Helpful

Too many different kinds of cheese and things
just get too confusing, which things often
are. You would like to purchase a single
     scrub pad
but they only seem to be available
in bundles of a dozen or more
and you know that you will not use
a dozen scrub pads in what is left
     of this lifetime.

If you ran, say, a summer camp
or a prison, or maybe if you were
     a profligate breeder
utterly cowed by the most obscure
pronouncements of scripture
you might have use for a cask of
pork and beans or a package
of toilet paper large enough
to possibly float you to safety
in the event of a ship wreck.

You certainly don't need forty AA batteries
or a bag of jerked meat that could feed
a party of lost explorers for a significant period
     of lostness.
No, what you want is a single
scrub pad to clean your single
frying pan, but you don't need it
     that bad.

The old fellow at the entrance
is wearing a gold paper crown
that has the word HELPFUL
inscribed on it in some sort of mock
medieval font, and as you leave
empty-handed he offers
what almost seems like a genuine smile,
claps his hands enthusiastically,
and says, "I hope you found
what you were looking for!"
Which, of course, you have not
even as you suddenly sense that
     you have.

Conductors of the Moving World

The Making of CONDUCTORS OF THE MOVING WORLD from Little Brown Mushroom on Vimeo.

For more info, or to order the book, go here.

Here's the math on the edition, with thanks to Steve Sturdevant (and Andy), Kurt Froehlich, Rial Cone, and Stephen Davis for taking a crack at crunching the numbers: Based on the total number of original photos, and the random selection of one photo each from 17 columns of three stacks of prints, plus the 17 slots in each volume and the purely serendipitous sequencing, the number of possible editions of Conductors of the Moving World is “45,933,532,441,368,219,648,000. That is: 45 Sextillion, 933 Quintillion, 532 Quadrillion, 441 Trillion, 368 Billion, 219 Million, 648 Thousand. Or, in more poetic terms, roughly the number of grains of sand upon the earth.” (The quote is from Andy.)

Or, in purely personal terms, somewhere in the same ballpark as the odds of running into a beloved ghost on a corner of Bryant Park moments before entering The International Center of Photography, where Inspector Ota took his first tentative steps as a reincarnated man.

This is a really mysterious, lovely, and lovingly assembled book, and my contributions are the least of its charms. Many, many thanks to Alec Soth, Hans Seeger, Carrie Thompson, and Charlie B. Ward --a sort of Caucasian version of A Tribe Called Quest-- for working so hard on a truly mad project.

If you should decide to order the book, cross your fingers that you get the astronaut, or at least the manhole, bikini shot, or World Trade Center towers. I'll be happy to send anyone who requests one a specially packaged collection of the 110 lines of text --strange little aphorisms and koans inspired by, among other things, Zen, the history of traffic control, Walter Benjamin, and P.D. Eastman's Go, Dog, Go!-- that didn't make it into the final version. Or perhaps I'll just post them here at some point.

You There: A Plea In A Dark Time

Our job is to understand and to care, and most of us have failed miserably.

The everything we cannot understand we are asked to accept, and at this, also, we have failed miserably.

Most of us, though, have gotten pretty good at going on, and for this most modest of achievements we are rewarded with what?

Laughter, I suppose. A sensitivity that can sometimes almost convince us we are human and have souls worth saving. The occasional flight outside of ourselves that allows us a glimpse --however brief-- of exactly where we are and what we have been given, which is the one thing we can ever truly call our own: our lives in this world, exactly as the world is, which is too often heartbreaking and fragile but which can nonetheless also be incomprehensibly fascinating and beautiful.

So, You there: Big Thing. Great Eraser. Compulsive builder and eccentric architect. Demolition expert. Thresher. Conjurer. Custodian of bursting and broken hearts and Choreographer of confrontations with mirrors and painful truths. Master of disappearance and deterioration. You with your largess with lilacs and your wondrous palette of greens. Lord of the turtles and obsessive molder of birds and beetles. Dog maestro. Prodigal prototype. Soul pincher. Star sower. Shatterer. Lamp lighter. Candle Snuffer. Trickster. Slumberer. Sourpuss. Soft-hearted old fool. Mutterer. Madman. Misery maker. Historian of Mystery. Erratic Umpire. Virtuoso of oblivion and obliteration. Terrifying Immensity. Merciful One.

You, who so often in your boredom or wrath seem to study your majestic creation like an indifferent chess move: I'm crying uncle, right here and right now. Come on, Alleged Something, show a little tenderness. Go easy on us. If you have some perhaps understandable grudge, let it go and give us one more shot to make things right.

Forgive us all the great and usual sins. We can be beautiful, but so can we be stunned and stupefied into unaccountable and unpardonable ugliness. We know this. We know that some of us are fools, and dangerous, but there are many who try very hard to combat such destructive assholes. Please don't make it any harder than it already is. Please don't be a vengeful dick.

