a sudden they arrived home in a cloud of cologne & sickly perfume. These scents always conjure nausea in me, an allergy since I can remember. No phone call. They wanted to visit with me (intermittently, while I unpacked their car), to expound on the details of their marvelous celebration, but I deferred, claiming to be in the middle of important writing, the momentum of which was in motion & my attention to which was critical. She kept trying to give me things from their trip to Costco: a loaf of bread, a five pound bag of coffee, a papaya the size of a small child. I will give them back, each & all, in the morning. She kept wanting to tell me that her granddaughter played piano, that she saw her dearest friend from junior high, that her daughter fought through the pain of a torn ligament in her knee obtained the day prior at Whistler. ...
Read more