We know that we are bumbling failures, too often cold hearted, but we also know that we can still be miraculous and compassionate, and the best of us are out there proving that every minute of every day. So, come on, forgive us. Most of us want desperately to be here.

We understand your takeaway prerogative and, frankly, we've seen enough of it lately. You've shown that you can crush us, that we can be crushed, that we can crush each other (and do), but I'm asking you to please raise up off us and let us try once more to prove ourselves worthy of the grace and the magic we've been given, and the redemption we've supposedly been promised.

And if you must turn away, if you've truly had enough, then turn, and let us live. We can take care of each other, and should. And will.

Insomnia: A Dispatch From The Foothills Of Sleep

From somewhere he heard a few hesitant notes from a piano. Perhaps it was coming from the back room, but it sounded even more distant. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could almost not have been a piano he was hearing. It could have been an audio hallucination. There was no pattern, just a random pinging at the high end of the keyboard. Silence, then a burst of four or five notes.

He went through the front room and into a hallway that was carved through permanent shadow. The whole place had been sealed up tight for weeks and most of the furniture had been removed. The curtains were all tightly drawn, and only a stray strand of fuzzed light snuck in from outside, crepuscular and loaded with slow cruising dust.

There was still blood on the kitchen floor, a substantial quantity of it, dried to the darkest edges of maroon and become almost chalk, or tempera powder. It had splashed up onto the cupboards and across the refrigerator door.

From the kitchen he could see out into the backyard, where there was a familiar and now abandoned doghouse. When he wandered out there he found the piano: a rusted set of wind chimes swaying almost imperceptibly from a clothesline pole.

He didn't stay long.

At the edge of town there were the ruins of an ancient fortress, perched right at the edge of the ocean on a hill. The ramparts and parapet were all more or less in place, thrown up around a cluster of terraces, each of them situated at a different height and connected by a series of damp tunnels and stone steps and the occasional wooden ladder. Above it all at the southernmost end overlooking the water was the largest terrace, now completely exposed to the sky and the stars.

He made his way through the tight lanes of the town to this fortress, and through the labyrinths of the fortress to the terrace above the ocean. He'd been there many times. It was a wonderful place for silence. Whatever sound made the journey up there was oddly transformed. The voices from the little tavern at the bottom of the hill sounded as if they were rising from a very deep well.

The whine of an unseen boat in the darkness lulled him almost to sleep. He saw blazing cruise ships creeping along the distant horizon, and heard what sounded like one loud laugh carry from far out at sea. Exhausted and splayed on his back, he watched as one star after another tumbled down the sky and crashed into the ocean.

After a time he walked back to his room at the only inn still open in town.

He was very tired from his long journey and retired early, only to be immediately seized by an episode of what felt like intense seasickness. Words and images were pitching around in his head and it was as if he were aboard a flooded boat or rolling raft. This went on for several hours. He went to the basement at one point and retrieved a plastic pail that he placed next to the bed and vomited into during the night. Recalling that he had a bottle of motion sickness tablets in his travel bag, he staggered to the sink and swallowed several of the pills.

The medication did not, however, quell his seasickness, and he suffered through terrifying hallucinations of violent storms and hurricanes and even sea serpents. Again and again in the midst of these visions he would find himself tossed from a boat into the endless, roiling darkness of the sea.

He thrashed and thrashed until he felt himself sinking into a deeper and darker place. As he sank he was dimly aware of daylight slowly developing on the walls of the room.

The coroner's report listed the official cause of death as drowning.

Take Your Protein Pills And Put Your Helmet On

We are flying in outer space. My dog is floating upside down and licking the darkness.

To make a spacesuit I turned my skin inside out and rolled around in salt.

There are no assholes in outer space, or if there are they are nowhere to be seen. It's not like an airport.

The sound of outer space is a swelling sound that builds and builds and never breaks. Sometimes it sounds like an endless series of medical carts being wheeled down empty tunnels a mile beneath the earth. Other times it sounds like a solitary vacuum cleaner in an immense hotel ballroom at four o'clock in the morning. Still other times it can sound like a lonely road in a horror movie when someone who is about to be killed is walking away from a brokedown car as darkness falls.

Don't even think about trying to take pictures in outer space unless you have a special camera, which you don't.

There is plenty of time in outer space to contemplate things both simple and grand. The term "space capsule," for instance, a phrase that manges to be both. Or you might wonder this: when Elvis was sitting alone in his underwear in a hotel room late at night and looked in the mirror, what did he see?

In outer space the plains and prairies of the earth begin to seem like the work of a rococo eccentric, and mountains take on the abstract quality of something purely imagined.

Most of the voyagers who blast off for outer space head straight for a space station. This is the equivalent of planning your vacation around a visit to a truck stop. Just as on planet earth, the real wonders in outer space are to be found along less traveled byways. A man named Sun Ra understood this. He knew how to turn his skin inside out.

If you spend enough time in outer space, and obtain some level of mastery over the patience such travel requires, you begin to appreciate what a wonderful gift it is to expect that nothing much will happen, and to wish you could have access to such mastery during your time on earth.

In outer space I assign my dog the rank of colonel.

In outer space I actually sleep, and dream of a monkey in a white room, sitting quietly in a corner, painting on a canvas and tap-tap-tapping his hairy little foot to a popular song on the radio. A woman in a lab coat brings the monkey a glass of ice cold root beer. The monkey asks to be excused to make a telephone call.

Sometimes, after dozing for a time in outer space, you can open your eyes and briefly convince yourself that you are in a boat floating in the middle of a deep, dark sea full of stardust and inexplicably swarming with fireflies.

Richard Riggins, Grade Four: Revisited

Richard Riggins had a little red robot that made his bed each morning and put his sneakers in neat rows in the bedroom closet. He also had a chimpanzee that played ping-pong with him in the basement.

Richard and the monkey liked the same programs on television, and whenever Richard laughed the chimp would bounce up and down, clap his hands, and expose his yellow teeth in a wide, happy smile.

Richard had received the chimpanzee from his father, who was an astronaut and traveled all over outer space in a rocket. Because his father was so busy, he did not live with Richard and his mother.

Richard's father would, though, sometimes come for a visit, arriving on each occasion in a helicopter that he piloted and landed in the parking lot of the Mormon Church across the street from Richard's house. Besides his work as an astronaut, Richard's father was also a famous scientist and archaeologist. He had once sent Richard some dinosaur bones. A strong, handsome man with a fine singing voice, Richard's father regularly sang with a band in a nightclub near the base where he lived with the other astronauts.

Richard's mother refused to acknowledge any of these things about the man who had fathered her only child.

Richard went to school at Thomas Edison Elementary. He was shy and small for his age, and had bright red hair that his mother cut with old sewing scissors. All of his clothing had once been the clothing of a cousin who was almost 20 years older than Richard. The other kids at school picked on Richard and said things about his mother, who was known to make scenes at the Piggly Wiggly and had written checks that were taped behind the counter there and at several other stores in town as well.

Richard never told any of his classmates or teachers about his father or his robot or his monkey.

At night, Richard would sit at his bedroom window in the dark, staring out across the neighborhood of small, low houses. Far in the distance he could see the town's water tower and the big sign above the 24-hour Conoco station near the highway. For some reason the water tower reminded him of a rocket ship, which reminded him of his father. He had determined that the next time he talked with his father he would ask for a talking bird for Christmas.

Richard's father would usually call late at night. Richard would have to tiptoe through the living room where his mother was often asleep in front of the television. Sometimes one of her cigarettes would still be smoldering in the ashtray next to the recliner, and Richard would quietly stub it out before proceeding to the kitchen to answer the phone. The ringing never seemed to wake up his mother.

His father's voice always sounded like it was coming from someplace far, far away, almost as if he were calling from his spaceship. Richard liked to imagine his father in his astronaut suit, turning cartwheels in the air as he chatted with his son on the telephone. His father would ask him about school, and when Richard told him that he was having a hard time his father would say, "It's okay. Things will get better." They would talk about the monkey and the robot, and Richard's father would laugh at the stories he told.

One night after it had snowed all day Richard's father called him from a tropical island where he was on a deep sea diving expedition. Richard told him that he wanted a talking bird for Christmas and his father had been silent for a moment.

"I think I might have just the bird for you," he said. "The one potential problem is that this bird speaks only Farsi, and you will have to teach it to speak English."

Richard said that he felt confident he could teach the bird to speak English.

His father asked him what words he would teach the bird, and Richard answered without hesitation.

"I will teach the bird," he said, "to say, 'I like you.'"

Doesn't It Sometimes Make You Wonder?

Once, when I was a younger man trekking with my dog in a remote part of Scotland, I saw it rain bubbles.

At the time I was as clearheaded and healthy as I have ever been in my life, and I remain certain that what I saw and experienced that day was no illusion and no mere anomaly of precipitation, light, or perspective.

No, what I saw, and captured time and again in my hands, were bubbles, multiform and frequently sheened with shimmering rainbows, and moving and behaving exactly as bubbles are known to move and behave. They floated, bobbed, drifted down in a steady, languid shower and then sailed and shimmied on the breeze.

There was no mistaking the bubbles for mere globules or droplets. Nor was there anything of the quality of berm or the fleeting and insubstantial products of carbonation; these were real, unmistakable bubbles, and most of them were at least as large as Christmas tree ornaments. A few of the bubbles I encountered were as large as volleyballs.

A man who wanders for a solid half hour in an utterly benign shower of bubbles will of course seek an explanation for such a phenomenon. My hosts at the time, an elderly couple who were distant relatives, were nothing if not matter-of-fact characters, and they did not seem to find my story entirely credible. They politely admitted that they had neither heard of nor experienced such an admitted curiosity. The other locals were no more credulous regarding my tale, and I was left with a mystery that has only grown more wondrous with age.

I spent three years in Scotland after graduating from college. I was trying to scare up a sociology dissertation that I never did get around to writing or even properly conceiving. When I returned to the U.S. I often found myself regaling friends with the tale of the day it rained bubbles. This was usually over drinks --for a great many years after my return I conducted most of my conversations over drinks-- and I discovered that listeners who were sufficiently lubricated were generally willing to find the story more credible and to offer up all manner of hypothetical explanations for what I experienced. None of these attempts at explanation, however, struck me as satisfactory or sufficient.

Nearly thirty years after I stood there in the middle of that forlorn, windswept place staring up with wonder into a sky filled with swaying bubbles, I placed a call to a local meteorologist of some renown and told him my story. He asked a number of questions that seemed to me irrelevant and then lapsed into a momentary silence.

Finally he said, in an almost apologetic tone of voice, "This was, as you say, quite a long time ago, and I'm guessing that what you're telling me didn't happen exactly as you remember it."

I thanked him for his time and hung up the phone.

Here's the thing, though: it did happen exactly as I remember it. I can still picture my dog leaping in the air and snapping happily at the bubbles. I can still see a particularly perfect specimen resting in my palm and then bursting without a sound.

I walked through nature in a shower of bubbles.

I was young, and in a rare, happy place in my life. And though it pains me still that I was unable to share the experience with another person who could also carry that wonder with them for the remainder of their time in this world, I'm nonetheless grateful for that single corroboration of one of my earliest and most fiercely held beliefs, which is that life is so much more --more magical, but also just plain more-- than most of us ever even try to imagine.

Any Old Business? The Day D. Boon Died

It was December 22, 1985.
A Sunday. I was home for
Christmas and had watched
the Vikings lose to the Philadelphia
Eagles and then I had gone
to the Sterling Twin theater
to watch Rocky IV. I know these
things because everything then
seemed important and so I tried
to keep a journal of that time. In the
funny pages of that morning's paper
Calvin and Hobbes built a snow fort,
and Calvin declared, "Together, a
veritable fist of defiance, we stand
immune to any onslaught!
We are invincible!"

Somewhere else in the world
that day, Paul Wolfowitz celebrated
his 42nd birthday by drinking the blood
of a poor woodcutter's only son.
There was no internet, of course,
no cellphones or iPods. I didn't even
yet own a Walkman. I was bored out
of my mind. I considered myself young
enough, though, that the world might
still be whatever I dreamed it might be.
All the same, the birth of Christ
couldn't happen fast enough that year.

News traveled swiftly, just not as swiftly
as it does now. D. Boon was already dead
by the time I went up to my room to listen to
records that night, but I didn't know that yet.
He was only twenty-seven years old,
and he had been one of the most
alive human beings I had ever seen.

A friend had to walk across town the
next morning to deliver the news.
I remember that I sat on the couch,
stunned and silent, while my friend paced
and ranted. "Do you realize," he said,
"that we could probably go out and knock
on every door in this town and not manage
to turn up a single Minuteman record?
Tell me that's not fucked. Explain to me
how that's not totally fucked."

This was now a long time ago,
and we were still young and fierce
about the things we loved and had
discovered that made us feel almost
comfortable with our difference,
but I nonetheless couldn't tell him.
I couldn't explain to him, and all
these years later I still could not
tell him, still could not explain
how that was not totally fucked.

This, Too, I Might Be Inclined To Believe

I used to know somebody who insisted that if you stopped whatever you were doing and really concentrated on listening beyond the sounds of the city you could hear the dead clearing their throats.

This was a long, long time ago, drugs were involved, and the person who believed this is now somewhere among the dead.

A number of years ago I was traveling west from Minnesota, headed for the Rocky Mountains. I was in a car with someone beloved to me, and at some point in perhaps eastern Montana we pulled off the road at a place where you could see the land rolling unbroken for what seemed a hundred miles in any direction. We had been traveling along a two-lane highway that saw very little traffic, and I seem to remember that we had gone something like an hour without seeing another vehicle. We had been keeping track.

As we were standing there surrounded by all that space and silence I mentioned to my traveling companion the story about listening intently and hearing the dead clear their throats.

"Out here you can sometimes hear the dead sing," she said. "It helps, of course, if it's a still day, and sunrise and dusk are the best times."

"Is this speculation?" I asked.

She shrugged, and then said, "I might know. I might have heard the dead sing."

We both stood there for a moment, listening.

"What do the dead sing?" I asked.

"Whatever they want," she said. "And whenever they want. They're so far away that you shouldn't necessarily expect to be able to make out what they're singing. There are so many of them, and it's not like you might think. There's not some giant chorus in heaven. No choir robes. There's no reason the dead should have to put up with direction of any kind anymore. I also don't believe the dead are bound to conventional human ideas regarding harmony, and even when a bunch of them are singing at once they most likely aren't singing the same song. I think they just sing all the songs they ever loved. I guess the best way to describe it is that it would be like hearing millions of transistor radios playing all at once, from far away across a big lake at dusk."

"Maybe they clear their throats in preparation for singing," I said. "Maybe that's what my old friend claimed he could hear."

"Maybe," she said.

"What about dogs?" I asked. "Do the dogs among the dead sing?"

"Of course," she said. "They're even easier to hear, if you've spent any time in this world tuned into a dog's heart. They sing nothing but 'Howdy! Howdy! Howdy!' and 'Yup! Yup! Yup!' and all sorts of variations of 'Hooray!'"

We listened some more, and then she nodded emphatically and said, "This is definitely the kind of place where you can hear the dead sing. Sometimes I imagine that they are singing the names of all those they ever loved and had to leave behind, and they're singing purely for the joy of remembering and translating those beloved names into music."

I said that I liked that idea. This woman wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a hippie, and was certainly not given to this sort of talk. That was probably why the experience was so memorable and kind of unnerving for me.

She said I should shut up more often and just listen. "Names are faces and voices, and faces and voices are memories, and all memories are music," she said. "I'm sure that's what the dead must believe, and what they give voice to when they sing. Someone might be singing your name at this very moment, your name and the names of all those you love in this world and have never properly regarded or celebrated as music. What if someone at perfect peace was out there somewhere singing, 'Bradley Dean, Bradley Dean, Bradley Dean'? Wouldn't you love to hear that? Or if they were just singing, 'Baby, baby, baby,' and you recognized their voice and knew they were singing about you? Wouldn't that be worth listening a long time for?"

Yes, I said, or certainly thought. Something like that would definitely be worth listening a long time for.

The Archive Of Invisible Ink: From The Crawl Space

I spent much of my early life hunting for fables, and can remember the days when the woods would be full of them in the spring. If you climbed back up into the bluffs behind my little cabin above Canoe Brook and nosed around under the rocks and in the shady areas beneath the big maples, you'd find fables growing wild and burrowed in the roots of the oldest trees.

Some afternoons, just as the sun was settling beyond the rolling hills to the west, I'd hike back home with a burlap bag full of fables. My boots would be caked with mud, my back would be aching, and I'd be exhausted from all the sun and fresh air, but I still couldn't wait to empty that bag on my kitchen floor so I could look over my recent acquisitions.

I once lugged home a bag full of squirming trolls. On other occasions I pulled from my sack a turtle with wings like those of a dragonfly, a collection of breathing mushrooms with dark and inquisitive eyes, and a tiny pirate chest full of mice the color of poppies. Once upon a time I found a stooped and tiny man with flowing white hair and a long beard. Fairies were nesting in his beard. This old man was both the remnant of some fable and an immense repository of fables. He sat on the edge of my kitchen table and told me the story of a giant who once roamed the local woods with the moon in a pack on his back. On windy days the giant would run through a meadow full of wild flowers, flying the tethered moon like a kite.

One day at sunset, the old man related to me in a voice so squeaky and small that I had to kneel to make out his words, a hawk was perched in a tree at the edge of the meadow, admiring the spectacle of the giant's luminous kite sailing into the gloaming. The kite, the hawk thought, would make a lovely addition to the night sky.

And as it sat there admiring this quiet spectacle, the hawk saw an arrow suddenly strike the giant squarely in the chest. The giant toppled backwards, the little man told me, and his feet rose momentarily like a seesaw before disappearing again into the tall grass and flowers. As the giant fell, he lost his grip on his kite's tether and the moon drifted slowly skyward, growing ever smaller as it rose and assumed its now familiar place in the heavens.

The hawk, with its keen and beady eyes, then saw a cat --wearing a red felt cap and in possession of a bow and a quiver of arrows-- make a dash for the dark woods at the edge of the meadow. In the blink of an eye, the little man said, the hawk swooped down from its place in the tree, snatched the cat in its talons, and carried it away to its nest, where the giant-slayer and liberator of the moon was promptly eviscerated.

I always interrogated the fables I brought home with me from the woods, and I also unfailingly released them again before retiring for the evening. Some of the fables I found in those days would leave me dazzled and mulling for many days. They changed me, and changed the way I look at the world and my place in it. They made me want to live to a ripe old age.

As I grew older, though, it became harder and harder for me to get back to my old fable hunting grounds. My life was crowded with work and other responsibilities and obligations. When I did manage to sneak away I found that the fables were increasingly difficult to find, and again and again I returned home empty-handed and disappointed.

I have since read that fables have become almost entirely extinct in America, or have been reduced to little more than grim little lessons and morals without the magic. It is my understanding, however, that patches of fables may still be found in parts of Latin and South America, in obscure corners of Eastern Europe, and in small pockets of Africa and the Middle East.

It is my hope that in the time still left to me I will one day venture to some of these places in search of the lost magic that was the stuff of so much happiness and so many old and wonderful dreams.

Cry Uncle

Everyday somebody's telling me to put
my hands up, somebody's telling me
to put my hands in the air.
I can't tell anymore what's a threat
or what's an exhortation,
but I'm generally inclined to do as
I'm told and so I spend
much of the time I spend by myself,
which is much of the time,
moving around with my hands up
and my hands in the air,
which are really, it occurs to me,
the same damn thing.
Either way, it makes me feel
oddly liberated and captured
all at the same time, a hostage
surrendering with a combination
of ecstasy and relief.
If we are to submit to forces
greater than ourselves,
let us dance our way into
the arms of our captors,
our hands up and empty
of all weapons but joy,
and with the secret understanding
that there really are no forces
greater than ourselves.

Watching The Words: The Relay

Screwing my weight on tight
Wasting my eyes on small type
Running from left to right
Still respectful of borders
The letters sporting as best they can
Within the pasture of the page.

I long for a landscape where the words
Can run all day and clear out of sight
And where I can sit on a hill
And watch them go until whatever
Story they have to tell disappears
And is lost to me but continuing
Somewhere to be continued carried
Along to the next reader in the relay
Who will just have to imagine for themselves
The parts of the story they have already
Missed just as I will somehow have to
Find some way to invent my own ending.

Seen

It was when I said that I didn't recognize you
without your glasses and you said you'd never worn
glasses that I first began to entertain the suspicion
that I really didn't know you. I mean, really didn't
know you, that we'd never laid eyes on each other.
Accustomed as I am to awkward moments,
I've nonetheless obtained no mastery over them,
and so I heard myself saying, "Why is it that
every song, including some really lousy songs,
reminds me of you and not in a good
way, but in a way that breaks my heart?
And why is it that every time my phone rings my
broken heart skips a beat in the expectation that it
might be you? You know, calling finally to apologize?"

In my memory I could swear that at that moment
you raised a thumb to the bridge of your nose
to secure your glasses. "Apologize for what?"
you said, as if you were actually curious.
And when I hesitated in answering --there were
so many possible answers, so many possible
worlds-- you said, not, I think, unkindly,
"Should I wait while you manufacture some memories?"
God bless you for that. Even after all those
years, even as your eyes seemed to be straining
behind your glasses, even as you were looking
beyond me at something up the street,
even as you checked your watch and investigated
the chirping of your cell phone in your purse,
you were seeing me clearly.  Seeing me as
you and only you have ever truly seen me.

Another Evening With Scratch Galligan

I gave my dog, Fergus "Scratch" Galligan, a mustache for Christmas. It is a fine mustache, but I had my fill of it earlier this evening, and made my feelings known.

This evening I have other fish to fry, as I believe the expression goes, even as I remain uncertain whether in fact I am using the expression in the proper context.

The fish I have to fry are not impressive fish --not by any means-- yet they nonetheless must be fried. Once upon a time I spent my evenings feeding words into a rock tumbler; these days whatever words I can rustle up are tossed half-heartedly into the Fry Baby. When these words are sufficiently crisp I mix them in with the Galligan lad's rations.

Galligan is inordinately fond of even the most pedestrian words, and uses even finer words to describe them: Scrumptious. Savory. Delectable. I will hear him utter these and other such fancy words between bites. Often he will continue to smack his chops with genuine relish for a good fifteen minutes after he has dined.

Oh, yes, Fergus Galligan is indeed a fancy fellow, a gourmand of the banal. He will pronounce a bowl of prepositions and the scrawniest imaginable epithets, "the most toothsome repast in recent memory. On my honor, sir, your fried words have enriched my kibble experience tenfold."

Often Galligan will don his mustache as he digests and ruminates over the words he has just eaten.

I am, of course, gratified to be able to serve up such easy satisfaction with the increasingly dreary collection of words that I dredge from the increasingly long nights.

My dear Galligan never fails to surprise and delight me, even in the bleariest days of mid-winter. Galligan is, as I may or may not have previously mentioned, a Chilean Dasher, one of the rare dog breeds to have appeared on the Endangered Species list. At the time he came to live with me, at seven months of age, I was led to believe that he was one of only five surviving Dashers in the world. He was then a refugee, rescued from seismic debris and transported to the United States for safeguarding and study. Even this arrangement did not work out as planned --at least initially-- for the poor fellow. Twice before he came to me he had been placed in other homes only to have his custody rather hastily relinquished. The reason for this, I was told, was that Galligan was rather too spirited for many conventional domestic arrangements. The Dasher comes by its name honestly, and my lad is the swiftest of hounds, long-limbed, and a world-class leaper into the bargain. This is not a dog you want to present with the challenge of a fence.

I have had few problems, however, since taking responsibility for Mr. Galligan. I quickly discovered him to be an excellent conversationalist, an agile thinker, and a most reasonable fellow. These are not, of course, traits that the average person is eager to recognize in a dog, and I was somewhat astonished to learn that none of the boy's previous caretakers had ever attempted to converse with him. And where there is not attempt at conversation, you'll understand, there can be no reasoning.

If ever a dog was starved for conversation, it was Fergus Galligan, and in me I like to believe he found his perfect match. No subject is out of bounds between us, thank heavens. I once asked Galligan why he was not given to the humping I have previously experienced with other dogs. He shuddered quite violently and replied, "Such behavior is unseemly, sir, and beneath a Dasher. Your legs, and the legs of your visitors, as well as your pillows and general upholstery, are safe from me. I assure you I am as chaste as a monk."

Some moments ago, as I was reclining with a book and Galligan was reposed on the sofa, he raised his head and stated that he should like to hear some music featuring the French horn.

"Heavens above!" I replied. "Where do you get such ideas, Galligan? You, a dog, asking to hear French horns! Those words I'm feeding you must be giving you queer notions, old fellow. I'm not sure that, even were I feeling so inclined, I could dig up any recordings featuring French Horns."

After a bit more in the way of discussion on the matter, Galligan suggested that he may have learned the term from one of the holiday carols I regularly sang with him during our recent Christmas revels. I found this astonishing, as you might well imagine, and it wasn't until a good deal later, after Galligan had retired for the evening, that it occurred to me that this was an even queerer business yet.

"French hens!" I shouted to Galligan in the other room. "The words in the song are 'French hens'!"

A moment of silence followed, and I assumed Galligan must have been sound asleep. After a brief interlude, however, his voice --measured and a bit sleepy, yet characteristically undaunted-- carried to me in my easy chair: "What I requested, sir, was not French hens, but French horns. I remain certain of that fact. And I beg you not to trouble my sleep with any more of your foolishness."

My Sweet Lenora

No question, I was sweet on Lenora, but the girl loved only rain and pretty little birds and the goddamn flowers of the field.

She was one of those dreamers who liked to wax poetic about things, including those things I just mentioned, but not exclusively those things, not by a long shot. Oh, lord no. Lenora had some serious longing for the world. I believe she might put it that way, or even some way a good deal fancier than that.

She read poets who talked about trees and the moon and dying voles --I think they were voles-- and other such things, and these poems would make her gasp. The color would rise in her cheeks and I could almost feel her precious heart fluttering from across the room.

Often she would insist on reading poems aloud to me --a fair number of them were about birds, and many specifically about long-legged birds standing so quietly (poised was I believe a word commonly employed) in a marsh as either darkness fell or the sun began to make an appearance. I tried to listen intently to these poems, because that's what love will do to a man. And though I am surely no professor, if I had to say what I took away from the poems Lenora read to me it would be the message that at any given moment every damn thing you can imagine might just be up and fixing to die.

"Life is short," I would say, nodding my head.

"Life is precious," Lenora would say, tears sometimes welling in her eyes. "Life is so, so precious and rare."

"Well, I don't know as it's exactly rare," I might say, but only if I was starting to feel like I'd had a bit too much poetry to eat.

Lenora was a fetching gal. I'll be damned if she wasn't. And she had a view of the world that was comely as well, even if I did often find it difficult to square with my own. She was almost more adorable than I could stand, the way she would stir that strawberry powder --which I was pretty sure was carcinogenic, an opinion I shared with her-- into her milk and blow the mess full of bubbles with a red plastic straw.

I have to pause, God help me, after conjuring such a memory.

Eventually, however, my sweet Lenora and I had a conversation in which she admitted that were she forced to choose between subtracting a single homely tree or bird from the world or parting ways with me, she would choose the homely tree and the bird. Smitten as I admittedly was, that was just more batshit-crazy nonsense than I was willing to put up with. It just flat-out was, and when I said I was going home to Sioux City to see if I could get back my old job dealing blackjack, she let me go.

A lot of years have gone by now, though, and I've had plenty of time to wonder if maybe I shouldn't have tried just a little bit harder to be a different sort of man. Every few months I'll get to pining, and I'll type Lenora's name into the internet, even as I know damn well that she doesn't exist in that world and never will.

Still, I like to imagine that she's out there somewhere, on her knees in the wet grass, crying out my name as I'm crying out hers. What about people? I sometimes say to Lenora in my head. Sometimes I shout it out loud. What about love, little gal? Aren't them things precious too?

Everything Was Stolen From Germans And Made By Slaves

Scolded by Emerson.
Shamed by Schopenhauer.
Drugged by German poets.

Lord of nothing,
suckled from a she-wolf's teat,
locked down in a hovel of words.
Bad light. No invention. Inoperable.

Eyes conquered by the rearview mirror.

I might have liked you
if I could have heard you,
but your voice was on the other
side of some great divide.

The giant goes with me when I go.

Under my diaphragm you will find
a nest of young rats.
Be careful with your knife.
They are hopeless things, but harmless.

The world is full of judgment days.

This, though, is the hour of the carp
and of the dying flies.
No compensatory spark flares across
the neutral dark.

Call the crows. They will surely be
interested in this. And let some intrepid
astronaut among them carry these
ashes back to the stars.

In the ruins of the garden,
night with its black snout
follows the trail of blood
in the fresh snow.

Once, out of wild dreams a boy awoke
to discover that his tongue had turned to stone.
From the distant village dull bells
were pealing and darkness was advancing
swiftly on the chaos of his heart.

Let us pray,
and at least pretend
as if our lives
depended on it.

Shit Could Be A Whole Lot Righter

...Really I began the day

Not with a man's wish: may this day be different,

But with the birds' wish: May this day

Be the same day, the day of my life.

--Randall Jarrell, "A Man Meets a Woman in the Street"

Domino-like, one

"maybe" followed another

until...all fell down.

--Rachel Wetzsteon, from "Among the Neutrals"

Why didn't anybody tell me this shit was over? Couldn't someone have told me that I was climbing off one dying horse and onto another?

If you saw a man heaving one word after another into a casket wouldn't you have the courtesy or curiosity to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing?

No answers required.

No one blogs anymore, apparently. Or only old people do. I'm old, but I'm not that old, and God knows I'd hate to be quaint. There's still plenty of whippersnapper in me, but not enough to know what exactly the whippersnappers are doing now that they're not blogging.

At this point, however, I don't suppose I'm likely to find out.

I'm pretty damn sure, though, that the youngsters are not sitting around with their dogs listening to Bryan Ferry. Perhaps you'll agree with me that no straight man should ever listen to Bryan Ferry unless a woman is present. But there you have it: I am listening to Bryan Ferry. There is no woman present.

It's not the way I drew it up in the playbook all those years ago, but it is what it is.

Bryan Ferry is 65 years old. He probably has a blog.

Look, I'm not expecting a telegram anymore. Hell, I no longer even expect mail. I expect something, though. It doesn't look like the world can beat that out of me. I probably couldn't claim to have great expectations anymore, but I am still --I think-- expectant.

Actually, I can't say. I can't say, and I don't know, and I'm not sure.

Maybe you exist. Maybe you're actually out there, and this is some sort of connection. I'm grateful if you do, and if you are, and if this is.

I am, I can assure you, at least happy to imagine, and it is my one fierce hope that I will remain so, even if this shit is over. Which it appears to be.

If, in fact, you're real, I imagine you are good people, and I thank you and encourage you to persist in being good people. Hold your heads up high when you walk down the street. Say hello to the neighbors. Ignore the actuary and the clicking of his abacus. Seize every opportunity to defy gravity and amortization. And please find someone to dance with, hold them close, and speak some of your very best and most sincere words directly into their ear. Don't ever lie to the one you dance with.

Finally:

May you be seen and heard.

May you be known.

And may you never, ever be destroyed.

Sweet dreams.

Upon A Time, Once

I am listening to monk impersonators, but if you put a blindfold on me I wouldn't be able to tell you I wasn't hearing the real deal. That's how tired I am and how damn good these characters are.

Listening to the monk impersonators makes me remember the time I was walking along a road somewhere with my dog and heard monks singing. Real, live monks.

There was some sort of monk habitation there, and it looked every bit the part. I also recall noticing that these particular monks kept bees. Perhaps I'm imagining the bees, but I don't think so. I'm quite certain there were bees there, or evidence of the keeping of bees.

I may even have seen a presumed monk, outfitted in one of those bee suits (the kind that look like astronaut suits from an old issue of some science fiction magazine) and waddling across a field toward what appeared to be bee towers.

This, of course, would have been while the other, unseen monks were singing. Or chanting, which may be the proper term.

It was a lovely day in late spring. The windows of the monk lodging must have been thrown open for me to be able to so clearly hear the startling sound of the singing. I recall that there wasn't another soul in sight. I also have an image of blindingly bright linens --bedsheets, I think I surmised-- swaying gently from a clothesline.

Where or when would this have been? Somewhere in Europe, I suppose, in a time when my life seemed to be comprised of nothing but just such wonders and I as yet had no reason --not a single reason in the world-- to suspect that the wonders would ever cease.